
Behind the Scenes
DMA Lecture Recital prep with Hui-Chuan Chen
DMA Lecture Recital prep with Hui-Chuan Chen
Cashew considering baby geese on the Tidal Basin
Cherry blossom season in Washington DC!
With the generous support of the Presser Foundation’s Presser Graduate Award, I traveled to Germany from late March until early June 2022 to compile and research the published and unpublished song repertoire of German Romantic-era composer Luise Adolpha Le Beau (1850-1927). This research will be integral to the completion of my DMA thesis/lecture recital project on Le Beau’s Lieder, which I plan to present in the spring of 2023.
“In Search of Luise Adolpha Le Beau” is an ongoing series. For more details about this project, click here.
Born in Rastatt, Germany, Luise Adolpha Le Beau was raised in a musical family, and her parents devoted themselves to her education. She later developed a professional career as a composer, pianist, music critic, and piano pedagogue, although she identified primarily as a composer. Le Beau wrote in large-scale forms, such as symphonies, operas, and choral works, but also embraced small-scale Lieder and instrumental chamber music. During the 1870’s and 1880’s in Munich, Le Beau was successful in publishing and seeking performances of her newest works. In the decades that followed, however, she struggled to find further performance opportunities, moving to Wiesbaden, Berlin, and Baden-Baden to seek more fertile collaborative landscapes. Le Beau’s memoirs, Lebenserinnerungen einer Komponistin (Memoirs of a Woman Composer), published in 1910, detail her frustrations with the sexism and lack of acceptance she faced as a woman composer, which contributed to Le Beau’s withdrawal from her public composition career in the early 1900’s.
Upon her passing in 1927, although she meticulously organized and catalogued her manuscripts and personal papers, Le Beau’s music was simply “forgotten.” While more recent scholarship and recordings have highlighted her large-scale works and instrumental chamber music, there is little to no scholarship about her Lieder repertoire, only a handful of her published Lieder scores are available to the public, and to my knowledge, few professional recordings of Le Beau’s Lieder exist.
Throughout my first three weeks at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, my drive to “discover” the Lieder of Luise Adolpha Le Beau was often obscured. I planned to compile her song scores, guided by a basic English translation I had made of her autobiography, as well as to gather copies of her letters and journal entries that related to her song compositions. As I finally held one of Le Beau’s string-bound scores in my hands, the act of simply opening its cover revealed another layer of historical and socio-cultural context that I had not anticipated and would now need to decipher. While my research still centered itself on “the music” and Le Beau’s scores that she had copied so neatly as an ultimate act of self-preservation, I realized that the layers of meaning encasing her music, most of which had accumulated in the century after her death, could not be ignored. In fact, tracing whatever happened to the materials in her estate over the past century, which inevitably led me to questions about Germany’s twentieth-century past, is as relevant as anything that occurred during Le Beau’s lifetime.
This fact began to dawn on me as I learned to use the various archival tools that the library had to offer, namely a microfilm reader and a digital scanner. Each slide of microfilm represented one page of Le Beau’s musical materials, and since none of her Lieder compositions were particularly long, each opus fit onto its own roll of film with book-ended title slides. These slides listed identifying features of the musical work, such as its title, date of composition, and the date and location of its transfer onto microfilm. I soon noticed that the title slides on Le Beau’s Lieder compositions consistently listed their date of transfer in the 1980’s and their transfer location as the Deutsches Staatsbibliothek Berlin (DDR).
After the surrender of the German military and the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, Germany was divided into four Allied occupation zones, each controlled by the United States, Great Britain, France, or the Soviet Union. In 1949, the American, British, and French zones merged to later form the Federal Republic of Germany, a parliamentary democracy. In turn, the German Democratic Republic (GDR; known in German as the DDR) was constituted from the Soviet occupation zone in northeastern Germany. Ruled by the oppressive Socialist Unity Party as a satellite Marxist-Leninist nation of the Soviet Union, the GDR contained Berlin, Germany’s former capital, whose post-war fate had played out similarly to the rest of the nation. West Berlin remained part of the Federal Republic of Germany, a tiny enclave of democracy, while East Berlin became the de facto capital of the GDR itself. Berlin was now a divided city of two nations and the ultimate breeding ground for the Cold War’s political and cultural battles. In 1961, as a barbed-wire fence was built through the city overnight by the East German government, the division of West and East Berlin was further entrenched. To thwart the constant flight of East German citizens into West Berlin (and therefore, West Germany), the Berlin Wall transformed into a concrete fortress with armed guards instructed to “shoot to kill” anyone who illegally tried to escape from the east. Due to the Friedliche Revolution (Peaceful Revolution), the Wall fell incredibly without violence in 1989, as the government of the GDR collapsed.
