Remembered Virtuosi, Forgotten Composers Part 1

Since today is International Women's Day, it's the perfect opportunity to begin a series of posts about women composers.

In the nineteenth century in Europe, the role of women as performers and teachers of music was widely accepted and even acclaimed.  However, those who were prepared to consider women as composers were few in number.  The result is that a number of women famed for their abilities as performers also composed music of high quality -- yet that music is but rarely heard and not at all well known, even today.

That description fits the French composer Louise Farrenc (1804-1875) to a "T".  She achieved wide fame as a virtuosa of the piano, giving concerts and (with her husband) founding a musical publishing house.  She was also a noted teacher, serving for three decades as Permanent Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire.  Her students achieved many Premier Prix awards, and numbers of them embarked on professional careers.

While her public fame as a performing artist and a teacher was considerable, her musical compositions were far less well known.  The one genre in which she did not compose was opera, and the opera was the centrepoint of French musical life during her time.  This fact alone would have caused her work to be widely ignored by the public.

And yet, musicians and other knowledgeable persons acclaimed the high quality of her music.  In the 1820s, she began by writing exclusively for the piano, but her works already drew much favourable comment, from Robert Schumann among others.  Later, in the 1830s and after, she composed a great deal of chamber music, which many experts agree is of comparable quality with the best works of her male contemporaries.  Most notable among these is a nonet for four strings and five winds, a work which was performed with no less a virtuoso than Joseph Joachim leading the ensemble.  It was after the enthusiastic reception of this nonet that Farrenc was finally able to force the Conservatoire to pay her a salary equivalent to that paid to her male colleagues.

Here's where my reaction comes in, because the recording I acquired is a disc of three major chamber works: a clarinet trio and a piano trio, both in E-flat major, and a sextet in C minor for winds and piano -- which she later recast in an alternate version as a string and piano quintet.

This is all very engaging music -- in the sense that it engages the listener and keeps you engaged throughout.  No idle doodling along where you can check out for a bit -- this is music of both skill and substance, and well worth anyone's time and effort.

The musical vocabulary, as one might expect, is poised somewhere between Mendelssohn, Schumann and the early Brahms -- exactly the point in musical history where it was composed.  Farrenc was no revolutionary, but she plainly had a thorough grasp of all the expressive possibilities within the musical language of her time.  The sextet is especially admirable, making full use of the contrasting tone colours within the wind ensemble to highlight the musical ideas. 

Sure sign of a good thing: I have pulled this recording up and listened to it more than a few times in the months since I downloaded it.  Perhaps the impetus to write up this post will send me looking for more recordings of her music to enjoy.