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Hearing Her Voice
Women Musicians in Vienna, 1900

Featuring soprano-speaker Dr Carola Darwin and pianist Marie-Noëlle Kendall, this lecture-recital introduces some of the most important women musicians who were working in Vienna around 1900.

Vienna in the early 1900s was a fascinating place, full of artistic and intellectual experiments and innovations. While Gustav Mahler was electrifying audiences at the Vienna Opera, Schoenberg invented a new kind of musical harmony and Gustav Klimt created extraordinary, luminous visual art. Then there was Arthur Schnitzler in literature, as well as Josef Hoffman in architecture, Sigmund Freud in psychology and many more, all linked together by a complex network of personal and professional relationships. 

But what is less well known is that, in every art-form, these networks included women who carved out their own path, creating music, literature and visual art that was celebrated at the time but has since been forgotten. Over the course of this lecture-recital, you will learn about some of the most significant women composers, performers and critics at the time and have the chance to hear some of the music they created and discussed. These women’s musical voices, silent for a century or more, can now be heard again. And they are well worth hearing. 

Carola Darwin has been researching the lives and work of women musicians in Vienna 1900 for the past decade. She has recently recorded an album of songs and piano music by Johanna Müller-Hermann and Mathilde Kralik with pianist Marie-Noëlle Kendall. Her book The Other Voice: Women’s Musical Creativity in Alma Mahler’s Vienna is due to be published by Equinox in 2027.