Classical guitarist Emma Rush shines a light on the until now forgotten legacy of a 19th-century virtuosa with her latest album, The Life and Times of Catharina Pratten. The release is the result of research, a curatorial instinct, and, of course, scintillating music.
Rush has made the rediscovery and rehabilitation of forgotten voices in the classical canon something of a running theme in her work. In 2020, she released Wake the Sigh, which featured the seldom performed work of several women composers of the 1800s.
With this latest album, she presents a comprehensive case, including the research, and a passionate performance. The album includes seven previously unrecorded works by Pratten, and the first recordings of music by her father Ferdinand Pelzer, her husband Robert Sidney Pratten, colleague Leonard Schulz, and student Frank Mott Harrison. Rounding out the track list are works by Pratten’s contemporaries Francisco Tárrega, Giulio Regondi, and Ernest Shand.
She performs on the album using two guitars directly connected to Pratten. One of them incorporates Pratten’s personal signature, and the other is a Boosey and Sons “Pratten model” from the 1850s.
Emma Rush
Rush studied music as a child and through high school, but played piano, cello, and oboe — not the guitar. That focus didn’t come until college, when hearing a few friends who were studying classical guitar at Hamilton’s Mohawk College drew her to the instrument and its sound. She made a sudden, and what would prove to be very fruitful, decision to study the guitar seriously. A year later, she was studying at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, where she earned her BMus with honours. Through one of her teachers, Canadian guitarist Dale Kavanagh, she had a connection to the International Guitar Symposium in Iserlohn. Emma would pursue her studies at the Detmold Hochschule für Musik in Germany, where she graduated with a Master’s degree.
Today, in addition to her recording career, she tours regularly across Canada and in Europe and beyond, and has been a featured performer at the Shanghai International Guitar Festival, Festival de Guitarras Lagos de Moreno (Mexico), Future Echoes Festival (Sweden), and the Internationales Gitarren Symposion Iserlohn, along with festivals across North America.
Rush is also an advocate of bringing classical music to places it wouldn’t typically be heard, and has toured to remote and rural locations in Canada where live music performance of any kind is a rare event. Along with uncovering neglected works, she has often performed Latin American and other folkloric music from around the world, in addition to classical repertoire.
Emma has commissioned several original works, including her 2023 album A Dream of Colour, with music inspired by Canadian impressionist painter William Blair Bruce and written by composers Amy Brandon, Christine Donkin, Dale Kavanagh, Jeffrey McFadden, Daniel Mehdizadeh, Craig Visser, and Christina Volpini. Many composers have also dedicated their works to Rush, including Canadian composers William Beauvais and Timothy Phelan, Mexican composer Winy Kellner, and Brazilian Jaime Zenamon.
From 2011 until 2019, Emma founded and presented the Hamilton International Guitar Festival. Today, she is Co-Director of GuitarFest West (Calgary), Director of Pigeon Lake Guitar Retreat and Hamilton Guitar Day (Ontario), and a collaborator with Wakefield Guitar Festival (Québec).
Who was Catharina Pratten aka Madame Sidney Pratten?
Catharina Josepha Pratten was born as Catharina Josepha Pelzer in Mülheim, Germany on November 15, 1824. Her father was a German guitarist and music teacher by the name of Ferdinand Pelzer. The family emigrated to England in 1829.
She was playing at six, and by the age of eight, she’d already begun concert tours through Europe. Her reputation as a composer, performer, and teacher was well established by the mid-1840s. She established her own school called Madame Sidney Pratten’s Guitar School, and published several tutorials and educational books.
Catharina was an early advocate of alternative tunings for the guitar, and made a case for E major as well as D.
She married the English flautist Robert Sidney Pratten in 1854, and her career and renown only continued to grow. She became guitar teacher to Queen Victoria’s daughters Louise, Princess of Wales, and Beatrice, and Ernest Shand, the noted actor, singer, guitarist and composer.
Pratten composed about 250 works, the largest part for solo guitar or voice and guitar.
Emma Rush: The Interview
Putting the album together meant being part detective, part researcher, even before the music could be examined and performed.
