Classical Music: Women Composers. Female Composers: From Clara Schumann to Valentina Serova Most Popular Female Composer

“It is more likely that a man will give birth to a child than a woman will write good music", once said German composer Johannes Brahms. A century and a half later, women composers gather the world's largest concert halls, write music for films and come up with important social initiatives.

1. Cassia of Constantinople

The Greek nun Cassia was born into a wealthy Constantinopolitan family in 804 or 805. Today she is known not only as the founder convent in Constantinople, but also as one of the first women hymnographers and composers.

Cassia was very beautiful and, according to some sources, in 821 she even participated in a bride show for Emperor Theophilus. The girl was not destined to become the wife of the emperor, and soon Cassia took the veil as a nun in order to spend her whole life in the monastery she founded. There, Cassia composed church hymns and canons, and an analysis of her works, containing references to the writings of ancient authors, allows us to conclude that the girl had a good secular education.

Cassia of Constantinople is one of the first composers whose works can be performed by contemporary musicians.

2. Hildegard of Bingen

The German nun Hildegard of Bingen was an extraordinary person not only in terms of writing music - she also worked on works on natural science and medicine, wrote mystical books of visions, as well as spiritual poems.

Hildegard was born at the end of the 11th century and was the tenth child in a noble family. From the age of eight, the girl was raised by a nun, and at 14 she began to live in a monastery, where she studied art and liturgy.

The girl began to compose music on her own poems as a child, and already in adulthood she collected her works in a collection called "Harmonic Symphony of Heavenly Revelations". The collection includes chants, combined into several parts on liturgical themes.

3. Barbara Strozzi

The Italian composer Barbara Strozzi, who was later called "the most virtuoso", was illegitimate daughter poet Giulio Strozzi, who later adopted her. Barbara herself had four illegitimate children by different men. The girl was born in 1619 in Venice and studied with the composer Francesco Cavalli.

Strozzi wrote cantatas, ariettas, madrigals, and the texts for her daughter's works were written by her father Giulio. Barbara became the first composer to release her works not in collections, but one at a time. The music of Barbara Strozzi is performed and re-released today.

4. Clara Schumann

Born Clara Wieck in 1819 in Leipzig, the son of Friedrich Wieck, a well-known piano teacher in the city and country. WITH early age the girl learned to play the piano from her father, and at the age of 10 she began to successfully perform in public.

Together with her father, Clara went on tour in Germany, then gave several concerts in Paris. Around this time, young Clara began to write music - her first works were published in 1829. At the same time, the young Robert Schumann became a student of Friedrich Wieck, whose admiration for the talented daughter of the teacher grew into love.

In 1940, Clara and Robert got married. Since then, the girl began to perform music written by her husband, often she was the first to present to the public the new compositions of Robert Schumann. Also, the composer Johannes Brahms entrusted the debut performance of his works to Clara, close friend families.

Clara Schumann's own compositions were distinguished by their modernity and were considered one of the best examples romantic school. Robert Schumann also highly appreciated his wife's writings, who, however, insisted that his wife focus on family life and their eight children.
After the death of Robert Schumann, Clara continued to perform his works, and interest in her own creativity erupted with renewed vigor in 1970, when recordings of Clara's compositions first appeared

5. Amy Beach

American Amy Marcy Cheney Beach is the only woman in the so-called "Boston Six" of composers, which, in addition to her, included musicians John Knowles Payne, Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Edward McDowell and Horatio Parker. The composers of the "six" are considered to have had a decisive influence on the formation of American academic music.

Amy was born on September 5, 1867 to a wealthy New Hampshire family. WITH early years the girl studied music under the guidance of her mother, and after the family moved to Boston, she began to study composition as well. First solo concert Amy Beach took place in 1883 and was a great success. Two years later, the girl got married and, at the insistence of her husband, practically stopped performing, concentrating on writing music.

With her own works, she later performed on tour in Europe and America, and today Amy Beach is considered the first woman who managed to make successful career in high music.

6. Valentina Serova

The first Russian female composer, nee Valentina Semyonovna Bergman was born in 1846 in Moscow. The girl did not manage to graduate from the St. Petersburg Conservatory due to a conflict with the director, after which Valentina began to take lessons from music critic and composer Alexander Serov.

