Louise Farrenc is among the most unjustly uncared for composers of her technology.
However regardless of the challenges of working as a girl musician within the nineteenth century, she carved out a unprecedented multi-pronged profession for herself as a professor, performer, and composer.
Right now, we’re wanting on the life and achievements of Louise Farrenc and exploring among the unbelievable music she left behind.
Louise Farrenc’s Inventive Household Background
Louise Farrenc was born Louise Dumont on 31 Could 1804. This was six months after fellow French composer Hector Berlioz, and some years earlier than Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Chopin.
Her father was Jacques-Edme Dumont, a sculptor from a protracted line {of professional} sculptors.
Her household tree additionally included a number of completed ladies painters who labored alongside their husbands and fathers within the household enterprise. The household clearly valued and nurtured feminine creative achievement.
Louise Farrenc’s Early Musical Research
Louise started finding out piano as a baby. Her first trainer was a girl named Cecile Soria, who had studied with Italian composer and keyboard virtuoso Muzio Clementi.
As Louise superior, she started finding out with Ignaz Moscheles, the trainer of Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny. She additionally labored with Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who had studied with Mozart.
Quickly Louise grew to become all for composing, too.
Being a girl, she was barred from formally finding out composition on the Paris Conservatoire. Nonetheless, when she was fifteen, her dad and mom organized for her to begin taking non-public classes with a Conservatoire trainer named Anton Reicha.
Reicha was a buddy of Beethoven and would go on to show Liszt and Berlioz. He grew to become Louise’s major pedagogical affect.
Louise Farrenc’s Etude in F Sharp Minor, op. 26 no. 10
Assembly and Marrying Aristide Farrenc
In 1821, Louise married flute pupil Aristide Farrenc, a Conservatoire pupil and orchestral flautist on the Théâtre Italien in Paris. Louise was seventeen and Aristide was twenty-seven.
On the time, it was widespread for married ladies to retire from severe musical life, or to proceed it privately by establishing home-based salons.
Nonetheless, public efficiency remained central to Louise’s life. In truth, after their marriage, the Farrencs went on tour collectively.
Settling Down and Having a Child
After a number of years of working as a performing musician, Louise grew to become pregnant, and the couple determined to calm down in Paris. There she resumed her research with Reicha.
In February 1826, when she was twenty-one, she gave delivery to a daughter named Victorine. Victorine can be the couple’s solely little one.
Victorine additionally grew to become a piano prodigy and composer, and studied along with her mom starting in 1831.
Louise Farrenc’s Trio for flute, cello and piano, Op. 45
Founding Éditions Farrenc
Across the similar time, Louise and Aristide additionally started tackling an bold new undertaking: working collectively to discovered a music publishing home.
Aristide understood what a gifted composer his spouse was, and he wished to assist propagate her works.
They named their firm Éditions Farrenc, and it grew to become one of the revered music publishing homes in France.
After publishing twenty piano works by his spouse, the Farrencs dissolved the publishing enterprise in 1837.
Louise Farrenc’s Rising Success
In the meantime, Louise continued to get pleasure from success all through the 1830s.
Composer Robert Schumann, the editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, praised a set of her piano variations in 1836:
Had been a younger composer to undergo me variations akin to these by L. Farrenc, I might reward him extremely for the auspicious expertise and high-quality coaching in all places mirrored in them.
I quickly realized the identification of the writer – fairly, authoress – the spouse of the famend music writer in Paris, and I’m distressed as a result of it’s hardly possible that she is going to ever hear of those encouraging strains.
Small, neat, succinct research they’re, written maybe nonetheless beneath the attention of the grasp, however so positive in define, so logical in improvement – in a phrase, should fall beneath their attraction…particularly since a refined aroma of romanticism hovers over them.
As is well-known, themes which lend themselves to imitation are most fitted to variation, and so the composeress utilises this for every kind of pleasant canonic video games.
She even manages to hold off a fugue – with inversions, diminutions, and augmentation – and all this she manages with ease and songfulness.
Solely within the finale would I’ve wished the calm bearing I had been led to count on after what got here earlier than.
Louise Farrenc’s Variations Brillantes, Op. 15
Writing for Orchestra and Chamber Music Ensembles
Confidence buoyed by constructive suggestions, Farrenc started to jot down for bigger forces. Her first works for orchestra – two live performance overtures – date from 1834.
Louise Farrenc’s Overture No. 2
In 1840, Berlioz reviewed the second overture, writing that it was “effectively written, and orchestrated with a expertise uncommon amongst ladies.”
Within the late 1830s and early 1840s, she additionally started to sort out chamber music. She wrote two piano quintets in 1839 and 1840, adopted by two piano trios between 1841 and 1844.
Nonetheless, her biggest accomplishment as a chamber music composer got here in 1849 along with her Nonet in E-flat Main, revealed as her Op. 38.
On this work, she used instrumentation conventions established by violinist and composer Louis Spohr: two violins, viola, cello, bassoon, clarinet, flute, French horn, and a bass half performed by both a string bass or a contrabassoon.
