Louise Farrenc (1804 – 1875): Overture no 2 in E Flat Major, op 24
It is hard to overstate the achievements of Louise Farrenc. Aside from being the first woman to write a symphony, she was a fine concert pianist, an important musicologist and influential educator. Living through a particularly misogynistic time in French history, she managed to gain a professorship at the male-dominated Paris Conservatoire, the only woman to do so before the twentieth century. She even campaigned – successfully – to be paid the same as her male colleagues.
But for all her accomplishments, Louise Farrenc was hardly the barnstorming type. Throughout her life she largely shunned public attention and personal glory, preferring to let her work speak for itself. Yet she was also fortunate in her personal relationships, finding much affirmation and support from both her parents and then an equally sympathetic husband. It is perhaps no coincidence that her creative confidence would remain relatively robust, in sharp contrast to some of her distinguished but less well-supported contemporaries, such as Clara Schumann or Fanny Mendelssohn.
She was born Jeanne Louise Dumont, into an artists’ commune situated at La Sorbonne, Paris. Although somewhat Bohemian in temperament, her family had illustrious roots. Her father, Jacques-Edme Dumont, hailed from a family of sculptors dating back to the early 17th century (two of his works can still be found in the Louvre today), while Louise’s brother Auguste would create an equally successful sculpting career for himself, winning the prestigious Prix de Rome as a young man. Louise’s parents also belonged to a pre-Revolution generation in France who had developed particularly enlightened views towards gender equality. They would encourage their daughter in her musical studies from the word go and impose no barriers whatsoever on where she wanted to take her talent.
Louise quickly rewarded her parents’ faith by making exemplary progress with her piano playing and reaching a professional standard by her early teens. She was helped no end by the opportunity to study the instrument with two of European’s finest – the Bohemian virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles, and famous composer-pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel.
At the age of 15, she enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire to study piano, an institution where 90% of the students were male. Although the Conservatoire still banned girls from taking composition classes (as if fearing a future world containing woman composers would somehow bring an end to civilization), Louise was still able to take private lessons in composition, harmony and orchestration from one of the Conservatoire professors, Anton Reicha. Approachable, open-minded and innovative, Reicha was probably an ideal mentor for Louise, and she would continue her on and off tuition with him for the next decade.
From a young age, Louise seemed to develop a knack for making good life-decisions. Two years after enrolling at the Conservatoire, she married a fellow student, a flautist named Jacques Hippolyte Aristide Farrenc. It would be the start of a fruitful personal and professional partnership, spreading across almost half a century. According to German musicologist, Dr Christin Heitmann, “they supported each other, demonstrating concern and sympathy for each other’s field of professional activities. Each of them also contributed towards the family’s livelihood.”
A decade older than Louise, Aristide had also been an aspiring composer, but having quickly recognized his wife’s talent, he threw all his support and resources behind her instead. One of the first things he did was to set up their own publishing house, Éditions Farrenc, through which Louise was able to get much of her own music into print. “Aristide Farrenc was able to sense his young wife’s talent for composing”, according to one contemporary, “to encourage her, virtually force her, they say, to make available to the public works which her modesty, of a degree rarely encountered, impelled her to keep unpublished.”
The Éditions Farrenc would release over fifty of Louise’s compositions during her lifetime, and everywhere Aristide went on business as a publisher, he would take some of his wife’s music with him. Louise’s works were soon reaching the scrutiny of some of the most famous European composers and critics of the day, and they would usually attract praise, even if often couched in mildly misogynistic or sexist language.
Louise Farrenc was in fact a deeply atypical French composer for her time. In an era when the French musical landscape was dominated by the Grand Operas of Rossini, Meyerbeer and Donizetti, the huge programmatic symphonies of Berlioz and the virtuosic salon music of pianists extraordinaire Chopin and Liszt, Louise chose to draw her main inspiration from further east, and not least from the classical-symphonic tradition of Germany and Austria.
Her most productive years were from the early 1830s to late 1850s, during which she turned out her entire oeuvre of orchestral music, including three symphonies, two overtures and two “Grand Variations” for piano and orchestra. She was equally productive in the field of chamber music with sonatas, trios, two piano quintets and a notable Nonet (scored for string quintet and wind quartet), still regarded as one of her very finest works.