“Oh absolutely, I really love it, not just because it’s bringing to life stories that are there to be told, but there’s another aspect of it that’s detecting,” Rush says.
It doesn’t take that much detecting, however, to realize that the popular conception of music from various eras is shaped largely by the very few figures that have persisted over time.
“I find that with every period of history, everything is distilled into a couple of big names,” she says. There were hundreds of composers in various regions throughout what we now call the Baroque era, for example, yet our ideas about the entirety of that thriving musical environment boil down to a handful of names.
“I think it’s really interesting to explore how rich each era is.”
Along the way, musical history reveals social history about both the past and present.
“One of the things I really think that is important is a classical guitar world, and a classical music world, where everyone sees themselves in it,” she says. Revealing the diversity of a historical era can make an important point. “Part of that is to look into the past and show that there were all kinds of people writing music.”
After someone’s death, it’s up to the next generation to carry their legacy forward. In an environment where the work of women and non-white people was not valued, it was left to gather dust instead. The Victorians, in particular, are responsible for much of what we now consider the classical music canon. Even conventions like the current rules of concert hall etiquette that call for complete silence during a performance are relatively new, and were not in place when much of the classical music repertoire was written.
While Rush’s focus so far has been on overlooked women composers, she points out that the true history of music also includes an acknowledgment of the work of queer and non-white composers.
“People argue about the quality of those works,” she says. “I don’t have too much time for that. The quality and the beauty of it [are] so apparent to me.”
Catharina Pratten
While the work of some recently recovered composers, such as that of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de St- Georges, was lost due to its deliberate destruction, in contrast, Pratten left about 250 works she had published.
She was also quite a famous figure in her time. How does such a person slip into obscurity over a matter of decades after their death?
“This for me is continually baffling,” says Emma. “There’s so many women who were incredible composers and performers, and on their death, they were left out.”
She cites others, like British musical prodigy and composer Ethel Smyth, the first woman whose work was performed at the Proms, and a major British opera composer after Britten. One of Smyth’s operas, Der Wald, was performed in New York in 1903, and was the only opera by a woman composer ever produced at the Metropolitan Opera until Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin in 2016.
Yet, her work is virtually unknown.
“It was immediate erasure.”
Dolores de Goñi was one of the most famous guitarists and composers of the mid-1800s. “She was pop star huge,” says Rush.
Again, forgotten soon after her death. “A lot of times it’s not so overt, but it’s still predictable.”
Likewise, Pratten was someone who left an indelible mark during her lifetime.
“Catharine Pratten was so incredibly important. She defines the guitar in Britain in the 19th century.”
She spent 65 years of her life playing the guitar, from 1830 until her death in 1895.
“At that time, the guitar was not that popular in England.” Rush notes her efforts directed at education produced not only a series of books, but a new music notation symbols for the instrument. “She was so ahead of her time.”
Catharina Pratten: The Music
“It’s really deeply emotional,” Emma says of Pratten’s music. “It’s lyrical and romantic. Something that really strikes me about her music is that you really get a sense of her personality when you play it, and it’s so deeply expressive.”
Pratten composed a great deal of music for her students, many of whom were upper class women. “But they use the whole fretboard, and use all kind of effects,” Rush says. “She writes real music.”
Her catalogue also includes high level concert works. “She has a big collection of works for the guitar in open tuning,” Emma says, noting that the concept wasn’t widely known at the time.
“She’s full of surprises,” she adds. “Every time I think I know everything, I learn something new.”
Pratten was quite enterpreneurial in her practice, and although she had a publisher, often published both her own work and that of other guitarist-composers. “She took on a lot of things,” Emma explains.
“The result is really beautiful, because if you look at her scores, there’s all sorts of information you wouldn’t get with a regular publisher.” Rush mentions instructions like ‘should sound like velvet’. “Her music really has its own character.”
The Album
“I’m so fascinated. The more I learn about her the more interesting she becomes.”
The album is currently available in digital and physical form, and Rush will be performing at a launch party and concert in Hamilton on June 14.
- Find tickets and details on the June 14 concert [HERE].
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