On 19 March 1850, Louise Farrenc’s Nonet premiered publicly at the Salons Érard in Paris. According to François-Joseph Fétis, the audience for the performance of this ‘beautiful work’, in which some of the most notable musicians of the time played (including Joseph Joachim, Charles Lebouc, Achille Gouffé, and Louis Dorus), comprised more than four hundred people.Footnote 1 Farrenc’s chamber composition for nine instruments received positive reviews, though no one noted the horn player’s reference to Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony at the first movement’s conclusion. This musical allusion appears in the same instrumentation (horns) and in approximately the same place (the coda) in both pieces, suggesting that the reference was purposeful. But given the lack of acknowledgement of this reference in press accounts of the Nonet, did no one in the audience notice it? And what might Farrenc’s motivations have been for alluding to Beethoven’s symphony in this piece?
Despite growing up in politically turbulent early nineteenth-century France and with the strict and frequently contested gender norms that emerged in the wake of the 1789 Revolution, Louise Farrenc became a successful pianist, pedagogue, and composer. As a virtuoso pianist, a composer of chamber music, piano music, and symphonies, and a piano professor at the Paris Conservatoire — among the first women to achieve this distinction — Farrenc became a well-known musician in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Her career also demonstrates her interest in achieving increased social equality for women, including herself, within institutions like the Paris Conservatoire, which did not employ women as frequently or with the same salaries as men.Footnote 2 After becoming a piano professor at the Conservatoire in 1842, she petitioned for and received a salary equal to her male colleagues in the same position.Footnote 3 In this article, I offer a reading of how she went about striving for equality for women in musical contexts — including performing resistance to essentialist gender norms in her Nonet — during a time when feminist thought was developing in France.
Scholars have addressed Farrenc’s successes, particularly in the interest of drawing attention to nineteenth-century women composers who have been omitted from the music performance and scholarship canon until recently. In addition to foundational biographical work by Bea Friedland and Catherine Legras, Florence Launay has written numerous essays and a book that feature Farrenc, importantly underlining how social circumstances such as her marriage to fellow musician and music publisher Aristide Farrenc facilitated her career. Moreover, Christin Heitmann has explored the influence of Viennese Classicism, and Beethoven’s music in particular, on Farrenc’s compositions.Footnote 4 I contribute to these conversations by considering how Farrenc engaged with, negotiated, and challenged nineteenth-century French gender norms. Although applying the term ‘feminist’ to Farrenc appears anachronistic, especially since extant sources do not suggest that she ever described herself this way, I nevertheless argue that Farrenc employed what we might consider today a kind of feminist praxis in how she resisted some nineteenth-century French gender expectations, including in her support of her female students.Footnote 5 In ‘A Killjoy Manifesto’, Sara Ahmed underlines the feminist importance of supporting other women. She writes that
to make a manifesto out of the killjoy means being willing to give to others the support you received or wish you received. […] We are creating a support system around the killjoy; we are finding ways to allow her to do what she does, to be who she is.Footnote 6
Ahmed addresses the inequities of institutions, asserting that ‘we need to use the benefits we receive to support those who do not receive these benefits, including those within our own institutions who do not have the same securities that give us the opportunity to expose the insecurities’.Footnote 7 Similarly, feminist musicologist Alexandra Apolloni has discussed the significance of signal boosting, or amplification:
Thinking in terms of amplification is productive for multiple reasons: first, it assumes that marginalized people are already speaking. They are active, they have agency, they aren’t sitting around waiting for someone with more power to give them permission. It also acknowledges, however, that because of social inequality, their voices often get drowned out. It places responsibility on people with established platforms to stop doing things that drown out those other voices and to actively create platforms that boost marginalized voices.Footnote 8
As Samantha Ege and Kimberly Francis have demonstrated, this kind of feminist support and advocacy was a feature of how some twentieth-century women approached classical music cultures in the United States and Europe.Footnote 9 And, as Karen Offen and Claire Goldberg Moses have shown, collaboration, mutual support, and collective action were also central to French feminist activists in the nineteenth century.Footnote 10
Farrenc’s feminist praxis appears not only in her advocacy of other women musicians, but also in her musical compositions. Ellie Hisama has written, in relation to US-based twentieth-century composer Miriam Gideon, about the possibility of determining someone’s political views through their music, especially in instances where scholars have few materials to consult.Footnote 11 Farrenc presents us with a similar situation, as no sources have yet been found that espouse her political views. However, analysis of Farrenc’s Nonet, as well as her activities and social circles, reveals what nineteenth-century French feminist praxis may have looked and sounded like at a time when French feminism was developing.
In what follows, I situate Farrenc’s private and public life, her Conservatoire appointment, and her musical choices in her Nonet within the context of then-burgeoning French feminist thought and literature. I demonstrate that she facilitated her own career by playing by the societal gender rules of her time and simultaneously subtly subverting these, while also expediting the careers of her students. I analyse Farrenc’s Nonet and its allusion to Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ within her political, social, and musical contexts, arguing that it functioned as a statement on women’s compositional capabilities and essentialist understandings of women, as well as a commentary on the Conservatoire’s musical and gender politics. Moreover, the allusion can be understood as related to two political events of 1848: the Revolution, which many mid-nineteenth-century French petitioners for women’s rights supported, and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s election as president of France. Although no letter or diary may ever surface in which Farrenc clearly laid out her political perspectives, making it difficult to know whether she truly had feminist intentions or was just doing her job as composer, performer, and professor, I nevertheless hope that this article encourages contemplation of Farrenc in a new light, as a ‘feminist musician’ in practice if not in name or specific ideology.
