| Abstract: | Women pianists in London in the 1950s, performing mainstream repertoire (Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and Chopin) as well as modern pieces which demanded stamina, physicality and bravura, were often the subject of negative reviews. The critics’ attitudes towards them seems to echo the prevailing Freudian mantra, ‘anatomy is destiny’: women, generally smaller than men, apparently possessing less power and mental capacity, were deemed unfit for this repertoire. But if some women pianists demonstrated ‘unusual’ (for women) physical and mental power, successfully performing long and difficult pieces, they too were damned by the critics, because they did not fit the traditional notion of femininity. In this article, the author demonstrates the magnitude of the effect of the cultural image of women on the reception of both the ‘feminine’ and ‘unfeminine’ women pianists in 1950s London. |
