To Write as They Played

Sarah Moorhouse reviews Susan Tomes’s new collective biography, “Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives.”

By Sarah MoorhouseJuly 24, 2024

• History

• Gender & Sexuality

WHEN LUCY HONEYCHURCH, the heroine of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), plays the piano, her friend Mr. Beebe decides that her musicality is an “illogical element” about her. “[S]ome sonatas of Beethoven,” Forster tells us, “can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph.” Playing Beethoven, the usually demure Lucy becomes assertive and daring. Mr. Beebe muses: “If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting—both for us and for her.”

Beyond the bounds of Forster’s novel, the comment is a slightly ironic one. Many female pianists throughout history have had to live exactly as they played—that is, at home. Public performances, much less the prospect of earning money through artistic displays, were frowned upon until the 20th century. Yet, as Susan Tomes shows us in her new collective biography, Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives, the music-making that took place behind the walls of domesticity was exciting in its own ways. Drawing on archival material spanning three centuries, Tomes uncovers a history of female pianists who performed in defiance of their gender and in pursuit of beauty and art, resisting any suggestion that there might be an “illogical element” in the activity.

A concert pianist and historian, Tomes has written several books about the piano. Her previous volume, The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces (2021), plots its course through a hundred works that, she suggests, determined the trajectory of classical music. Women and the Piano is similarly ambitious in scope. The book opens with a sweeping overview of changing attitudes towards female pianism and the evolution of the instrument, from its origins in the 17th-century harpsichord to the development of the modern-day digital keyboard. The subsequent 50 mini-biographies are organized into three main “eras” of piano playing: the “dawn” of the piano, the heyday of the concert pianist in the 19th century, and early 20th-century jazz and light music. Arguably, neither the age of concert pianists nor that of jazz is over: in a concluding section that reflects on challenges faced by today’s female pianists, Tomes offers a sense of the range of classical music-making that still enjoys widespread popularity.

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Both this book and its predecessor raise questions about Tomes’s selection criteria. In her introduction to the present volume, she comments on her decision to include women “whose stories illustrate a range of issues that female pianists had to confront”—figures who “showed that women were not merely imitating men but had their own artistic authority.” Prioritizing “range” and eliding such varied lives into short biographical entries of standardized length leads to inevitable gaps: for some of these players, there’s scarcely enough material to fill two pages; for others, this format proves too concise.

Meanwhile, several important figures are not mentioned at all. In her section on “light-music pianists,” for example, Tomes includes the Trinidadian pianist Winifred Atwell as a representative of the performers popular for playing “less serious” piano music in music halls and pubs in 1960s and ’70s Britain. The classically trained Atwell was the first Black artist to have a number-one hit in the UK Singles Chart, an achievement that’s important to emphasize. Tomes doesn’t, however, mention less well-to-do performers such as “Mrs. Mills,” the plump and jovial pianist who fed a love of this style of music among the English working class. An omission like this gestures toward a particular pattern throughout the book, in which piano playing typically appears the preserve of those with means. The result is a lopsided—or, at the very least, limited—history: though they embodied none of the glamour or sophistication stereotypically attached to piano playing, performers such as Mrs. Mills brought an enjoyment of the instrument to a wider audience than is acknowledged in Tomes’s book.

The absence of independent entries on renowned living pianists such as Martha Argerich and Mitsuko Uchida seems similarly curious. Tomes’s stated aim is to tackle the “collective amnesia” that surrounds female pianists, even those who were famous in their own time. The goal is a commendable one—so why not celebrate progress, however incremental, toward its achievement? Argerich won the 1965 International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, Poland, at the age of 24, after which she gained international prominence foremost for her playing rather than her gender. Stopping the clock before the ascent of such superstar performers isn’t simply a shame; it’s a move that feels slightly disingenuous. Surely, these developments deserve a place in Tomes’s purportedly wide-ranging story?

