Emilie Mayer: Symphonies 3 & 7

Emilie Mayer was one of the very few successful female composers of her time. Born in Mecklenburg, she was also known affectionately as the 'female Beethoven'. On our second symphony CD, Emilie Mayer opens up a new facet of her compositional spectrum by displaying classicist tendencies: clear and transparent structures, regular periods in the development of themes, no formal experiments. The additional name "Militair" refers to the use of piccolo, triangle, cymbals and bass drum in the final movement. All we know about her Seventh Symphony is that it was probably composed by 1856: it is fair to say that in this symphony Emilie Mayer draws on the sum of her previous experience in composing symphonies: a large-scale build-up of tension, as she practiced in the opening movement of her Second Symphony, for example, with the clear classical formal language of her Third Symphony. The motivic integration is so dense that the boundaries between thematic and non-thematic formal sections become blurred. Further masterpieces by one of the most important female representatives of 19th century Central European music.