Here's an unusual find for anyone interested in the history of music by women in the Western concert tradition. Margarethe Danzi was a composer, singer, and pianist of the late eighteenth century, the wife of composer Franz Danzi, a student of Leopold Mozart, and a frequent associate of Wolfgang. All these relationships are recounted in copious detail (probably too copious for the average listener) in the booklet, which also includes an inexplicable photo of the performers sitting on a tractor. Composition was not Danzi's ...
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Here's an unusual find for anyone interested in the history of music by women in the Western concert tradition. Margarethe Danzi was a composer, singer, and pianist of the late eighteenth century, the wife of composer Franz Danzi, a student of Leopold Mozart, and a frequent associate of Wolfgang. All these relationships are recounted in copious detail (probably too copious for the average listener) in the booklet, which also includes an inexplicable photo of the performers sitting on a tractor. Composition was not Danzi's main activity, so it is all the more surprising to find that her music falls far outside the molds containing those of other female amateurs of the era -- it is obvious that she had a gift, and the listener is left wondering what might have happened if social and medical factors (Danzi died young, of a lung disease) had not curtailed her output. The date of these sonatas is uncertain, but they likely were written in the 1780s, which makes their ambitions all the more remarkable. For...
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