Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Experiencing Sara Levy’s World
- Part One Portrait of a Jewish Female Artist: Music, Identity, Image
- Part Two Music, Aesthetics, and Philosophy: Jews and Christians in Sara Levy’s World
- Part Three Studies in Sara Levy’s Collection
- Appendix: The Salonnière and the Diplomat: Letters from Sara Levy to Karl Gustav von Brinckmann
- Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
Appendix: The Salonnière and the Diplomat: Letters from Sara Levy to Karl Gustav von Brinckmann
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Experiencing Sara Levy’s World
- Part One Portrait of a Jewish Female Artist: Music, Identity, Image
- Part Two Music, Aesthetics, and Philosophy: Jews and Christians in Sara Levy’s World
- Part Three Studies in Sara Levy’s Collection
- Appendix: The Salonnière and the Diplomat: Letters from Sara Levy to Karl Gustav von Brinckmann
- Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
Summary
Sara Levy's letters to Karl Gustav von Brinckmann (1764–1847) ended up in a castle in Southern Sweden. Trolle Ljungby, built in the Renaissance style, holds one of the most extensive turn-of-the-nineteenth-century private manuscript collections that have come down to us. In this private archive, hundreds of letters written by Jewish women in Berlin around 1800 survive. Brinckmann, who served as Swedish diplomat at the Prussian court, was acquainted with Rahel Levin, Henriette Mendelssohn, and Brendel Veit (later Dorothea Schlegel), Sara and Marianne Meyer, Henriette Herz, Friederike Liman, and Freude Fränkel, among many others. And he was in close contact with the Itzig daughters. From Brinckmann's “Briefverzeichnisse,” the almost obsessive lists of letters he had written and received, we know that he corresponded with five of the sisters: Vögele/Fanny von Arnstein, Zippora Wulff/Cäcilie von Eskeles, Sara Levy, Rebecca Ephraim, and Recha Itzig. His affection even extended to women of the next generation: Henriette von Pereira-Arnstein, Lilla Salomon/Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy, as well as her older sister Rebekka Salomon/Seligmann.
Karl Gustav von Brinckmann preserved all of the letters written by Berlin's Jewish women, who must in turn have received more than a thousand letters from the Swedish diplomat. Unfortunately, only Rahel Levin handed his letters down to posterity; all the other letters were lost. Only one-sided dialogues can be found in the Swedish castle. Only the women's voices have survived.
Like so many of her contemporaries, Sara Levy was engaged in extensive correspondences. From the letters she wrote to Brinckmann, we learn that she was in close contact with her older sisters Fanny von Arnstein and Cäcilie von Eskeles, both of whom lived in Vienna. With those who lived in Berlin, such as Bella Salomon, grandmother of Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and Hannah Fließ (at whose house the famous “Fließische Konzerte” took place), Sara Levy probably exchanged billets, short and often very sophisticated texts delivered by servants. When Henriette Mendelssohn first moved to Vienna and then to Paris where she worked as a governess in noble families, Sara Levy kept in close touch with her.
We do not know how and when Sara Levy and Brinckmann first met.
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- Information
- Sara Levy's WorldGender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin, pp. 243 - 254Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2018