15 years of women's voices: From the pen of a woman. Literature & Music

Bettina Rossbacher reads works by Irma von Troll-Borostyáni and others.
Božena Angelova (violin) and Minka Popović (piano) perform works by Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), Dora Pejačević (1885-1923)

 “We will only know what women are when they are no longer told what they should be,” wrote the writer, philosopher and painter Rosa Mayreder, born in Vienna in 1858, in 1905. In the same year, Ethel Smyth was born in England, who irritated Brahms with one of her fugues and spent two months in prison as a suffragette. The highly talented journalist and women's rights activist Irma von Troll-Borostyáni, nine years her senior, walked through Salzburg's old town in men's clothing and demanded that girls' talents and abilities finally be encouraged. The composer Lili Boulanger impressed a misogynistic jury in 1913 and was the first woman to receive the prestigious Prix de Rome.
In a society that wanted to deny female beings creativity, creative power, intellect and even soul, these women, as well as Emilie Mayer, Marie von Ebner-
Eschenbach, Cécile Chaminade, Eugenie Schwarzwald and other female composers and writers went their own way undeterred - and proved the world wrong.