PORTRAIT OF A LADY HOLDING A VIOLIN

Taking a Regency portrait of an unknown violinist as his starting point, Kevin MacDonald investigates the lives and careers of Louise Gautherot and other female violinists of Georgian England

Five years ago, in a Surrey saleroom, I came across a Regency portrait of a female violinist by the great Anglo-Irish portrait artist Adam Buck signed and dated ‘London, 1805’. This launched a search to find out just who the depicted artist might be, and ultimately opened my eyes to a neglected world of female concert violinists in Georgian England.

Beginning with the image itself (left), a watercolour/pastel with the blue sky typical of so many Buck portraits, we see a standing figure in an elegant white gown typical of the Regency period. She is of uncertain age, but certainly not a youth, perhaps in her thirties or forties with no wisps of grey in her hair. She holds an Amati-esque violin. On the table before her is a bow with an ivory frog and adjuster of a style used on ‘Cramer’ bows by the Tourtes and others in the 1770s and 80s. It is tightened and has no visible camber (see close-up, right). All in all, a trifle ‘old-fashioned’ for 1805. On a music stand is a book opened to its title page which comprises an illustration of a classically rendered woman holding a lyre and the word ‘CONCERTOS’ at the top.

Generally speaking, we know that Buck painted the bon ton of the Regency world, the aristocracy, the celebrities. Who could this concerto-playing figure be? I began researching female violinists giving concerts in Georgian London and there were more than you might think, all with fascinating stories. Yet, without exception, they were born on the Continent, and either only toured in Britain, or were blown by the chaos of the French Revolution to relatively permanent relocation in England.

POSSIBLE PERSONALITIES

Perhaps the first female violinist to feature in London concerts was Gertrud Schmeling (1749–1833). Hailing from a musical family in Hesse-Kassel, she was taken under the wing of C.F.

Abel and Giardini after a successful tour of the Low Countries, and played in Soho, London, in 1760 as an eleven-year-old prodigy. Shortly thereafter she was invited to perform at the royal court. However, her violinistic career did not last, shifting under substantial prejudices against female instrumentalists to an illustrious singing career as ‘Madame Mara’ post-1763.

Regardless, she would have been 55 or 56 years old by the time of our portrait.

One of the best-known female violinists of the era was the great Regina Strinasacchi (1761–1839), who famously premiered Mozart’s Violin Sonata K454 in 1784, with Mozart playing from blank sheets at the keyboard. In a 1785 letter to his daughter, Nannerl, Leopold Mozart wrote, ‘No one can play an Adagio with more feeling and effect than she does.’ She also was the subject of a well-known silhouette depiction, playing her violin beside a music stand, as shaped by Hauk in 1795.

However, there is no evidence that she ever visited London during her playing career. Instead, she married the cellist Johann Conrad Schlick in 1785 and together they became attached as musicians at the Gotha court. Subsequent absences for touring appear to have been strictly continental, including Italy, Austria and Russia.

There are two other prominent female violinists of the era, notably Henriette Larrivée (1764–1839) and Marianne Crux (1771–1855) who, although sometimes in London, were not present there in the years immediately before or after 1805.

Larrivée came to London in 1791 as part of a trio of family musicians with her father, Henri (a baritone), and sister Camille Delaval (a harpist). She also sometimes performed as a soloist.

By 1799, with political conditions stabilising in France, she had returned to her native Paris with her husband, the composer Antonio Borghese.

Marianne Crux (later Petersén), daughter of a ballet master, was born in Mannheim and was schooled from an early age as a singer and violinist, but principally the latter. Her violin teacher was Friedrich Eck and she was known to the Mozarts. Like Schmeling, she was a noted prodigy before her teenage years.

She won plaudits at the court of Friedrich Wilhelm II in Prussia and chose to embrace the career of a travelling artist, touring across Germany, Scandinavia and England in the 1790s. In 1795, she was abandoned by her husband Jacob Gillberg, a Swedish portrait artist, and for a time was reduced to running a girls’ hostel. However, she continued to perform within Sweden and was elected to the Swedish Royal Academy of Music in 1801. In 1802 she remarried, to Johan Petersén, son of a wealthy merchant of Gothenburg, and appears to have spent the rest of her long life in Sweden and northern Germany.

