Louise Farrenc

Louise Farrenc enjoyed extensive publication as a composer during her lifetime, yet her music largely vanished from view once she passed away. A brilliant pianist as well, she also distinguished herself as a teacher, becoming the sole woman to hold a full professorship at the Conservatoire de Paris throughout the nineteenth century. Her chamber compositions in particular stood out for their exceptional caliber. The broader revival of works by female creators helped restore attention to her catalog, resulting in numerous fresh recordings that emerged during the twenty-first century.

Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont in Paris on May 31, 1804, she grew up in a family of sculptors that included her father Jacques-Edme Dumont and her sister August Dumont. Early training came from Cecile Soria, herself a pupil of Muzio Clementi, and her evident gifts soon led to instruction from leading keyboard virtuosos Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Ignaz Moscheles. In 1819 her parents permitted private lessons with Antoine Reicha, the Conservatoire’s composition instructor, since female students were barred from official enrollment. She wed flutist Aristide Farrenc during the 1820s, and the couple performed together on tour; Louise meanwhile built a solo career that brought her widespread renown in the 1830s. Keyboard pieces formed the bulk of her output in those years, with several dozen appearing in print. Her daughter Victorine, who followed in her footsteps as a pianist, died in 1857.

Farrenc’s dual reputation as performer and creator secured her 1842 appointment as piano professor at the Conservatoire, a post she retained for three decades. Throughout the 1840s she produced an array of chamber scores, three symphonies, and several substantial choral works, while also authoring the treatise Le trésor des pianistes, one of the earliest studies devoted to the performance of earlier repertory. Even so, her salary remained lower than that of her male colleagues until she successfully requested an increase following the 1849 premiere of her Nonet for string quartet and wind quintet, Op. 38, which featured violinist Joseph Joachim. Repeated requests for an opera libretto from major theaters proved fruitless. She stayed musically engaged into the 1870s and received the Prix Chartier from the Académie des Beaux-Arts on two occasions in her final years. Farrenc died in Paris on September 15, 1875. By the mid-2020s more than forty of her compositions, among them the Nonet and all three symphonies, had been captured on disc, and her music was returning to concert programs with growing regularity.