The Songs of Johanna Kinkel: Genesis, Reception, Context

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. 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 Drawing on a wealth of unpublished sources surrounding Kinkel, this book explores the extent to which Kinkel's Lieder reflect and transcend compositional-aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political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. ANJA BUNZEL holds a research position at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences