On Friday 13th November, I will be performing the musical settings of poetry by three German poetesses: Anna Louise Karsch (1722–1791), daughter, Karoline von Klencke (1754–1802) and granddaughter, Helmina von Chézy (1783–1856).

This lecture recital will incorporate my research from my Master’s of Music thesis, in which am researching the poetic and epistolary work of three generations of female writers: grandmother, Anna Louise Karsch (1722–1791), daughter, Karoline von Klencke (1754–1802) and granddaughter, Helmina von Chézy (1783–1856).[1] I am particularly interested in, as musicologist Karin Baumgarten writes, the three women’s “authorship within a filial paradigm (mother-daughter relationships)”, and I seek to explore the ways in which the anomaly of three generations of poetesses persisted through the patriarchal literary scene of 18th and 19th century Europe.”[2] Using evidence of male patronage both hindering and advancing the women’s careers, my thesis seeks to uncover the extent to which their political and poetic sentiments were altered, and even misconstrued, by male publication and musical setting.[3] I will give particular attention to the poetry which was set to music by composers, given that, as musicologist Emily Kilpatrick notes, ““transposing” or “translating” a work from one medium to another is necessarily more complex when form and expression are so inextricably merged”.[4] Ultimately, my thesis seeks to advocate for the writing of Karsch, Klenke and Chézy as a unique example of “kunkellehn” or “female line inheritance”, during a time in which the passing down of knowledge, wealth, and employment from generation to generation was a right predominantly reserved for men.[5] 

[1] Susanne Kord, Women Peasant Poets in Eighteenth-Century England, Scotland, and Germany: Milkmaids on Parnassus (Boydell & Brewer, 2003), 4; Karin Baumgartner, ‘“Wozu Eine Amazonen—Literatur?”: Literary Creativity and Productivity in the Writings of Helm Ina von Chézy’, in Writing the Self, Creating Community, NED-New edition, ed. Elisabeth Krimmer and Lauren Nossett, German Women Authors and the Literary Sphere, 1750-1850 (Boydell & Brewer, 2020): 164, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvrdf1pv.11.

[2] Baumgartner, ‘“Wozu Eine Amazonen,”” 164; Karin Baumgartner, "In Search of Literary Mothers Across the Rhine: The Influence of Genlis and Staël on the Writing of Helmina Von Chézy", Women’s Writing 18, no. 1 (2011): 52–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2011.525010.

[3] Kord, Women Peasant Poets; Reinhard Van Hoorickx, “An Unknown Schubert Letter”, The Musical Times 122, no. 1659 (1981): 292, https://doi.org/10.2307/961889.

[4] Emily Kilpatrick, “Ravel’s “Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé”: A Philosophy of Composition’, Music and Letters 101, no. 3 (2021): 512, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcaa001.

[5] Baumgartner, "In Search of Literary Mothers," 52.