The significance of Johanna Kinkel (1810–1858) as a nineteenth-century female composer, pianist, poet, music pedagogue, writer, journalist, mother to four children, and wife of the German revolutionary, poet, and professor, Gottfried Kinkel (1815–1882), has long been overlooked. Kinkel published seventy-eight Lieder between 1838 and 1851, as well as two singing tutors and a number of music-pedagogical and fictional writings. This book focuses on Kinkel’s Lieder and the context within which those Lieder were composed, performed, reviewed, and received. Kinkel’s music was performed among her friends and more distant contemporaries, was reviewed in all renowned German nineteenth-century music journals, and was published by a variety of presses. This poses the question why her oeuvre is underrepresented within today’s musical and musicological research and performance canons, even though Kinkel was acknowledged in encyclopaedias as early as 1855. Although all of Kinkel’s Lieder were published during her lifetime, they were not mentioned in an encyclopaedia until 1911, while her novel Hans Ibeles in London, published posthumously in 1860, was recognised by Pierer’s Universal-Lexikon in the year of publication. It thus seems that – in line with nineteenth-century perceptions of male creative and female reproductive domains – Johanna Kinkel’s public image was that of a writer rather than a composer during the second half of the nineteenth century.

By contrast, Kinkel was especially respected for her strong-willed personality, her sharp intellect and witty humour, and her brilliance as a composer and pianist among her friends. Malwida von Meysenbug (1816–1903), for instance, described Kinkel as a ‘brave fighter for truth and right’, while also voicing her fascination for Kinkel’s literary, musical, and pedagogical talents. Recalling a holiday with the Kinkels outside of London, von Meysenbug praises Kinkel’s pedagogical approach:

Another friend, Fanny Lewald (1811–1889), admits that ‘one forgot that she was a remarkable poet and a great musician, because one was only able to think about what kind of a woman and what kind of a character she was’.