Where then do we find Le Beau’s estate as it was partially transferred onto microfilm in the 1980’s at the Deutsches Staatsbibliothek Berlin (DDR)? It seems that the post-World War II consequences for Germany’s largest library also mirrored that of its capital. After the defeat of the Nazi regime and the partitioning of Berlin, the library found itself once again as a contested socio-cultural space where struggles over political ideology dominated. Its collections were now divided and claimed by two separate countries: the Deutsches Staatsbibliothek of the GDR and the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz of the Federal Republic of Germany. Le Beau’s estate, housed in the Musikabteilung (music department) on Unter den Linden, now lived in East Germany under another iteration of a totalitarian regime.
How, though, did Le Beau’s estate survive World War II? What happened to the library’s holdings during the terrors of the Nazi regime? Per her own instructions, Le Beau’s estate was divided between the state libraries of Berlin, Karlsruhe, and Munich. Less than a decade after her death in 1927, the Nazi regime censored the (then-named) Preußische Staatsbibliothek’s collections, obstructing the staff’s ability to acquire new materials and inciting the 1933 public burning of over 20,000 books by students in the neighboring Bebelplatz. Library staff were fired, silenced, and persecuted. The Nazi regime also expanded the library’s holdings through wide-scale theft and seizure of property. In 2019, the Berlin Central and Regional Library (ZLB) estimated that as much as a third of their 3.5 million volumes may have been stolen by the Nazis, who looted the property of Jewish families, libraries, and organizations, as well as Masons, Catholics, Communists, Socialists, Slavs, and anyone who dared to criticize the Nazi regime.
As war raged from 1940 to 1945, Berlin sustained heavy bombing with large swathes of the city reduced to rubble. Prior to the war, Unter den Linden, the library’s home since 1914, had already experienced a radical transformation. Throughout the nineteenth century, this iconic boulevard, considered one of the most elegant promenades in Europe, had been lined with linden trees, a cultural symbol of truth, love, and memory. Under their authoritarian grip, the Nazi regime dug up its trees, replacing them with immense Nazi flags and propaganda. In 1945, Unter den Linden was left in ruins by one of the largest American air raids on Berlin.
Earlier in 1941, after Allied bombing damaged the Preußische Staatsbibliothek, the Nazi regime evacuated the library’s collections. Millions of volumes of printed materials and media, which presumably included seventy-nine of Le Beau’s manuscript scores, were transferred to thirty secret locations throughout eastern Germany, including caves, monasteries, abandoned mines, and castles. After the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, these cultural materials were scattered. Many library staff had fled or died during the war. The Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin estimates that between 335,000 to 400,000 items were destroyed, and over 300,000 are missing to this day. While Le Beau’s estate survived in Berlin, she was less fortunate at the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe, a city that held personal significance for Le Beau and her family. Located in Baden-Württemberg, a region in southwestern Germany east of the Rhine River, Le Beau had spent her childhood in Karlsruhe and later Baden-Baden; it seemed a fitting choice to bequeath the more personal items in her estate to the region’s largest library. In 1942, the Badische Landesbibliothek was collateral damage in a British air raid, and firebombs destroyed the building and much of its holdings (at the time, 360,000 volumes). The fires consumed a sizable portion (though not all) of Le Beau’s personal estate, including her diaries.
In Berlin, however, Le Beau’s estate was ultimately returned to its former home on Unter den Linden, a bombed-out shell of its former self and the soon-to-be national library of the GDR. In 1989, with reunification on the horizon, the two Berlin libraries discussed their desire to unite as one institution. In 1992, after nearly fifty years as separate entities, irrevocably altered by the brutality of totalitarian regimes, the devastations of war, and the tumult of geo-political events, the two state libraries merged to form the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, in whose building I now sat.
