Female Patronage and Agency in Music between 1760 and 1840

Up to now little research has been done on the role that women have played through their activities as organizers of concerts, ordering and dedicating compositions, etc., but also in supporting and financing musicians: In what ways did women support musicians and composers? Did they promote `their` musicians in a similar way as men did or are there traits of patronage, that are typically female? Did they rather persuade their husbands, fathers, suns etc. to sponsor or were they able to provide funds from their own estates? Recently, in the holdings of the Dommusikverein und Mozarteum at the the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum (ISM) and the Archiv der Erzdiözese Salzburg (AES), several music collections of women have come to light, containing a number of early copies of Wolfgang Amadé Mozarts works: The collection of Josepha von Paumgarten (neè Lerchenfeld, 1762-1817, Munich), the collections of Anna (Nanette) Fröhlich (1793-1880, Vienna) and Marie von Podstatsky-Liechtenstein (1803-1864, Salzburg) and the collection of Josephine von Baroni-Cavalcabò (1787-1860, Vienna/Lwiw). To these may be added individual musical sources out of the collections of Caroline Christine Friederike von Waldstein-Wartenberg (1766-1844) in Joseph Graf von Dauns collection and Fanny Arnstein (1758-1818) in the holdings of the Mozart-Nachlass. These collections will serve as the base of an investigation examining female agency in music (of which female patronage is one expression) in the sense of organizing concerts, funding performances, collecting music materials, founding concert organizations, etc. between 1760 and 1840 and limited to the cities of Salzburg, Vienna and Munich. By including a wide variety of written documents (letters, diaries, travellogues, auto-biographies etc. the project aims at developing a more varied understanding of female (but also male) support of musicians and networks as a part of musical life between 1760 and 1840 in the cities of Salzburg, Vienna and Munich. While the musical sources will be included in the RISM catalogue, dealing with them, other written sources and the female musical networks will result in a publication that will hopefully be able to answer many of the pending questions.