Feminism in Farrenc’s France
Issues surrounding women’s rights, or what Offen and other historians, using contemporary terminology, have termed ‘the woman question’, were hotly debated in nineteenth-century France.Footnote 12 Although the terms ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’, which originated in France, did not appear in print until the 1870s and 1880s, authors such as George Sand and Marie d’Agoult, artists such as Rosa Bonheur, activists such as Suzanne Voilquin, Jeanne Deroin, and Flora Tristan, and organizations such as the Saint-Simonians, the Fourierists, and the Société de la Voix des Femmes argued for women’s rights throughout the century in ways that resonate with current understandings of feminism as concerned with women’s equal access to rights under the law.Footnote 13 As Offen has demonstrated, debates concerning women’s rights were public and well known among the general French public, both within the highly educated bourgeoisie and the working classes.Footnote 14 In the wake of the 1789 Revolution and Napoleon’s 1804 Code Civil, which strictly regulated women’s lives — for instance rendering married women ‘passive citizens’ whose husbands controlled their finances and actions — and delimited their access to the civil rights that non-disabled French-born men (or ‘active citizens’) received, some French people questioned laws that restricted women’s education, finances, and careers.Footnote 15 Movements and organizations in support of women’s rights began to emerge from the 1820s.Footnote 16 The Saint-Simonians, for instance, were a socialist political and religious group active in the 1820s and 1830s, primarily in Paris and Lyon; they sought a utopic society, part of which, for some members, involved women achieving equality with men in public life.Footnote 17 The Saint-Simonians and other nineteenth-century organizations that included advocates for women’s rights focused on greater access to rights and resources for women, though in most cases they did not challenge the place of women in the social hierarchy, and even when they did, these views were often perceived as too radical.Footnote 18 Print media helped to develop feminist ideas and bring women together, for instance in women’s magazines of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s such as La Voix des femmes and Journal des femmes, and Saint-Simonian journals like La Femme libre, La Femme nouvelle, and La Tribune des femmes. Footnote 19 This period saw the rise of women-run journals and newspapers, as well as women taking on public roles as journalists and authors.Footnote 20 French women’s writings sometimes presented characters that challenged essentialist notions of women’s versus men’s ‘natural’ qualities, for example in Claire de Duras’s novel Edouard (1825), which, Alison Finch notes, features characters who ‘are apparently questioning the notion that certain characteristics are inherently male or female’.Footnote 21
Yet even as activists, artists, authors, and organizations of the 1820s to the 1840s foregrounded women’s rights, the shifting political regimes of early to mid-nineteenth-century France maintained constructions of women as self-sacrificing wives and mothers. In fact, as women gained more rights, they were still considered during the July Monarchy as best suited for motherly roles, both within the home and in public spaces.Footnote 22 According to James F. McMillan, ‘motherhood in particular was seen as the key, not the barrier, to progress for bourgeois women’.Footnote 23 For mid-nineteenth-century activists like Voilquin and Deroin, as well as educators like Josephine Bachellery, highlighting women’s roles as mothers who would raise future generations of French citizens offered an argument for providing women with additional education.Footnote 24
Women’s motherly roles extended beyond the home as bourgeois women began to take up charity work. Numerous charitable organizations were established in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many founded by women or with women as members. Though many such organizations were connected to the Catholic Church, charity was also the purview of women who hosted salons and concerts with the aim of raising money for these organizations.Footnote 25 For many French bourgeois women, the 1848 Revolution presented opportunities for increased charity work, since this Revolution involved working-class people who, in the eyes of many elite women, needed financial and social support.Footnote 26
Numerous women advocating for women’s rights supported the 1848 Revolution. This event resulted in the formation of the Second French Republic for several years, before Napoleon III (Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte) staged a coup d’état in 1851, leading to the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852. Upper-class and bourgeois women like Sand, d’Agoult, and Hortense Allart supported the 1848 Revolution in their writings.Footnote 27 However, one result of the Revolution was that French men, regardless of income or property, gained the right to vote. With this political advancement came the recognition by many women that access to suffrage was based solely on sex, although disabled men under the care of a guardian or institution would also not have had the right to vote.Footnote 28 Thus in the wake of the 1848 Revolution, republican and socialist women such as Jeanne Deroin and Eugénie Niboyet spoke and published on women’s rights, were involved in the founding of the Club de l’Emancipation des Femmes (which would change its name to La Société de la Voix des Femmes in May 1848), and founded the daily newspaper La Voix des femmes in support of feminist causes.Footnote 29 The central concerns for the feminists of La Société de la Voix des Femmes were the right to vote, the right to hold office, the legalization of divorce, and greater access to education and employment.Footnote 30
It was within this particular context of the late 1840s that Louise Farrenc obtained the position of professeur de piano at the Paris Conservatoire, with the knowledge that she was earning a smaller salary than many of her male colleagues, and with a panoply of female students, many of whom needed assistance in advancing their musical careers.Footnote 31 She was also an active composer, often lauded for her ability to compose ‘serious’ music, which in this context referred to instrumental music in the European classical tradition — though not the flashy virtuosic style that was beginning to decline in popularity;Footnote 32 as Joseph d’Ortigue wrote in an 1842 review, Farrenc was ‘dedicated to this cult of serious music’, making herself ‘known by quartets and quintets of a very grand style and by a truly virile construction’.Footnote 33 Though as far as we know Farrenc never explicitly claimed to be a feminist, she would have been familiar with the debates concerning women’s rights that pervaded nineteenth-century French political culture, and as I demonstrate in what follows, she — like some of her female author and activist contemporaries — developed ways of navigating the systemic inequalities that she and her students faced.
Assimilation and Resistance: Farrenc and Gendered Sociocultural Norms
Like her women author counterparts, Farrenc performed French womanhood in ways that both aligned with and challenged the gendered political order that assigned certain qualities and social roles to women.Footnote 34 Extant sources leave little information regarding how she specifically coached her students.Footnote 35 Therefore, in order to better understand how she may have advised them, and especially since detailed information about her many students is scant, here I focus on how she framed herself as a model nineteenth-century bourgeois white French woman while also utilizing these social norms to her professional advantage. To a certain extent, she embodied what Ingrid Sykes has termed the French feminine ideal of the pious woman who, while not necessarily religious, demonstrated modesty and focused on supporting others.Footnote 36
Farrenc assimilated to French social norms for her class and gender in her home and family life. Marriage and motherhood, while very much expected though often constraining, especially under the Code Civil, gave women access to certain kinds of social capital and spaces. In fact, Farrenc’s status as a married woman may have been a factor in her employment as a piano professor for young women at the Conservatoire because of the role model it would have allowed her to be for these women in a social context that emphasized marriage. In 1821, Louise Dumont married musician Aristide Farrenc, who was ten years her senior, at the age of 17, and had a child — their daughter Victorine — in February 1826. The age gap between husband and wife, the young age at which Louise married Aristide, and the age at which she gave birth were somewhat standard in early nineteenth-century France, although these norms would have varied according to race and class.Footnote 37 Arranged marriages were still common, especially among the bourgeoisie. Louise, however, seems to have found a husband with whom she had a relationship based primarily on love rather than on financial considerations — although these may have been a factor as well, especially considering Aristide’s successes as a performing musician, composer, teacher, and publisher by the time of their marriage.Footnote 38 Prior to their marriage, Louise Dumont and Aristide Farrenc made music with Louise’s family in their apartment at the Sorbonne.Footnote 39 Aristide was a supporter and advocate of Louise’s career, publishing her compositions and travelling throughout Europe to garner interest for her performances and pieces.Footnote 40 Aristide was clearly a significant and beloved member of Louise’s family: her brother once wrote, during his stay in Rome in the early 1820s, that he missed hearing Aristide’s flute.Footnote 41 Farrenc’s love for her husband, in addition to her love for early music and piano repertoire, is evidenced by her commitment to completing his extensive passion project Le Trésor des pianistes, which Aristide had begun in the late 1850s, though it remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1865.Footnote 42
Descriptions of Farrenc as ‘timid’ and ‘modest’ also align with the behaviour expected of bourgeois women during her lifetime, even if her self-advocacy and other actions bent the rules of bourgeois womanhood. To take just one example, Larousse’s Grand dictionnaire universel, published at the end of her life, described her as
modest, timid even, and having created the renown with more care than other artists solicit, Madame Farrenc would have condemned her musical productions to an eternal silence, if the prayers of her friends and numerous admirers of her talent had not, so to speak, done violence to this exaggerated reserve.Footnote 43
Although this passage utilizes gendered language to describe women musicians that persisted at least until the early twentieth century, this characterization of Farrenc as extremely modest and reserved also resonates with common expectations of elite and bourgeois French women in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 44 As Foley articulates,
The rules of good conduct at social events were strictly defined in manuals of good conduct. A young woman was instructed not to attract attention; to remain seated by her mother; to dance with anyone who invited her; never to meet a man’s gaze directly; to remain within her mother’s field of vision; to reply to questions but not to initiate conversation. The ideal young woman was not a strong and self-assured individual, then, but submissive, malleable and modest, with no will of her own.Footnote 45
Early and mid-nineteenth-century etiquette guides for married women provided them with detailed instructions for their roles as ‘mistresses of the house’ (maîtresses de maison), tasked with the care of children, upkeep of the home, receiving visitors, and conducting polite conversation in social events.Footnote 46 Within these gendered expectations, many French women and girls found ways to be strong and self-assured, even if surreptitiously, and Louise Farrenc was no exception.
