Notes for: July 30, 2019
Add Louise Farrenc to your list of composers whose work should be much better known. Clara Schumann (whose Piano Trio you’ll hear next week) and Fannie Mendelssohn weren’t the only two gifted 19th-century female composers. But the obstacles placed in the way of women who wanted to compose were daunting – for many years, for example, women were excluded from composition classes at the Paris Conservatory. Given that bias, Louise Farrenc’s achievements were all the more impressive.
A piano prodigy, Louise Dumont was encouraged from an early age by her family of well-known painters and sculptors. She studied with two renowned piano virtuosos, Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, then at 15 began to study composition with the composer Anton Reicha. After she married the flutist Aristide Farrenc at 17, she began a life of touring as a pianist as well as composing. Among her most striking compositions were the Nonet, scored for an unusual combination of nine wind and string instruments and performed by the famed violinist Joseph Joachim; the Symphony No. 3, a sensation when it was performed at the Paris Conservatory; and the Sextet for piano and winds, an instrumental combination that wouldn’t be used again until Poulenc’s Sextet 90 years later. Schumann and Berlioz praised her compositions. Twice the Academie des Beaux-Arts awarded her the Prix Chartier for chamber music, an unprecedented honor for a woman. The Paris Conservatory added her Thirty Etudes for piano to their mandatory piano curriculum. Her fame as a pianist also led to her appointment as a full professor at the Paris Conservatory – the only woman to hold that rank. And, as if her plate weren’t full enough, with her husband – a music publisher who published many of her works – she compiled a 23-volume anthology of early keyboard music.
Farrenc was influenced by Beethoven’s stretching of Classical norms, and she shared some of Brahms’s Romantic ardor. You’ll hear this in her Trio for Flute, Cello, and Piano, which gracefully melds Classical form with a flair for the Romantic. From the brief chordal fanfare that opens the sonata-form Allegro to the animated coda with which it ends, the momentum never flags. Seductive lyrical melodies combine with dramatic broken chords and brilliant scalar runs that pass from instrument to instrument to keep the movement moving propulsively forward. Farrenc’s affection for wind instruments is evident in the Andante, where the flute takes center stage with a gentle melody that only briefly gives way to an agitated middle section. The exuberant, rhythmically striking Scherzo features a lovely cello line in the trio and virtuosic turns for everyone. A spirited, harmonically colorful Finale splendidly combines bravura with lyricism – a most satisfying end to this gem of a Trio.