In 1863, Valentina and Alexander got married, two years later the couple had a son, the future artist Valentin Serov. In 1867, the Serovs began to publish the magazine "Music and Theater". Spouses supported friendly relations with Ivan Turgenev and Pauline Viardot, Leo Tolstoy, Ilya Repin.

Valentina Serova was rather reverent about her husband's work, and after his death she published four volumes of articles about her husband, and also completed his opera The Enemy Force.

Serova is the author of the operas Uriel Acosta, Maria D'Orval, Miroed, Ilya Muromets. In addition to music, she also wrote articles about composing, published memoirs about meetings with Leo Tolstoy and memories of her husband and son.

7. Sofia Gubaidulina

Today, Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina lives and works in Germany, but her native Tatarstan hosts annual music competitions and festivals dedicated to the famous native of the republic.

Sofia Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol in 1931. As a girl, she graduated from Kazan musical gymnasium, and then entered the Kazan Conservatory, where she studied composition. Having moved to Moscow, Gubaidulina continued her studies at the Moscow Conservatory, and after graduation she received an important parting word from the composer Dmitry Shostakovich: “I wish you to go your own “wrong” way.”

Together with Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina was one of the trinity of Moscow avant-garde composers. Gubaidulina worked a lot for cinema and wrote music for such films as "Vertical", "Man and His Bird", "Mowgli", "Scarecrow".

In 1991, Sofia Gubaidulina received a German scholarship and has since lived in Germany, regularly visiting Russia with concerts, festivals and various social initiatives.

"IN Ancient Greece all harpists were men, and now it is a "female" instrument. Times are changing, and the words of Brahms that “it is more likely that a man will give birth to a child than a woman will write good music” sound frivolous, ”said Sofia Asgatovna in an interview.

As in any other areas classical art Western world, in the history of academic music there are countless forgotten women who deserve to be told about themselves.

In particular - in the history of composer's art.

Even now, when the number of notable female composers is growing every year, the seasonal schedules of the most famous orchestras and concert programs most famous performers Rarely are works written by women.

When the work of a female composer nevertheless becomes an object of spectator or journalistic attention, the news about this is necessarily accompanied by some sad statistics.

Here's a recent example: The Metropolitan Opera this season gave the brilliant "Love from afar" by Caia Saariaho - as it turned out, the first opera written by a woman, shown in this theater since 1903. It is comforting that the compositions of Saariaho - like, for example, the music of Sofia Gubaidulina or Julia Wolf - are performed quite often even without such newsworthy occasions.

Selecting a few little-known musical heroines from a large list of female names is a difficult task. The seven women that we will talk about now have one thing in common - they, to one degree or another, did not fit into the world around them.

Someone solely because of their own behavior, which destroyed cultural foundations, and someone - through their music, to which there is no analogue.

Louise Farranc (1804–1875)

Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont, she became famous in the European music world of the 1830s and 1840s as a pianist. Moreover, the girl's performing reputation was so high that in 1842 Farranc was appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatory.

She held this post for the next thirty years and, despite the pedagogical workload, managed to prove herself as a composer. However, rather than "managed to show", but "could not show".

Farranc came from a famous dynasty of sculptors and grew up among the best people Parisian art, so the act creative expression It was very natural for her.

Having published about fifty compositions during her lifetime, mostly instrumental, Madame Professor received rave reviews about her music from Berlioz and Liszt, but in her homeland Farranc was perceived as too non-French composer.

In France, every first promising author scribbled many hours of opera, and the laconic and classically inspired works of the Parisian really ran counter to the then fashion.

In vain: her best works - like the Third Symphony in G minor - to put it mildly, are not lost against the background of the mastodons of that time like Mendelssohn or Schumann. Yes, and Brahms, with his attempts to translate classicism into the language of the romantic era, Farranc bypassed ten or even twenty years.

Dora Pejacevic (1885–1923)

A representative of one of the most noble Balkan noble families, the granddaughter of one of the bans (read - governors) of Croatia and the daughter of another, Dora Pejacevic spent her childhood and youth exactly as usual in the world pop culture they like to depict the life of young and carefully guarded by the family of young aristocrats .