During her fifty-five-year career, Farrenc took on musical roles that were both normative and non-normative for women. Girls and women of her social status were all but required to be proficient pianists; Farrenc pushed this sociomusical norm by becoming a virtuoso concert pianist — a role usually reserved for men, although a handful of women in nineteenth-century Europe, such as Clara Schumann, Marie Pleyel, and Charlotte Tardieu de Malleville, succeeded as virtuosos, albeit with some of them receiving less praise from critics than their male contemporaries.Footnote 47 Katharine Ellis has eloquently described the social context of French women pianists in the nineteenth century: ‘It was a disquieted male gaze that beheld women’s public display of that most appropriate female domestic accomplishment: playing the piano.’Footnote 48 At the same time that she was becoming known as a pianist, Farrenc began composing, a musical activity that, in the ideological terms of the time, was reserved predominantly for men, despite the fact that many women composed in this period.Footnote 49 But Farrenc was careful about how and what she composed, so as not to raise too many eyebrows, at least at first. She began, as many women did, with smaller-scale compositions designed for consumption in the bourgeois home, including solo piano pieces, songs, and chamber compositions, which were generally coded as feminine throughout Europe at this time.Footnote 50 Farrenc was blessed with her husband’s assistance at the beginning of her compositional career, as his publishing company published and distributed her works in and beyond France.
Like many women in nineteenth-century France, Farrenc became active in charitable work, in her case, that which involved music. In the 1820s and 1830s, Louise, Aristide, and Victorine hosted numerous public salons and concerts. Hosting musical salons and soirées was considered a social service, especially in instances when they were attached to a cause — in Farrenc’s case, most often an association benefiting artists or musicians. As a result, hosting charitable musical events allowed Farrenc to perform what Sykes has described as the French feminine ideal of the pious woman, committed to serving her family and community while also providing family members with opportunities to make connections with musicians and notable Parisian figures. As Sykes has shown, performing pious womanhood in nineteenth-century France enabled women musicians to advance their careers while also engaging in efforts to create support and community for the societally underserved.Footnote 51 Henri Herz and Félix Le Couppey, Farrenc’s piano professor colleagues at the Conservatoire, rarely if ever attached their concerts and soirées to a social cause, though several of Le Couppey’s most famous female students — Marie Remaury, Marie Marchand, and Laure Bedel — did, demonstrating that this kind of musical charity work was not only gendered, but also a means for women to establish a public performing, teaching, or compositional reputation.Footnote 52
Several of the salons, soirées, and concerts that Farrenc hosted benefited organizations like the Association des Artistes-Musiciens.Footnote 53 On 23 April 1828, a soirée organized by the Farrencs was so full that those in attendance at times got in the way of the performers. Although Farrenc’s compositions did not appear on the programme, the event gave the couple a chance to showcase their performance talents — Louise at the keyboard and Aristide on the flute — while also demonstrating to the Parisian public that they had close associations with widely known musicians like Fernando Sor, who played several pieces for guitar.Footnote 54 Two years later, Louise Farrenc organized a soirée musicale at the Salons Érard featuring the celebrated composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who had been one of her mentors in composition and keyboard technique.Footnote 55 In late December 1844 and in April 1845, she organized additional concerts for the benefit of the Association des Artistes-Musiciens. The 1844 concert included an overture and a symphony by Farrenc, her O Salutaris for three voices, and an ‘air de Didone’ performed by a Mlle Betz.Footnote 56 On 13 and 27 April 1845, she presented concerts in support of the same association, featuring her compositions and her daughter Victorine’s pianistic artistry.Footnote 57
Farrenc also participated in lotteries — events like raffles or silent auctions that were popular at this time and offered women additional opportunities to become involved in community support initiatives.Footnote 58 An announcement in the Journal des débats on 23 March 1846 publicized a ‘magnificent lottery organized for the profit of the fund of assistance and pensions of the Association des artistes musiciens’, taking place between 21 and 31 March, with the drawing of winners on 2 April.Footnote 59 The lottery’s prizes included a family of saxhorns by Adolphe Sax and a Débain harmonium; while the prizes were on display, numerous musicians, including Farrenc, played music of ‘the best masters’.Footnote 60
Throughout her career, Farrenc was well known as a piano teacher, yet another normative role for nineteenth-century women musicians. Like many of her Conservatoire colleagues and students, she taught lessons out of her home in addition to giving lessons at the Conservatoire.Footnote 61 She also taught her daughter, thus taking on the role of ‘mother-educator’, much discussed by feminist historians of nineteenth-century France as providing significant support for feminist efforts to permit women equal access to education as their male counterparts.Footnote 62 Though teaching was a common musical activity for women, the extremely prestigious position that Farrenc occupied during her lifetime was rarely held by women in the nineteenth century; when she took up the position of professeur de piano at the Paris Conservatoire, she was stepping into traditionally masculine territory. This is underlined by the confusion in numerous newspapers, which struggled to report Farrenc’s appointment correctly. On 14 September 1842, the Journal des débats incorrectly reported that ‘Monsieur’ Farrenc had been appointed a professeur; a few days later on, the newspaper corrected their mistake: ‘It’s not M[onsieur] Farrenc at all, but M[ada]me Farrenc who was just named professeur de piano at the Conservatoire.’Footnote 63 Le Ménestrel made a different error, requiring the following correction on 25 September 1842:
The double nomination of M. Herz and of Mme Farrenc, in replacing M. Adam, as professeurs de piano at the Conservatoire, has given rise to a few errors that it is useful to address. Mme Farrenc is not at all named professeur-adjoint ou supplémentaire, but indeed professeur in title.Footnote 64
Farrenc’s appointment as both a woman and a named professor rather than an adjunct professor appears to have been unprecedented enough for several newspapers to provide misinformation.
Despite Farrenc’s embodiment of many of the nineteenth-century French social expectations for women, she pushed back against the gendered social, educational, institutional, and economic norms that placed women in less equitable positions than their male counterparts. When Farrenc joined the Conservatoire staff in 1842, she made two hundred francs less than her colleague Herz, who had been hired at the same time and for the same position with the same required duties and responsibilities: teaching female piano students. Farrenc and Herz were both well-known musicians in Paris, although Herz was much more famous than Farrenc due to his inventions, virtuosic performances, and international tours.Footnote 65 In 1849 and 1850, Farrenc wrote to the Conservatoire’s director, Daniel Auber, to request a salary increase — a bold request given that women in France did not receive pay equal to that of male colleagues until well into the twentieth century.Footnote 66 She underlined the inequities between her treatment and that of her male colleagues in her 1850 request:
Sir,
About fifteen months ago I had the honor of requesting that you grant me, just as you do many of my colleagues, an increase in salary, and you gave me to understand that you would comply with my request the moment funds became available.
It is now almost two years since MM. Alard and Franchomme, named professors after I was, obtained an increase; likewise M. Girard, who joined the Conservatory much later. Several others, in addition, have enjoyed the same privilege.
