Throughout his life, Vaughan Williams was a notorious flirt. This love of women and flirtation permeates not only his music, but his professional and personal relationships alike. Yet, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, Vaughan Williams was also a strong advocate for many women who sought to develop professional careers in the male-dominated music world. This conflict between his behaviour and actions presents a conundrum for those looking to investigate his broader advocacy of women on the one hand and his private behaviour on the other. This chapter explores the contradictory nature of Vaughan Williams’s behaviour and beliefs, from his period of teaching at the Royal College of Music, to the emergence of the nickname ‘Uncle Ralph’ and all that name entailed, revealing a more complex portrait than has hitherto been proposed of the composer’s relationship with his female composition students, in particular.

Scholars of nineteenth-century music often use the term “long nineteenth century” to refer to the 125-year period between the beginnings of the French Revolution and the First World War. If the nineteenth century was long, however, it was also deep, containing vast numbers of musical scores that extend well beyond the canonical works that have dominated scholarly journals, recital halls, and course syllabi. My chapter focuses on a composer from the deepest regions of the Lied genre—Marie Franz—who wrote inventive and affecting songs that raise important questions about the analysis and performance of nineteenth-century song. Franz’s songs suggest that as much as we should attend to the activities that women musicians engaged in during this period, we should also attend to the pieces that they wrote, no matter how small in size or few in number. They prove that even in the most private spaces women were composing songs of bracing originality, and that discovering the full scope of that originality often requires digging deeply for unpublished repertoire. And they show that to fully illuminate the astonishing, extensive, and little-studied songs from this century, we need the commitment not just of scholars, but also of performers.

The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire figured prominently in Amy Beach’s life. Her friendship with the artist colony’s founder, Marian MacDowell, ensured Beach an open invitation; she held eighteen residencies between 1921 and 1941. The colony offered Beach the perfect environment for her creative work: a direct experience of nature and the uninterrupted solitude of a studio of her own amid a community of creative workers. Beach was at the height of her career during these years. She mentored many of the younger women composers who came to work at the colony and composed much of her best music there. Beach became a devoted supporter of the MacDowell Colony. She organized benefit concerts and spoke passionately on its behalf whenever she had the chance. On her death, she left the rights to her music to the colony, a gift that continues to earn income today.

This chapter assesses the state of Clara Schumann studies and argues that more attention needs to be devoted to her musical works. It previews three of the book’s main arguments: (1) that Clara Schumann should be viewed as her own song composer, rather than as a composer whose style and success are measured against her husband’s; (2) that detailed musical analysis has a crucial role to play in demonstrating her importance to the history of the nineteenth-century Lied; and (3) that musical form is indelibly linked to poetic form and meaning. The chapter also briefly outlines the content of the chapters to come.

The epilogue reflects on what the study of Clara Schumann’s songs reveals about the seemingly fathomless depths of the nineteenth-century Lied and the staggering number of little-known songs by underrepresented composers whose names may be less familiar than Schumann’s but whose music is no less deserving of being published, performed, recorded, analyzed, and celebrated.

In Chapter 1, Sophie Fuller considers the musical landscape which composers working in the earlier twentieth century inhabited. From the early days of the twentieth century, when women were expected to concentrate upon song and small-scale piano works, to the wider opportunities which opened up during the interwar period, Fuller considers a range of composers, including Cécile Chaminade, Maude Valérie White, Louise Adolpha Le Beau, Ethel Smyth, Adela Maddison, Poldowski (Irene Wieniawska), Marguerite Canal, Jeanne Leleu, Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Elsa Barraine, Germaine Tailleferre, and Alma Mahler.