“Historical Anthology of Music by Women”
Anna Amalie was the twelfth child and sixth daughter of Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia and the youngest sister of Frederick the Great. She studied first with her brother Frederick and then with Gottlieb Hayne, a Berlin cellist and cathedral organist. She became an accomplished performer on keyboard instruments, flute, and violin. In 1758, Amalie appointed J. P. Kirnberger, one of Bach’s most distinguished students, as her Kapellmeister and studied with him until 1783. Her choice of Kirnberger is an indication of her rejection of the prevalent Berlin style of composition in favor of the highly contrapuntal style of the late Baroque. She shared this taste with her brother, some of whose compositions were even more reactionary than her own.
Although the general assessment is that her music was inferior to her brother’s, that judgment is not borne out by an examination of her music. Kirnberger thought well enough of Amalie’s work to include an excerpt from her setting of Dei Tod fesu (which pre-dates Carl Heinrich Graun’s famous one) in his Kunst des reinen Satzes, one of the classics of eighteenth-century compositional technique. Her compositions also include sonatas, chorales and arias in the old style, and marches and songs (some of which were published in a modern edition in Berlin in 1927/28). Amalie became more reactionary as she grew older; for example, she denounced Gluck in a letter to Kirnberger, but she remained supportive of C. P. E. Bach, perhaps because of her devotion to his father’s work.
Amalie’s most important contribution to music was the founding of a superb music library, now known as the Amalien-Bibliothek and housed partly in East Berlin and partly in West Berlin. Begun under Hayne and nurtured by Kirnberger, the library assembled one of the truly great collections of eighteenth-century and earlier music. It is particularly rich in manuscripts and early printed editions of Bach, including the Brandenburg Concertos, St. Matthew Passion, B-minor Mass, most of the harpsichord concertos, and many cantatas. It also contains compositions by earlier composers, such as Hans Leo Hassler and Palestrina; work of other late Baroque composers, including Handel and Telemann; and works by Amalie’s contemporaries Johann Adolph Hasse, Carl Heinrich Graun, Johann Gottlieb Graun, and C. P. E. Bach. Three eigh- teenth-century catalogs list the contents of the collection—approximately 3,000 books and over 600 volumes of music. The catalog was continued by Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Carl Friedrich Zelter, who added many Bach items. The contents of the library provided much of the material for Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s study of Bach (1802) and was the inspiration for the Berlin Bach movement led by Zelter. It became one of the central points for the collection of Bach manuscripts and was a major source for the complete edition of Bach’s works.
The style of the Sonata for Flute in F major suggests an early date of composition, before Amalie began to adhere to the counterpoint of the late Baroque. Only the first movement, Adagio, is presented here. The entire sonata compares favorably with the sonatas of Amalie’s brother and of C. P. E. Bach, both of whom were extraordinarily prolific in this genre. The gracious “affective” style of the melody and the simplicity of the harmony are very much in keeping with the sonatas composed for Frederick’s evening performances at his palace Sans Souci. Perhaps this sonata was composed for one of these soirées.
Further Reading
Blechschmidt, Eva Renate. Die Amalien-Bibliothek. Berliner Studien zur Musikwissenschaft. Berlin: Verlag Merseburger, 1965.
Sachs, Curt. “Prinzessin Amalie von Preussen als Musikerin,” Hohenzollern Jahrbuch XIV (1910):181-91.
edited by Gustav Lenzewski
© 1975 by Chr. Friedrich Vieweg, Music Publishers, Munich, Germany. Reprinted by permission.
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