The Nonet in E flat for winds and strings, Op. 38 (1849), is an unusual work in Louise Farrenc’s output. It is her only surviving chamber work without piano – her three symphonies and two concert overtures are the only other pieces in her catalog of forty-nine numbered works that do not use the piano – and it was composed for a nonstandard ensemble that combines the woodwind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) with four orchestral string instruments (violin, viola, violoncello, and double bass) to create a large chamber ensemble of virtuoso soloists. Unlike the piano trio, string quartet, or even the Parisian salon quintet with double bass,¹ ensemble types that had generated dozens of works since the end of the eighteenth century, to the point that phrases like “piano trio” or “string quartet” indicated not just the ensemble of instruments or players, but a musical genre itself with specific compositional conventions and expectations, the nonet as such was new in the nineteenth century. Although it echoes earlier genres like the divertimento and serenade for winds or for winds and strings, or the “Harmoniemusik” of eighteenth-century aristocratic courts, Farrenc’s Nonet belongs to an emergent nineteenth-century concert tradition of large chamber ensembles that had become popular in Paris at the beginning of the century. Septets, octets, and even diecettos (for ten instruments) with and without piano had become important centerpieces for some chamber-music concerts, where they provided a theatrical “hook” for audiences who wanted something that stood apart from the standard trios and quartets on offer at most such events. This specific instrumentation had only two precedents before Farrenc composed her work: the Nonet in F major, Op. 31, composed in 1813 by violinist Louis Spohr (1784–1859) at the request of his Viennese patron Johann von Tost, and the Nonet in A minor, Op. 77, by Farrenc’s contemporary George Onslow (1784–1853), which he composed for performance by Paris’s Society for Classical Music in 1848.

Farrenc (1804–1875) was at the height of her career as a composer in 1849, riding a wave of critical and public acclaim for her symphonies and chamber music, as well as her solo piano compositions. Celebrated as a “learned” musician and composer of “serious” music, she had earned a reputation over the previous decade as one of Paris’s best composers of the juste milieu, or the “middle way” between the old and the new styles. How and why did her specific situation, and that of Paris’s chamber concert scene, lead her to write an esoteric work for wind instruments instead of, for example, a set of string quartets or a piano quartet at this juncture? How did this unusual piece capture the tastes and idiosyncrasies of Parisian audiences at this historical moment, leading it to be her most renowned work, destined to be performed and praised throughout her lifetime despite the challenges it posed (and still poses) to performers and concert organizers?

This handbook invites readers to enter into Farrenc’s musical world in order to explore the Nonet as a work that is simultaneously extraordinary, on the one hand, not only for its craftsmanship and its expressive potency but also by virtue of its unusual instrumentation, while on the other hand being wholly representative of the day-to-day musical culture of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Chapter 1 begins by setting the scene with a description of Farrenc’s grand solo concert on March 19, 1850, when the Nonet was publicly premiered, so that readers less familiar with the concert conventions and culture of the period will have some sense of what it might have been like to hear this work in the original setting for which it was created. The chapter then recounts the series of events that led up to that performance and made possible the composition and presentation of the Nonet. Throughout the 1840s, Farrenc worked within a network of like-minded musicians (including performers, salonnières, and composers) to expand Parisian interest in instrumental music, especially in genres associated at the time with German composers and with “serious” compositional styles. Histories of music in Paris have tended to focus on musical theater, especially French and Italian opera, and on the culture surrounding virtuoso performers, with some discussion of developments in orchestral writing (focused, often, on Hector Berlioz’s innovations) and instrument design. These professional activities generally took place in public venues and were often written about in music journals and newspapers, making them “visible” to modern scholars. Chamber music, however, occurred primarily at home and in the semi-private, semi-public space of the salon or the “house concert.” A great part of its appeal was the intimate setting and feeling of being included in an event designed for a select few listeners. That setting also meant that it was the special purview of women musicians, who could participate without the stigma associated at that time with putting themselves on public display. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Louise Farrenc and the circle of professional and semi-professional women performers, composers, and teachers to which she belonged sustained public interest in a growing canon of earlier chamber works from the eighteenth century, and they created or inspired new works that developed that style further. The role that women musicians played in creating an audience for “serious” chamber music in Paris at and after the middle of the century has not yet been fully acknowledged in music history. Even more surprising for modern readers, perhaps, is the role that music for winds played in bringing audiences to these concerts and making these events memorable for critics, thereby preserving them for modern musicians and historians.

Chapter 2, the heart of the book, takes readers through the Nonet movement-by-movement to show how Farrenc used her intimate knowledge of Parisian tastes and her familiarity with the repertoire and conventions of Classical and Romantic music to negotiate changing expectations of listeners and musicians at the mid-century. The Nonet and Farrenc’s other chamber works created a bridge between musical traditions that would make possible later innovations in instrumental music by the likes of Gabriel Fauré and César Franck. The analysis in Chapter 2 highlights the playful interactions and dialogue that make the Nonet engaging for performers and listeners, as well as Farrenc’s innovative approach to form and structure that mark the Nonet as a consummate work of compositional craft and ingenuity. Chapter 3 concludes the Handbook with a discussion of the Nonet’s reception and legacy by exploring the ways in which it and Farrenc’s other chamber works formed a foundation for critical acclaim in the composer’s lifetime but were ultimately forgotten by later generations who were all too happy to push aside composers of the middle decades, characterized as too beholden to a German or Viennese classical past, in their rush to support a nascent French nationalist tradition in the last quarter of the century.

