Louise Farrenc was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 composer, virtuosa pianist and teacher. Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, she was the daughter of Jacques-Edme Dumont

Jacques-Edme Dumont

Jacques-Edme Dumont was a French sculptor.Dumont came from a large dynasty of sculptors that included his grandfather Pierre Dumont and children Augustin-Alexandre Dumont and Jeanne Louise Dumont Farrenc. He was a pupil of Augustin Pajou, and in 1788 he won the Prix de Rome...

, a successful sculptor, and sister to Auguste Dumont.

Biography

Louise Farrenc enjoyed a considerable reputation during her own lifetime, as a composer, a performer and a teacher. She began piano studies at an early age with a Senora Soria, a former student of Muzio Clementi

Muzio Clementi

Muzio Clementi was a celebrated composer, pianist, pedagogue, conductor, music publisher, editor, and piano manufacturer. Born in Italy, he spent most of his life in England. He is best known for his piano sonatas, and his collection of piano studies, Gradus ad Parnassum...

, but when it became clear she had the talent of a professional pianist, she was also given lessons by such masters as Ignaz Moscheles

Ignaz Moscheles

Ignaz Moscheles was a Bohemian composer and piano virtuoso, whose career after his early years was based initially in London, and later at Leipzig, where he succeeded his friend and sometime pupil Felix Mendelssohn as head of the Conservatoire.-Sources:Much of what we know about Moscheles's life...

 and Johann Nepomuk Hummel

Johann Nepomuk Hummel

Johann Nepomuk Hummel or Jan Nepomuk Hummel was an Austrian composer and virtuoso pianist. His music reflects the transition from the Classical to the Romantic musical era.- Life :...

. Because she also showed great promise as a composer, her parents decided to let her study composition with Anton Reicha

Anton Reicha

Anton Reicha was a Czech-born, later naturalized French composer. A contemporary and lifelong friend of Beethoven, Reicha is now best remembered for his substantial early contribution to the wind quintet literature and his role as a teacher – his pupils included Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz...

, at the time composition teacher at the Conservatoire. it is not yet clear if Louise Farrenc followed his classes there, as the composition class was at the time one of the classes opened only to men. She met Aristide Farrenc, a flute student ten years her senior, who performed at some of the concerts regularly given at the artists' colony of the Sorbonne, where Louise's family lived. She married him in 1821. She then interrupted her studies to concertize throughout France with her husband. He soon grew tired of the concert life and decided to open a publishing house in Paris, which as Éditions Farrenc, was one of France’s leading music publishers for nearly 40 years.

Farrenc returned to her studies with Reicha. After completing her studies, she reembarked on a concert career and gained considerable fame as a performer during the 1830s. By the early 1840s, her reputation was such that in 1842 she was appointed to the permanent position of Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatory, a position she held for thirty years and one which was among the most prestigious in Europe. Despite this, Farrenc was paid less than her male counterparts for nearly a decade. Only after the triumphant premiere of her nonet, at which the famous violinist Joseph Joachim

Joseph Joachim

Joseph Joachim was a Hungarian violinist, conductor, composer and teacher. A close collaborator of Johannes Brahms, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant violinists of the 19th century.-Origins:...

 took part, did she demand and receive equal pay. Beside her teaching and performing career, she also produced and edited an influential book about early music performance style. For several decades after her death, Farrenc’s reputation as a performer survived and her name continued to appear in such books as Antoine François Marmontel

Antoine François Marmontel

Antoine François Marmontel was a French pianist, teacher and musicographer.Marmontel entered the Paris Conservatory in 1827. His teachers were Pierre Zimmerman in pianoforte, Victor Dourlen in harmony, Jacques Fromental Halévy in fugue and Jean-François Le Sueur in composition...

’s Pianistes célèbres. Her nonet had achieved around 1850 some popularity, as did her two piano quintets and her trios. But, despite some new editions of her chamber music after her death, her works fell into oblivion.

Music

At first, during the 1820s and 1830s, she composed exclusively for the piano. Several of these pieces drew high praise from critics, including Schumann

Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....

