Louise Farrenc (jan 1, 1804 – jan 1, 1875)

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French composer Louise Farrenc was born into a family of distinguished artists known for sculpting, painting, and engraving as well as traditional music and dance performance.

Louise studied piano with Antonin Reicha after her aunt, Anne Elisabeth Cecil Soira, saw promise in her early piano studies. After Farrenc married, her husband supported her music and she grew as a musician. Farrenc's husband eventually went into music publishing, and Farrenc had many of her works published thanks to her husband’s publishing assistance. While composing, Farrenc accepted an offer to work at the Paris Conservatoire, holding the first and only position as a female faculty member in the nineteenth century.

Louise Farrenc differs stylistically from her French contemporaries in that her music was a part of “musical counterculture” that drew on a more “serious” German style. Native and foreign critics at the time praised the German style and “deplored” popular French music. As her composition teacher Antonín Reicha befriended and learned from many German composers (Such as Haydn and Beethoven), such German characteristics make sense.

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