The creative journey of the female composers featured in this recording project spans over two centuries. Each piece contributes to shaping the image of female composers between the 19th and 20th centuries. A role that evolved from a marginal presence to a recognised creative force. These composers lived in an era when public careers were often closed to them. Many devoted themselves to the piano – the domestic instrument par excellence – writing numerous pieces for four-hand piano, a repertoire that was intimate and familiar but not without artistic ambition.
At the end of the 18th century, we find the Englishwoman Jane Savage (1752-1824), daughter of the well-known organist and composer William Savage. Jane participated in London’s artistic life – linked to the circle of Händel, Arne and Boyce – from a young age. She published several collections of sonatas, duets and sacred songs, often at her own expense. Her music reflected a classical ideal of balance and clarity, suited to the tastes of the cultured amateurs of Georgian England. After her marriage, Savage reduced her public activity but continued to compose privately, leaving a legacy that is now being rediscovered as a valuable testimony to the contribution of women to the nascent British keyboard school. A Favorite Duett for Two Performers on One Pianoforte or Harpsichord, published towards the end of the 18th century, is divided into three movements, revealing a surprising formal mastery. The first movement, Maestoso, solemn and well-balanced, recalls Mozartian rhetoric with elegant modulations. The central Larghetto highlights a simple but not banal cantabile, with imitative dialogues between the two hands that emphasise the chamber music dimension and melodic sensitivity. The final Rondo is brilliant, rhythmically incisive and embellished with small ornamental flourishes.
In the mid-19th century, while four-handed piano music was enjoying its golden age in bourgeois salons, highly talented female figures emerged who managed to win over their audiences. In France, Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944) stands out, perhaps the first female composer to achieve international fame in the late Romantic period. Her output, largely devoted to the piano, includes the Six pièces romantiques op. 55 (composed around 1890). These embody the fin de siècle taste for the pièce de genre, short pieces inspired by evocative images or scenes, very much in vogue in French Romanticism. In these pages, Chaminade paints a colourful gallery: from the pastoral freshness of Primavera, suspended between the rhythm of a barcarolle and the spirit of a waltz, to La chaise à porteurs, a light and gallant march, and finally, the Sérénade d’automne, which alternates a lulling melody with brilliant episodes reminiscent of the mandolin. Thanks to their melodic charm and refined writing, Chaminade’s compositions became popular both in Europe and America, where women’s circles – the “Chaminade Clubs” – dedicated to her music even sprang up.
Another French voice contemporary with Cécile was that of Mel Bonis (1858-1937). Born Mélanie, but forced to adopt a masculine-sounding pseudonym, she was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, where she studied with Franck and Guiraud. Her academic training and contact with the Parisian impressionist nouvelle vague allowed her to develop a refined style, combining Franck’s melodic cantabile with the sense of harmonic and timbral colour of the French school of the fin de siècle. After an arranged marriage that forced her to interrupt her career for many years, Bonis returned to composing after her husband’s death, leaving a corpus of over three hundred works, including pieces for piano, chamber music, sacred music and orchestral music. Her output for four-hand piano is significant both for the educational repertoire and for the concert repertoire. Among her works, Los Gitanos stands out, a piece of impetus and colour that evokes Andalusian music, characterised by obstinate rhythms, percussiveness and modal scales that recall the Spain imagined according to the taste of the Belle Époque.
