1810–1858 · Germany · Romantic
Johanna Kinkel (1810–1858) was a German composer, writer and choral conductor, and a piano teacher. Her singing union in Bonn was one of the first choirs in Germany led by a woman. Kinkel gave piano and singing lessons, including in London, where she moved with her family. The site holds her songs for voice and piano at various levels of difficulty.
Johanna Kinkel was born on 8 July 1810 in Bonn, the daughter of a grammar-school teacher. She studied music from childhood. Her mother first taught her sewing and cooking. By the age of fifteen, the strictly Catholic-raised girl knew she wanted to become a musician. Through her father she met Franz Anton Ries and his circle — Ries taught her to play the piano.
Johanna began working as a piano and singing teacher. In 1829–1832 and 1834–1836 she led the Bonn singing union, which Ries had previously headed. For this society she wrote her first work, the cantata Vogelkantate, op. 1; a revised version was published in 1838 by the Berlin publisher Trautwein.
In 1832, twenty-two-year-old Johanna married the twenty-nine-year-old Cologne book and music dealer Johann Paul Matthieux. The marriage confined her to domestic duties and turned abusive: a medical report spoke of a nervous breakdown caused by her husband's deliberate mistreatment. After six months her parents brought their sick daughter back to Bonn, and only more than a year later did she return to the musical life of Bonn society. The marriage ended in divorce in 1840.
In 1836 Dorothea Schlegel introduced Johanna to Felix Mendelssohn, who encouraged her passion for composing; on his advice she went to Berlin. There she studied thoroughbass with Carl Böhmer, while Wilhelm Taubert trained her as a concert pianist; she paid for her studies by giving private piano lessons. Through Georg von Brentano, whom she had met in Frankfurt, she became friends with Bettina von Arnim and taught her daughters for free, grew close to Mendelssohn's sisters, played at Fanny Hensel's Sunday concerts, and met Clara Schumann (then still Clara Wieck), Adelbert von Chamisso, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, Emanuel Geibel, and the Hegel family; she herself performed in Berlin salons. Her Berlin years were very productive for her as a composer: she wrote duets, cantatas, and songs to poems by Goethe and others; critics such as Ludwig Rellstab and Robert Schumann praised her published works.
In 1839, once Matthieux finally agreed to a divorce, Johanna returned to Bonn. She held morning concerts and re-formed her singing union from her former pupils — one of the first choirs in Germany led by a woman — and became a central figure in Bonn's musical life: her concerts were attended, among others, by Franz Liszt. That same year she met Gottfried Kinkel again, a former pupil of her father whom she had known slightly since her youth. Together they founded the literary circle Maikäferbund in 1840, with a handwritten journal read only among friends. The divorce was finalized in 1840. She converted to the Lutheran church, since the Catholic church forbade divorced people from remarrying, and later married Gottfried Kinkel. By 1848 she had four children.
During the 1848–1849 revolution, Gottfried Kinkel became one of the symbolic figures of the Baden-Palatinate uprising, which called for an all-German republic, and his wife supported him with all her strength. Karl Marx, who published the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, wanted to engage her as a translator of English texts, but Gottfried refused. While her husband was away — first as a deputy in Berlin, then as a participant in the uprising — Johanna took over the editing of the Neue Bonner Zeitung, for which she also regularly wrote review articles on musical events; she and her husband published this newspaper in cooperation with Carl Schurz. After the uprising was crushed, Gottfried was arrested and sentenced to death; with the help of Bettina von Arnim and other acquaintances, Johanna managed to have the sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
Carl Schurz freed Gottfried from Spandau prison; after her husband's escape and move to London, Johanna followed him with their four children in 1851. Their home became a gathering point for German revolutionaries who had fled to England; Alexander Herzen was a frequent visitor there and called Kinkel one of "the most remarkable German émigrés in London".
While her husband was in the USA raising money and troops for a new revolution in Germany, Johanna founded a children's singing school and gave piano and voice lessons, at times supporting the family on her own. Later she also gave piano lessons, led a choir, brought out two books on musical education, and wrote music, poetry, prose, and articles about contemporary composers — Chopin, Mendelssohn. The excessive workload, together with worry over her husband and household duties, made her bouts of low spirits increasingly frequent; in 1856 she suffered a heart attack, from which she initially recovered. Her character combined dreamy sensitivity with a sober view of life — something reflected in her Erzählungen ("Stories", Stuttgart, 1849, 1883).
Shortly before her death she finished her autobiographical novel Hans Ibeles in London, which her husband published posthumously in 1860. On 15 November 1858 she fell from a window and was found dead in the yard of her own house; whether this was an accident or a deliberate act was never established. Her gravestone was inscribed with the words "Freedom, Love, and Poetry". The musicologist Eva Weissweiler considers the suicide version more likely, pointing to a "more or less clearly" expressed intention to die in the novel Hans Ibeles in London; in her view, Kinkel, unlike other women composers of her era, thought the problem of "woman and composition" through to the end, and after the revolutionary catastrophe of 1848 composing music simply became impossible for her.
All of Johanna Kinkel's works preserved on the site are songs (Lieder) for voice and piano — 44 editions in all; this is the only genre represented among her sheet music on the site. She set to music words by Goethe, Chamisso, Rückert, A. von Platen, and Heine, as well as her own poems, poems by her husband Gottfried Kinkel, and verses by other contemporary poets. These works are good Romantic "everyday music" (Gebrauchsmusik). Besides the songs published on the site, Johanna Kinkel had a substantial output of musical compositions — duets, cantatas and other genres; those published during her Berlin years enjoyed great popularity.
In 1838 Bettina von Arnim's children performed her "opera seria" Savigny und Themis for Friedrich Karl von Savigny's birthday; the staging's design involved the painter Caroline Bardua.
Besides songs, Johanna Kinkel was the author of a work on piano instruction, Acht Briefe über Klavierunterricht, published in Stuttgart in 1852.
Johanna Kinkel wrote part of her music for the Maikäferbund circle, which she directed together with Gottfried Kinkel; the circle held an annual festival of its own. She also wrote music for her own children, and these pieces were published too.
On the site her songs are presented at two levels of difficulty. Most are upper-intermediate: 37 of them, including "Das Lied der Nachtigall", "Gondellied", "Der spanische Zitherknabe" and "Rheinsage". Seven songs are harder, at advanced level: "Die Geisterinsel", "Der Seejungfern Gesang", "Durch Carthago's Trümmerhallen" and others. Among the titles are both Rhine legends and distant lands: "Rheinsage", "Beduinen-Romanze", "Der spanische Zitherknabe", "Sehnsucht nach Griechenland". The title "Wiegenlied" appears twice on the site — these are two different songs by Kinkel. One can start getting to know Kinkel's music with the upper-intermediate songs, then move on to the more extended "Die Geisterinsel".