Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany, (Hardcover)

In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization.

Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-lying critics who argued for music as a fine art, a component of modern, polite, and commercial culture, rather than a symbol of institutional power.