. In the 1830s, she tried her hand at larger compositions for both chamber ensemble and orchestra. It was during the 1840s that much of her chamber music was written. While the great bulk of Farrenc’s compositions were for the piano alone, her chamber music is generally regarded as her best work. The claim can be made that Farrenc’s chamber music works are on a par with most of her well-known male contemporaries.

Throughout her life, chamber music remained of great interest. She wrote works for various combinations of winds and or strings and piano These include two piano quintets Opp.30 & 31, a sextet for piano and winds Op.40, which later appeared in an arrangement for piano quintet, two piano trios Opp.33 & 34, the nonet for winds and strings Op.38, a trio for clarinet (or violin), cello and piano Op.44, a trio for flute (or violin), cello and piano Op.45, and several instrumental sonatas (a string quartet sometimes attributed to her is regarded by specialists as the work of another composer, not yet identified).

In addition to chamber music and works for solo piano, she wrote two overtures and three symphonies. She had the great honour to hear her third symphony Op.36 performed at the Société des concerts du Conservatoire in 1849. The one area which is conspicuously missing from her output is opera, an important lacuna as opera was at the time the central musical form in France. Several sources, however, indicate that she was also ambitious in that field, but did not succeed in being given a libretto to set to music by the Théâtre de l'Opéra or the Théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique, for reasons still to be discovered.

Why did Farrenc remain unknown as a composer?

For nearly the entire 19th century, French musical opinion was completely dominated by opera, be it lyrique, comique or grand opera. A French composer could not gain any reputation without having first had a success at the opera. Indeed, commenting on this sorry state of affairs, Saint-Saëns

Camille Saint-Saëns

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...

 lamented, “The composer who was bold enough to venture out into the field of instrumental music had only one forum for the performance of his works: a concert which he had to organize himself and to which he invited his friends and the press. One could not even think of attracting the public, the general public; the very mention of the name of a French composer on a placard—especially that of a living French composer—was enough to send everyone running.” Saint-Saëns found himself forced to create an organization whose sole purpose was to remedy this problem, but it was not until the 20th century that the general public began to frequent the concerts of the Société Nationale de Musique in any number.

François-Joseph Fétis

François-Joseph Fétis

François-Joseph Fétis was a Belgian musicologist, composer, critic and teacher. He was one of the most influential music critics of the 19th century, and his enormous compilation of biographical data in the Biographie universelle des musiciens remains an important source of information today...

, perhaps France’s greatest 19th century music biographer and critic, wrote in his new edition of the Biographie universelle des musiciens of Louise Farrenc, only three years after her death, as follows: "Unfortunately, the genre of large scale instrumental music to which Madame Farrenc, by nature and formation, felt herself called involves performance resources which a composer can acquire for herself or himself only with enormous effort. Another factor here is the public, as a rule not a very knowledgeable one, whose only standard for measuring the quality of a work is the name of its author. If the composer is unknown, the audience remains unreceptive, and the publishers, especially in France, close their ears anyway when someone offers them a halfway decent work...Such were the obstacles that Madame Farrenc met along the way and which caused her to despair. This is the reason why her work has fallen into oblivion today, when at any other epoch her works would have brought her great esteem."

Her works were recognized by the savants and connoisseurs of the time as first rate, but this was not enough to gain her any lasting fame as a composer. Similar oblivion obscures the career of George Onslow, another important 19th-century French composer, primarily of chamber music. Unlike Onslow, Louise Farrenc never tried her hand at opera. This sealed her fate. If one looks at those French composers who were known during most of the 19th century, they are all opera composers to a man.

List of compositions

Louise Farrenc wrote exclusively for the piano from 1820 to 1830, expanding her range to include works for orchestra beginning 1834. Her work includes 49 compositions with opus numbers.