I therefore venture to hope, M. Directeur, that you will agree to fix my honorarium at the same level as these gentlemen, because, setting aside questions of self-interest, if I do not receive the same incentive they do, one might conclude that I have not invested all the zeal and diligence necessary to fulfill the task which has been entrusted to me.Footnote 67
The timing of this request is significant: her colleague Herz had been on tour in the United States and South America since 1846, yet still received his full Conservatoire salary during his absence, despite not fulfilling his mandated professorial duties.Footnote 68 Conservatoire records indicate that Farrenc’s request was honoured by 1855, when her salary was 1200 francs — the same as Herz’s.Footnote 69 By 1860, when raises were given to the piano faculty, Herz and Farrenc received 1400 francs per year, the same amount that professors of male piano students received; this was an improvement upon the situation in 1855, when the teachers of male students, as well as Le Couppey, received a higher salary than Herz and Farrenc, in Le Couppey’s case likely because he had already been receiving a higher salary as a harmony and accompaniment professor prior to his appointment as a piano teacher.Footnote 70 Salary records for 1865 and 1870 show further pay increases for Farrenc and her male colleagues, and by 1870, Farrenc earned 2000 francs per year — the same amount as her male colleagues on the piano faculty except Georges Mathias, who received a smaller salary as a recent hire.
Similarly, by 1868 Farrenc did not hesitate to express her frustration at the unfair distribution of students among Conservatoire professors to Alfred de Beauchesne of the Conservatoire’s administration. Farrenc’s letter hints at the internalized misogyny of many French women of her time, since it indicates that Mme Rouch demanded that her daughter be placed in the class of one of Farrenc’s male colleagues:
This morning I ran across Mme. Rouch who absolutely rejects my class for her daughter and who claims to have left no doubt, when I saw her Monday after the examination, of her positive intention to entrust her daughter only to M. Le Couppey. Now I am perfectly capable of understanding clearly, when someone speaks to me clearly, and that’s what this lady should have done at once, in which case I would not have dreamed of requesting her daughter; I wanted to give you this brief explanation.
Now, dear Sir, I pray you urge the Director to give me another pupil, because you realize that I absolutely must have one. Besides, you withdrew Mlle. Bessament after having told me I would have her. Just as the other professors are anxious to keep their pupils, so am I. It wouldn’t be any more difficult to assign Mlle. Marx to me than it was, last year, to grant admission to a weak application rejected by the committee and as usual given to me.Footnote 71
Mme Rouch likely had numerous reasons for wanting her daughter placed in Le Couppey’s class, but this letter nevertheless bears witness to Farrenc’s frustration in repeatedly being given students who were later removed from her piano class. It must have been additionally frustrating to receive the administration’s response to this letter: Mlle Berthe Marx ended up in Herz’s class despite Farrenc’s urging otherwise.Footnote 72
Farrenc’s Mentoring Practices
Despite being given fewer students than her male colleagues, and what she described as students weaker in piano performance, Farrenc did very well by students in her class.Footnote 73 During her tenure at the Conservatoire, many of her students won prizes in piano, harmony and accompaniment, solfège, and even harp, and many went on to have careers as instrumentalists, teachers, composers, and singers. In this section, using the scant sources that exist that might illuminate her teaching and mentoring practices, I argue that Farrenc’s support and encouragement of her students in numerous musical pursuits can be understood as a kind of nineteenth-century French feminist musical practice. She helped them to obtain positions, provided them with opportunities to perform publicly and meet Parisian musicians who could promote their careers, and showcased their compositional talents. Significantly, women were not admitted to the Conservatoire’s composition classes until the 1850s; the first were Charlotte Jacques and Louise Contamin (a piano student of Mme Coche) in 1858 and 1859, respectively. Both students were enrolled in Aimé Ambroise Simon Leborne’s class, suggesting that he was more open to admitting female students than his colleagues.Footnote 74 Women who sought to compose before this time therefore needed to find composition teachers outside of the Conservatoire’s framework, including taking private lessons in composition, as Farrenc had done with Hummel and Anton Reicha.
In fact, Farrenc may have given female students training in composition as part of their piano lessons. Given that young women often faced resistance from their families and French society to their desires to compose, as Marcia Citron in particular has detailed, Farrenc would have recognized that for many young women, their compositional aspirations and training would have been best kept quiet until some amount of success had been obtained; piano lessons, in this context, would have been apt spaces for composition education.Footnote 75 Moreover, there were numerous precedents for women being taught composition within piano and organ lessons, both in private lessons and in Conservatoire classes.Footnote 76 As Louise Bernard de Raymond has compellingly demonstrated, Reicha, one of Farrenc’s most influential composition teachers and a Conservatoire professor, not only understood keyboard performance and composition as intimately intertwined, but also mentored female composition students differently from male composition students.Footnote 77 Given that women were not beholden to the norms of the Conservatoire’s compositional training because they were forbidden from taking composition classes there during Reicha’s tenure, his compositional pedagogy for female students involved more encouragement of melodic invention and harmonic adventurousness. In addition, as Sykes has pointed out, women in organ classes at the Conservatoire in the nineteenth century received more training in harmony and composition than female students in other classes.Footnote 78 Indeed, three of Farrenc’s students who composed — Louise (Cohen) Béguin-Salomon, Augustine Lorotte, and Marie Genty — took organ lessons with François Benoist, usually after they completed their training with Farrenc, who likely knew they would receive additional training in composition in these lessons.Footnote 79 Moreover, we know that Farrenc taught or encouraged her daughter to compose, since several of Victorine’s unpublished compositions are housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Further support for the possibility that Farrenc provided her female piano students with training in composition lies in these students’ success rates in classes more closely related to composition, as well as the number of pieces her students published in the years immediately following their study with Farrenc. The Conservatoire’s class lists from 1847 to 1868 demonstrate that many of her students enrolled and thrived in harmony and accompaniment classes — classes that were generally reserved for students who had excelled in solfège courses — that would have given them additional training valuable for compositional prowess, should they choose that path (see Table 1).Footnote 80 Although the percentage of Le Couppey’s students who won prizes in harmony and accompaniment is close to or exceeds that of Farrenc’s students, this makes sense since he had been a harmony teacher prior to his appointment as piano professor and likely included harmony training in piano lessons. That Farrenc provided her students with compositional skills and advice seems especially likely given how many of her students published compositions (see Table 2). In fact, a larger percentage of Farrenc’s students — 16.4% — published compositions in the years following their Conservatoire training than Herz’s (11%) or Le Couppey’s (8.4%) (see Table 1).