Louise’s second orchestral Overture in E Flat Major from 1834, though a still relatively early work, already reveals a mastery of her craft. It also demonstrates an attractive mix of Germanic and French influences: while the slow and dramatic introduction recalls Beethoven, the zestful energy and humour of the main body of the music unmistakably brings the likes of Rossini, Berlioz and the contemporary Parisian music scene to mind. Louise packs so much material into just six minutes of music, but with such verve and textural variety that it never sounds at all dense or heavy.
Aside from her composing, Louise was also building a sterling reputation as a teacher and performer throughout the 1830s, to the point where she was eventually appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire in 1842. Aside from the distinction of attaining such a position against the odds, the musical resources of the institution made it easier for her to organize regular performances of her own compositions. Some of her music she could even hear without any volition on her part – her Thirty Piano Etudes in all Major and Minor Keys (1838) were so widely admired that they became compulsory on the Conservatoire syllabus from the 1840s onwards.
After several premieres of her latest compositions, culminating in a sensational first rendition of her Nonet in 1850, Louise took a deep breath and petitioned the Conservatoire director, Daniel Auber, to have her salary raised to match that of her three closest male colleagues. “I dare hope, M. Director”, she wrote, “that you will agree to fix my fees at the same level as these gentlemen, because, setting aside questions of self-interest, if I do not receive the same incentive they do, one might think that I have not invested all the zeal and diligence necessary to fulfil the task which has been entrusted to me.” It might have helped her case that Auber had been a big admirer of Fanny Mendelssohn, before the latter’s untimely death four years earlier, and very probably did not care to see other talented female composers go underappreciated on his watch. Louise was granted her overdue pay-rise.
The Nonet, alongside her majestic Third and final symphony, written around the same time, probably represents the peak of Louise’s compositional career. After this, her output of orchestral works in particular would begin to slow up, one reason being the perennial difficulties in getting such large-scale music performed on the public stage.
The Belgian music critic François-Joseph Fétis, a man usually well-disposed towards female composers, fully recognized the problem that Louise faced: “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… 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… Such were the obstacles that Madame Farrenc met [and] which caused her to despair.”
Louise was also always hampered by the underlying sexist narrative of the day, and the constant bias about the abilities of her gender, even when her male counterparts thought they were otherwise being appreciative. “It is such a rarity for a woman to compose symphonies of real talent,” wrote one, while another observed of her First Symphony, “the dominant quality of this work, composed by a woman, is precisely what one would least expect to find. There is more power than delicacy.” According to Berlioz, Louise “orchestrated with a talent rare among women”, and even the sympathetic Fétis could not help himself when he wrote that “with Mme. Farrenc, the inspiration and the art of composing are of masculine proportions.”
Louise’s output further slowed in her later years after the premature death of her talented pianist daughter Victorine in 1859, aged just 32. But even as her creative flame dimmed, she remained productive in other ways, sharing in her husband’s (still not fashionable) interest in pre-classical music.
In their final years, Louise and Aristide would work together on a 23-volume anthology of European keyboard music (which they titled Le Trésor des Pianistes – The Treasure of Pianists), with works starting from the mid-sixteenth century and running all the way up to the present day. After her husband’s death in 1865. Louise completed the final 15 volumes herself as well as performing much of their less familiar, pre-classical content at a series of Conservatoire recitals known as Séances Historiques (Historical Sessions).
Louise would remain at her Conservatoire post into old age, surviving just long enough to see the first female students admitted to the institution’s composition classes. She retired in 1873 and died two years later aged 71 – a life well spent on the whole, having surrounded herself with some good people. Perhaps in the end that had been the secret of her success. As the American classical music presenter Barney Sherman once observed, “greatness is less likely to emerge when you’re indoctrinated with the idea that you don’t have what it takes. To state that in positive terms, genius is far more likely to emerge when somebody is telling you that you do have it and should run with it.”
In an age when innumerable female composers were still frozen out by regressive social expectations, the life of Louise Farrenc demonstrates just how much was possible, with a little encouragement.