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Elfrida Andr?e (1841-1929) was a Swedish composer, organist, and conductor who dedicated her life to "the improvement of womanhood" in regard to both her musical career and feminist politics in general. She managed, together with her father, to drive through two statutory amendments for women: women gained the right to apply for and hold appointments as organists and telegraphists. Andr?e was the first woman in Sweden to hold these positions. As a conductor, her greatest achievement might have been the symphony concert in 1904, in Dresden, where she conducted her own works. The local German critics had never before seen a woman conducting her own orchestral music.
The book proceeds partly as a chronological biography describing Andr?e's family and childhood surrounding in Visby (a town on the island of Gotland); her studies in Stockholm between the ages of fourteen and twenty-six, together with her sister Fredrika (later, as Fredrika Stenhammar, a well-known singer); her visits to Germany, the United States, England, and Belgium; and her many-sided musical activities as an organist, conductor, educator, and concert arranger (arrangements performed in approximately eight hundred concerts) in Gothenburg until her death. In addition, several chapters focus on specific themes, such as her family, the birth of her opera, her efforts for the improvement of women's position, her various activities as church musician, and the development of her musical language.
?hrstrom's account of Andr?e's life and career as musician and composer builds partly on her previous study of women musicians in nineteenth-century Sweden, which investigated the social and professional conditions under which three generations of bourgeois and aristocratic women musicians worked.(1) In addition to the private spheres of life, the music making of women in nineteenth-century Sweden, as in other countries of the Western world, took place also within the "half-public" venues provided by the salons. Impressive salons organized by the urban bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century, along with the professional training in music that became available to Swedish women, provided fertile ground for women composers such as Elfrida...