PERCENTAGES OF STUDENTS FROM FARRENC’S, HERZ’S, AND LE COUPPEY’S PIANO CLASSES (1847–68) WHO TOOK HARMONY & ACCOMPANIMENT (H&A) COURSES, WON PRIZES, AND PUBLISHED COMPOSITIONS
| Farrenc
73 students between 1847 and 1868 |
39.7% took at least one year of H&A | 17.8% won prizes in H&A | 11% won first prize in H&A | Out of 29 students who took H&A, 44.8% won prizes | Out of 29 students who took H&A, 27.6% won first prize | 16.4% published compositions |
| Herz
96 students between 1847 and 1868 |
27 (28%) took H&A courses | 10 (10.4%) won prizes in H&A | 5 (5.2%) won first prize in H&A | Out of 27 students who took H&A, 37% won prizes | Out of 27 students who took H&A, 18.5% won first prize | 10.4% published compositions |
| Le Couppey
59 students between 1853 and 1868 |
21 (35.6%) took H&A courses | 10 (16.9%) won prizes in H&A | 6 (10.2%) won first prize in H&A | Out of 21 students who took H&A:,47.6% won prizes | Out of 21 students who took H&A, 28.6% won first prize | 8.5% published compositions |
STUDENTS OF FARRENC, HERZ, AND LE COUPPEY BETWEEN 1845 AND 1868 WHO PUBLISHED COMPOSITIONS
| Student | Teacher(s) | Published Compositions a |
|---|---|---|
| Marie-Louise Ausser (under Mme Dupré-Ausseur) | Farrenc | 2 published piano pieces, 1863–68 |
| Louise Frédérique (Cohen) Béguin-Salomon | Farrenc | 14 published piano pieces, 1849–94 |
| Marie-Marguerite-Louise-Aglaé Colin | Farrenc | 6 published piano pieces, 1861–65 |
| Léonide Deloigne (under Mme Viguier) | Farrenc | 3 published piano pieces, 1858–68 |
| Victorine Farrenc | Farrenc | 3 unpublished piano pieces, 1847–59 |
| Marie-Mathilde-Louise Genty | Farrenc & Franck b | |
| Hermance Lévy | Farrenc | 2 piano pieces, publ. 1856 |
| Marie Augustine Aimée Hippolyte Lorotte | Farrenc | 6 compositions (piano, voices), publ. 1855–66 |
| Hortense Parent | Le Couppey & Farrenc | 3 piano pieces, publ. 1856–71; 5 piano exercise books, publ. 1880–1920 |
| Léonie-Françoise-Catherine Roy (under L. Roy) | Farrenc | 1 piano piece, publ. 1869 |
| Sophie Maria Sabatier-Blot | Farrenc | 3 songs, 1 opéra comique, publ. 1861–65 |
| Marie Nelly Tavernier | Farrenc | 7 piano pieces, publ. 1870–74 |
| Françoise-Ida Boullée | Herz | 3 piano pieces; 2 chamber works; 1 concerto, publ. 1854–62 |
| Adelaïde-Léona-Aulnay Ferrari | Herz | 2 piano pieces, publ. 1875–88 |
| Françoise Gras (under Mme Vacher-Gras) | Herz | 2 piano pieces, publ. 1860–64 |
| Marie-Louise-Émilie-Clémence Labéda | Herz | 1 piano piece, publ. 1860 |
| Élisabeth-Aristide-Héloise Lorenziti | Herz | 8 piano pieces, publ. 1857–89 |
| Jeanne-Louise-Marie Midoz (under J. Midoz) | Herz | 2 piano pieces, publ. 1878 |
| Clotilde Riester | Herz | 1 piano piece, publ. 1866 |
| Constance-Marie Secrétain (under Marie Secrétan) | Herz | 1 piano piece, publ. 1870 |
| Émilie-Marie Sturmfels (under E. Sturmfels) | Herz | 2 piano pieces, publ. 1883–85 |
| Marie-Christine Trautmann (under Marie Jaëll) | Herz | 10 published/1 unpublished piano pieces; 3 published/4 unpublished songs; 3 published chamber pieces; 2 unpublished concertos; 1 published choral piece, 1872–1925 |
| Angélina-Joséphine-Eugénie Blankenstein | Le Couppey | 1 song, publ. 1925 c |
| Marie-Antoinette Gaillard | Le Couppey & Franck d | 5 songs, 1 piece for solo violin or mandolin, publ. 1904–09 |
| Fanny-Marceline-Caroline Rémaury | Farrenc & Le Couppey | 1 piano piece, publ. 1864 |
| Louise-Sophie Tiger (under Louise Filliaux-Tiger) | Le Couppey | 14 songs, 14 piano pieces, 5 chamber pieces, 1 orchestral piece, publ. 1880–1914 |
a Information regarding compositions and their publication dates comes from www.bnf.fr, unless otherwise noted.
b Launay reveals that Genty took organ and composition lessons from Franck; Compositrices, p. 246.
c La Croix du Nord, 14 July 1925.
d Ibid.
Whether or not Farrenc taught her students composition, she supported their careers as pianists and composers. Béguin-Salomon not only became a professor at the Paris Conservatoire, she also composed numerous piano pieces, transcriptions, piano études, and piano salon music, beginning in the 1840s when she was still a student of Farrenc.Footnote 81 Lorotte, who was Farrenc’s student in the 1840s, was a professor of solfège at the Conservatoire between 1844 and 1859, and published music for solo piano and for voices in the 1850s and 1860s.Footnote 82 Several of Farrenc’s students from the 1840s and 1850s — Hermance Lévy, Léonide Deloigne, and Marie Colin — published compositions in the 1850s and 1860s. One of Farrenc’s more successful composer students was Sophie Maria Sabatier-Blot, who published piano music, songs, and transcriptions for piano four hands in the mid-1860s and wrote an opéra comique entitled Un Mariage par quiproquo. Performed in 1862 to positive review in Le Ménestrel, this piece relays a story clearly informed by nineteenth-century French trends towards, but also feminist resistance to, arranged marriages: a young woman, Hélène, resists the arranged marriage her parents have prepared for her so that she can choose her own partner by the opera’s conclusion.Footnote 83
Many of Farrenc’s piano students became well known during their lifetimes. With the exception of Marie Jaëll (née Trautmann), who was Herz’s student and is only mentioned under her husband Alfred Jaëll’s name, and Caroline Montigny-Rémaury, who was Le Couppey’s student, none of Herz’s or Le Couppey’s students from 1842 to 1862 appear in Fétis’s Biographie universelle des musiciens (1878) — considered one of the most comprehensive encyclopedias of musicians at this time. By comparison, four of Farrenc’s students appear in Fétis’s volume: her daughter Victorine, Béguin-Salomon, Hortense Parent, and Marie Louise Mongin. These women were likely included in Fétis’s volume through Farrenc’s urging, given her and her husband’s friendship with him. Ellis has discussed how Aristide Farrenc advocated for Fétis to include Mongin in the Biographie universelle. Footnote 84 Given the extent to which, as Ellis has pointed out, Aristide included Louise’s suggestions and opinions in his correspondence with Fétis, it is not a stretch to assert that Louise may have asked her husband to try to persuade Fétis to include her students in the dictionary, thus illustrating how much Farrenc pushed for her students to be better known.Footnote 85 Farrenc also produced a significant percentage of students who held positions at the Paris Conservatoire or at other musical institutions, including provincial branches of the Conservatoire and the Opéra-Comique, and in churches. As Table 3 shows, Farrenc taught sixteen and Herz taught seventeen students between 1845 and 1870 who went on to professional positions, while Le Couppey taught fourteen. But given the small number of students that Farrenc taught (73), as compared to the number that Herz taught in the same timespan (96), 22.8% of Farrenc’s piano students became professionals, while only 17.7% of Herz’s and 25% of Le Couppey’s obtained similar positions. Le Couppey’s high number may reflect his desire, similar to Farrenc’s, to support his students in pursuing professional musical careers.