The girl grew up under the strict supervision of English governesses, almost did not communicate with her peers and, in general, was brought up by her parents with an eye on a further successful marriage for the family, rather than on happy childhood.

But something went wrong: as a teenager, Dora caught fire with the ideas of socialism, began to constantly conflict with her family, and, as a result, at the age of more than twenty, she was cut off from the rest of the Pejacevics for the rest of her life.

This, however, only benefited her other passion: even at the dawn of the First World War, the rebellious noblewoman established herself as the most significant figure in Croatian music.

Dora's compositions, evenly inspired by Brahms, Schumann and Strauss, sounded extremely naive by the standards of the world around her - for example, at the time of the premiere of her old-fashioned piano concerto in Berlin and Paris, they were already listening with might and main to Lunar Pierrot and The Rite of Spring.

But if we abstract from historical context and listen to the music of Pejacevic as a sincere declaration of love for the German romantics, it will be easy to notice her expressive melody, made on high level orchestration and careful structural work.

Amy Beach (1867–1944)

Most famous episode biographies of Amy Beach can be rephrased like this. In 1885, when she was 18, Amy's parents married her to a 42-year-old surgeon from Boston. The girl was already a piano virtuoso at that time and hoped to continue her music studies and performing career, but her husband decided otherwise.

Dr. Henry Harris Audrey Beach, concerned about the status of his family and guided by the then ideas about the role of women in secular New England society, forbade his wife to study music and limited her performances as a pianist to one concert a year.

For Amy who dreamed of concert halls and sold-out recitals, it turned out to be tantamount to tragedy. But, as often happens, tragedy gave way to triumph: although Beach sacrificed her performing career, she began to devote herself more and more to writing and is now unambiguously identified by most researchers as the best American composer of the late Romantic era.

Her two main works - the Gaelic Symphony published in 1896 and the piano concerto that followed three years later - are really beautiful, even if by the standards of those years they are completely devoid of originality. The most important thing is that in the music of Beach, as one might assume, there is absolutely no place for provincialism and parochialism.

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953)

Ruth Crawford Seeger is much more famous in the circles of serious fans, researchers and just lovers of American folk music than in the world of academic music. Why?

There are two key reasons: first, she was the wife of the musicologist Charles Seeger, and therefore the ancestor of the Seeger clan, a family of musicians and singers who did more to popularize American folk than anyone else.

Secondly, she recent years ten years of her life, she worked closely on cataloging and arranging songs recorded on numerous trips by John and Alan Lomax, the largest American folklorists and collectors of folk music.

Surprisingly, right up to the start life together both Ruth and Charles Seeger were composers of a highly modernist leaning, whose music could hardly be called "folklore". In particular, the writings of Ruth Crawford of the early 1930s can only be compared with the works of Anton Webern - and even then only in terms of skillfully built dramaturgy and succinctly concentrated musical material.

But if Webern's traditions shine through every note - it doesn't matter, Austrian or Renaissance music - then Seeger's works exist as if outside of tradition, outside of the past and outside of the future, outside of America and outside of the rest of the world.

Why is a composer with such an individual style still not included in the canonical modernist repertoire? Mystery.

Lily Boulanger (1893–1918)

It would seem, what kind of music could an eternally ill, deeply religious and pathologically modest Frenchwoman from high society compose at the beginning of the last century? That's right - one that could serve as a good soundtrack to doomsday.

Best essays Lily Boulanger are written in religious texts like psalms or Buddhist prayers, they are performed most often as if by an incorrectly tuned choir to a torn, unmelodious and loud musical accompaniment. You can’t pick up an analog to this music right off the bat - yes, it is somewhat similar to Stravinsky’s early works and Honegger’s especially fiery compositions, but neither one nor the other reached such depths of despair and did not go into such extreme fatalism.

When a friend of the Boulanger family, composer Gabriel Fauré, discovered that three-year-old Lily absolute pitch, parents and older sister could hardly imagine that this gift would be embodied in something so unangelic.

By the way, about my sister. Nadia Boulanger turned out to be a figure in the history of music, unlike any more significant. For almost half a century - from the 20s to the 60s - Nadia was considered one of the best music teachers on the planet. Having very specific views both on new music at that time, and on music in the literal sense of the word, classical, tough, uncompromising and exhausting her students the most difficult tasks, Nadia, even for her ideological opponents, remained an example of musical intelligence of unprecedented memory and power.

Perhaps she could have become as significant a composer as she turned out to be a teacher. In any case, she started as a composer - but, by her own admission, after Lily's death, something broke inside Nadia. Having lived for 92 years, the older sister never reached the heights of the few compositions of her younger sister, who burned out from Crohn's disease at the age of 24.

Elizabeth Maconki (1907–1994)

Ralph Vaughan Williams, the largest British composer last century, was a passionate champion of national musical traditions. So, he enthusiastically processed folk songs, wrote suspiciously similar to Anglican hymns choral works and, with varying degrees of success, rethought creativity English composers the Renaissance.

He also taught composition at London's Royal College of Music, where his favorite student in the 1920s was a young Irish girl named Elizabeth Maconki.

Decades later, she will tell that it was Vaughan Williams, for nothing that he was a traditionalist, who advised her never to listen to anyone and in composing music to focus only on her interests, tastes and thoughts.

The advice proved to be decisive for Maconki. Her music has always remained untouched by both the global trends of the academy avant-garde and the age-old Anglo-Celtic love for rural folklore. It was during her student years that she discovered Bela Bartók (a composer, by the way, who also worked outside of any obvious trends), Makonki in her compositions naturally repelled the mature music of the great Hungarian, but at the same time she consistently developed own style much more intimate and introspective.

illustrative examples originality and evolution of Maconchi's composer's fantasy - her thirteen string quartets, written from 1933 to 1984 and together forming a cycle of quartet literature, in no way inferior to those of Shostakovich or the same Bartok.

Vitezslava Kapralova (1915–1940)

A few years before World War I, an inconspicuous Czech composer and concert pianist Vaclav Kapral founded in his native Brno a private music school for beginning pianists. The school continued to exist after the war, soon earning a reputation as almost the best in the country.

The flow of those wishing to study, and to learn specifically from the Corporal himself, even briefly made the composer think about stopping all other activities in favor of teaching.

Fortunately, his daughter Witezslava, who at that time had not yet celebrated her tenth birthday, suddenly began to demonstrate extraordinary musical abilities. The girl played the piano better than many adult professionals, memorized the entire classical song repertoire and even began to write short plays.

The corporal developed a plan, surprising in terms of the degree of arrogance, stupidity and commercialism: to grow a real monster of music from Vitezslava, capable of replacing him as the main teacher of the family school.

Of course, none of this happened. The ambitious Witezslava, who wanted to become a composer and conductor, at the age of fifteen entered two corresponding faculties at the local conservatory at once. So that a woman wants to conduct - this was not seen in the Czech Republic of the 30s before Kapralova.

And to simultaneously conduct and compose - it was generally unthinkable. It was precisely to compose music in the first place that the newly enrolled student began - moreover, of such quality, such stylistic diversity and in such volumes that there is really no one to compare with.

It is clear why in the TV series “Mozart in the Jungle” it is Kapralova who becomes the role model for the heroine named Lizzy who cannot sit back: Vitezslava died of tuberculosis at the age of 25 - but at the same time, the number of compositions written by her exceeds the catalogs of very, very many authors.

It is logical to assume, however, that this phenomenal girl did not live to see her final triumph as a composer.

For all their formal quality, Kapralova’s compositions are stylistically very similar to the music of the leading Czech composer of those years, Bohuslav Martinu, who was also a great friend of the Kapral family, who knew Vitezslav from childhood and even managed to fall in love with her shortly before the girl’s death.

TEXT: Oleg Sobolev

AS IN ANY OTHER FIELD OF CLASSICAL ART Western world, in the history of academic music there are countless forgotten women who deserve to be told about themselves. In particular - in the history of composer's art. Even now, when the number of notable female composers is growing every year, the seasonal schedules of the most famous orchestras and the concert programs of the most famous performers rarely include works written by women.

