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Graduate Award, I traveled to Germany from late March until early June 2022 to compile and research the published and unpublished song repertoire of German Romantic-era composer Luise Adolpha Le Beau (1850-1927).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.

Luise Adolpha Le Beau (1850-1927)

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.

The Geo-Politics of a Manuscript Score

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.

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.”