When Emilie Mayer moved into her own apartment in 1851 at Markgrafenstraße 72, today Berlin-Kreuzberg, she had the job title “composer” entered in the city’s address book.

That alone was news.

Because the "Rheinische Musik-Zeitung für Kunstfreunde und Künstler" remarked in its issue of April 5 of the same year: "Emilie Mayer is a lady who spends her time almost exclusively composing." Since at that time there were all sorts of prejudices against working women cherished, which were taken for laws of nature, the article also delivered a portrait of the composer, which was intended to disarm the doubters: “Anyone who knows her personally knows that vanity, extravagance and similar motives are out of the question in her case;

one would get completely wrong ideas about her,

if you picture them as the women who transcend the natural limits of female talent tend to be.

She is quiet and modest, thoroughly feminine and feels a quiet, blissful satisfaction in her musical activity, which seems to make up her entire happiness in life.”

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Modesty and quiet happiness - we don't know whether that was a characteristic of Emilie Mayer or a Biedermeier strategy of surreptitiously gaining social goodwill.

But what we do know is that her lifetime achievement as a composer was anything but humble and quiet.

She wrote nine string quartets, each with the same number of violin and cello sonatas, as well as songs and piano music, including a concerto for piano and orchestra.

That alone would be remarkable enough, because with this quantity of works Emilie Mayer has to be placed alongside the two best-known female composers of the nineteenth century, Fanny Hensel (baptized Mendelssohn Bartholdy) and Clara Schumann (nee Wieck).

But Mayer achieved much more.

With eight symphonies she made her breakthrough in a genre

Barbara Beuys reports on this important context in her slim, easy-to-read biography of Emilie Mayer.

"Europe's greatest composer" is the subtitle, which sounds lurid, but measured against Mayer's epoch-making achievement, it is not wrong.

The second subtitle, "A Search for Traces", indicates that there are only a few original sources from which Mayer's life can be reconstructed.

These include twenty-one letters in the Berlin State Library, the biographical sketch by Elisabeth Sangalli-Marr from the "Neue Berliner Musikzeitung" from 1877, Wilhelm Tappert's essay on "Die Frauen und die Musikal Composition" in the "Musikalisches Wochenblatt" from 1871, and numerous reviews.

Of course, Beuys can already rely on solid research on Mayer,