Emilie Mayer

Emilie Mayer (1812–1883) was one of the most prolific and successful composers of nineteenth-century Germany, and one of the most unjustly forgotten. Born in the Mecklenburg town of Friedland, the daughter of a wealthy pharmacist, she showed musical gifts early but, like most women of her time and class, seemed destined for a purely domestic life. Her path changed dramatically and tragically in 1840, when she was twenty-eight: her father took his own life, and she threw herself into composition. She moved to Stettin to study with the celebrated song composer Carl Loewe, and later settled in Berlin, where she built a remarkable public career at a time when professional women composers were almost unheard of. She wrote on the largest scale (eight symphonies, fifteen concert overtures, string quartets, sonatas and a great deal of chamber music), and her works were performed and praised in her lifetime, earning her the nickname ‘the female Beethoven.’ After her death in 1883 her music vanished almost completely from the repertoire, and it is only in recent years that her symphonies and overtures have begun to be revived, recorded and championed. This concert takes part in that rediscovery.