When the work of a female composer nevertheless becomes an object of spectator or journalistic attention, the news about this is necessarily accompanied by some sad statistics. Here's a recent example: The Metropolitan Opera this season gave the brilliant "Love from afar" by Caia Saariaho - as it turned out, the first opera written by a woman, shown in this theater since 1903. It is comforting that the compositions of Saariaho - like, for example, the music of Sofia Gubaidulina or Julia Wolf - are performed quite often even without such newsworthy occasions.

Selecting a few little-known musical heroines from a large list of female names is a difficult task. The seven women that we will talk about now have one thing in common - they, to one degree or another, did not fit into the world around them. Someone solely because of their own behavior, which destroyed cultural foundations, and someone - through their music, to which there is no analogue.

Louise Farranc

Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont, she became famous in the European music world of the 1830s and 1840s as a pianist. Moreover, the girl's performing reputation was so high that in 1842 Farranc was appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatory. She held this post for the next thirty years and, despite the pedagogical workload, managed to prove herself as a composer. However, rather than "managed to show", but "could not show". Farranc came from the most famous dynasty of sculptors and grew up among the best people of Parisian art, so the act of creative self-expression was extremely natural for her.

Having published about fifty compositions during her lifetime, mostly instrumental, Madame Professor received rave reviews about her music from Berlioz and Liszt, but in her homeland Farranc was perceived as too non-French composer. In France, every first promising author scribbled many hours of opera, and the laconic and classically inspired works of the Parisian really ran counter to the then fashion. In vain: her best works - like the Third Symphony in G minor - to put it mildly, are not lost against the background of the mastodons of that time like Mendelssohn or Schumann. Yes, and Brahms, with his attempts to translate classicism into the language of the romantic era, Farranc bypassed ten or even twenty years.

Dora Pejacevic

A representative of one of the most noble Balkan noble families, the granddaughter of one of the bans (read - governors) of Croatia and the daughter of another, Dora Pejacevic spent her childhood and youth exactly as usual in the world pop culture they like to depict the life of young and carefully guarded by the family of young aristocrats . The girl grew up under the strict supervision of English governesses, almost did not communicate with her peers and, in general, was brought up by her parents with an eye to a further successful marriage for the family, rather than a happy childhood.

But something went wrong: as a teenager, Dora caught fire with the ideas of socialism, began to constantly conflict with her family, and, as a result, at the age of more than twenty, she was cut off from the rest of the Pejacevics for the rest of her life. This, however, only benefited her other passion: even at the dawn of the First World War, the rebellious noblewoman established herself as the most significant figure in Croatian music.

Dora's compositions, evenly inspired by Brahms, Schumann and Strauss, sounded extremely naive by the standards of the world around her - for example, at the time of the premiere of her old-fashioned piano concerto in Berlin and Paris, they were already listening with might and main to Lunar Pierrot and The Rite of Spring. But if we ignore the historical context and listen to Pejacevic's music as a sincere declaration of love for the German romantics, then one can easily notice her expressive melody, high-level orchestration and careful structural work.

Amy Beach

The most famous episode of Amy Beach's biography can be retold as follows. In 1885, when she was 18, Amy's parents married her to a 42-year-old surgeon from Boston. The girl was already a piano virtuoso at that time and hoped to continue her music studies and performing career, but her husband decided otherwise. Dr. Henry Harris Audrey Beach, concerned about the status of his family and guided by the then ideas about the role of women in secular New England society, forbade his wife to study music and limited her performances as a pianist to one concert a year.

For Amy, who dreamed of concert halls and sold-out recitals, this turned out to be tantamount to tragedy. But, as often happens, tragedy gave way to triumph: although Beach sacrificed her performing career, she began to devote herself more and more to writing and is now unambiguously identified by most researchers as the best American composer of the late Romantic era. Her two main works - the Gaelic Symphony published in 1896 and the piano concerto that followed three years later - are really beautiful, even if by the standards of those years they are completely devoid of originality. The most important thing is that in Beach's music, as one might assume, there is absolutely no place for provincialism and parochialism.