Orchestral works

• Symphony in C minor, op. 32 (1842)
• Symphony in D, op. 35 (1845)
• Symphony in G minor, op. 36 (1847)
• Overture in E minor, op. 23 (1834)
• Overture in E, op. 24 (1834)
• Grand variations on the song Le premier pas, for piano and orchestra, op. 4
• Grand variations on a theme by Count Gallenberg, for piano and orchestra, op. 25

Vocal works

• Andréa la folle, Ballade
• Je me taisais, Romance
• La tourterelle, Romance
• La madone
• Le berger fidèle, Romance
• Le prisonnier de guerre, Scène dramatique
• Le suicide, scène et air (Composition identique au prisonnier de guerre)
• Toi que j'appelle

Choral works

• O père qu'adore mon père (Hymne de Lamartine
  Alphonse de Lamartine
  Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine was a French writer, poet and politician who was instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic.-Career:...
  
  ), (unaccompanied choir)
• O père qu'adore mon père (Hymne de Lamartine), (choir and piano)
• O salutaris hostia, (soprano, alto and tenor)

Chamber music

• Nonet in E, op. 38 (1849; string quartet and wind)
• Sextet in C minor, op. 40 (1852; piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn)
• Quintet No. 1 in A minor, op. 30 (1839; piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass)
• Quintet No. 2 in E, op. 31 (1840; piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass)
• Trio in E, op. 33 (1841-44; piano, violin and cello)
• Trio in D, op. 34 (1844; piano, violin and cello)
• Trio in E, op. 44 (1854-56; piano, clarinet and cello)
• Trio in E minor, op. 45 (1854-56; piano, flute and cello)
• Concertante Variations on a Swiss tune, op. 20 (piano and violin)
• Sonata for violin and piano in C minor, op. 37 (1848)
• Sonata for violin and piano in A, op. 39 (1850)
• Sonate for cello and piano in B, op. 46 (1857)
• Grand Variations on the song Le premier pas, op. 4

Piano works

• Variations (Aristide Farrenc), op. 2
• Grandes variations Le premier pas, op. 4 (piano solo)
• Variations brillantes sur un thème de La Cenerentola
  La Cenerentola
  La Cenerentola, ossia La bontà in trionfo is an operatic dramma giocoso in two acts by Gioachino Rossini. The libretto was written by Jacopo Ferretti, based on the fairy tale Cinderella...
  
   de Rossini, op. 5
• Variations sur l'air favori O ma tendre musette!, op. 6
• Air suisse varié, op. 7
• Trois rondeaux, op. 8
• Rondeau sur un air du pirate de Bellini
  Vincenzo Bellini
  Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini was an Italian opera composer. His greatest works are I Capuleti ed i Montecchi , La sonnambula , Norma , Beatrice di Tenda , and I puritani...
  
  , op. 9
• Variations (George Onslow), op. 10
• Rondeau sur des thèmes d'Euryanthe de Carl Maria von Weber
  Carl Maria von Weber
  Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school....
  
  , op. 11
• Variations (Galopade favorite), op. 12
• Rondeau (Rossini), op. 13
• Les italiennes, op. 14
• Variations brillantes (Donizetti), op. 15
• Les allemandes, op. 16
• Air russe varié, op. 17
• La Sylphide, op. 18
• Souvenir des Huguenots, op. 19
• Les jours heureux, op. 21
• Fugues, op. 22
• Trente études dans tous les tons majeurs et mineurs, op. 26 (1838)
• Hymne russe varié, op. 27
• Variations sur un thème allemand, op. 28
• Variations (Bellini,) op. 29 (Piano à quatre mains, arrangements pour 2 ou 3 pianos)
• Douze études brillantes, op. 41 (1853)
• Vingt études de moyenne difficulté, op. 42 (1854)
• Trois mélodies, op. 43
• Scherzo, op. 47
• Valse brillante, op. 48
• 1er nocturne, op. 49
• Vingt cinq études faciles, op. 50
• Deuxième valse brillante, op. 51
• Diverses œuvres pour le piano, sans numéros d'opus
• Mélodie, sans numéro d'opus

External links

• Sound-bites from Op.45, Trio in e for Flute (Vln), Cello & Piano
• Louise Farrenc, Classical Composer: A Biography for Young Readers