'If-the-pretty-little-hand-won't stretch': Music for the fair sex in eighteenth-century Germany

The image of the young lady at music is part of the mythology of the eighte enth century, nostalgically summoning a bygone era in European manners. How should such images be read, and what uses are they put in the construction of the past and the present? Richard Leppert appeals to eighteenth century iconography to argue the disciplinary function of music on women. This art icle extends Leppert's arguments in a newly uncovered repertory of songs an d keyboard works published in eighteenth century Germany "for the fair sex. " Moving between prescriptions about musical practice specifically and wome n's character and place in the world more broadly, this music evinces cauti onary and disciplinary rhetorics that accord with Leppert's readings. But w hereas Leppert deals with paintings-more or less official representations-m usical performance and reception complicate the picture. In performance, mu sic offers possibilities for negotiation. On closer examination, instrument al music for the fair sex reveals a complex web of generic and stylistic mo tifs that undermine the manifest rhetoric of easiness and simplicity in the repertory and invoke the professional and public spheres. Questioning as w ell as espousing virtue, and haunted by the figure of the rake, songs for l adies reflect the instability in the emergent discourses of bourgeois femin inity and the private sphere.