We are left with the two most widely known and admired female violinists in London at the time. The first and eldest, Maddalena Laura Lombardini Sirmen, can by her age and existing likenesses be eliminated from being the subject of our painting. However, to understand the career and evaluation of the actual ‘lady’ depicted, one must understand the life and reputation of Sirmen, a pioneering composer and star of the London concert stage who had been a pupil of Tartini.

MADDALENA LAURA LOMBARDINI SIRMEN (1745–1818)

Sirmen and Strinasacchi are probably the only female Georgianera violinists whose names retain a certain cachet in modern violin culture. In the case of Sirmen, this is probably partly because she was an active, published composer, but in larger part it is because of a lengthy letter written to her by Tartini in 1760 concerning violin technique. It was subsequently published in English by Charles Burney in 1771 and has been regularly republished in different forms ever since.

Born Maddalena Lombardini, in Venice, she was admitted into the Ospedale di San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti at age seven for musical studies. She took the initiative to correspond with Tartini at age 14, and although their initial contact was only via letter, she soon travelled to Padua, having lessons with the great virtuoso face to face intermittently between 1760 and 1766.

However, to leave the ospedale marriage and a dowry were required. After an initial rejection by the authorities, this was arranged and she married the violinist Ludovico Sirmen (1738–1812) in 1767.

So ‘liberated’, she was set upon her travels, first to Dresden where she and her husband had an appointment to the court, and then on to the Concert Spirituel in Paris. L’avant-coureur of 22 August 1768, noted that ‘her violin was the lyre of Orpheus’ and that ‘her taste and facility of playing puts her in the first rank of virtuosos’. Subsequently, she gave concerts with her husband in France and the Low Countries before appearing in London in the winter of 1770–1, when she shone as one of the brightest concert artists of the season, having her own benefit concert in April.

Sirmen was notable for performing and publishing her own major works: Six Quartets (1769, possibly co-written with her husband), Six Trios (c.1769–70), Six Violin Concertos (1772–3), Six Violin Duets (1773) and a single Violin Sonata (1785). They were relatively popular in their time, with the trios, concertos and duets being published many times in Paris, London and The Hague. Stylistically, her works owe little to Tartini and are very much part of the early Classical era. Her violin concertos are all of three movements, fast–slow–fast, evenly proportioned with concluding rondos. They feature chromaticism, major–minor alternations and clearly set up cadenzas. Parallels might be drawn with those of her contemporaries such as Giornovichi. Her duets are of two movements, excepting the second (with three), and have a marked energy to them with little time for reflection – there are only two slow movements in the set. A distinctive element are passages with doublestops alternating between players to create effective three-part harmonies. The first and sixth duets are probably the strongest of the group. The authorship of her quartets is unclear. In the first edition by Bérault (Paris, 1769) they are said to be by ‘Lodovico, e Madelena Laura Syrmen’, but modern musicological opinion inclines to her primary authorship. Indeed, Barbara Gabler, in her introduction to the Furore edition of Sirmen’s quartets, points out that Ludovico’s authorial presence was only due to French legalities at the time – that publication could not then be made independently by women. The modern edition and recordings give Maddalena’s name alone. The quartets are mainly slow–fast two-movement works, and are melodic, innovative compositions written around the time of the birth of the French quartet school, contemporary with Haydn’s op.9 set and Boccherini’s op.8.

Title page of Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen’s Six Violin Duets

Sirmen’s halcyon days in London unfortunately did not last, and the whims of fashion went against her. For reasons unknown, in 1774 she made the decision to shift from the violin to being a vocal soloist, without any real success, and was reduced to singing secondary parts in Dresden by 1782. An attempt at a comeback as a violin virtuoso in post-Viotti Paris at the Concert Spirituel in 1785 was a critical failure, her playing being reviewed in the Mercure de France 7 May 1785 as being old-fashioned: ‘Her style has aged extremely […] she can still charm the ear, but she cannot astonish.’ She soldiered on at the Concert Spirituel, answering her critics by playing concertos by Viotti, but apparently to no avail. Sirmen returned to Italy where she lived out her life in Venice. However, her few years of celebrity in London had established a reputation against which all subsequent female violinists of the place and era would be judged – including Louise Gautherot.