In the Anglo-Saxon world of the late nineteenth century, we encounter Helen Hopekirk (1856-1945) and Amy Beach (1867-1944). Hopekirk, of Scottish origin, was a virtuoso pianist, teacher and composer who established herself with an international career. A pupil of great masters such as Karl Klindworth in Berlin, she also trained in Paris, enriching her pianistic style with solid technical mastery and an interpretative sensitivity appreciated by contemporary critics. As early as the 1880s, she undertook tours in Europe and the United States, performing in prestigious venues such as Boston Symphony Hall. After her marriage, she moved permanently to the United States and became a central figure in Boston’s musical life, both as a concert performer and as a teacher at the New England Conservatory. Hopekirk left behind a body of work that reflects her dual connection to the German Romantic tradition and Scottish folk music with pieces for solo piano, Lieder and chamber music, often permeated with folk melodies transfigured with refined harmony. Her writing is distinguished by her skilful use of modal colours and a sober lyrical approach. Two of her arrangements of Scottish songs, Land o’ the Leal and Eilidh Bàn, exemplify these qualities. Originally composed by Hopekirk for solo piano, they were later transcribed for piano four hands by Anna Caporaso. The former is a funeral song transformed into a delicate elegy, while the latter lightly evokes the dance rhythm of a folk ballad. In their four-hand guise, these works also reflect a pedagogical and chamber-music orientation, in keeping with the 19th-century salon tradition.
The American Amy Beach represents an extraordinary case in the US musical landscape of the time: a prodigious pianist and the first American composer to achieve national recognition for a symphonic work (Gaelic Symphony, 1896), Beach is considered the founder of the Second Boston School. Raised in a cultured family in New Hampshire, she continued her studies almost entirely as a self-taught musician, perfecting her piano skills and studying counterpoint, orchestration and classical forms on her own through the works of German composers. After her marriage, she limited her concert activity to comply with social conventions but continued to devote herself to composition. She produced an impressive body of work, including a symphony, a concerto for piano and orchestra, cantatas, vocal cycles and numerous chamber and piano works. In Summer dreams op. 47, published in 1901 and dedicated to her niece Edith, each movement is preceded by a short poetic verse chosen by the composer, a feature that brings the collection closer to the German Romantic tradition. The titles tell the story of a fairy-tale summer: Brownies is a light and witty dance of forest sprites; Robin Redbreast chirps with springtime freshness in arpeggiated figurations; Twilight suspends harmony in twilight shades; Katy-dids offers a lively and sparkling rhythm like a chorus of nocturnal insects; Elfin Tarantelle is a small virtuosic tarantella of fantastic spirits; Good Night concludes with a tender lullaby.
With the early 20th century, contexts and languages changed. Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) embraced neoclassicism with a clear, brilliant and witty language. She studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where she met Milhaud, Honegger, Poulenc and Auric, who together with her and Durey formed the well-known group Les six. Her early music reflects the influence of Ravel and Satie, with a taste for short forms, lively contrasts, transparent writing and subtle humour. Despite the difficulties she encountered during the war and a long period of critical oblivion in the second half of the century, Tailleferre continued to write with tireless consistency, leaving us plenty of chamber, orchestral, vocal and piano scores that bears witness to female modernity in 20th-century Paris. Her ability to combine formal rigour with a sense of playfulness makes her one of the most personal voices in 20th-century French music. The Suite burlesque, written in her later years, consists of six miniature pieces (Dolente, Pimpante, Mélancolique, Barcarole, Fringante, Bondissante) that testify to her ever-sparkling and playful vein.
In the contemporary scene, we find Christine Donkin (1976), representative of a generation of composers finally free from the barriers that hindered her predecessors. Canadian, trained in Ottawa and later in Edmonton, Donkin has developed an original and communicative language, capable of combining formal rigour, inventiveness and expressive immediacy. Her output includes works for orchestra, choir, chamber music and a vast series of piano compositions, many of which have been adopted in the teaching programmes of conservatories and music schools in North America. The collection From Riccioli’s Moon (2011), inspired by the lunar seas so poetically named by the astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli in the 17th century, is one of her most emblematic works. Here, the pages dedicated to The Sea of Tranquility and Bay of Rainbows recount in music the suspended calm and iridescent reflections of these imaginary places on the lunar surface. In the first piece, the two pianists must merge into a single, almost liquid sound, suggesting the stillness of a calm sea in space, while the second piece introduces a more sparkling and iridescent writing style, with arpeggios evoking the light playing on the waves.
Giulaino Marco Mattioli © 2025