The questions that today shape the concert experience—what we listen to, how musical discourse is articulated, and in what space the performance takes place—were reconsidered in the first half of the 19th century by Clara Schumann through her concert practice. Her conception of the recital played a decisive role in defining the format of the modern concert and in establishing a more reflective relationship between repertoire, performer, and audience. In contrast to the heterogeneous, virtuoso programmes typical of the early decades of the 19th century, Clara Schumann began to organise her recitals with greater aesthetic coherence, bringing together works by composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, or Mendelssohn within a single artistic horizon. This programming model encouraged more focused listening and conferred lasting status on certain works, contributing to the consolidation of the repertoire that today forms the core of the Western musical tradition.
This new understanding of her artistic activity as a performer ultimately led to a gradual separation between her public persona and her role as a composer, which she herself tended to subordinate to her identity as a concert artist. However, in the early years of her career she frequently included her own works in her programmes, alongside a repertoire in which vocal pieces held a prominent place. The works heard in this concert come from both genres: the Scherzo No. 2 for piano and several lieder. The practice of combining composition and performance was common among many women musicians of the 19th century, who found in private salons and public concerts privileged spaces in which to present their own works.
Song—in the form of the lied or the mélodie—thus came to occupy a central place in the output of composers such as Fanny Hensel, Clara Schumann, and Pauline Viardot. This genre offered especially fertile ground for women’s creative work, as it lay at the intersection of domestic music-making, the salon, and the public concert. In their works, the vocal line is characterised by close attention to the text and by an expressive lyricism supported by highly sensitive piano accompaniments, in which the piano actively participates in shaping the poetic discourse. This aesthetic, based on the intimate interaction between voice and piano, became a fundamental model for women composers in the early 20th century on both sides of the Atlantic, who found in song a privileged medium for expressive experimentation and artistic affirmation.
In the first decades of the 20th century, this model was reinterpreted in diverse cultural contexts. In the United States, Amy Beach drew on the European Romantic tradition to develop a distinctive voice linked to the search for a national musical identity, incorporating materials drawn from
ethnographic studies and Indigenous musics within an art-music compositional language. For her part, María Grever transferred that lyrical ideal to the realm of popular song, combining her European training with elements of Mexican and Latin American tradition to create a style in which vocal expressivity and melodic clarity blur the boundaries between academic and popular repertoire.
In parallel, in Europe the early feminist movements began to challenge women’s subordinate position in intellectual and artistic life, opening up new possibilities for education and public visibility. Although access to musical studies expanded progressively, professionalisation remained shaped by gender expectations. In this context we find Alma Mahler, Wanda Landowska, and Nadia Boulanger, represented on the programme with early works for piano and song. In them one can perceive the beginnings of very different trajectories: from Alma Mahler we have a corpus of 14 lieder marked by a chromatic language and a close relationship with Symbolist poetry; Wanda Landowska oriented her career towards performance and research, becoming a key figure in the harpsichord revival and in the rediscovery of Baroque music; and Nadia Boulanger, after a brief period of composition, exerted a decisive influence as a pedagogue on several generations of 20th-century composers.
In contemporary creation, the work of Laura Vega, Maria do Céu Camposinhos, and Rebecca Saunders reflects an expansion of the referential possibilities of musical language. In these pieces, vocal and instrumental writing naturally integrates materials and turns drawn from the popular sphere, sedimented in the collective imagination, often linked to texts by authors from their own cultural context. At the same time, the chamber dialogue is rethought to the point of dissolving the traditional functions of the instruments into a continuous, organic sound texture. In Fletch, by Rebecca Saunders, this principle is expressed in an eminently timbral writing that translates into sound the physical gesture of the arrow.