Ruth Crawford Seeger

Ruth Crawford Seeger is much more famous in the circles of serious fans, researchers and just lovers of American folk music than in the world of academic music. Why? There are two key reasons: first, she was the wife of the musicologist Charles Seeger, and therefore the ancestor of the Seeger clan, a family of musicians and singers who did more to popularize American folk than anyone else. Secondly, for the last ten years of her life, she worked closely on cataloging and arranging songs recorded on numerous trips by John and Alan Lomax, the largest American folklorists and collectors of folk music.

Surprisingly, until the beginning of their life together, both Ruth and Charles Seeger were composers of an extremely modernist persuasion, it was with great difficulty to apply the word “folklore” to their music. In particular, the compositions of Ruth Crawford of the early 30s can only be compared with the works of Anton Webern - and even then only in terms of skillfully built dramaturgy and laconically concentrated musical material. But if Webern's traditions shine through every note - it doesn't matter, Austrian or Renaissance music - then Seeger's works exist as if outside of tradition, outside of the past and outside of the future, outside of America and outside of the rest of the world. Why is a composer with such an individual style still not included in the canonical modernist repertoire? Mystery.

Lily Boulanger

It would seem, what kind of music could an eternally ill, deeply religious and pathologically modest Frenchwoman from high society compose at the beginning of the last century? That's right - one that could serve as a good soundtrack for Judgment Day. The best compositions of Lily Boulanger are written on religious texts such as psalms or Buddhist prayers, most often they are performed as if by an incorrectly tuned choir to a ragged, non-melodious and loud musical accompaniment. You can’t pick up an analog to this music right off the bat - yes, it is somewhat similar to Stravinsky’s early works and Honegger’s especially fiery compositions, but neither one nor the other reached such depths of despair and did not go into such extreme fatalism. When a friend of the Boulanger family, composer Gabriel Fauré, discovered that three-year-old Lily had absolute pitch, her parents and older sister could hardly imagine that this gift would translate into something so unangelic.

By the way, about my sister. Nadia Boulanger turned out to be a figure in the history of music, unlike any more significant. For almost half a century - from the 20s to the 60s - Nadia was considered one of the best music teachers on the planet. Having very specific views both on new music at that time, and on music in the literal sense of the word, classical, tough, uncompromising and exhausting her students with the most difficult tasks, Nadya, even for her ideological opponents, remained an example of musical intelligence of unprecedented memory and power. Perhaps she could have become as significant a composer as she turned out to be a teacher. In any case, she started as a composer - but, by her own admission, after Lily's death, something broke inside Nadia. Having lived for 92 years, the older sister never reached the heights of the few compositions of her younger sister, who burned out from Crohn's disease at the age of 24.

Elizabeth Maconki

Ralph Vaughan Williams, the greatest British composer of the last century, was a passionate champion of national musical traditions. So, he enthusiastically reworked folk songs, wrote choral works suspiciously similar to Anglican hymns, and, with varying degrees of success, rethought the work of English composers of the Renaissance. He also taught composition at London's Royal College of Music, where his favorite student in the 1920s was a young Irish girl named Elizabeth Maconki. Decades later, she will tell that it was Vaughan Williams, for nothing that he was a traditionalist, who advised her never to listen to anyone and in composing music to focus only on her interests, tastes and thoughts.

The advice proved to be decisive for Maconki. Her music has always remained untouched by both the global trends of the academy avant-garde and the age-old Anglo-Celtic love for rural folklore. It was during her student years that she discovered Bela Bartók (a composer, by the way, who also worked outside of any obvious trends), Makonki in her compositions naturally repelled the mature music of the great Hungarian, but at the same time she consistently developed her own style, much more intimate and introspective. Vivid examples of the originality and evolution of Makonka's composer's fantasy are her thirteen string quartets, written from 1933 to 1984 and together forming a cycle of quartet literature, in no way inferior to those of Shostakovich or the same Bartok.

Vitezslava Kapralova

A few years before the First World War, an inconspicuous Czech composer and concert pianist Vaclav Kapral founded a private music school for aspiring pianists in his native Brno. The school continued to exist after the war, soon earning a reputation as almost the best in the country. The flow of those wishing to study, and to learn specifically from the Corporal himself, even briefly made the composer think about stopping all other activities in favor of teaching.