Portrait of Maddalena Laura Lombardini Sirmen (artist unknown)

Maddalena Laura Lombardini Sirmen Duetto I (from Six Violin Duets, Venier, Paris, 1773), first violin part, first movement

LOUISE GAUTHEROT (C.1763–1808)

Born in France, Louise Deschamps was a child prodigy who gave her Concert Spirituel debut in 1774. In her maturity she went on to be the most enduring female violin virtuoso of Georgian London, performing there regularly between 1789– 94 and 1804–6. She is also undoubtedly the subject of the mystery portrait at the beginning of this article. Not only was she active in the London of 1805, where Buck painted the image, but an earlier 1790 lithograph of Gautherot by Francesco Bartolozzi after a portrait by Pierre Violet shows a clear correspondence of facial features. The timing of the Buck watercolour, in the midst of her return to the London concert stage, is also striking.

In her early years as Louise Deschamps, she performed as a violin soloist at the Concert Spirituel on at least twelve occasions, frequently choosing concertos by Giornovichi, before leaving the stage sometime around 1780 to marry a Monsieur Gautherot and have children. We know little of her husband, who seems to have kept in the background, but somewhat more about her children, who comprised – as we shall see later – at least two daughters. She returned to the French concert stage in December 1784, relocating to England in early 1789 as social unrest in France began to intensify.

In her mature years, Gautherot is noted as having been an important interpreter and populariser of the works of Viotti, an association that lasted throughout the rest of her career. Warwick Lister’s research has shown that in 1787 she premiered a Viotti concerto in Paris (evidence suggests nos.11 or 12). Likewise, she was the first to perform Viotti’s music (a concerto) in London on 9 February 1789. The nature of Gautherot’s association with Viotti is unclear. Assertions that she was one of his formal pupils are unsupported, but Lister suggests that at least in spring 1787, ‘She received some coaching from the composer to whose works she had largely dedicated her career.’

Also, it would be incredible if the two violinists were not well acquainted, as their times of residence and social circles while in Paris and London overlapped considerably.

GAUTHEROT WENT ON TO BE THE MOST ENDURING FEMALE VIOLIN VIRTUOSO OF GEORGIAN LONDON

Gautherot’s path certainly crossed that of some of her female colleagues mentioned above over the course of her concert life. In January 1785 she played at the same Concert Spirituel as Sirmen –a veritable changing of the guard. Also, in 1794, at Hanover Square Rooms, Gautherot played a Viotti sinfonia concertante with Larrivée and her harpist sister – an early London performance with all-female soloists.

Between newspaper reviews, memoirs and diaries the stylistic elements of Gautherot’s performance are extensively, if variably, documented. Assessments by authors both male and female betray some of the underlying gender prejudices of the Regency period, particularly as concerns playing the violin. In the words of Simon McVeigh in his 1993 book Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn, ‘As the instrument of the leader [the violin] was a symbol of dominance.’ Gautherot raised the hackles of contemporary (male) reviewers such as William Parke, who quoted earlier writings about her in his Musical Memoirs (1830), praising her ability, but decrying her ‘masculine effort’ and asserting that, ‘If she is desirous of enrapturing her audience, she should display her talent in a situation where there is only just light enough to make “darkness visible”.’ From a contemporary female perspective, things were different. The diarist Hester Thrale wrote in 1789 (published in Thraliana, 1942) that ‘How the Women do shine of late! […] Madame Gautherot’s wonderful Execution on the Fiddle; – but say the Critics a Violin is not an Instrument for Ladies to manage, very likely!

I remember when they said the same Thing of a Pen.’

An appraisal of comments made over Gautherot’s long career give the impression of a player with stunning left-hand technique but a less impressive bow arm. A review of a 25 July 1792

Edinburgh concert in the Caledonian Mercury asserts that ‘It is scarcely possible to conceive with what ease, elegance and rapidity this Lady’s fingers fly over the strings of her violin.’ On 10

February 1789 the World and Fashionable Advertiser reviewed her first London performance, noting that ‘She bows but feebly, but she has a rapid and brilliant left hand, that overcame many difficulties.’ Other reviews, such as that of the London Evening Post (26 February 1789) were less equivocal: ‘Madame Gautherot’s concerto on the violin was equal to any performance on the same instrument by the first musical master of the present times.’

