Writing about the lives and works of eight female composers over four centuries of western European history showed me, forcefully, what they were up against. Each of them created their music in societies that made certain places off limits, from the opera house to the university, from the conductor’s podium to the music publisher, and made sure that certain jobs, whether in cathedral, court or conservatoire, were ones for which they could not even apply. In every century, certain beliefs made their task all the harder because, from 17th-century Florence to 20th-century London, their art triggered dark sexualised fantasies about the creative woman. I was amazed at the variety of ways in which the composers worked to allay those fears: through a lifetime of chastity (meet the always proper Marianna von Martines of Vienna) or relentless childbearing (take a bow, Clara Schumann, mother of eight); through the performance of perfect domesticity (the fragrant Frau Hensel of Berlin, aka Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix’s big sister), or by adopting the persona of the child-woman, as did the formidably ambitious Lili Boulanger, who nevertheless signed herself Bébé.

Creativity against the odds, that was what it was all about – and seizing the moment. Francesca Caccini, for example, made a brief moment of political history work for her. In 1620s Tuscany, female leaders needed female composers to create the soundtrack that would justify their exceptional and threatening power. As Caccini wrote to her close friend and professional collaborator Michelangelo Buonarroti, great-nephew of Michelangelo, if the Medici “ball bounces to my hand I won’t let it get away”. Precisely because of that determination, we have the first “opera” (more precisely a balletto in musica, complete with dancing horses, first performed in Florence in 1625) to be written by a woman, wonderfully brought to life last November in Brighton. Just one of the many Caccini works, this 2015 production shows what she was capable of, and what we have lost.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ceccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola d’Alcina

A generation later, came the Venetian Barbara Strozzi, denied access both to the brave new world of public opera in her home city, and to the old world of the church and its music. Strozzi chose another route to professional success: new media. She would have more works in print than any other composer in the 17th century. Strozzi achieved this feat despite, or because, of her status as a courtesan or concubine, a role chosen for her by her family when she was a teenager. Ironically, being a sex worker made Strozzi’s composing ambitions just that bit more achievable. In the 17th century women were not supposed to publish. Indeed, publication was seen as another form of prostitution well into the 19th century. This is one of the reasons why Felix Mendelssohn’s Wedding March is well known but his equally talented sister’s music is not – her family, including Felix, would not tolerate the scandal of print. But Strozzi knew that respectability was never going to work for her. She was already damned, she might as well publish.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barbara Strozzi’s Pensaci Ben Mio Core

Fanny Hensel (the big sister to Felix) had her own strategy in 19th-century Prussia. When she was 14, her banker father returned from a business trip with special gifts for his daughter and son, both prodigies: for her, a necklace of Scottish jewels; for him, the writing implements so that he might compose his first opera. But Fanny did not stop composing and, little by little, she pushed the boundaries of her private arena, creating one of the most important musical platforms of her time, the magnificent Sonntagsmusik, “Sunday musical events”. It helped that she lived in a Berlin mansion with her very own Gartensaal [garden room] for concerts. Then, at 40, Hensel – gloriously, courageously – found a way out of the gilded cage, agreeing that a handful of her works could be published. It would prove to be too little, too late: she died just over a year later.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fanny Hensel’s Piano Trio Op 11

Hensel’s battle is as emotionally charged as Parisian Lili Boulanger’s determination to keep composing in the face of terminal illness (we now know she had Crohn’s disease) amid the horrors of the first world war. In June 1917, aged only 23, the composer endured an operation with only local anaesthetic, laudanum and oxygen. In October she was working again, copying a fragment of her opera into her notebooks. As her sister, Nadia, wrote: Lili “wants to live, her organism is fighting but the illness is stronger.” Boulanger herself wrote, desperately, in the manuscript of her opera: “Copied in December 1917. Everything must be finished before 1 January. It MUST!!! Will I be able to do it?” The new year came, and still she composed, dictating her Pie Jesu to Nadia, a work that shifts from anguished intensity to calm acceptance of fate, the concluding “Amen” the “essence of affirmation”, the work a triumph according to later musicologists. Boulanger died on 15 March 1918, aged 24.

Whether in the courts of Florence or Versailles, the great houses of Berlin or Vienna, the crowded streets of Paris or Leipzig, or even a quiet English village, in every generation women evaded, confronted and ignored the beliefs and practices that excluded them from the world of composition. I now walk around Venice and see Strozzi (not Vivaldi); I visit the Schumannhaus in Leipzig and see Clara, not Robert; I go to the Proms, and hear echoes of Elizabeth Maconchy, not Britten. And I listen to a whole lot of music that is new, at least to me. But I also hear the sound of silence – when there should be the music of women.

My visit to Berlin in 2014, in search of Fanny Hensel, brought home to me the Communist regime’s completion of the work begun by the Nazis in removing the (Jewish) Mendelssohns from the city’s history. Even in Berlin today, there’s surprisingly little acknowledgement of Felix (partly because Leipzig has taken him as one of their own), let alone Fanny. It was hard to find her grave, even though she is buried next to him and her husband, Wilhelm Hensel – although the mayor has stated that the plot will be maintained in future. The family had become Lutheran and were buried in a Christian cemetery. Given that this was heavily bombed in the second world war and then bisected by the Wall, it seems remarkable that the gravestones exist at all. Fanny’s is the largest, second from the right, on which there are two phrases of music from her final composition, Bergeslust. I found it touching that whoever – perhaps her husband? – commissioned Fanny’s memorial wanted to honour her first and foremost as a composer.

Earlier in the day, I had visited the Mendelssohn-Remise in Jagerstrasse, in a building that once housed the family’s banking business. There, to one side, two antique chairs sat facing each other – the beginning of an attempt to recreate Fanny’s music study, a room captured in all its detail in watercolour and pencil soon after her death.

So why do I still not hear her music? Why are we still so reluctant to programme music by women? Can it be that the tired anti-feminist argument that, somehow, to celebrate women’s work is to diminish men’s is still in play? I want a world of Caccini and Mozart, Hensel and Beethoven, Maconchy and Shostakovich. Surely, that world is a richer one for all of us?

Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music by Anna Beer is published this week by Oneworld Publications.