Fortunately, his daughter Witezslava, who at that time had not yet celebrated her tenth birthday, suddenly began to demonstrate extraordinary musical abilities. The girl played the piano better than many adult professionals, memorized the entire classical song repertoire and even began to write small pieces. The corporal developed a plan, surprising in terms of the degree of arrogance, stupidity and commercialism: to grow a real monster of music from Vitezslava, capable of replacing him as the main teacher of the family school.

Of course, none of this happened. The ambitious Witezslava, who wanted to become a composer and conductor, at the age of fifteen entered two corresponding faculties at the local conservatory at once. So that a woman wants to conduct - this was not seen in the Czech Republic of the 30s before Kapralova. And to simultaneously conduct and compose - it was generally unthinkable. It was precisely to compose music in the first place that the newly enrolled student began - moreover, of such quality, such stylistic diversity and in such volumes that there is really no one to compare with.

Great women of Russia

Anastasia Moreva

The Voronezh Composers' Organization dedicated the spring musical and educational quiz to the great women of Russia. Her heroines were Catherine the Great, Natalia Goncharova, poetesses Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, and female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. Adults and young participants of the quiz learned with interest little known facts from biographies prominent women, listened to the performance of the Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Lyubov Kontsova, the soloist of the Voronezh Opera Elena Petrichenko.

For example, the Russian Empress Catherine II initiated women's education in Russia. On her initiative, the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, a school at the Academy of Arts, and a Society of Two Hundred Noble Maidens were opened. Catherine was engaged literary activity, leaving behind a large collection of works - notes, translations, fables, fairy tales, comedies, essays, as well as librettos for several operas. Participated in the weekly satirical magazine "Everything".

Natalya Goncharova - wife and muse of A.S. Pushkin dedicated to the poet's lines "I am married and happy ... This state is so new to me that it seems I have been reborn." Married to the great poet, she gave birth to four children. The program included compositions by M.I. Glinka, A.S. Dargomyzhsky, as well as the Voronezh composer Vladimir Naumov to the verses of A.S. Pushkin.

For the first time, many heard the name of a brilliant woman, poet and writer Evdokia Rostopchina. She knew A.S. Pushkin, M.I. Lermontov, V.A. Zhukovsky, N.V. Gogol, meetings with whom served as an impetus for writing his own poems. She composed lyrical plays, novels in prose, dramatic plays for the theatre. In St. Petersburg, in the Rostopchins' house, they often gave musical evenings, which were visited by F. List, M.I. Glinka, Prince V.F. Odoevsky, writers A.N. Ostrovsky and L.A. May, as well as artists M.S. Shchepkin, I.V. Samarin and others. We are interested in the fact that the countess spent two years in the Voronezh estate that belonged to her husband - the city of Anna. The opening of the evening was the performance of E. Krylatov's romances "You will remember me", A. Rubinstein's "Morning" to the verses of E. Rostopchina.

The attention of the listeners was presented to the romances of the Voronezh composer Alexander Ukrainsky based on Anna Akhmatova's poems "Love", "Let the voices of the organ burst again", glorifying the triumph of art, spring, love, real poetry. The text of the poems is conveyed in the composer's music with amazing poignancy and penetration.

Marina Tsvetaeva – a poetess who sings of natural beauty and joyful feelings of love. Difficult life path Tsvetaeva is reflected in her work, which is saturated with motives romantic love, rejection and loneliness. On the verses of M. Tsvetaeva, the works of another Voronezh composer A. Mozalevsky were written, which completed the program of the evening.

October 1st was International Music Day. Of course, this is primarily a holiday of composers. But for some reason, people rarely ask the question - why are there so few female composers? You can conduct an experiment and interview, say, 100 people on the topic "who is your favorite composer." And surely all 100 respondents will name a male writer. For example, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Rachmaninov, Strauss, Beethoven or Prokofiev… And there won't be a single woman on this list.

But over the past two centuries there have been (and are) composers representing the fair sex, whose names thundered in Europe or are known now.

And today, we can talk about the brightest female composers.