Comparisons with Sirmen were inevitable. Susan Burney (daughter of the famed musicologist Charles Burney and sister of the novelist Fanny Burney) wrote an extended diary entry after attending a performance on 1 May 1789.

Mme Gautherot played a violin duet with Cramer... She executed all the passages – but it was with evident labour – Nothing was distinct – nothing clear... She has labored infinitely there can be no doubt to attain such rapid execution & so much precision, but in the most valuable points is I believe very inferior to Sirmen indeed. It is true I heard Sirmen before I had heard any great Violin Players & perhaps she wd now not seem so charming to me as she did in those early days – Yet still I am convinced she was far superior in style & in feeling to Mme Gautherot ... In the 2nd Act Mme Gautherot executed a Trio of Viotti’s ... as it is Music rather brilliant than touching, she executed it exceedingly well. (British Library, Egerton MS 3692, f.26)

1790 Lithograph of Louise Gautherot by Francesco Bartolozzi after Pierre Violet – probably the first portrait of a female professional violinist with their instrument

THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

But notwithstanding such critical observations, Gautherot sustained a much longer popularity in London than Sirmen. She featured in Johann Peter Salomon’s concert series for three years and was one of the soloists in Haydn’s first London concert appearance in 1791. However, Gautherot took a prolonged break from the concert stage after 1794, and it is unclear why. Some newspaper notes in the 1790s refer to ‘indispositions’ or health problems. She was also clearly raising a family and there is no information to clarify the nature of her personal life in the decade before her return to the stage in 1804.

The Morning Post of 23 April 1804 announced that:

The celebrated Madame Gautherot, who is considered as the first solo female performer of the violin, will have her long talked of Concert at the Willis’s Rooms on Thursday next... Those who remember the astonishing effects of her very extraordinary powers a few years ago, are much gratified at the revival of this renowned musical phenomenon.

ASSESSMENTS OF LOUISE GAUTHEROT’S PERFORMANCES BY AUTHORS BOTH MALE AND FEMALE BETRAY SOME OF THE UNDERLYING GENDER PREJUDICES OF THE REGENCY PERIOD, PARTICULARLY AS CONCERNS PLAYING THE VIOLIN

However, in following issues it becomes evident that Gautherot’s comeback performance was more of a vehicle to launch the career of her two daughters. A further announcement on 25 April specifies that Madame Gautherot would only play a single violin concerto, while her daughters would be making ‘their first appearance in public’ on the harp and pianoforte. It has not yet been possible to find a review of this performance, but it must have met with some success, as there were successive Gautherot and daughters benefit concerts in 1805 and 1806 at the King’s Theatre and Willis’s Rooms, with tickets being sold from the Gautherot residence at 10 Frith Street (Soho) and at music shops. Curiously, rather than offering a concert in 1807, Madame Gautherot opted to stage one-act French comedies for select parties at her Frith street residence. Her daughters – always termed simply the ‘Misses Gautherot’ – went on immediately to successful London concert careers which endured into the 1840s.

Madame Gautherot’s second and definitive disappearance from the concert platform after 1806 undoubtedly had something to do with declining health. Her death – at the early age of 45 on 28 July 1808 – was announced in the newspapers of England and Ireland, remembering her as a ‘celebrated Professor of the Violin’ (Morning Chronicle 4 August 1808).

FINAL PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

The image that began this article is one of the earliest portraits of a professional female violinist with their instrument. Given the context of Louise Gautherot’s life a few other aspects stand out: a celebration of her return to the stage in 1804–05, the sheet music page opened to ‘CONCERTOS’, and a ‘transitional’ bow to which she was accustomed.

But there is another surprise from the auction in question – the image was accompanied in the sale by another Adam Buck portrait, this time of two young women, one with a harp, the other with leaves of manuscript – the Misses Gautherot! Of course, I did not know this at the time – and did not even bid on it – more is the pity.

How these portraits came to be in the loft of Wayford Manor, Somerset, is a question that may never be solved. The Misses Gautherot lived exceptionally long lives and alternated between London and Leamington Spa, depending on the social season, until 1854 when the pianist sister died. The harpist continued offering lessons in Leamington Spa until at least 1861.

I hope that a future researcher might make more connections concerning this talented and fascinating family trio.

Pastel pencil and watercolour portrait by Adam Buck of the Misses Gautherot, c.1805

KEVIN MACDONALD