Louise Farrenc grew up in Paris during the Revolutionary period that saw the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and of different monarchies in France. These political changes impacted the Parisian musical scene and influenced Farrenc’s career and that of her friends and colleagues. Farrenc began her career as a virtuoso pianist-composer writing popular works like sets of variations on opera melodies and folksongs, but at the end of the 1830s, she changed her musical path. In the 1840s, like many composers in Central Europe at the time, she abandoned the virtuoso music of her youth to write chamber music with and without piano as well as three symphonies. She became known as a composer of serious music, an upholder of “German” traditions in France, and critics wrote about her compositions as representing the best new music of France. Her Nonet for Winds and Strings provides a culmination of the work she had done up to that point as a composer and performer devoted to finding a “middle way” between the Classical and Romantic traditions.