1804–1875 · France · Romantic
Louise Farrenc (1804–1875) was a French pianist, composer and teacher from Paris. She wrote piano pieces, chamber ensembles and three symphonies, and from 1842 to 1872 she taught piano at the Paris Conservatoire. The site's catalogue includes her intermediate-level work for voice and piano, "Le berger fidèle".
Jeanne-Louise Dumont was born in Paris on 31 May 1804. Her father, Jacques-Edme Dumont, was a sculptor of the fourth generation of his family's line, and her brother Auguste also chose sculpture. The family lived at the Sorbonne, where the government housed artists' families, and the children grew up among painters, engravers and sculptors from birth.
Her parents only married officially on 27 January 1807, after both Auguste and Louise had been born. Her sister Constance studied painting. Louise also drew well, but in the end she chose music. All three children received a serious education, and it did not depend on whether the child was a boy or a girl.
Louise studied music from the age of six. Her piano teacher was Anne-Cécile Soria, a pupil of Muzio Clementi and also Louise's godmother. Soria taught the girl not only to play but also solfège and the basics of composition, and Louise's gift for the piano showed quickly.
Musical evenings were frequent at the Sorbonne, and the young pianist took part in them both as a soloist and as an accompanist.
Later Louise wanted to deepen her theoretical knowledge and became a pupil of Anton Reicha, from whom she learned the art of variation. She also took piano lessons with Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel.
In 1821 Louise married the flautist Aristide Farrenc and took his surname. They probably met at one of the Sorbonne's musical evenings, where she played a piano concerto by Dussek and also accompanied Aristide in a flute concerto by Berbiguier. For a time the couple toured together, and her husband became her impresario.
Aristide soon tired of concert life and, with his wife's help, opened a publishing house in Paris. Éditions Farrenc remained one of the leading music publishers in France for almost forty years. In 1824 he published Louise's first works, Opp. 2 and 4. Her lessons with Reicha stopped at the time of the wedding but later resumed, and now she studied counterpoint, fugue and instrumentation.
On 24 February 1826 Victorine was born, the couple's only child. She also became a pianist and performed with her mother several times. While her daughter was small, Louise composed and played little.
In the 1820s and early 1830s Farrenc wrote piano pieces for her own performances. From 1832 she returned to music in full, and her works began to appear far more often. In 1833 alone Opp. 9, 11, 12 and 13 were published, in Paris and in London. What finally earned her the reputation of an accomplished composer was Op. 17, "Air russe varié"; critics praised it, Robert Schumann among them.
In 1832 Louise had a success in London, and Aristide wrote about it to Hummel in a letter of 1833. Aristide had published Hummel himself since 1825, and Hummel gave Louise advice and encouragement. At one concert in the Farrencs' home the programme included his Septet No. 1, and Louise played a rondo and an adagio by the same composer.
In 1838 the Gallenberg Variations (Op. 25) were published, and in the same year Farrenc finished Op. 26, the Thirty Studies in all major and minor keys. The collection was printed in 1839 and the critics welcomed it. In 1845 the Conservatoire took the studies into use. Also in 1838, together with the Pleyel firm, Farrenc organised a morning concert devoted entirely to her own works and played them herself at the piano; the critics received it warmly.
In the 1830s, besides piano pieces, Farrenc wrote two overtures for orchestra, Opp. 23 and 24; both were composed in 1834. The first was performed in 1835 at the Gymnase-Musical, the second on 5 June 1840 at the Société des concerts du Conservatoire. Her three symphonies appeared in 1843, 1846 and 1849; the third (Op. 36) was played by the Société des concerts du Conservatoire in 1849.
Much of her chamber music was written in the 1840s. The nonet for strings and winds (Op. 38) was completed in 1849, and the violinist Joseph Joachim took part in its 1850 premiere. Her other chamber ensembles also drew the attention of specialists.
In 1842 Farrenc was appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire and held the post until 1872. Among women, she alone held such a position at the Conservatoire in the 19th century. According to accounts of the time she taught well: many of her pupils finished the course with first prizes and became professional musicians.
For almost ten years she was paid less than her male colleagues. Only after the triumphant premiere of the nonet, in which Joseph Joachim took part, did she demand equal pay and receive it.
Her daughter Victorine died of tuberculosis in 1859. After her death Louise gave no concerts for several years and wrote no more music. Alongside teaching, her main work became the anthology Le Trésor des pianistes, issued by her husband's firm: 23 volumes appeared in all, the first seven prepared together with Aristide. The anthology included, among other things, first editions of several pieces by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.
In 1861 and 1869 Farrenc received the prize of the Academy of Fine Arts (the Prix Chartier). She died in Paris on 15 September 1875 and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.
Her name kept appearing in books about pianists for a few decades after she died: in 1878 Antoine-François Marmontel placed her among the most celebrated pianists of his day in Les Pianistes célèbres. Afterwards her music was mostly forgotten. Interest in women composers revived in the late twentieth century, bringing her works back to concert halls and recordings; today her symphonies are played and recorded.
Farrenc composed for a wide range of forces, from pieces for solo piano to symphonies and chamber ensembles, and she also left a small number of vocal and choral works. Most of her music is for piano alone, but her chamber music is usually regarded as the best she produced. She wrote no opera: she wanted to, but neither the Opéra nor the Opéra-Comique gave her a libretto.
Farrenc's major works, the three symphonies among them, were all performed in her lifetime. Her two overtures for orchestra, Opp. 23 (E minor) and 24 (E flat major), date from 1834. In the same decade she also wrote several vocal works. Op. 25, the Gallenberg Variations, survives in two manuscripts held by the National Library of France: one is titled Grand Variations for piano with orchestra, the other Fantasia for piano and orchestra.
Chamber music held her interest throughout her life: the Op. 38 nonet, a sextet that adds winds to the piano (Op. 40), a pair of piano quintets (Opp. 30 and 31), a pair of piano trios (Opp. 33 and 34), and two further trios with cello and piano (Opp. 44 and 45), the first with clarinet or violin and the second with flute or violin, and several sonatas, among them sonatas for violin and piano and for cello and piano. Specialists believe that a string quartet occasionally credited to her was actually written by a different, still unidentified composer. She wrote her three symphonies with the models of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in mind and built them on traditional lines: the opening movements follow sonata form, a slow and lyrical movement comes next, then a minuet or scherzo, and the finale shows off her command of invertible counterpoint and freely expressive fugues.
Among her piano works are Brilliant Variations, Op. 2 (about 1824), on a theme of Aristide Farrenc, "Air russe varié" (Op. 17) and the Thirty Studies (Op. 26). As a pianist Farrenc specialised in the music of Beethoven and Mozart, and later took up pieces by the French harpsichordists and English virginalists, giving the first modern concert performances of many of them; audiences received them poorly. The site's catalogue currently holds one of her works, "Le berger fidèle" for voice and piano, at intermediate level; it is a place to begin.