The fair sex came to music seriously only at the beginning of the 20th century. Of course, one can say about the heroines of the 19th century - Louise Farranc or Joanna Kinkel. But they were not very well known to the general musical community.

Therefore, we can start, perhaps, with the Frenchwoman Lily Boulanger. Unfortunately, few people remember her now, but at the beginning of the 20th century, the name of Lily thundered throughout Europe. She was, to put it modern language, super popular, although God has let her go quite a few years.

Lily grew up in a musical family, her father was a composer, and also held a position as a vocal teacher at the Paris Conservatory. Interestingly, her mother, singer Raisa Myshetskaya, was born in St. Petersburg.

Lily learned to read music at the age of six - then she did not even know the letters and could not read. Of her early compositions, only the E-major waltz survives. But in 1909 she entered the Paris Conservatory, and already in 1913 she became the first woman to receive the Grand Prize of Rome for the cantata Faust and Helena. In 1914, as a laureate of the Rome Prize, she spent four months in " eternal city". However, her trip was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. She died untimely of tuberculosis in March 1915, when she was not yet 25 years old ... She was buried in the Montmartre cemetery, but very few know where her grave is.

In the 20th century, the Englishwoman Ruth Jeeps was extremely popular. Since childhood, she has performed as a pianist. However, already at the age of eight she performed her first original composition. Why not Mozart in a skirt? In 1936 she entered the Royal College of Music, where she studied piano, oboe and composition, and after graduation she again performed as a pianist and oboist. Then Ruth got a serious hand injury. and focused on writing own compositions and manual musical groups. So, in 1953, Gyps founded and headed the Portia Wind Ensemble, a chamber ensemble of wind instruments. The peculiarity of this team was that it consisted exclusively of female musicians. In 1955, under the leadership of Gyps, the London Repertory Orchestra was created, which consisted mainly of young musicians, and in 1961, the Chanticleer Orchestra. As for the compositions of Gips, she wrote five symphonies. Specialists especially appreciate the Second Symphony, where, according to professionals, Ruth outdid herself. Ruth Jeeps died in 1999 at the age of 78.

bright star classical music call Sophia Gubaidulina. She entered the Conservatory in 1954, successfully completed not only her, but also graduate school. As Gubaidullina herself says, the parting word spoken by Dmitry Shostakovich was important for her at that time: “I wish you to follow your “wrong” path.”

Gubaidulina created not only "serious" music, she also wrote compositions for 25 films, including "Mowgli" and "Scarecrow". But in 1979, at the VI Congress of Composers, in the report of Tikhon Khrennikov, her music was criticized. In general, Sofia got into the "black list" of domestic composers. In 1991, Gubaidulina received a German scholarship, and since 1992 she lives near Hamburg, where she creates her works. And he rarely comes to Russia.

Well, and, of course, one cannot but say about Alexander Pakhmutova. She is perhaps the most successful female composer recent decades. She from the very early childhood She was exceptionally gifted in music. And she wrote her first melodies when she was only three years old. Moreover, at the age of four, little Sasha composed the play "The Roosters Sing".

It is not surprising that then she was accepted into the Central Music School at the Moscow State Conservatory without any problems. By the way, she graduated from the Conservatory in 1953, and then successfully completed her postgraduate studies. And even while studying, she wrote music, and became one of the most popular and demanded composers of the USSR.

Pakhmutova's main hobby is songs. The songs, the music for which Alexandra Nikolaevna wrote, were performed and performed by many outstanding artists of the Soviet and Russian stage: Sergey Lemeshev and Lyudmila Zykina, Muslim Magomayev and Tamara Sinyavskaya, Anna German and Alexander Gradsky, Iosif Kobzon and Valentina Tolkunova, Lev Leshchenko and Maya Kristalinskaya, Eduard Khil and Sofia Rotaru, Valery Leontiev and Lyudmila Senchina.

In general, despite the fact that there are fewer women composers than men, they also left a bright mark on world music.

After all, in addition to all those listed above, there were and are such talents as Barbara Strozzi, Rebecca Saunders, Malvina Reynolds, Adriana Helzky and Karen Tanaka, and the contribution of the beautiful half of humanity to the world musical heritage is also very great.