Girls Conductors Historical past: 7 Forgotten Pioneers

Over the previous decade, it has develop into increasingly more widespread to see girls conducting orchestras.

Many individuals imagine that ladies solely began conducting within the twentieth century, however that perception can be mistaken.

As of 2025, we’re nonetheless ready for a complete scholarly examine of the historical past of ladies conductors, so that you shouldn’t take into account this checklist closing.

However listed below are seven of the primary girls conductors, all born earlier than 1870, and all lively within the nineteenth century.

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805–1847)

Fanny Mendelssohn was born in 1805 to a rich household in Hamburg. 4 years later, her brother Felix was born.

Fanny and Felix had been a number of the most astonishing musical prodigies in music historical past. Their musical dialogue with each other throughout their childhoods was deeply formative to their respective developments, and their household’s wealth enabled them to obtain the very best training and alternatives accessible.

Nevertheless, due to their wealth, it was thought of inappropriate for Fanny to seem earlier than the general public, regardless of her expertise as a pianist.

She did carry out continuously at residence live shows, which she turned well-known for. She even organized for small orchestras to seem at her salons.

Fanny Mendelssohn’s Overture in C-major

She as soon as wrote to Felix, “Mom has actually informed you concerning the…orchestra on Saturday and the way I stood up there with a baton in my hand… Had I not been so horribly shy and embarrassed with each stroke, I might’ve been in a position to conduct fairly effectively.”

She was rehearsing a refrain in a piece by her brother in Might 1847 when she immediately misplaced feeling in her fingers. She went to place them in vinegar to revive feeling because the refrain sang, and she or he known as out from the opposite room, “How stunning it sounds!”

She then had a stroke and died earlier than the day was over.

Study extra concerning the life and tragic loss of life of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel.

Nina Stollewerk Rosthorn (1825–1914)

Nina Stollewerk was born in Vienna in 1825. She studied music with Simon Sechter, who taught giants like Bruckner, Thalberg, and Vieuxtemps.

She wrote her first lieder on the age of 16. Jenny Lind, some of the well-known singers on the earth, sang her music.

In 1851, she appeared as a conductor at Munich’s Odeon live performance corridor, conducting her personal works.

Critiques appeared of her within the press, all centered round her gender. In 1852, one newspaper wrote:

“One may actually settle for the emancipation of ladies within the path of artwork, which is so near the feminine emotional world, particularly when, as within the case of Nina Stollewerk, she additionally seems as a conductor with such unpretentiousness, expertise, and a transparent inside drive for such creative exercise.”

Different critics had been extra hostile.

“The girl ought to spare herself the difficulty of conducting herself, a minimum of in public; it’s, other than its peculiarity, in actual fact – superfluous!”

Elfrida Andrée (1841–1929)

Elfrida Andrée was born in Sweden in 1841. She needed to combat for the place, however in 1867, she turned one of many first girls within the nation to work as a church organist.

She additionally composed. It was her dream to put in writing works for orchestra. “The orchestra, that’s my aim!” she wrote within the 1870s.

She did write two symphonies, however the premiere of the primary (the place she was not on the rostrum) was lackluster.

Elfrida Andrée’s Symphony No. 2

In 1897, when she was in her mid-fifties, she turned the pinnacle of the Gothenburg Employees Institute Live shows. Certainly one of her duties was conducting live shows. This made her the primary Swedish lady to conduct in public.

Florence Ashton Marshall (1843–1922)

Florence Ashton Marshall was born in Rome to an inventive English household in 1843.

She married a author and music collector named Julian Marshall in 1864 and had three daughters.

She started finding out music comparatively late in life, attending the Royal Academy of Music starting in 1873. Finally, she turned an achieved and prolific composer, writing a lot of songs, operettas, and works for orchestra.

She and her husband each contributed to the primary version of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Within the late nineteenth century, she was elected an affiliate of the Royal Philharmonic Society, a prestigious British music society.

She was additionally chosen to steer the South Hampstead Orchestra, which she did for over thirty years. Throughout her tenure, she carried out with giants like violinist Mischa Elman and even introduced a Brahms symphony.

Helen Pleydell-Bouverie, the Countess of Radnor (1846–1929)

Woman Radnor was born Helen Matilda Chaplin on 21 March 1846 within the city of Ryhall, 100 miles north of London.

She studied music as a younger lady, however married in 1866.

