‘Working harder, playing better and waiting longer’: Susan Tomes on bringing 50 women pianists out of the shadows

Hélène de Mongeroult, Maria Szymanowska, Hazel Scott. How many of these names do you recognise? In their time, these women had extraordinary careers as pianists and composers but have largely vanished from view. When pianist and writer Susan Tomes was approached by her publisher to write a history of women and their relationship with the piano, she discovered just how one-sided that history was.

‘Once I started my research, I found a whole chunk of my musical education was missing. It didn’t strike me at the time, but all the pieces I learned were by men and all the famous concert pianists were male. The achievements of women as pianists and composers, while not actively suppressed, were set aside as it was more important to record what the men did.’

Tomes found such a wealth of examples of successful female pianists in their time she had to make some difficult choices as to who made the final cut. ‘At one point I had 70 women so with a heavy heart I chose a varied selection of 50 stories that represented problems women have faced over the years rather than producing a long list. One person who didn’t end up with a whole biography was Nannerl, Mozart’s sister, who was as good as he was, and they toured together until she became a teenager and her father made her stay at home. Although she did compose, none of her compositions survived. This is an example of the sort of issues women had to grapple with.’

The more well-known pianists, Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelsohn, feature alongside some less familiar names from Hélène de Mongeroult, the composer and fortepianist said to have escaped the guillotine during the French revolution by improvising on the Marseillaise, to Hazel Scott, the Trinidadian jazz and classical pianist and singer who was the first black performer in the United States to have her own nationally syndicated television show in the 1950s. Then there was Maria Szymanowska – the first professional virtuosic pianist of the 19^th century who wrote and performed nocturnes and études that pre-dated Chopin – and Marianna Martines.

‘[Martines] lived in Vienna and was a contemporary of Mozart’s,’ explains Tomes. ‘When she was a girl, the young Haydn lived in the attic and gave her composition and piano lessons. She was also mentored for 40 years by Europe’s most famous opera librettist, Pietro Metastasio, who lived in the same building. When he died, he left her money and she used this to set up her famous salons which were attended by the composers of the day, including Mozart – yet I hadn’t heard of her. When I was last in Vienna, I visited her apartment building which has two blue plaques; one for Haydn and the other for Metastasio. There is no mention of Marianna Martines. This is another reason why these women are not as famous as the men; they weren’t commemorated or celebrated in the same way.’

It wasn’t always like this, Tomes explains. In the early years of the instrument’s history, women were the Queens of piano playing, but only in the home. They would play for dancing or accompany singers and it was considered an accomplishment for a lady to play well – think of the women in Jane Austen’s novels. But once it went from being a domestic pastime to a profession, men dominated, says Tomes. ‘Composers like Beethoven were writing the powerful assertive music men wanted to play and everything became bigger, from the pianos to the concert halls. From then on women found it difficult to get onto the stage. It was not acceptable for women to travel on their own and society looked down on them for leaving their children at home to selfishly go off to indulge their love of music. To some extent it is not a balanced situation even now.’

Tomes interviewed a number of today’s leading pianists for her book who all said they’ve had to work harder, play better and wait longer for recognition because they were female. From her own experience as an international pianist, Tomes points out that most of the major piano competitions over the last 40-50 years have been won by men, the majority of judging panels are male, although she says this is slowly beginning to change, and it is men that tend to teach at an advanced level, including masterclasses.

With an increasing number of awareness campaigns about women who’ve done interesting things in life but who never became as famous as the men, Tomes says her book is timely. ‘I’d like to think young girls learning the piano might come across it and be encouraged, against the odds, to have a life in music and get on the concert stage and have respected careers as pianists.’

Susan Tomes’s latest book, Women and the Piano – A History in 50 Lives, is published by Yale and can be purchased here.