1850–1927 · Germany · 20th century
Luise Adolpha Le Beau (1850–1927) was a German pianist and composer, born in Rastatt and settled in Baden-Baden. She studied with Clara Schumann and Josef Rheinberger and wrote for orchestra, choir, chamber groups, piano and voice. The site has her songs for voice and piano at an intermediate level.
Luise Adolpha Le Beau came into the world in Rastatt, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, on 25 April 1850. Her parents were Wilhelm Le Beau, an army officer, and Karoline, born Barack; Luise was their only daughter. Her father also made music and composed, and he started teaching her the piano when she was five. He left the Baden army in 1856, and from then on both parents took charge of the girl's general schooling.
Luise composed her first piece when she was eight. From 1863 to 1866 she studied languages at the local girls' school as a visiting pupil, and at sixteen she earned a diploma from a private girls' institute. After that she devoted herself to music.
After her confirmation at Easter 1865, Luise began piano lessons with the court Kapellmeister in Karlsruhe. Anton Haizinger gave her singing lessons. In 1868 she appeared in Karlsruhe, playing Beethoven's E-flat major concerto along with Felix Mendelssohn's concerto in G minor.
In 1870 Luise became acquainted with Anton Rubinstein and Franz Lachner. In 1873 she applied to take lessons with Clara Schumann in Baden-Baden. The study lasted one summer, twelve lessons in all, owing to Schumann's teaching approach and clashes of personality. In February 1874 a concert contract led her through five towns in the Netherlands: Utrecht, Arnhem, Rotterdam, The Hague and Amsterdam.
So that Luise could study with the composer Josef Gabriel Rheinberger, the family moved to Munich; in 1876 she began working with him, with a recommendation letter from Hans von Bülow, who was both pianist and conductor. The rules of the Royal Music School kept her lessons apart from those of the male students. Rheinberger and Le Beau grew close, and Op. 104, his Toccata for piano, bears her dedication. Franz Lachner went through many of her works with her.
The years from the move to Munich until 1885 were Le Beau's most productive. In 1877 she toured Bavarian towns together with the singer Aglaja Orgeni and the violinist Bartha Haft, performing her own compositions there. From 1878 she wrote reviews for the Berlin Allgemeine Deutsche Musik-Zeitung, but gave this up when her editor kept altering and cutting her articles. In that same year, 1878, Le Beau opened private music classes for daughters of educated families, which prepared women to work as piano teachers.
Gradually Le Beau turned her attention to other composers, among them Berlioz, Wagner, Chopin and Schumann, and drew away from Rheinberger; their lessons came to an end in 1880. She finished writing out Ruth, Op. 27, a set of biblical scenes with soloists, choir and orchestra, in the summer of 1882. The Leipzig publisher Christian Friedrich Kahnt issued it, and the work was first performed in Munich on 5 March 1883. Also in 1882, an international composition contest gave first prize to her Cello Sonata, Op. 17.
That same year, 1882, she met Franz Liszt in Weimar but came away disappointed: the meeting neither brought her useful contacts nor moved her piano playing forward. In 1884 she befriended the author Luise Hitz and put several of her poems to music, and on a journey to Salzburg and Vienna she met Eduard Hanslick and Johannes Brahms.
In 1885 the family moved to Wiesbaden: Luise's parents were growing frail, and in Munich she had struggled to find musicians to work with. In Wiesbaden some of her pieces were performed, and she taught music theory and singing. There she began Hadumoth, Op. 40, and the Piano Concerto, Op. 37. Her music started to be heard far from Germany too, in Sydney and Constantinople.
The family had to relocate to Berlin in 1890. There Le Beau studied the history of music in the Royal Library, and later she left her manuscripts in its care. Among her Berlin contacts were Woldemar Bargiel, Joseph Joachim and Philipp Spitta. She took on only a few pupils, leaving time to compose and to prepare a fair copy of the Hadumoth score. Georg Vierling, who belonged to the Royal Academy of Arts, proposed her for a chair at the Royal School of Music; she was turned down, as that post was never awarded to women.