While far greater atrocities occurred during the Nazi regime, the Holocaust, World War II, and the subsequent rise and fall of the GDR than the potential of losing Le Beau’s estate, I believe that tracing the fate of her materials throughout this period lays bare one of the many twisted aims of totalitarianism — it seeks to destroy knowledge by erasing the historical archive and rewriting it in its own terrifying image. By following the microcosmic trajectory of Le Beau’s scores, we also reveal the extent to which hatred, cruelty, and ignorance can ripple throughout a society, leaving nothing, not even the smallest of cultural items, unscathed.
In the foreword of her memoirs, Lebenserinnerungen einer Komponistin, Le Beau articulates how, although thwarted as a composer in life due to gendered prejudice, she desired that her musical legacy would survive and earn a fairer assessment from future generations.
“Whatever gifts I was given, I have nurtured with all my strength; no one can do anything more! I did not disdain even the smallest gifts, but rather, I took delight in all musical works as long as they were artistically serious and true… The royal libraries in Munich and Berlin already preserve all my printed works and will later also receive my manuscripts, which I will leave them. Historians and all those whom I wish to present with this consideration can judge the collection of my works, yes, and they will certainly do so with more impartiality and fairness than my contemporaries… Should one or another of my compositions please later generations, I have not written in vain.”
Le Beau entrusted her estate to these historic institutions, believing that they would act as a bulwark in preserving her legacy; less than two decades after her death, some of her materials were already in ashes. Despite this chaos, her manuscript scores endured, including her song compositions. Although few of her songs have been publicly heard since the late nineteenth century, I intend to make it so that they are considered once again with “more impartiality and fairness” (unparteiischer und gerechter), as Le Beau herself intended.
Keep an eye out for my next installment of “In Search of Luise Adolpha Le Beau: Part III” and remember to subscribe (it’s free!) for a monthly update in your inbox. Also, feel free to share any comments or questions in the section below.
With the generous support of the Presser Foundation’s Presser Graduate Award, I traveled to Germany from late March until early June 2022 to compile and research the published and unpublished song repertoire of German Romantic-era composer Luise Adolpha Le Beau (1850-1927). This research will be integral to the completion of my DMA thesis/lecture recital project on Le Beau’s Lieder, which I plan to present in the spring of 2023.
“In Search of Luise Adolpha Le Beau” is an ongoing series. For more details about this project, click here.
Born in Rastatt, Germany, Luise Adolpha Le Beau (1850-1927) was raised in a musical family, and her parents devoted themselves to her education. She later cultivated a professional career as a composer, pianist, music critic, and piano pedagogue, although she identified primarily as a composer. She wrote in large-scale forms, such as symphonies, operas, and choral works, but also embraced small-scale Lieder and instrumental chamber music. During the 1870’s and 1880’s in Munich, Le Beau was successful in publishing and seeking performances of her newest works. In the decades that followed, however, she struggled to find further performance opportunities, moving to Wiesbaden, Berlin, and Baden-Baden to seek more fertile collaborative landscapes. Le Beau’s memoirs, Lebenserinnerungen einer Komponistin (Memoirs of a Woman Composer), published in 1910, detail her frustrations with the sexism and lack of acceptance she faced as a woman composer, which directly contributed to Le Beau’s withdrawal from her public composition career in the early 1900’s.
Upon her passing in 1927, although she meticulously organized and catalogued her manuscripts and personal papers, Le Beau’s music was simply “forgotten.” While more recent scholarship and recordings have highlighted her large-scale works and instrumental chamber music, there is little to no scholarship about her Lieder repertoire, only a handful of her published Lieder scores are available to the public, and to my knowledge, few professional recordings of Le Beau’s Lieder exist.
After more than a year of planning, I found myself barreling towards the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin on Unter den Linden. With its grand neo-Baroque façade and imposing marble staircase, I felt instantly dwarfed by the sheer size and space of such an historic building. I prepared myself for what I could encounter next – would Luise Adolpha Le Beau’s archive reveal what I hoped and expected it to? Through my online research, I knew that I would find her Nachlaß (estate) at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, which included seventy-nine score manuscripts and some of her personal correspondence. Several letters had been digitized, but Le Beau’s score manuscripts remained in their original or microfilm forms, accessible only on site. While I had cross-checked online resources to create an initial list of her song opuses, both published and unpublished, I could only verify my theories in person.
