The other night, of course, I didn’t meet Antonia Brico personally – she died in 1989. I learned about her by watching the feature film The Conductor, which tells the story of Brico’s early conducting years, from the time she expressed the unstoppable wish to lead orchestras, over the years in which she had to overcome all the forces working against her deepest soul desire, until her first large orchestra concert at the very beginning of the year 1930, when she directed the Berlin Philharmonic.
I won’t disclose more of Brico’s story: look for the film and watch it yourself, it’s definitely worth it! What you can easily find are parts of the documentary Antonia: The Portrait of the Woman which show Brico in her role of an experienced orchestra head. The stories and anecdotes she tells there (for example, check those at minutes 12:45, 16:10 and 25:45) are simply exquisite and show how much humour she had. She also shares there that the people who prevented her most from conducting were women – it seems that the entire mindset (of both men and women) of the era (further beyond the 1920s and 1930s) was really erroneous. We can only ask ourselves why.
One wouldn’t think that gender inequality (still) exists in music, right? Brico’s life story reminded me of the article Why aren’t there more women conductors? which I came across several years ago and found out that it took ‘only’ 118 years for a woman to lead the orchestra at the famous British Last Night of the Proms. Marin Alsop, the conductor featured in the article, relates so wonderfully to the issue in question – I warmly recommend reading what she has to say. Another such example comes from Holland, Brico’s homeland, where only in 2018 (the same year when the film about Brico came out), for the first time in the Dutch history, a female conductor, Karina Canellakis, became Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.
The list of such life stories and such outstanding (and vastly unknown) females could probably become very long. I’ll allow myself an alternative note here, one that sheds further light at the general gender climate which set the sentiment for those far away times that the above-mentioned movie deals with (and beyond everything we know about the 1920s as the glitz and glamour as well as immorality and corruption era). This comment leads us to another (or even another two) form(s) of art. Namely, in 1921 (maybe the year when the little Antonia Brico started school), at the very beginning of the surrealist movement, Pablo Picasso painted his two similar Three Musicians collage and oil paintings and even though these are painted in the style of Synthetic Cubism, all the represented musicians there appear as men. The third musician, a friar, wears a robe indeed (and therefore not trousers), but is still masculine even though he’s a singer (which is probably the very first of the roles in music that women were allowed to conquer). These three personae represent common roles from Commedia dell’arte, a popular form of Italian theatre with ‘masked’ characters. Theatre which, in turn, was responsible for the advent of actresses. Thus, let me finish this remark with hope that behind their masks at least some of the Three Musicians are female 😊
BTW, the film The Conductor was directed by a Dutch female director, Maria Peters. Last but not least, according to the film producer, it was very difficult to finance this movie, probably because the director was a woman. This was the producer’s statement given in 2018. Well, ladies, we definitely have a long way to go!