Emilie Mayer:

In our successful Emilie Mayer edition, we now begin on Vol. 1 with three of her string quartets. While still a student of Carl Loewe, the composer turned to the most aesthetically demanding and respected genre of chamber music, the string quartet. In 1848, a critic of the Berliner Vossische Zeitung praised the "lovely cantilenas," the "deft arrangement," and "especially the noble and dignified style" of her string quartets. The quartets in G major, A major, and E minor were written by 1858 and were always favorably reviewed by the critics. However, borrowing from classical patterns, the strict motivic-thematic interpenetration of formal sections are only some aspects of Mayer's quartet style.

Emilie Mayer was one of the very few successful female composers of her time. The Mecklenburg-born composer was also referred to as the "female Beethoven". On this second CPO symphony album, Emilie Mayer opens up a new facet of her compositional spectrum by exhibiting classicistic tendencies: clear and transparent outlines, regular periods in the formation of themes, no formal experiments.

„Women who compose independently are rare in the music world. As abundant as the literary world is with female talent, the musical scene has few to champion, and among these few, Emilie Mayer is at the top. Her prolific output resembles a wellspring. She transforms every sensation, every feeling and every emotion to music.“ Elisabeth Sangalli-Marr (c. 1828–1901) described Emilie Mayer’s unique position in the music world of the time with these words in a Biographische Skizze (biographical sketch) published in 1877. Indeed, no other composer of her generation was so unimpressed by patriarchal gender conceit and rigid role attributions as „Europe’s greatest female composer“ (as Emilie Mayer is described in the subtitle of a recently published biography).

“Compositions that already on a first hearing leave behind a uniquely original impression.” This is what klassik-heute.com wrote after the release of CPO’s first CD with piano trios by Emilie Mayer. Her extensive chamber oeuvre for piano also contains two piano quartets. She composed these two works, one in E flat major and the other in G major, at the end of the 1850s. At the time Emilie Mayer was an esteemed composer residing in Berlin: most of her works were performed with success, and she enjoyed broad recognition in music circles. Each of her quartets consists of four movements. Here her model in formal matters was not so much Mozart or Beethoven but Schumann, whose sole Piano Quartet op.47 had been published a good fifteen years before. Considering her music as a whole, we may say that in her piano quartets, just as in her chamber oeuvre in general, Emilie Mayer was a compellingly independent composer with firm rooting in classical models who succeeded in developing a romantic musical language all of her own.