Women’s Museums at Home: Frauenmuseum Bonn, Germany

Apr 6, 2020

In times when many museums worldwide are forced to keep their doors shut, we invite you to engage with exhibitions and collections of women’s museums virtually. On this blog we will share with you online exhibitions or virtual views into our member museums worldwide.

Today we invite you to take a look at this great exhibition by Frauenmuseum Bonn in Germany:

On the occasion of Beethoven’s 250th birthday the Frauenmuseum Bonn opened the exhibition “Eleonore, Emilie, Elise”. In the historical part, the everyday life of Bonn women at the end of the 18th century is depicted. Since women were clearly in the majority in Beethoven’s time, they shaped life in Bonn at least as much as men. We introduce a few Bonn women as examples – such as Maria Magdalena van Beethoven, the composer’s mother – and discuss how women lived as nobles, as wives of the new educated middle-classes, as wives working in the crafts, as simple workers or as beggars.

In the artistic part of the exhibition, female artists devote themselves to music in images, installations or sound. They honour the great master, deal with music in general, express their own musical experiences and introduce contemporary female composers. In addition, important women composers of Beethoven’s time will be remembered, such as Maria Theresia Paradis (Vienna) or Emilie Mayer (Stralsund/Berlin), who are unjustly little known.

Heide Pawelzik: Verbot Geige zu spielen

Gisela Weimann: Garten der Komponistinnen

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