Josephine Lang: Consigned to Oblivion

She was a respected composer whose songs attracted the attention of Felix Mendelssohn, Robert and Clara Schumann, Ferdinand Hiller and other important figures of German musical life. She published extensively, performed before audiences and was praised by contemporary critics for the originality and emotional power of her music. She was Josephine Lang.

Harald and Sharon Krebs describe her as one of the most gifted, prolific and widely published song composers of the nineteenth century. Yet, her life and music subsequently became virtually unknown.

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Josephine Lang - Source: https://share.google/5ZIAfHiTXsHwP4GAG 

Born into Music

Lang was born in Munich in 1815 into a remarkable musical family. Her father, Theobald Lang, was a violinist in the Munich court orchestra. Her mother, Regina Hitzelberger, was a successful opera singer. Her grandfather and great-uncle had also been musicians in the court orchestra, while her maternal grandmother had been a celebrated singer. Her mother initially taught her, and Lang was already performing demanding piano music in public at the age of eleven.

The opportunities available to Lang were circumscribed from the beginning. Financial difficulties prevented her from receiving the advanced and systematic musical education that her talent might have justified, and while still young she had to earn money by teaching piano.

When Felix Mendelssohn met the fifteen-year-old Lang in Munich in 1830, he was struck by her musical ability. He gave her lessons in harmony and counterpoint and mobilized his extensive musical network on her behalf. The encounter appears to have had a catalytic effect: the 1830s became an exceptionally productive period in which Lang composed and published numerous songs.

Through this world came connections with Ferdinand Hiller, Robert Schumann and, eventually, Clara Schumann.

A Composer of Romanticism

Lang's music emerged from some of the central intellectual and aesthetic concerns of Romanticism. The form to which she devoted most of her creative life was the Lied, the German art song. In the Lied, poetry and music encounter one another. Language acquires another emotional dimension through melody, harmony, rhythm and piano accompaniment. The form lent itself exceptionally well to the Romantic fascination with interiority, nature, love, memory, loss and Sehnsucht, the difficult-to-translate sense of longing for something absent, distant or perhaps unattainable.

Lang composed approximately 300 songs, setting poems by Goethe, Heine, Uhland and many others. Music became a means of interpreting the emotional possibilities contained in a text.

Harald Krebs's analysis of her multiple settings of poems by Christian Reinhold Köstlin demonstrates how identical words could generate quite different musical worlds at different moments.

Lang herself provided the best description of her music when she characterized her songs as her “diary.” Modern analysis of her manuscripts, correspondence and biography confirms that many compositions can be related to particular experiences in her life. Her sensitivity to poetic texts and the autobiographical character of her songs make it difficult to separate the composer from the person experiencing love, illness, hope, bereavement and uncertainty.

Her music belongs to a culture in which the inner life of the individual became material for artistic creation.

Romanticism as a Social World

For Lang, the salon was particularly important. Nineteenth-century salons enabled composers and performers to encounter writers, patrons and other musicians, hear new works and have their own compositions performed. They were especially significant for women, whose access to formal musical institutions was much more restricted. Research on Lang and salon culture traces her participation in such environments in Munich, Stuttgart and Tübingen.

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Josephine Lang and the Salon in Southern Germany (Chapter 13) - Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (Source: https://share.google/ofmjs80hW78CE0ts6)

Lang married the jurist and writer Christian Reinhold Köstlin in 1842 and moved to Tübingen. She subsequently gave birth to six children in seven years. Both spouses suffered from poor health, and after Köstlin's death in 1856, Lang faced severe financial difficulties. She continued composing, publishing and teaching while supporting her family. Despite these circumstances, at least 150 of her songs were published during her lifetime, with many others remaining in manuscript.

The constraints upon Lang did not prevent artistic production.

Recognition Without Canonization

Lang's concentration on the Lied may also have contributed to her subsequent marginalization. Although the Lied occupied an important place in German Romanticism, the nineteenth-century ideal of the great composer increasingly privileged large-scale public works, particularly symphonies and operas. Yet, the Lied itself was no obstacle to canonization, as the enduring reputations of Schubert and Schumann demonstrate. The question, therefore, is not simply which musical forms Lang cultivated, but whether women composers enjoyed the same opportunities to transform artistic achievement into lasting historical recognition.

Her contemporaries did not ignore her. Recent research using Munich newspapers shows that Lang's performances and compositions received significant public attention. Critics praised her originality, technical ability and emotional depth and even described her as a “tone poetess.”

Mendelssohn encouraged her. Robert Schumann reviewed her music positively. Clara Schumann later helped her with publication opportunities. Ferdinand Hiller remained a particularly important advocate, and in 1867 published a biographical essay intended partly to increase public awareness of her circumstances. Hiller actively sought wider circulation for the essay.

Why, then, did Lang disappear?

The answer may lie in the difference between recognition and canonization. Recognition can occur through contemporary performances, friendships, reviews, publishers and artistic networks. Canonization requires something more durable. Music must continue to be performed after its creator's death. Scores must remain in print. Conservatories must teach the works. Music historians must write about them. Performers must record them. Each generation must, in effect, transmit the music to the next.

One explanation emerges from a comparison with two other women composers of her generation, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Clara Schumann. As Sharon Krebs has observed, Lang enjoyed considerable recognition during her lifetime and published more music than either of them. Yet, Hensel and Schumann possessed a familial connection to a famous male composer. Their places in musical history could be sustained, at least partly, through the continuing scholarly and institutional attention devoted to Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann. Lang had no comparable connection. The consequences remained visible even in the twenty-first century. While the bicentenaries of Hensel and Schumann were marked by international academic conferences, Lang's bicentenary received no equivalent recognition.

Gender mattered enormously. Women could participate in domestic music-making and salons, and could compose songs and piano pieces. However, they faced greater obstacles in obtaining advanced professional education, institutional appointments and access to the large-scale musical forms and public environments from which the nineteenth-century image of the “great composer” was increasingly constructed.

Romanticism celebrated individuality, emotional authenticity and artistic genius. Yet, artistic immortality did not depend upon genius alone. It depended upon institutions.

Who Decides What We Remember?

Josephine Lang died in 1880. Her music did not disappear because nobody had heard it, or nobody had published it, or respected musicians of her age had dismissed it. On the contrary, she had been heard, published and admired. What disappeared was the cultural machinery that continually reproduced her presence.

Lang forces us to reconsider how cultural memory works. The history of music that reaches us is not simply a catalogue of the greatest works naturally surviving the passage of time. It is also the outcome of repeated decisions by performers, publishers, critics, conservatories, scholars and audiences about what deserves to be transmitted.

Josephine Lang belonged to the world of German Romanticism. Artists may create works, but institutions help create immortality.