In 1893 Le Beau and her family moved to Baden-Baden and settled there. On 19 November of that year Hadumoth, Op. 40, was heard for the first time. Over the following years several new works appeared, among them the Symphony for orchestra, Op. 41, first performed in Baden-Baden in 1895. In 1896 her father died after a stroke, leaving Luise as the only person to look after her mother, who had become almost blind.
Le Beau completed the symphonic poem Hohenbaden in the summer of 1897, and Baden-Baden heard it for the first time on 25 February 1898. Her mother died in 1900. Her last large chamber work, the String Quintet, Op. 54, for two violins, viola and two cellos, never appeared in print. She wrote a fairy-tale opera in 1902, The Enchanted Caliph, Op. 55, and dedicated it to her parents. In Baden-Baden more works followed over the next years, numbered Op. 56 to Op. 65.
In 1902 Le Beau travelled to Rome, where she met the singer Alfredo de Giorgio. Her autobiography came out in 1910 under the title Lebenserinnerungen einer Komponistin (Memoirs of a Woman Composer). The book tells of her concerts and of her dealings with colleagues, men and women alike, while her private life, her way of composing and her sources of inspiration get only a brief mention. She refers to her diaries as she tells the stories, but they seem not to have survived.
She spent her final years travelling, teaching, composing and giving concerts, and she reviewed music for the Baden-Baden paper. After the First World War she also contributed a text on Baden-Baden's musical life to the Badeblatt. A former pupil's father offered her a lifelong pension in 1922. At the age of 75 Le Beau marked her birthday with a recital of her own piano music.
Luise Adolpha Le Beau died in Baden-Baden on 17 July 1927, at the age of 77. She was laid to rest at the city cemetery beside her parents. In her memory the city gave her name to its music library, and a memorial plaque went up on 23 July 2004 at Lichtenaler Strasse 46, where she had lived and where she died.
Le Beau wrote in many genres. For chorus and orchestra she created Ruth, Op. 27, and Hadumoth, Op. 40; for orchestra, the Symphony, Op. 41, and the symphonic poem Hohenbaden. Her chamber music includes the Cello Sonata, Op. 17, the piano quartet Op. 28 and the String Quintet, Op. 54. The fairy-tale opera The Enchanted Caliph, Op. 55, dates from 1902, and she also wrote a Piano Concerto, Op. 37.
Piano music runs through her output like a thread. Her piano works include the Fantasy-Piece, Op. 1/1, the Concert Etude, Op. 2, the Original Theme with Variations, Op. 3, the Sonata, Op. 8, Eight Preludes, Op. 12, Improvisata, Op. 30, the Ballade, Op. 47, Three Old Dances, Op. 48, the Funeral March, Op. 53, Three Piano Pieces, Op. 57, the Barcarolle, Op. 59, In the Forest, Op. 63, and Evening Sounds, Op. 64.
Her works were heard well beyond Germany. The Quartet, Op. 28, had its first performance in Leipzig's Gewandhaus and was played in Sydney in 1889 at The Women Exhibition in a programme made up entirely of women's compositions, and Ruth was given in Constantinople. The Munich years were especially fruitful for Le Beau: many of her works were performed and printed, and the press wrote warmly about them. To close that period she composed the String Quartet in G minor, Op. 34. She based Hadumoth on scenes from the novel of the same name by Victor Scheffel.
Le Beau also did scholarly work. In 1890 she published the article Componistinnen des vorigen Jahrhunderts (Women Composers of the Previous Century), for which she searched out her predecessors; it gives special attention to Marianna von Martines, a contemporary of Haydn.
She also wrote songs and choral pieces: in 1884, after meeting the writer Luise Hitz, she set several of her poems to music, and among the works from Op. 56 to Op. 65a there are piano pieces, songs and choruses. The site has her songs for voice and piano: Gruss an die Nacht (intermediate level), Frühlingsanfang, Die Alpenrose, Ein Gebet, Juchhe and Wiegenlied (all intermediate+). Gruss an die Nacht is a good place to begin, since it has the lowest level of these six.