UC Davis

Remarkable nineteenth-century characters, such as Verdi’s Violetta, Puccini’s Tosca, Strauss’s Salome, Bizet’s Carmen, among many others, inhabit our women imaginary in European concert music. However, in terms of creation, these representations of women in music—which we have come to learn, enjoy, and admire—do not emanate from women. We seldom ask: what about women characters written by women? In a male-dominated art, unsurprisingly, women are primarily represented through the unequivocal male-gaze, stereotyped by men and masculinist culture. In this dissertation, I focus on Augusta Holmès and Cécile Chaminade because, while they are contrasting composers, a history of generalized gender bias has held them both up as salon music writers and as the only two successful French women composers of the fin-de-siècle. In investigating such oversimplifications, I examine the gender bias that inhabits the concept of salon music. Further, my attention to musical representations of women by women unfolds into a quest to contextualize Holmès’s and Chaminade’s access to music education, networking, and performance venues, and their individual stories. Considering the political specificities of the fin-de-siècle, namely the encroachment on women’s rights, I establish a conversation between what women were ascribed to do in nineteenth-century France and what Holmès and Chaminade actually did. Analyzing Chaminade’s construction of women characters in Sombrero (1894) and Colette (1891), I observe her use of exoticism to portray a Spanish woman and argue her music had global reach. Likewise, I present a complex picture of Holmès’s allegories for The Republic and Andromeda as heroines of the nation in Ode triomphale (1889) and Andromède (1901), and I contend that Holmès’s nationalism and anti-Dreyfusism heavily inform her music, shedding great light onto her last symphonic poem, Andromède. With women at the center, nuanced narratives on music, past and present, emerge.