Female Pianists and their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Katharine Ellis

Female Pianists and their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Katharine Ellis

Department of Music

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Abstract

The sudden appearance of several female concert pianists in Paris in the mid 1840s forced male journalists to develop new critical rhetorics. Criticism of the period became saturated with problematic notions of gender, the use of the body, and levels of acting in performance. Because they were interpreters rather than composers, women pianists challenged traditional
ideas about the meaning of pianistic virtuosity and were central to the enlargement of the concert repertory. In comparison with male colleagues, however, they were disadvantaged, caught in a web of conflicting ideas concerning the relative value of particular keyboard repertories that were themselves gendered.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	353-385
Number of pages	33
Journal	Journal of the American Musicological Society
Volume	50
Issue number	2-3
Publication status	Published - 1 Jul 1997

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Ellis.jams.pianists.1997
Published as Ellis, K. (1997). Female Pianists and their Male Critics in Nineteenth Century Paris. Journal of the American Musicological Society, 50(2-3), 353- 385. © 1997 by the American Musicological Society. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the Regents of the University of California on behalf of the American Musicological Society for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® on JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/r/ucal) or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center, http://www.copyright.com.
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http://www.jstor.org/stable/831838

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Female Pianists and their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris

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