As I registered for my Bibliotheksausweis (library card), I suddenly felt intimidated. I heard the faint whispers of an “impostor devil” in my ear, wondering whether I really planned to waltz into the Musikabteilung (Music Department) with my awkward German and order the entire estate of Luise Adolpha Le Beau. I had never embarked on archival research before, let alone in another language – what did I think I was doing?
After an initial week of engaging with Le Beau’s estate materials, I began to feel more at ease in my burgeoning role as an archival researcher, in part due to the direct, but sympathetic guidance of the Music Department staff. I observed certain characteristics that they all shared – an attention to detail, their acknowledgment that no “small” thing should go untouched, their sense of responsibility as custodians of history, and an indefatigable desire to help visitors like myself. They were all vaguely familiar characters, as if I had met them before. I realized then that they reminded me of my mother.
In 1976, Maria Emma Vergara, my mother, graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park with a Master’s degree in Library Science. After emigrating to the United States from Colombia as a child, my mother carried with her a love of literature and the legacy of a family of writers, including José María Vergara y Vergara (1831-1872), my mother’s great-great grandfather who penned the first Spanish literary history of Colombia. Since her career as a librarian and archivist occurred mainly before I was born, it took me several weeks of research at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin to connect my mother’s story with my own search for Luise Adolpha Le Beau and her music.
Upon my parents’ marriage in 1972, my mother was nineteen years old. They soon moved cross-country from southern California to Upstate New York where my father pursued a PhD in Philosophy at Cornell University. They sold my mother’s Volkswagen Beetle to pay for her first semester’s-worth of tuition at Ithaca College. Originally, she hoped to study Speech Pathology, but after a single semester, they simply did not have the funds for my mother to continue her studies. Without a full scholarship, she faced the real possibility of abandoning her college degree. After interviewing at nearby SUNY Cortland, the university awarded my mother the funds that she so desperately needed, setting her on course to later become a librarian. Since SUNY Cortland did not offer a concentration in Speech Pathology, my mother changed her fields of study to include Social Science and Spanish Literature. In upstate New York of the early 1970’s, my mother was one of the first Latina students and native Spanish-speakers in the Spanish department, as well as the university.
After graduating summa cum laude from SUNY Cortland, my mother scheduled a meeting with her advisor to discuss future career prospects. This advisor, who was also a woman in a university landscape with scant female professors or administrators, offered my mother a piece of advice: she should pursue secretarial work. Infuriated and defeated, my mother cried for a week, but continued with her plans to pursue a graduate degree in Library Science. After moving to Washington DC and graduating from the University of Maryland in 1976, she worked at the Library of Congress as an Assistant Librarian in the Hispanic Division, cataloguing materials related to human rights abuses in Central and South America. Sexual harassment was an overt and commonplace occurrence for women employees, but my mother persisted with her work, serving as a cataloguist for DC-based organizations, such as USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development). There, she archived information on oral rehydration of infants, as well as maternal nutrition and health throughout Africa and Asia.
Over the past three months in Germany, as I have found myself in the stillness of library reading rooms, it is clear to me that my mother’s work has, in part, guided me into these fraught, and yet important, literary spaces which have historically excluded women. And so, as I am “in search of Luise Adolpha Le Beau,” I see now that I will encounter many others along this path, whose lives and work intertwine with a nineteenth-century composer and a twenty-first century me. Although the story of this project begins long before I traveled to Germany, I find it best to start my first post at the exact moment where I grasp my library card and walk through the heavy wooden doors of the Musikabteilung at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.
As I continued my research over the subsequent weeks at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, I realized that tracing whatever happened to the materials in Luise Adolpha Le Beau’s estate after her death in 1927 was as relevant as anything that occurred during her lifetime. Per her own instructions, Le Beau’s meticulously curated estate was divided between state libraries in Berlin, Karlsruhe, and Munich. Through my examination of her manuscripts, I discovered the twentieth-century history of the library itself embedded into her scores. As a contested socio-cultural space, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin was irrevocably altered by the brutality of totalitarian regimes, the devastations of war, and the tumult of geo-political events, which wreaked havoc upon the library’s collections and its curators.
Keep an eye out for my next installment of “In Search of Luise Adolpha Le Beau: Part II” and remember to subscribe (it’s free!) for a monthly update in your inbox. Also, feel free to share any comments or questions below.