Josephine Lang

This chapter documents the musical legacy of Josephine Caroline Lang (1815–1880), who lived and worked during the height of nineteenth-century Germany's romantic era. Like Jacquet, she belonged to the professional middle class and inherited a highly visible musical family from both her parents' family lines. She grew up in the midst of the Munich court's active musical life, which had recently absorbed the brilliant musicians of Mannheim. Throughout her life, Lang enjoyed some measure of relative domestic stability, laced though it was with struggle and tragedy; and she experienced many of the advantages of her rich cultural heritage—advantages that paved her way to a professional position higher than that won by most talented German women of her day.