Louise Farrenc

Jeanne-Louise Dumont was born in Paris on 31 May 1804 into a family of artists. Her father, Jacques-Edme Dumont, and her brother Auguste were renowned sculptors: Auguste would create the Spirit of Liberty that crowns the July Column at the Bastille. The family lived at the Sorbonne, where the government then housed artists. Louise grew up in a cultivated environment where women could have careers: her godmother, a pianist herself, gave her her first piano lessons.

She proved an exceptional pianist and took lessons from Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, two of the greatest virtuosos of the day. At fifteen, in 1819, she began studying composition with Anton Reicha, a Conservatoire professor whose pupils also included Berlioz, Liszt and Franck. Since women could not attend the Conservatoire’s composition classes, she took private lessons.

In 1821, aged seventeen, she married Aristide Farrenc, a flautist and music student who encouraged her career. The couple founded a music publishing house, “Éditions Farrenc”, which published works by Beethoven, Hummel and Louise herself. Their daughter Victorine was born in 1826; she became a talented pianist before dying of tuberculosis in 1859, aged thirty-two. Louise gave concerts and published piano pieces, notably brilliant variations that caught Schumann’s attention.

In 1842 she was appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire, a post she held for thirty years. She was the only woman to hold such a permanent instrumental professorship at the Conservatoire in the nineteenth century. Yet for nearly ten years she was paid less than her male colleagues. After the success of her Nonet in 1849 she demanded and obtained equal pay in 1850, a remarkable victory for the time.

Louise Farrenc composed in genres then reserved for men: the symphony and chamber music. She wrote three symphonies, including the Third in G minor (1847), premiered by the orchestra of the Société des concerts du Conservatoire, and two overtures. Her chamber music is particularly rich: two piano quintets, trios, violin and cello sonatas, a Sextet and above all the Nonet Op. 38 for winds and strings, premiered in 1849 with the famous violinist Joseph Joachim.

With her husband she was also passionate about early music, then rarely played. From 1861 they published Le Trésor des pianistes, a huge twenty-three-volume anthology of keyboard music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Couperin to Rameau, from Bach to Scarlatti, with historical notes. After Aristide’s death in 1865 Louise continued the project alone until 1872. She also gave historical concerts to introduce this repertoire.

She twice received the Prix Chartier of the Académie des beaux-arts for her chamber music, in 1861 and 1869. She retired from the Conservatoire in 1873 and died in Paris on 15 September 1875. After her death her music was almost completely forgotten. It was rediscovered in the late twentieth century, and her symphonies and chamber music are now regularly performed and recorded, revealing a major composer of French Romanticism.