1812–1883 · Romantic
Emilie Mayer (14 May 1812 – 10 April 1883) was a Romantic-era German composer born in Friedland. She wrote eight symphonies, chamber music, piano sonatas and orchestral overtures. Her music was played in several German cities during her lifetime, and in our own day her works are being discovered anew. The site offers her songs for voice and piano.
Emilie Luise Frederica Mayer was born on 14 May 1812 at Friedland, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Her father, Johann August Friedrich Mayer, was a well-off pharmacist; with his wife Henrietta Carolina he had five children, and Emilie was the third, as well as the eldest girl. When she was three years old, her mother died.
Her private music lessons began at five, with the organist Carl Heinrich Ernst Driver as her teacher. That was also when the girl started to compose, bringing him little pieces written in a free manner. In one of her surviving personal notes she recalls that, a few lessons in, she was already writing variations, dances and small rondos.
In nineteenth-century Germany a woman was expected to become a wife and mother and to set every other ambition aside for the household. Unlike many of her contemporaries, her family and her male mentors backed her music and composing. She took over the care of her father's house, as her mother once had, yet nobody pushed her to give up music or to marry. After their father's death her brothers went on encouraging her to compose, travelled with her and paid for her trips.
Her father died in 1840. Emilie threw herself into composing, and a few months later came another blow: the death of her mentor Driver.
In 1841 she went to Stettin, the provincial capital (today Szczecin, Poland), and took up composition with Carl Loewe, a leading name in the city's musical life. Working with him she produced Die Fischerin, her sole Singspiel. Loewe proved to be among the most important influences on her development. Thanks to his mentoring she became part of Stettin's music-making: he founded numerous concerts, teaching customs and salons there, and Emilie and her pieces featured prominently in them.
In 1847 the Stettin Instrumental Society gave the first performances of her first two symphonies, in C minor and E minor. After that, at her teacher's urging, Emilie moved to Berlin to carry on with her studies. There she learned fugue and double counterpoint from Adolf Bernhard Marx, and instrumentation from Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht.
She began to publish her music (for example the songs of Opp. 5–7, in 1848), and these were heard at private concerts. On 21 April 1850 Wieprecht then led his orchestra, called Euterpe, at the Royal Theatre in an evening of her works: a concert overture, a string quartet, Psalm 118 set for chorus and orchestra, two symphonies and several piano solos. Not long after, Elisabeth Ludovika of Bavaria, Queen of Prussia, awarded her the gold medal of art.
That success carried real weight, since in the mid-nineteenth century few women composed at all and a major orchestral concert built chiefly around one woman's music was rarer still. As her standing in Berlin rose, she became one of very few women of her era acknowledged as a symphonic composer. She went on writing for public performance and journeyed to attend her works being played, at the Königliches Schauspielhaus and in Cologne, Munich, Lyon, Brussels and Vienna.
Emilie Mayer's career was shaped largely by the mentorship of Carl Loewe, who urged her to take composing seriously. His guidance helped her become one of the few women of her day to write symphonies, and his backing helped make her music respected, even championed, by her male colleagues. Even after Loewe left, the new directors of the Stettin Instrumentalverein kept putting her works on their programmes.
Another spark was military band music, which inspired her Symphony No. 3, the “Military”. Her career fell in the years of rising national conservatism in Germany after many failed revolutions, so her wish to compose as an unmarried woman struck many of the more senior men around her as very progressive.
In Berlin Emilie became connected with influential musicians and patrons of the concert scene, which helped her symphonies and chamber works get performed. Her ties with orchestras and conductors, including those who gave first performances of her pieces, played a decisive part in spreading her music.
Carl Loewe died in 1869, and a Loewe Society was founded afterwards. Emilie dedicated a pair of her cello sonatas to society members and their families. Op. 40 (1873) goes to the sister of the composer Martin Plüddemann of Kolberg; the D major Sonata, Op. 47 (1883), goes to Baron von Seckendorff of Stargard.
Emilie returned to Berlin in 1876, and her music was still frequently performed there. Her new Faust Overture, inspired by Goethe's Faust, went down well, and she took a significant place in the city's cultural life again. Munich's Philharmonic Society made her an honorary member, and she shared the chair of the Berlin Opera Academy. She died of pneumonia in Berlin on 10 April 1883 and was buried in the Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof I at Holy Trinity Church, close to the graves of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn.
Emilie Mayer composed eight symphonies, plenty of chamber works, piano sonatas and orchestral overtures. Her early style drew on Viennese Classicism, and the later pieces are more Romantic. Her harmonic language features abrupt key changes and many seventh chords, the diminished seventh offering her several routes of resolution. A hallmark is to set up a tonal centre through a dominant seventh and then hold back the move to the tonic, sometimes omitting it completely. Her rhythms tend to be complex, with layers interacting at the same moment. Opening movements generally take sonata-allegro form.
Present-day scholars and conductors often set her orchestral music beside Beethoven's, because of its sharp contrasts, driving rhythms and large symphonic structures. As in Beethoven, there is strong thematic development and intense feeling within the established Classical forms. Her symphonies marry the architecture of Viennese Classicism to expressive harmonies and the wide emotional range of Romanticism. Those traits, with the ambition of her orchestral works, earned her a reputation in her lifetime as the female Beethoven.
Among her late works are two cello sonatas: Op. 40, written in 1873, and the Sonata in D major, Op. 47, dated 1883. The Faust Overture, after Goethe, was a hit in Berlin. Her first two symphonies, in C minor and E minor, were played in Stettin in 1847, and in 1850 Berlin heard two symphonies, a string quartet and a concert overture. Those just meeting her music might begin with the songs, which are available on the site.
Today's performances of her symphonies and chamber music reveal a distinctive voice: Beethoven and Mendelssohn left their mark, yet she has her own dynamic sense of form and a lyrical bent. After her death her music slid into obscurity and came back to the concert repertoire only after more than a century. The site gathers her songs for voice and piano. At the Intermediate+ level are “Du bist wie eine Blume” and “Abendglocken”. At the Advanced level are “Der Erlkönig”, “Das Schlüsselloch im Herzen”, “O lass mich dein gedenken” and “Wenn der Abendstern die Rosen”.