Songs of Johanna Kinkel

<p>Johanna Kinkel (1810-1858) was a composer music pedagogue pianist poet writer and activist. Her biography features both an unusually strong socio-cultural engagement and the self-perception of a typical nineteenth-century mother. After the failure of her first marriage in 1836 she went to Berlin to study composition and piano. There she became acquainted with some of the most prestigious salons of the city and was able to sustain herself financially through teaching and publishing music. She returned to Bonn in 1839. In 1843 following her successful divorce in 1840 she married the poet professor and revolutionary Gottfried Kinkel (1815-1882) with whom she had four children. In 1851 the family relocated to London as émigrés where Johanna Kinkel continued to teach singing and piano as well as with her writings on music and musical life.<br />Despite Kinkel's passion for choral music - she founded and led the Bonner Gesangverein for almost twenty years - as a composer she was primarily known within the realms of art song. Between 1838 and 1851 she published seventy-eight Lieder with such well-established publishers as Bote & Bock Hofmeister Kistner Schlesinger and Trautwein. This book examines Kinkel's musical output by focusing on her published Lieder and the context within which they were composed performed reviewed and received. Analysing both the compositional aesthetics and poetry in Kinkel's Lieder and by way of comparison some of her contemporaries' settings of the same words renders insights into what could be called public and private domains professionalism and amateurism in music as well as perceptions of 'masculine' and 'feminine' musical styles. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished sources surrounding Kinkel this book explores the extent to which Kinkel's Lieder reflect and transcend compositional-aesthetic cultural and socio-political facets typically associated with the first half of the nineteenth century.<br /><br />ANJA BUNZEL holds a research position at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences</p>