Her first try at conducting got here when she determined to conduct a church choir, till she was requested to cease “interfering.” However she’d been bitten by the conducting bug.

On the peak of the Victorian period, she used her wealth and title to discovered an organisation known as the Folks’s Leisure Society. She additionally started showing each in personal and in public as a singer.

In 1881, she based a string orchestra made up of aristocratic girls gamers. In 1894, they premiered a piece by the celebrated British composer Hubert Parry.

Hubert Parry’s Woman Radnor’s Suite

The Musical Occasions reviewed her efficiency:

Woman Radnor is a conductor of fairly distinctive {qualifications}, who evidently workouts the indefinable affect over her gamers which distinguishes the conductor “born, not made.” Her beat is determined and expressive, and she or he makes use of her left hand in an efficient method suggestive of a sympathetic examine of Dr. Richter’s strategies. Her entire consideration is given to the forces underneath her command, for she doesn’t belong to these animate metronomes who, as somebody – was it Bulow? – stated “have their head within the rating as a substitute of the rating of their head.” Woman Radnor, in actual fact, hardly referred to the music in entrance of her, even Dr. Parry’s Suite being apparently performed by coronary heart.

In 1896, the 12 months she retired, the orchestra consisted of 19 first violins, eighteen second violins, twelve violas, fourteen cellos, seven double-basses, and timpani.

Josephine Amann-Weinlich (1848–1887)

Josephine Weinlich was born on 2 August 1848 within the small city of Dechtice in present-day Slovakia.

We don’t know what her early coaching was, however we do know she performed in a household musical ensemble as a baby.

In early 1867, when she was eighteen, she based a string quartet made up of ladies who would play at personal occasions. By Might, she was promoting to rent further musicians.

Josephine Weinlich’s Freie Gedanken (Free Ideas)

At first, their forces had been small: three violins, a cello, a flute, a harp, a harmonium, and a piano. However they slowly grew, and shortly that they had twelve members.

They traveled round Europe within the 1870s. The ensemble glided by a lot of names, however probably the most well-known ones had been Weinlich’s Damen-Kapelle or the Vienna Girls’s Orchestra.

In January 1870, she married a fellow conductor named Ebo Fortunatus Amann, who went on to handle the ensemble.

In 1871, they traveled to America to tour. A disagreement with their American supervisor led to the dissolution of the orchestra, however she reformed one other upon her return to Austria. The brand new orchestra had thirty-three girls musicians, together with seven boys who performed clarinet, trumpet, trombone, and horn.

“Her look is complete, her arm vigorous; she is aware of all of the music by coronary heart…and conducts from reminiscence,” The Musical Normal reported in 1873.

She tried to be taken severely as a composer, and never simply as a form of glorified dance band. She employed the storied Musikverein in Vienna to offer a live performance, though critics (and presumably audiences) had been preoccupied by her gender.

In 1879, after the dissolution of the second incarnation of her orchestra, she moved to Lisbon and performed the municipal orchestra there. That is an intriguing little bit of music historical past as a result of the orchestra would have been made up of males, and there are few data of male orchestras permitting girls to conduct them within the nineteenth century. Extra examine is required!

Emma Steiner (1856–1929)

Emma Steiner was born on 26 February 1856 in Baltimore, Maryland. By the age of seven, she was composing, and by eleven, she had written her first opera. (It’s now sadly misplaced.)

As a teen, she started working as an operetta conductor. She finally started working for Edward Everett Rice at his Rice and Collier Opera Firm, touring the nation. She claimed she gave 700 performances of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado alone.

She turned well-known for her sturdy will. In 1885, she horsewhipped a person for approaching too strongly to one among her 16-year-old refrain women, and obtained right into a bodily altercation with a benefactress after she and an all-female manufacturing of As You Like It was fired in favor of an all-male one.

In 1877, she wrote a comic book opera known as Fleurette, which acquired good evaluations for the music and dangerous evaluations for the libretto.

In 1894, she performed the Anton Seidl Orchestra, one of many nice American orchestras of the day, in Chickering Corridor in New York. Three years later, she introduced a collection of live shows with members of the New York Metropolitan Orchestra, by which she’d conduct works by Wagner, Liszt, and others.

In 1925, she appeared on the Metropolitan Opera Home in New York to conduct an orchestra in her work. It wasn’t the official Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, nevertheless it was the primary time {that a} lady had ever performed in that storied house. The rationale for the present was her fifty years within the opera enterprise.

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