Lecture with musical examples by Gitta Martens and Dr. Reinhard Gagel, emilie mayer gesellschaft e.V.
"Emilie Mayer, composer" wrote the 39-year-old pharmacist's daughter from Friedland on the doorbell of her Berlin apartment in 1850, after her third symphony had been performed at the Königliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin.
This marked the beginning of an unprecedented career for the self-confident woman, who had studied composition with the ballad composer Carl Loewe in Stettin and the music theorist Adolf Bernhard Marx in Berlin. Her symphonies and overtures were performed in Szczecin, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Prague, Cologne, Munich and many other European cities, as were numerous chamber music works and songs.
Independent thanks to a paternal inheritance and supportive siblings, she was able to concentrate her life entirely on music for over 40 years. Until her death in 1883, critics were astonished not only by the quality of her works, but above all by the fact that they were actually composed by a woman.
140 years later, it is still a problem to find works by women in the classical music scene. But a change is noticeable: Emilie Mayer is being played intensively again today.
Gitta Martens has compiled the little material that can be found on Emilie Mayer into a novel with her own thoughts and insights. "The Diary of Emilie Mayer, Composer" shows a strong woman who created great music and yet had to fight for recognition time and again.
Reinhard Gagel will present some of her works, explain their structure and perform them.
The Emilie Mayer Society, founded in Friedland in 2022, brought the composer back into the region's consciousness in September 2023 with a four-day "Mayerei" festival. The next "Mayerei" will take place in 2025. The society documents activities relating to Emile Mayer and responses to her work on its website.