STUDENTS OF FARRENC, HERZ, AND LE COUPPEY WHO OBTAINED POSITIONS IN FRENCH MUSICAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE 1840s TO 1890s a
| Student | Teacher | Position(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Marie Hippolyte Gustavie Barles | Farrenc | Repet. de solfège at Conservatoire |
| Louise Frédérique (Cohen) Béguin-Salomon | Farrenc | Prof. à Paris |
| Léonide Deloigne (Mme Alfred Viguier) | Farrenc | Prof. à Paris |
| Louise Donne | Farrenc | Prof. agr. de solfège au Conservatoire |
| Elisa [Alice] Ducasse | Farrenc | Théâtre lyrique, 1869–72 Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique, 1872–81 Prof. à Paris |
| Berthe Gaildrau (Mme Fèvre-Croué) | Farrenc | Prof. à Paris |
| Alexandrine-Augustine-Amandine-Pélagie Laudoux | Farrenc | Concerts Lamoureux |
| Caroline Lévy (Mme Trouillebert) | Farrenc | Prof. à Conservatoire |
| Marie L’Héritier (Mme Delaunay-Riquier) | Farrenc | Prof. à Paris Opéra-Comique |
| Marie Augustine Aimée Hippolyte Lorotte (Mme Roland) | Farrenc | Prof. de solfège at Conservatoire Organist at Saint-Eugène b |
| Marie Louise Mongin (Mme Louis-Albert Coedès) | Farrenc | Prof. à Paris |
| Juliette-Anna-Françoise Nondin (Mme A. F. Weingaertner) | Farrenc | Prof. à Nantes et Paris |
| Hortense Parent | Farrenc | Opened her own piano school |
| Marie-Pauline Regnier | Farrenc | Prof. à Paris |
| Léonie-Marie-Alexandrine Rivoirard (Levielli; Mme Coulon) | Farrenc | Théâtre de l’Opéra, 1864–70; New York (1872), Milan, Marseille, Reggio, Bordeaux |
| Aline-Léonide Stadler | Farrenc | Concerts à Paris (piano) |
| Marie-Thérèse-Françoise de Besaucèle | Herz | Art. lyr. Bouffes-Par. |
| Françoise-Ida Boullée | Herz | Concerts à Paris |
| Marie-Hélène Brunet (Brunet-Lafleur) | Herz | Th. de l’Opéra Cmique Th. Lyrique Concerts de l’harmonie sacrée Prof à Paris |
| Rose-Charlotte-Lovely Chassal | Herz | Professeur au Sacré-Coeur à Bordeaux |
| Aimée-Félicie Leclercq (Mme Tarpet & Mme Ch. Monnot) | Herz | Prof. de piano cl. prép au Conservatoire |
| Françoise Gras | Herz | Prof. à Paris |
| Elisabeth-Clémence-Lucille Hardouin | Herz | Prof. au Conservatoire |
| Marie-Christine-Émile Hess | Herz | Prof. à Nancy |
| Marie-Françoise-Félicité Le Callo | Herz | Prof. à Paris (L’Institut musical) c |
| Émilie-Charlotte Leroy | Herz | Prof. de piano prep. au Conservatoire |
| Constance-Marie Secrétain | Herz | Prof. à Paris |
| Émilie-Marie Sturmfels | Herz | Prof. à Paris |
| Berthe-Clélie Thibault | Herz | Th. de l’Opéra |
| Marie-Agathe Thurner | Herz | Prof. de piano à Rouffach, Chateau-Renard |
| Marie-Christine Trautmann (Mme Jaëll) | Herz | Virt. Concerts de Paris et étranger |
| Rachel-Fanny Van Lier | Herz | Art. Lyr. Paris |
| Augustine-Jeanne-Claudine Viallon | Herz | Prof. à Paris |
| Clémence-Alexandrine Abazaer (Mme Paul Lhérie) | Le Couppey | Prof. à Paris |
| Blanche-Zoé Boulat, dite le Bel | Le Couppey | Prof. à Paris |
| Sophie-Félicie Boutoille | Le Couppey | Prof. à Paris |
| Jeanne-Henriette Celliez | Le Couppey | Prof. à Paris |
| Marie-Antoinette Gaillard | Le Couppey | Prof. agr. de solfège au Conservatoire |
| Alice Léon (Mme Dufrêne) | Le Couppey | Prof. à Paris |
| Mélanie Lévy (Mme Ducatez) | Le Couppey | Prof. à Paris |
| Hélèna-Anaïs Liauzun | Le Couppey | Prof. à Paris, Institutrice à Piac |
| Fanny-Marceline-Caroline Rémaury | Le Couppey | Virtuose; Concerts en France et à l’étranger |
| Antoinette-Mathilde Rouget de Lisle | Le Couppey | Répétiteur de clavier au Conservatoire |
| Anaïs Roulle (Mme Vander-Hoeven) | Le Couppey | Répétiteur de solfège au Conservatoire |
| Justine-Augustine Savit | Le Couppey | Prof. à Toulouse |
| Louise-Sophie Tiger (Mme Filliaux) | Le Couppey | Prof. à Paris |
a I have used terms employed in Constant, Le Conservatoire, when available. The information regarding positions comes from Constant, except where otherwise noted.
b Sykes, Women, Science, and Sound, p. 78.
c Le Gaulois, 30 October 1872, p. 4.
In addition to helping her students navigate careers as teachers and composers, Farrenc modelled, and facilitated, access to performance venues. During her lifetime, she performed with or had her works performed by many notable French musicians, including double bassist Achille Gouffé, cellists Charles Lebouc and Alexandre Chevillard, flautist Louis Dorus, violinists Jean-Delphin Alard and Joseph Joachim, and tenor Alexis Dupont.Footnote 86 Farrenc also received the support of famous conductors, venue owners, and salon hosts. Sébastien and Pierre Érard frequently provided a venue and sold tickets for her concerts, and François-Étienne Bodin hosted regular salons, many of which featured Farrenc, her daughter Victorine, or one of her piano students, as well as Farrenc’s compositions.Footnote 87 Reviews of concerts involving Farrenc’s students demonstrate that she likely used her influence to get many of the same musicians to support and perform in these concerts.Footnote 88 Even by the 1850s and 1860s, after she had reduced her public concertizing, many of the musicians who appeared in her concerts in earlier decades performed in her students’ concerts. In addition, she tried to ensure that her students would receive press coverage of their performances. A letter dated 4 March 1867 from Farrenc to a member of the French press indicates this:
I just learned with the greatest regret that the tickets that Mademoiselle Mongin meant to send to you for her concert have been sent in error to the journal at rue Choiseul. Please, Monsieur, accept her apologies, and if despite this small accident you would indeed like to say some words about this soirée, we would both be very grateful.Footnote 89
Farrenc therefore seems to have helped her students to obtain the best musicians and venues for their performances, and solid access to reviewers (and thus publicity), giving their music and musicianship the greatest opportunities to be heard.
Farrenc also seems to have used her connections in and knowledge of the publishing world to facilitate or offer advice on publication. While early in her career she published many of her compositions via her husband’s publishing firm, Aristide closed the firm around the time that Louise took up the Conservatoire post. From this point forwards, Louise primarily self-published original compositions, with a handful of pieces published by Colombier and Meissonnier; she also published arrangements and edited scores with Colombier, Richault, C. Heu, and Frere, while Leduc published several of her compositions around the time of her death. Numerous Farrenc students also chose to self-publish their compositions, including Béguin-Salomon and Sabatier-Blot. Like Farrenc, Sabatier-Blot also turned to Richault for the publication of her arrangements, and Béguin-Salomon retained Richault as a publisher from the 1850s to the 1890s, while also using other publishers active in Paris, including Deventer & Dewitt, Leduc, Brullé, Challiot, and Saint-Hilaire. Given the overlap between Farrenc’s publishers and those of her students, it is possible that she introduced her students to publishers, mentored them in the norms of music publishing, or gave them advice on how to self-publish compositions.
