Fanny lends Clara a helping hand

The discovery that the rather mediocre Easter Sonata, wrongly attributed to Felix Mendelssohn, is actually by his sister Fanny has poked the feminist hornet’s nest yet again.

Out flew the old insects ably led by the BBC, flapping their wings and buzzing the usual politicised inanities about the gross injustices suffered by women composers throughout the ages. The implication is that swarms of female geniuses have only been held back by flagrant discrimination.

Until now Clara Schumann has been the biggest inscription on the banners of musical feminism. It has been suggested, or sometimes actually said outright, that poor Clara had her composing genius suppressed by a regiment of Teutonic MCPs led by her husband Robert. But for such sharp practices, the world would realise she was at least her husband’s equal.

There was a brouhaha about this in 2015, when it was discovered that the A-level music syllabus covered 63 composers, all of them despicably male. Clara’s name was held up as the greatest omission.

Now Mrs Schumann herself, one of the best pianists of her time, didn’t consider her compositions to be significant. They were mostly little nothings she knocked off for her own recitals, as was a common practice then. Essentially Clara wasn’t even a minor composer – she wasn’t a composer at all.

And yes, perhaps in the nineteenth century there existed some prejudice against professional women, although that didn’t diminish Mrs Schumann’s success in something she really was good at, performance. Yet, at a wild guess, women’s rights were even a smaller priority in the twelfth century, when the sublime composer Hildegard von Bingen plied her art unimpeded.

Hildegard’s works survive to this day not because she was a woman composer, but because she was a great composer. Which Clara wasn’t, and neither was Fanny, as her hundreds of known works demonstrate vividly to anyone whose ears aren’t blocked by ideological plugs.

This category demonstrably doesn’t include the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who have embarked on a widely publicised search for ‘lost’ female composers.

They have their work cut out, for, according to the BBC, there are at least 6,000 of those lost sheep, waiting to be found for the delectation of music lovers who’ve had their fill of MCPs like Bach and Beethoven. The suggested number is nothing short of staggering. Let me spell it out for you: SIX THOUSAND.

Now, at the risk of sounding immodest, I know music rather well. My wife, a concert pianist, knows it much better. This morning we put the 6,000 number to the test by compiling our own list of male composers, ranging from sub-minor to minor to major to super-major.

Admittedly, we only spent half an hour on this exercise and, had we spent the whole day and used some reference literature, we could probably have done better. As it was, we barely got to a hundred, scraping the bottom of the barrel, where some 18^th century Russian liturgical composers reside next to the lesser known Dutch and English polyphonists of the Elizabethan era (or whatever it was called in Holland).

Now it’s fair to assume that – due to discrimination only! – male composers must have outnumbered female ones at least 100 to one throughout history. Hence, accepting on faith the 6,000 figure put forth by the BBC, there must be more than 600,000 shamefully masculine composers languishing in the dark dungeons of history, waiting to come out and see the blinding light of fame.

I hope you realise that we’re no longer talking just about ignorance, stupidity and tastelessness. The toxic ideology of feminism has poisoned the brains of our culture vultures, rendering them certifiably mad.

Edwina Wolstencroft, BBC Radio 3’s editor, confirmed this clinical diagnosis when announcing plans to broadcast works by female composers, emphatically including Fanny Mendelssohn. I hope, said Miss Wolstencroft that “the live broadcast contributes towards Fanny’s recognition as a musical genius.”

Right. Fanny is ‘a musical genius’. So what term shall we use to describe those MCPs Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert? Since the verbal scale of human artistic attainment doesn’t really go higher than genius, we can only assume one of three things.

Either those gentlemen were demigods, sitting at the right hand of Apollo atop the musical Olympus, or Miss Wolstencroft et al. genuinely believe that Fanny is every bit their equal, or this lot care not about music but ideology expressed through music.

Dismissing the first assumption as sheer paganism, we have to accept some combination of the second and third ones as the likely cause.

Then we realise what a subversive role the BBC and likeminded institutions play in our culture, of which music is the salient representation. They are the enemy within, cancerous cells gradually eating away at everything that’s healthy and genuine.

As such, they cause even a greater harm than pop excretions. At least no one seriously considers those as the acme of the human spirit. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Miss Wolstencroft does.