Louise Farrenc’s Nonet
Becoming a member of the Paris Conservatoire School
In 1842, she was named to the piano college of the Paris Conservatoire.
Though there have been different ladies working within the faculty’s vocal division, Farrenc can be the one lady to carry this explicit place for the remainder of the nineteenth century.
She achieved fabulous outcomes. Through the years, lots of her piano college students gained prizes. All had been ladies, as courses on the Conservatoire had been segregated by gender.
Prizewinners included her daughter Victorine, who enrolled as a piano pupil in 1843 and gained a premier prix the next yr.
Negotiating Equal Pay for Equal Work
In 1850, Farrenc’s Nonet was carried out in Paris by, amongst others, up-and-coming violinist Joseph Joachim. It was an enormous hit.
She used the renown the work introduced her to barter a wage on par along with her male counterparts. For years, she had been paid lower than them solely due to her gender.
She wrote to her boss:
I dare hope, M. Director, that you’ll agree to repair my charges on the similar degree as these gents, as a result of, setting apart questions of self-interest, if I don’t obtain the identical incentive they do, one would possibly suppose that I’ve not invested all of the zeal and diligence obligatory to satisfy the duty which has been entrusted to me.
Her attraction was profitable.
Writing Symphonies
After Farrenc was named to the Conservatoire college, she additionally started writing symphonies.
This was a hanging factor for a French composer to do. Symphonies loomed a lot bigger within the German musical custom than within the French one, and there weren’t many symphony orchestras in Paris.
It was particularly uncommon for a girl to do that style, given the skilled credentials often essential to persuade an orchestra to play one’s work.
Nonetheless, between 1842 and 1847, Farrenc wrote three symphonies. Right now her best-known is her third in G minor.
Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3
Its elegant emotional restraint, technical rigour, and sheer magnificence will remind fashionable listeners of Mendelssohn’s symphonies.
The work was premiered in 1849 by the Orchestre de la Société des concert events du Conservatoire, an orchestra made up of each professors and college students.
That evening her symphony was programmed alongside Beethoven’s Fifth, an endorsement of the Conservatoire’s excessive opinion of her.
Placing Her Work in Context
It’s astonishing to consider how good her orchestral works are, contemplating how few instances she truly obtained to listen to them carried out.
Many of the nice composers of this period heard and carried out their works a number of instances in efficiency earlier than writing extra.
Farrenc by no means had that chance. And but she wrote a number of staggeringly completed orchestral works in a time when few ladies had been making an attempt the problem.
The Obstacles of Writing for Opera
Farrenc wished to jot down opera, too, however it was exceedingly troublesome for rising composers to have operas accepted to be mounted in Paris within the mid-1800s, particularly in the event that they had been ladies.
In 1862, French critic François-Joseph Fétis wrote in his ebook Biographie universelle des musiciens:
Sadly, the style of large-scale instrumental music to which Madame Farrenc, by nature and formation, felt herself referred to as entails efficiency assets which a composer can purchase for herself or himself solely with huge effort.
One other issue right here is the general public, as a rule, not a really educated one, whose solely normal for measuring the standard of a piece is the title of its writer.
If the composer is unknown, the viewers stays unreceptive, and the publishers, particularly in France, shut their ears anyway when somebody presents them a midway respectable work; they consider in success just for trinkets.
Such had been the obstacles that Madame Farrenc met alongside the way in which, and which precipitated her to despair.
The Tragic Demise of Victorine
Regardless of her works’ top quality and the truth that they remained in print for seventy-five years after their preliminary publication, they had been largely forgotten by the early twentieth century.
It’s tempting to marvel if issues might need been completely different if she’d had a member of the family outlive her and advocate for her work, as pianist Clara Schumann advocated for the work of her husband Robert.
Victorine might have been that individual for her mom, however she died in her mid-thirties in 1859 of tuberculosis.
Louise Farrenc’s Cello Sonata in B-Flat Main, Op.46
Focusing On Le Trésor des pianistes
Whereas grieving the devastating lack of their solely daughter, Louise and Aristide Farrenc labored collectively on an enormous assortment of piano music referred to as Le Trésor des pianistes (The Pianists’ Treasure).
Aristide did a lot of the analysis, whereas Louise centered on Baroque ornamentation. She grew to become more and more all for forgotten Baroque music for harpsichord, and was working to popularise now-beloved composers like Couperin and Scarlatti.
After Aristide died in 1865, Louise continued the undertaking alone. It might finally develop to change into a twenty-three-volume assortment: a powerful capstone on a protracted profession.
Louise Farrenc’s Demise and Legacy
Louise Farrenc died in 1875.
After her dying, the Live performance Nationwide performed the gradual motion of her third symphony in tribute. Her music remained in print for years afterwards earlier than slipping out of the more and more male canon.
These days, Farrenc is fortunately experiencing a much-deserved revival and reassessment. An increasing number of of her works are being recorded and showing on live performance packages.
Hopefully, this pattern will proceed for a few years to come back, securing the everlasting place within the canon that she so richly deserves.
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Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 2