‘Sheroica’: Performing Politics in the Nonet (1849–50)
Farrenc’s feminist praxis also appears in her compositions, with the Nonet and its reference to Beethoven’s Third Symphony as one telling example of how she negotiated gender politics through music.Footnote 90 In nineteenth-century France, many women, frustrated with their societal positions and the limitations that these brought, found imagining, creating, and performing different positionalities a crucial means of survival and resistance. One of Farrenc’s contemporaries, Marie d’Agoult — a French author who was Liszt’s lover and the mother of three of his children — wrote that a woman, ‘by conquering the imagination, exciting the mind, and stimulating the brain to reexamine received opinions, will make an impact on her century by other means than, but perhaps just as effectively as, a legislative assembly or an army captain’.Footnote 91 Similarly, Foley discusses the importance of imagination in the lives of nineteenth-century French girls, taking the experience of Lucile Le Verrier, the daughter of French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier and the author of Journal d’une jeune fille Second Empire, as a notable example:
As 14-year-olds, she and her friend Elisabeth played a game in which they assumed male personae and enacted imaginary adventures based on historical events. […] Two years later, at 16, her imaginary games may have been abandoned but she had taken refuge in her singing. When singing, she wrote, she imagined herself as one of the ‘heroines’ of the aria, and made ‘exciting voyages in the world of the imagination’.Footnote 92
Farrenc’s Nonet likewise offers an example of nineteenth-century French feminist imagination at work. By alluding to Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Farrenc engages in a practice of citation popular among her contemporary feminist authors, such as Germaine de Staël and Claire de Duras, both of whom famously quoted, alluded to, or intertextually engaged with novels, epics, and poetry by famous male authors, often to make a political point about the fraught nature of gendered expectations.Footnote 93 Thus we might understand Farrenc as putting into music what she modelled for the women musicians she taught: play by most societal rules, but simultaneously and subtly, through musical imagination, challenge gendered social norms and express how things could be otherwise.
Farrenc’s Nonet (1849) demonstrates her awareness of nineteenth-century genre conventions for instrumental music. The instrumentation and organization engage with contemporary traditions for chamber music, showcasing her exceptional skills in composing in this genre — she won the Académie des Beaux-Arts’s prestigious Prix Chartier for chamber music composition twice during her lifetime, in 1861 and 1869.Footnote 94 The Nonet is a chamber piece in four movements for nine instruments that suggests an altered string quartet (violin, viola, cello, and double bass rather than two violins, viola, and cello) combined with a woodwind quintet. With this instrumentation, Farrenc was likely paying tribute to her teacher Reicha, a prolific wind quintet composer who had written three Grandes symphonies de salon — the first for nine instruments, the second and third for ten — in the 1820s, at around the time or just after Farrenc studied with him.Footnote 95 As in Reicha’s Grandes symphonies de salon, the Nonet’s instrumentation implies a small orchestra. Indeed, Farrenc’s contemporary critics underlined that the piece’s four-movement structure and its movements’ organization resembled that of a symphony — a genre with which the composer was extremely familiar, given that she had already written three, in 1841 (op. 32), 1845 (op. 35), and 1847 (op. 36).Footnote 96 In all her symphonies as well as in the Nonet, Farrenc composed a sonata-form first movement with a slow introduction, a slow second movement, a third movement that is a dance form or a scherzo, and a final movement in a fast tempo. Her decision to compose a piece that resembles a symphony with smaller performing forces may have been informed by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire’s decision to deny her request for a performance of her Second Symphony in November 1849, since they had ‘fulfilled all of [their] obligations towards her’ after showcasing her compositions, including her Third Symphony in April 1849.Footnote 97 As many women composers at the time knew, a chamber piece for nine instrumentalists, designed for performance in a salon or small concert hall, would have been easier to have performed than a large symphonic work.Footnote 98
There are numerous similarities between Farrenc’s Nonet and Beethoven’s Third Symphony that indicate that Farrenc’s reference was purposeful. Like the ‘Eroica’, the Nonet is in E♭ major, with a first movement in sonata form (standard for first movements at the time), a third-movement scherzo, and a theme and variations for the fourth movement. Heitmann has noted several musical connections between the Nonet and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, including the fact that both scherzo movements are in C minor; she emphasizes that Farrenc’s references to Beethoven’s Fifth in the Nonet would be difficult to hear, and a score would be helpful, if not necessary, to locate these references.Footnote 99 Farrenc’s allusion to the ‘Eroica’ in the Nonet, however, would have likely been audible to audience members familiar with this symphony; indeed, I realized this reference through listening to the movement rather than through score study.
Farrenc makes a connection to the ‘Eroica’ in the thematic content of her Nonet’s first movement. The first reference appears when she introduces the first theme in bar 24 at the start of the Allegro section (see Example 1a). Here, she changes the time signature to 3/4, matching the time signature of the first movement of the ‘Eroica’. In addition, Farrenc’s first theme and Beethoven’s (in Example 1b) are exceedingly similar: both involve downwards followed by upwards movement through the pitches of an E♭-major triad, and the two share the same rhythmic pattern. Despite these similarities, the connections between the two themes may have been obscured for some listeners for at least two reasons. First, Farrenc places the first iteration of the theme in the violin, whereas Beethoven introduces his theme in the cellos. Second, where Beethoven’s theme begins with movement from E♭ up to G and then back to E♭ before moving down to B♭, Farrenc’s theme begins on G, then proceeds to move downwards through an E♭ arpeggio.
Farrenc, Nonet, movement 1, bars 24–27, violin.
Beethoven, Third Symphony, movement 1, bars 3–8, cellos and basses.
Yet in the first movement’s coda, Farrenc emphasizes the similarities between the themes, rendering the connection between the two much clearer. At bar 382, just after the violin cadenza, she places the movement’s first theme in the horns, which is how the theme appears in the Beethoven (see Example 2a). Moreover, rather than have the downbeat of the theme’s fourth bar land on a note outside the E♭-major triad, as she had in every previous instantiation of the theme, Farrenc has the horn player make one crucial and illuminating change: to repeat the B♭ they had just played at the end of the theme’s third bar. In the ‘Eroica’, the horns also repeat B♭ in their performance of the theme at the beginning of the coda (see Example 2b).Footnote 100 If listeners familiar with Beethoven’s movement had not heard the thematic similarities at the start of the 3/4 section of the movement, Farrenc’s re-composition of the theme in the coda would definitely have increased the likelihood that they would hear it in the coda.
Farrenc, Nonet, movement 1 coda, bars 382–86, horn (transposed from score).
Beethoven, Third Symphony, movement 1 coda, bars 630–33, horn (transposed from score).
But why Beethoven? And why the ‘Eroica’ Symphony? Although the reception of Beethoven in France in the early nineteenth century indicates that neither his music nor his Third Symphony were as popular in France as they were in Austro-Germany at this time, the symphonie héroïque was often applauded by critics and audiences alike.Footnote 101 The symphony as a whole was significantly less popular or well-known than just the second movement, the Marche funèbre, the most frequently performed part of the symphony in France in the 1820s to 1840s. In addition to being performed in concerts, the Marche funèbre movement was a frequent sonic counterpart to the funerals of notable musicians during this time, including those of Jean-Jacques Grasset, the Théâtre-Italien’s orchestra conductor, and François-Antoine Habeneck, the conductor of the Paris Opéra and the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire.Footnote 102 The story about Beethoven’s fraught dedication to Napoleon on the symphony’s title page was commonplace, as were readings of the symphony in terms of heroism.Footnote 103 Numerous critics observed the ‘vigour’, ‘energy’, and ‘originality’ of Beethoven’s symphonies in general and of the symphonie héroïque in particular — a piece that sometimes drew comparisons to other symphonists, as in this 1853 review:
Beethoven does not have the limpidity, the naive grace of Haydn, nor the pure and square allure of Mozart nor the melodic sequencing of their thought; but what vigour in the conception! What magistral spontaneity! What nerve in the instrumentation! What an original turn, unexpected in the context of the phrase! This marche funèbre of the symphonie héroïque is one of the most moving compositions of the maestro, as this scherzo is one of his most charming inspirations.Footnote 104
In mid-nineteenth-century France, then, Beethoven was considered a master of symphonic music and instrumental music more broadly, whose compositions, and especially the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, offered examples of musicalized heroism and masculine ‘vigour’.
