Louise Farrenc

Louise Farrenc is a major musical personality hiding in plain sight. Composer, pianist, researcher, editor and educator, she was praised by Berlioz and Schumann; she became the Paris Conservatoire’s only 19th-century female professor of piano; she fought for equal pay as a woman, and won it. Born in the year Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, when Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony was contemporary music, she lived to see the devastation of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the birth of Saint-Saëns’s Société Nationale de Musique. Most significantly, her music – too long neglected – is seriously good.

Farrenc was composing dazzling concert pieces that require a powerful technique

She was born Jeanne Louise Dumont on 31 May 1804, into a Parisian family of artists. Her father, Jacques-Edme Dumont, was from a family who had been sculptors since the time of Louis XIV – her brother, Auguste Dumont, continued the tradition. Louise’s musical talent showed early. At first she studied the piano