Women Composers of the Romantic era

Apart from the legacy of Louise Farrenc, few symphonies written by French women in the nineteenth century have come down to us. To discover their orchestral compositions, we have to turn to excerpts – overtures or dance scenes – from operatic works (and they themselves are extremely rare) or else resort to arrangements of genre pieces, originally written for the piano. Nevertheless, women composers who also had a career as concert artists were able to produce concertante works in which their chosen instrument converses with a large ensemble. The virtuoso pianist and teacher Marie Jaëll, for instance, premièred her Second Piano Concerto in 1884 at the Société Nationale de Musique with Édouard Colonne conducting. Although Franz Liszt described the work as “a brilliant masterpiece”, it went almost unnoticed in France, but it did enjoy great popularity in Germany.