Beethoven’s Third Symphony also held associations with the Conservatoire at this time. During Farrenc’s lifetime, the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire performed his compositions in every single concert from the orchestra’s debut in March 1828 until 1875. The orchestra featured the symphonie héroïque in thirty-eight concerts, including as the first piece of its debut concert, as well as in programmes for the start or conclusion of a season in nine instances, and for Good Friday or Easter four times.Footnote 105 The Conservatoire’s programming of Beethoven was so voluminous that in 1841, Berlioz pleaded to stop having to review Conservatoire concerts for the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris; he was disappointed by the repetitive programming and felt he had nothing left to say about Beethoven.Footnote 106 This rise in the programming of Beethoven’s and other composers’ symphonic works coincided, especially in the 1840s, with a decline in interest in solo virtuoso performers and their compositions, as well as critical attacks on them — Farrenc’s colleague Herz was a frequent target of these.Footnote 107
Beethoven’s symphonie héroïque was also famous in France for its connection to the 1789 Revolution and Napoleon. Farrenc, like most French musicians of the time, would have been aware of the history of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, including the dedication to Napoleon and its subsequent removal. Aristide Farrenc was among the first editors to publish Beethoven’s complete works in France, publishing his Third Symphony in 1831. Although Aristide knew the symphony’s historical context, he decided not to include Beethoven’s preface, dedication, and performance instructions in this early French edition of the work. This decision resulted in a critique in the Revue de Paris in April 1836; the author summarized the current stories about the symphony, including Beethoven’s disappointment in Napoleon, and suggested that the composer wrote this piece not for the general, but rather in response to Prince Louis de Prusse’s death.Footnote 108 The Farrencs would have likely been aware of this review of Aristide’s edition; if Louise had somehow not known about the work’s political history prior to the 1836 review, she almost certainly knew about it by the time of the Nonet’s composition.
Given the social and political contexts of Farrenc’s France, as well as her compositional choices, her Nonet and its references to Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ can be understood as a subtle but subversive take on French gender politics, the musical and gender politics of the Conservatoire, and the 1848 Revolution. In her life, Farrenc excelled in toeing the gendered social line and challenging gender norms in ways that were subtle but effective; she performs a similar negotiation of gendered musical norms in the Nonet. The masculine associations of the symphonie héroïque, its heroic musical language and title, and its historical associations with male figures provide critical context for Farrenc’s allusion. Because the listener may not fully recognize the reference until the end of the Nonet’s first movement, despite it being present from the beginning, it is possible to understand Farrenc’s quotation as a musical wink that prompts a questioning of the essentialist nature of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ social and musical categories. Considering that this kind of questioning and challenging was also present in some nineteenth-century French feminist literature, thought, activities, and activism, we can understand Farrenc as communicating the extent to which women, and not just men, can be heroes of their own stories and geniuses of musical composition, even if surreptitiously.Footnote 109
Given what Dana Gooley has termed the ‘battle against instrumental virtuosity’ in the 1830s and 1840s, Farrenc’s quotation of Beethoven can also be interpreted as a veiled comment on her colleague Herz’s diminishing popularity as a performer, his lacklustre teaching practices, which were lampooned in the press, and the fact that he continued to be paid a salary greater than hers even while on tour in the United States and South America.Footnote 110 This reading seems especially plausible since Beethoven was considered an exemplar of ‘serious’ instrumental music, compared to what was being framed at the time as the ‘superficial’ virtuosity of performer-composers like Herz. Herz’s absence from the Conservatoire and Farrenc’s concerns about the salary inequities there overlap precisely with the composition and premiere of her Nonet.Footnote 111
Farrenc may have also been engaging with the practices of contemporary French feminist authors. In Corinne, Germaine de Staël famously took male authors’ novels as models, but challenged the notion that only men could be heroic protagonists by writing a novel that featured a strong, heroic, genius female protagonist.Footnote 112 There is a strong chance that Farrenc read Corinne, given de Staël’s fame and the novel’s popularity, especially among educated bourgeois women.Footnote 113 As Ellen Moers has written,
Corinne served as a children’s book for a special kind of nineteenth-century child: girls of more than ordinary intelligence or talent, and rising ambition to fame beyond the domestic circle. Reading Corinne made an event of their youth — for some, a catalyst to their own literary development.Footnote 114
Raised in a bourgeois French family of artists, Louise Farrenc may have been one of the many French girls who read and was inspired by the unconventional female genius of both Corinne and de Staël.Footnote 115 Even if she had not read the book, she was likely familiar with the protagonist’s literary, artistic, and musical genius, which de Staël showcased extensively throughout the novel.Footnote 116
This feminist reading of the Nonet is bolstered by the work’s closeness in timing to the 1848 Revolution, which numerous women who had been advocating for French women’s rights had supported. Significantly, this Revolution was followed by the election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as the president of France in December 1848; he was elected via the first French presidential election since the legalization of universal male suffrage — a bone of contention, as previously mentioned, for many feminist thinkers and activists. Farrenc published the Nonet in 1849 and its first performances took place in the early months of 1850.
Given these contexts for Farrenc and her Nonet, then, I suggest that the chamber work can be read as a feminist and political statement in multiple ways. The timing of its composition, in the years just after the 1848 Revolution, as well as Farrenc’s allusion to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, one of the most famous pro-revolutionary and pro-republican musical pieces of the time, suggests that the Nonet functioned as a subtle musical performance of republican politics and, perhaps especially, of wariness surrounding Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s election — and for good reason, given his coup d’état just three years later. In addition, Farrenc’s woman-supporting approach to her and her students’ careers, as well as her quotation of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, intimates a reading of the Nonet as a challenge to the fixity of gender roles in nineteenth-century France and an articulation of the possibility of women as musical geniuses. Finally, due to the timing of the Nonet’s composition during Herz’s absence from the Conservatoire, as well as Beethoven’s association with the rise of ‘serious’ music there and in Paris generally, the piece may also provide a window into Farrenc’s commentary on the position and musical inclinations of her Conservatoire colleague Herz.
Conclusion
Louise Farrenc’s musical career has often been considered remarkable, especially given how many women in nineteenth-century France were barred from professional opportunities to which men had relatively easy access. Indeed, her career was extraordinary, not only for her obvious successes but also for how she modelled and practised a forward-thinking, woman-centred method in her teaching and mentoring. Her musical compositions tell the story of a woman who, like many of her literary contemporaries, found ways to express her disdain for gendered understandings of women’s ‘natural’ roles, works, qualities, and performances. Through examination of Farrenc’s life, music, and career, of the careers of her many talented students, and of her sociocultural context, a woman comes to light who can be a model for women musicians today. We still need a kind of feminism in which women support other women in order to create more equitable musical cultures and just societies.
Open access
