Louise Farrenc French pianist, and not only the only woman professor at the famed Paris Conservatoire in the whole of the 19th century, but one of the greatest professors at that. It was her students who swept up the first prizes.
And do you think she was paid as much as the men there? Of course she wasn’t. Until, after roughly a decade of repeatedly complaining about it, she came out with her famous Nonet and the response was so overwhelming that the management gave in and finally gave her a pay-rise to equal the men. She’s possibly the first woman in public life to break that glass ceiling.
Louise Farrenc was born Jeanne-Louise Dumont in 1804 in Paris – her married name comes from her flautist husband and the French music publishing house that she helped to found. A virtuoso pianist, whose teachers were students of Mozart on the one side and Clementi on the other, her early composing was good enough to attract the attention of the professor at the Paris Conservatoire. But she couldn’t study composition there; she was a girl. So she studied with him privately. And embarked upon a glittering concert career only briefly interrupted by her marriage, age 17, and the birth of her daughter who she toted around with her as a baby on tour.
She was 32 when she was appointed to the Conservatoire, stayed for 30 years. And was through all this time composing, prolifically – piano music, chamber music, symphonies, song, including this, her famous nonet of 1849. The critics praised its “virile touch”. A talent “rare among women”, “precisely what one would least expect to find”. “With Madame Farrenc,” one wrote, “the inspiration and the art of composing are of positively - - - masculine proportions”
MUSIC: Nonet
Louise Farrenc, 1804 – 1875
Presented by Anna Clyne
Written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
