I just spent a wonderful three-day weekend in Berlin at a music festival, the Frauen Orchester Projekt, where an all-women orchestra rehearses intensely for three days and then puts on a concert (officially an informal reading—but it was definitely a concert) of music by women. They played Agnes’s Overture in E flat, the first time that music has been performed since 1874, when it was played in Agnes’s hometown of Brno. It’s tempting to say that Agnes couldn’t have imagined an event like that: an orchestra of women in a world capitol, playing her music about 150 years after she wrote it. But I also think she probably could have imagined it easily. I feel so clearly that she was writing for the future, leaving such clear copies of her manuscripts, even when her pieces weren’t published. I think she absolutely did imagine that her music would be played in a world capitol, and I like to think she could easily imagine a concert by women of music by women.
It was so moving to hear the piece played by an orchestra, not the midi sounds on my computer; I cried just like I knew I would, especially when the audience whooped and applauded afterwards. It was also really helpful to hear the orchestra rehearsing the piece. There are some spots that just don’t work—the poor horn players said some of their parts are unplayable, so we’re going to have to rewrite those, and the clarinets also had some strange moments in their parts. They’re going to share a spreadsheet so the players can let us know about errors—whether ours or Agnes’s—that we’ll need to fix before publication, and that may be a big project. In the midi version, the timpani part struck me as just dumb, but in the hands of the skilled timpani player (the first woman orchestral percussionist in Germany, if I understood her right), the timpani ended up being the heartbeat of the whole orchestra, giving everything shape and nuance. The incredible conductor, Mary Ellen Kitchens, is an absolute powerhouse. I think Riley, my fantastic student/assistant/collaborator, got video of her jumping into the air as she conducted the finale; if she did, I’ll make sure to share it here. Riley did come, with her partner and parents, and it was thrilling to see her get the applause she deserves for all her hard work typesetting the score and parts (I edited them, but she did the actual typing of notes into the computer).
It was fun to hear the form so clearly in the performance, as you can in works by great composers. The overture is in a modified Sonata Allegro Form. In Sonata form, there’s a part in the middle, after lots of wandering around, where everything gets set up very clearly for the triumphant return of the opening music. It’s called the dominant preparation, and it’s all about making you want to hear the return of the original key and the original theme. The overture sets up a very clear feeling of dominant preparation, but instead of leading to the original theme like you expect, it pulls the rug out from under you and goes instead to a slow, lyrical, quiet theme. Then there’s another build, and we do get the original theme as expected. But there’s a very clear breaking the rules happening there. For lots of the nineteenth century, music critics talked about music as being “masculine”—loud, bombastic, forceful— or “feminine”—quiet, slow, lyrical. Did Agnes have those characterizations in mind? It feels like she must have. If she did, is she saying something about having a big lead-up not to the main theme but to a definitely “feminine” theme? I wonder.
I also played an all-Agnes concert, mostly solo but with a couple of songs with the lovely mezzo Frances Falling, as a post-festival “matinee.” The audience laughed out loud at some of the moments where Agnes ends a piece with a smile and a shrug, and they definitely wanted to clap after every etude (I played six of the twelve), even when I announced them as a set. It’s so fun to play crowd-pleasing music. I think people enjoyed it, and I definitely had some moments where I heard the piano writing differently now that I had heard the orchestral writing. This happens in, say, Beethoven all the time: you can really get a clear sense of how the composer is imagining the piano music because you know how the orchestral music sounds. But this was my first time hearing Agnes’s orchestral music live, and that was really fun to discover some added dimensions in some moments. Some of the playing went very well and some of it wasn’t my best, which I expected: early afternoon is my lowest-energy part of the day, and I knew I would be already tired from the emotional orchestral concert that morning. And then the piano had some trouble—there was a definite “clunk” happening on one of the low notes, and I couldn’t get it to play as quietly as I wanted it to. But the thing that really pulled my focus was trying to speak to the audience in both English and German. My German is just couple of notches past rudimentary, and I had meant to write out my concert patter and translate it with AI and have everything ready to read. But I just didn’t get to writing out my concert patter—I kept feeling tired and jet-lagged and not up to writing (turns out writing takes really similar energy to practicing, just my luck). So I thought I’d try speaking in English into DeepL, the AI translator on my phone, and then reading the translation into German. That could probably have been an okay plan if it had worked, but of course technology is a miracle until it fails, and it didn’t quite work. I got flustered and tried to sort of translate on the fly. I think it was okay—I do think the audience enjoyed themselves—but it took so much of my focus, and really made my playing not as strong as it could have been. One very funny moment was when I was playing the fifth etude, which is loud and fast and busy, and it made the whole piano move, and my phone—there for translation—fell off the music desk and into the piano, where it rattled on the strings and made them buzz. The audience laughed, and I stopped playing. Someone yelled out “prepared piano!” And I said “Sorry Agnes!” And everyone clapped. It was a funny and joyful moment…but I really, really hope it’s not the main thing people remember from the concert, and I’m afraid it may be.
But it’s exciting that Agnes had her Berlin debut and I did too, and it was exciting to premiere pieces there. I’ll include the program of the “matinee” concert below.
One striking moment for me was after that concert, when we were all packing up our things, and I heard Mary Ellen, the conductor, whistling the main theme from the Agnes overture. For the past three years I’ve been hearing Agnes’s music in my head—in fact, I often don’t listen to external music, because I’m enjoying listening to the Agnes music in my head—and I’ve been aware that I’m the only one around me with this music in my head. But here was someone else walking around with Agnes Tyrell’s music running through her head. And then yesterday, when I was walking around Berlin, I thought that there’s a whole orchestra of women who might have Agnes Tyrrell’s music running through their heads now. I love that.
Klavierwerke und Lieder von Agnes Tyrrell
Jocelyn Swigger, Klavier
mit Frances Falling, mezzosopran
Frauen Orchester Project
9 Marz 2025
14:30
Konzertsaal 2, FEZ Berlin
Alle deutschen Erstaufführungen
von Idyllen und Scherzi, A884
1. Pastorale
2. Scherzo in a-moll
4. Scherzo in D-due
von 12 Konzert Studieren Op. 48, A837
No. 1 in b-moll „Dritten“
No. 2 in H-dur
An den Mond A840
Gedichte von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Idyll in G-dur A860 no. 1
Albumblatt in d-moll Op.18/3
Albumblatt in G-dur Op. 18/2
von 12 Konzert Studieren Op. 48, A837
No. 3 in A-dur „Octaven“
No. 4 in A-dur
Die Muhle, A873
Nocturne in F-dur Op. 16, A829
Beim Wandern Op. 55, A843
Gedichte von Max Haushofer
von 12 Konzert Studieren Op. 48, A837
No. 8 g-moll
No. 11 F#-dur
Vielen Dank an:
FOP
Riley Dunbar
Kolbe Foundation
Gettysburg College
und das Archiv von Agnes Tyrrell in der Abteilung für Musikgeschichte des Mährischen Museums (MZM) in Brünn, Tschechische Republik
