Two Women Composers Rendezvous in Leipzig

courtesy of Naxos of America

About two and one-half months ago, the Swedish dB Productions label released an album of little-known historical significance. It involved the fact that, during the 1870s, there were two women composers studying in Leipzig, Ethel Smyth from the United Kingdom and Amanda Röntgen-Maier from Sweden, both of whom received lessons in composition at the Leipzig Conservatory. Leipzig was also where then Amanda Maier met the German-Dutch pianist and composer Julius Röntgen, who would become her husband in 1880.

The title of the recently-released album is Rendezvous: Leipzig, and it presents quartets by both of these composers that were probably written in Leipzig. The Smyth selection is her quartet in the key of C minor, which was completed in 1883. (Only her first quartet was given a number. Between 1882 and 1884 she was working on both the C minor quartet and another quartet in E-flat major.) Maier’s quartet, in the key of A major, was probably composed in 1877 but never completed. In 2019 the Swedish composer B. Tommy Andersson completed the first (Allegro) movement and reconstructed the Presto Finale. The album is available for download from Amazon.com. As of this writing, the physical release only seems to be available through European sources; and delivery may be subject to significant delay.

On Rendezvous: Leipzig the quartets are performed by the Maier Quartet, named in honor of the composer. Its members are musicians from the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, and there appears to have been a personnel change while these quartets were being recorded. Thus, the Maier performance was by Johannes Lörstad on first violin, Patrik Swedrup on second violin, violist Arne Stenlund, and cellist Klas Gagge. For the Smyth quartet Swedrup switched to first violin, and Henrik Peterson joined the group as second violin.

Both of these composers may be familiar to readers of this site. Smyth was acknowledged as the composer of the “March of the Women,” which became the anthem of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the leading suffragist organization in Britain. In addition, her last major composition, written between 1929 and 1930, was a cantata for soprano, bass, choir, and orchestra entitled The Prison; and this site discussed a recording of this music released by Chandos at the beginning of this past August. In writing about this album, I described the cantata as “an early twentieth-century reflection on the late nineteenth-century traditions that influenced Smyth’s music education;” and the C minor quartet offers more explicit signs of those influences.

On the other hand my first encounter with Röntgen-Maier came through her 1878 sonata for violin and piano in B minor on a “flute recital” album of Paula Gudmundson, playing a transcription by Carol Wincenc. Like Röntgen-Maier’s unfinished quartet, this sonata reflects the traditions that had accumulated over the course of the nineteenth century. Sadly, the composer died in 1894, never experiencing the changing times of the early twentieth century as Smyth did.

Within all of this context, the new album by the Maier Quartet may serve to expand our scope of late nineteenth-century practices. Personally, I tend to view those practices as defining a trajectory from the early career of Ludwig van Beethoven to the tone poems of Richard Strauss. The two quartets presented on Rendezvous: Leipzig can be clearly situated along that trajectory, but it is unclear that they add much to the more familiar repertoire that has come to define it.