This week’s offering is the third in an Agnes Zimmermann triptych. After a biography (rectifying some incorrect information elsewhere on the internet), and a reflection on a 2020 recording of her three violin sonatas, today’s blog post is about the ways in which her life as a 19th-century female musician still resonates today, with me, a 21st-century female musician.
Zimmermann has walked with me for the past few weeks. I find this with the women I research, that they become companions in more than performance or writing. Evangeline Livens did for a while, followed by Clara Macirone. Now, I find myself drawing on Zimmermann when talking about musical space, about chamber music, about manuscripts. I co-adjudicated the Historical Women Composers Prize at the Academy last week, alongside Diana Ambache. It is a requirement that every entry for this prize is chamber music, so we had from duos to quintets. Zimmermann was a consummate chamber musician, so this was right up her alley - and I found that I share her passion for space and light in the texture of a collaborative performance. It was an image of her manuscript that I had in my head for this realisation, that perfectly structured writing that allows light between the notes of even the thickest textures. It isn’t necessarily about literal silence, although breath is of course essential, but about the play of transparency through to opaqueness in the performance as well as in the writing. This, Zimmermann has made explicit for me some of the musical priorities I hold, but that I had not put words to.
The other way in which Zimmermann feels very present to me currently is in her life as she lived it. I wrote last week about imagining the composer in the act of writing, but this goes even further, in part fueled by this:
There’s a lot written on mental load, and second (third/fourth) shifts, but it’s not quite these areas that strike a chord for me when I think of women composers of the past. Classical composition – or, to be frank, life as any kind of classical musician – has never been kind to other obligations, not least in how it is written about. The idea of the composer renouncing all else for his (pronoun chosen carefully) art is so entrenched, so removed from everyday life, that the woman who manages to find a few minutes to write a song in between loads of laundry and feeding the children, must necessarily have less of the sublime in her writing. I see that race not just as running towards the goal of a complete artwork, but also running towards the goal of recognition.
Many of Zimmermann’s works were written in the years immediately after her time at the Academy. This is very common, not just for women composers, and I wonder how much it is because of the support and recognition that comes with a successful studentship, which tends to start to fall away as new students take their place. And for composers who do not have recourse to other systems, this can prove fatal to a career. Zimmermann was luckier than many women, as her performing life kept her in the public eye, but what happens to women for whom the printed page is their main way of disseminating creativity?
From 1890-1908, Zimmermann did take a step back from public music. This was during her time living with Lady Louisa Goldsmid, activist for education, both for women and for children. In Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, Sophie Fuller wrote of this relationship, of which little is known, causing Fuller to reflect:
“However I, living and working in a different century, decide to name Agnes Zimmermann and Louisa Goldsmid’s relationship, the facts of the devotion, the interrupted career, and the shared home remain a powerful reminder that women’s varied relationships with each other have always played a vital, if often neglected, role in their histories. Despite what can seem like overwhelming attempts to show otherwise, not all women can be defined by their relationships with men and male institutions […].”
In the eighteen years that the two women lived together, Zimmermann performed little and published nothing. This was not due to domestic necessity; Lady Goldsmid’s will leaves money to many loyal servants, including a butler, housekeeper, cook, coachman, and several housemaids. It is a reminder, though, that creativity has often been enabled by women; and Fuller’s question of what women-living-with-women does to their “artistry and creativity” is a far-reaching one. From Zimmermann and Goldsmid, to Macirone and her sister, or Dolby and her mother, or Mathilde Kralik and Alice Scarlat, and even to the servants that tended them and their houses, women pave the way for recognition, not just of creative genius, but of the manifold threads that make up creative work. Several months ago I mentioned the mothers who start their talented daughters on their instruments; the idea of a muse, “A person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist,” suddenly becomes one of great power and agency. What caused Zimmermann to write certain works? To play them?
Zimmermann remains a role model for me, and a source-to-come of rich possibility. In the meantime, I finish with a quote from philosopher Gilles Deleuze, of which Sophie Fuller’s reflections on Zimmermann remind me:
“Difference is not a negation of sameness. Difference may have a meaning that is independent of sameness, and repetition may be independent of the sameness of any given events or actions.”