To that end: Is it helpful to segregate women into their own history here? Collective biographies of artistic women have become especially popular in recent years; take, for instance, the success of Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men (2022), a riposte to Ernst Gombrich’s 1950 classic tome The Story of Art. As is the case with Women and the Piano, these books’ stated aim—and, when done well, their strength—is highlighting and honoring the achievements of women whom history has unfairly overlooked. In her opening chapter, Tomes deploys Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”

Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in 1949 and, to be sure, an unfortunate number of its discontents hold up. It’s somewhat surprising, though, that Tomes invokes these decades-old words, largely uncritically, as a diagnosis of the current state of musicology. She writes that, growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, “nobody tried to hold up women pianists as role models” for her, but things have changed since then. Only, one wouldn’t know it from reading Women and the Piano. I may have been blessed with a particularly feminist piano teacher; regardless, learning in the 2010s, my role models were female at least as often as they were male. Growing up in London, with concert venues such as the Wigmore Hall or the Royal Albert Hall on my doorstep, I was lucky to attend recitals by Argerich and the Labèque sisters, as well as Evgeny Kissin and the late Nelson Freire—and they were packed. More striking than these pianists’ gender was their commanding presence onstage, their preternatural ability to transport orchestra and audience alike.

Given her almost exclusive focus on historical figures and the number of talented women in her book who aren’t household names (Nina Simone and Clara Schumann are notable exceptions), Tomes’s case that women pianists have been unfairly overlooked is often convincing. She hails the early 19th-century pianist Hélène de Montgeroult, for example, as “extraordinary,” claiming that her Étude No. 107 formed the model for Chopin’s famous, ostensibly “revolutionary study” written 20 years later. Chopin “may turn her river into a torrent,” writes Tomes, “but the river was mapped by her.” Many of the individuals under discussion were defined in their lifetimes by their relationships with their male counterparts, whether professional or romantic. By reversing the focus, Tomes allows us to appreciate them on their own terms.

Nevertheless, the reader can’t help but wonder whether Tomes really needs to create a separate space—in which figures such as Chopin, Mozart, and Beethoven are neutralized into peripheral roles—to uncover the achievements of female pianists. While she does offer insight into the productive relationships between male and female musicians, introducing the latter under the auspice of “woman pianist” perpetuates the gendered qualification they spent lifetimes struggling to transcend. Fairer, perhaps, would be a study of the piano’s history that grouped men and women together according to genre or style, offering sustained commentary on each while acknowledging that their outputs were often uneven.

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To understand why so many women have been made to play the proverbial second fiddle, it’s essential to distinguish between the circumstances that have historically prevented many women from realizing their potential and the practices of historicizing that insufficiently acknowledge female contributions. One pragmatic barrier to rehabilitating many pianists’ legacies (that, curiously, Tomes doesn’t acknowledge) is the absence of recordings before the early 20th century. As an amateur musician, the most compelling way for me to engage with and appreciate pianists is to listen to their performances. It’s therefore easier to evaluate the skill and impact of women featured later in the book. Take Zhu Xiao-Mei (notably, the only living pianist to whom Tomes gives an entry). According to Tomes, Zhu has produced “among the best” recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations—and readers who remain unconvinced can seek it out and judge for themselves.

This isn’t possible in the case of pianists such as Arabella Goddard, who is little-known now but was, Tomes explains, “the most prominent British concert pianist for decades of her long career.” Reading, I couldn’t help wondering about a possibility Tomes neglected to raise: that Goddard’s waning fame might have as much to do with the fact that her career predated the advent of recordings as it does with her identity as a woman. After all, many of her male contemporaries, such as Leonard Borwick and Victor Bendix, are no longer household names either.

Tomes does observe, though she could have emphasized the point more prominently, that male pianists were more often composers—an activity that, conveniently, left a (literal) paper trail long before recordings became possible. Take Mozart, whose reputation as a pianistic prodigy supplements rather than supersedes his legacy as the composer of The Magic Flute and Requiem. Make no mistake: women also composed. But women have historically faced concentrated pressure to be decorous and mild, so when they did compose, their work was often tentative. Tomes views the restraint of Marianna Martines’s compositions, for instance, as evidence that “women at the time were powerfully enjoined to make sure their behaviour and their accomplishments were always graceful and modest.” And, since the most publicly impactful music is often the most audacious, this is a problem. There are exceptions, such as Schumann: her compositions are bold, and she does enjoy widespread renown today. But even Schumann stopped composing when she married and committed herself to supporting her husband’s musical career.

On that note, Tomes provides sound evidence of barriers faced by many female pianists in developing their abilities to the full. Their male contemporaries often surpassed their achievements not only since they were given the training, time, and resources to do so, but also because for women, marriage and motherhood—as well as social pressures—got in the way. In the words of Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, one of the pianists featured in the book, the female performer “is obliged to lead two entirely full lives.”

A striking example is Leopoldine Wittgenstein, mother of the philosopher Ludwig, and the pianist Paul, for whom Ravel wrote his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand after he lost his right hand during World War I. Tomes tells us that Wittgenstein, herself a prodigious talent, kept a practice schedule that, stretching to four or five hours a day, resembled that of a “professional concert pianist, which perhaps she was in a parallel fantasy life.” This fantasy life was never realized. Her daughter Hermine remarked in 1917 that her mother was “like a plant that’s not withered but constricted; that blossoms only when the big tree has gone.” Given that our only available record of Wittgenstein’s talent is anecdotal evidence, it is difficult to claim a place for her in the musical hall of fame.

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Perhaps the true frustration of Tomes’s portrait is the broadness of the brush with which it is painted. While some of the pianists featured did live “constricted” lives, others—such as Teresa Carreño, Eileen Joyce, and Nadia Boulanger—achieved a level of skill and recognition that matched or exceeded that of their male contemporaries. Again, the standardized length of Tomes’s entries creates a problem on this front, obscuring the variance of these pianists’ contributions. And while Tomes’s meticulous use of archival materials, such as letters and concert reviews, offers some sense of their individuality, she flattens out such differences in chapters focused on wider patterns of gender discrimination. In her declaration that female pianists “consistently […] have been registered as less important simply because they were female,” for instance, the word “simply” obscures other factors.

Tomes thereby risks characterizing female pianists as a homogeneous group, obscuring the myriad other factors (race and class chief among them) that impose obstacles to success. In her final chapter, Tomes discusses the findings of an anonymous survey she has carried out among living female pianists. Many of their answers betray an aversion to having their achievements or challenges explained away by their gender. To a question about whether she had been disadvantaged by being female, one respondent replied (“reasonably,” Tomes acknowledges): “[A]nyway, how would one know?”

Indeed, the sheer array of stories that Tomes fits into her book—from Zhu’s to Philippa Schuyler, who was subjected by her parents to a grueling practice regimen and punishing diet that involved eating raw meat—rubs up uneasily against its central premise: that there is something, first and foremost, gendered, and thereby homogeneous, about these individuals’ piano playing. In her final chapter, Tomes argues that the modern piano competition creates a “gladiatorial arena,” rewarding a style of “masterful” (read: masculine) playing to which female pianists “sometimes try to conform […] even though it may not suit them.” She likens this to “end-of-year exams,” which “play to the strengths of boys.”

Claims like these don’t do justice to the many female pianists who have not only participated in but also shaped musical history. Yuja Wang’s 2023 performance of all four Rachmaninoff concertos back-to-back is surely evidence of how, far from “conforming,” female pianists are now some of the fiercest participants in the gladiators’ ring. In short, music can and does offer a space beyond gender—there need be nothing illogical about it.

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Featured image: George Du Maurier. “—And mist or glim, I’d sail with him, if he would sail with me—” ca. 1865. Gift of William B. O’Neal. National Gallery of Art (1995.52.44). CC0, nga.gov. Accessed July 22, 2024.