Before turning to the Nonet, though, we should consider how Louise Farrenc came to be one of the most celebrated pianist-composers of mid-century Paris and the roles that Paris’s early nineteenth-century musical culture, its institutions, and the people associated with them played in her development as an artist and musician. The discussion that follows draws upon earlier scholarship by Bea Friedland, Catherine Legras, and Christin Heitmann, while also offering for the first time English translations of important reviews and responses to Farrenc and her music published during and after her lifetime as well as new analysis of these in the context of Paris’s complex musical culture.² However, the available record of Farrenc’s life remains frustratingly incomplete and scattered at the time of this writing, as Heitmann noted twenty years ago in her book on Farrenc’s chamber and orchestral music.³ Bea Friedland’s 1980 book (based on her 1975 dissertation) remains the best biographical source and the only one in English, but it contains errors and omissions awaiting correction. Louise Farrenc’s (documented) surviving correspondence includes just eighteen letters in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, but Heitmann also cites twelve letters preserved in various German and Austrian archives. None of these are currently available to the public online or in published/translated editions (and they are not provided in full in either Friedland’s or Heitmann’s book). Revelations like these indicate that a more thorough search for sources among Aristide and Louise Farrenc’s known contacts is still needed in order to get a complete picture of the couple’s life and work. In the meantime, the information we do have about Louise Farrenc and her career entices us to learn as much as we can about this fascinating composer.

The Virtuoso Pianist-Composer of the 1820s–1830s

Born in 1804 into a family of artists employed by the French crown, or the French government during France’s Republican years, Jeanne-Louise Dumont grew up in an artistic community housed together in apartments owned by the state nearby to the Sorbonne. She initially studied piano with a family friend, and when she showed a precocious talent for solfège and composition in addition to performance, she was allowed to study privately with composer Anton Reicha, who was employed as a professor of counterpoint and harmony at the Paris Conservatoire du Musique, or Conservatory. Her family’s devotion to art and craftsmanship alongside its relatively secure middle-class status meant that Jeanne-Louise had opportunities and support to pursue her craft professionally, unlike women born into more elevated social strata, such as Fanny Mendelssohn, or women born into lower status without the financial resources or time to pursue further studies. Because Jeanne-Louise was the younger of just two children and her parents were securely middle-class, she likely had few if any household duties and did not need to earn an income as a child laborer, maid, or governess to help support her family. In this way, we could say that she grew up in a sort of social “sweet spot” for artistic development. At the same time, her parents seem to have had no expectation that she would take up the life of a touring virtuoso, as many young musicians (men and women) did in the early nineteenth century, often with prompting from teachers and/or family members who sought to capitalize on their status as prodigies (such as Clara Wieck Schumann and, to a lesser extent, Carl Maria von Weber). Rather, Louise studied with local teachers and took full advantage of Paris’s thriving music culture to gain further knowledge of contemporaneous musical tastes and traditions. According to a biographical sketch published in 1866, she consulted with pianists Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel about her technique as a young woman, but there’s no evidence to suggest that she studied formally with either of them.⁴ (Both artists spent significant time in Paris during the 1820s, and Hummel became a family friend and professional colleague; Louise’s husband Aristide Farrenc published many of Hummel’s compositions in the 1830s.)

Jeanne-Louise’s early years coincided with the “Napoleonic” wars that eventually engulfed the entire European continent and spilled into colonial holdings and disputed territories in North Africa, the Middle East, and North America. Despite the turmoil occurring on the larger world stage, the situation in Paris was relatively secure, in part because the city and its artistic institutions served Bonaparte’s mission to project imperial authority and the efficiency of centralized power in the capital. Indeed, the Napoleonic years offered Paris’s middle and upper classes a renewed sense of stability and luxury after the violence of the Revolution and its aftermath, and this led to increased opportunities for local musicians. The first decades of the century saw a return of opulent church music, which had been banned during the revolutionary era, and grand theatrical productions that celebrated a triumphant national French identity and revolutionary valor.⁵ After Napoleon’s abdication and final defeat in 1815, the Bourbon Restoration brought émigrés back to France; many musicians who had fled to cities like London or Vienna returned to Paris, where they now founded schools, factories for instrument making, publishing houses, and concert series. The music industry flourished in Paris during the 1820s, driven in part by the “Rossini craze” that generated a wave of new compositions, arrangements, parodies, and souvenir editions of excerpts from the Italian operas being performed at the Théâtre-Italien and at other theaters throughout Paris’s suburbs. Rossini himself spent the years 1824–1829 in the capital, where he not only led new performances of Italian favorites but also created French versions of his recent works and composed new operas specifically for the French stage, such as the opéra comique Le Comte Ory in 1828 and Guillaume Tell in 1829. He brought Giacomo Meyerbeer to Paris in 1824 to stage that composer’s heroic opera Il Crociato in Egitto. During the 1830s, Rossini, Meyerbeer, and Daniel Auber developed a new operatic style (“French Grand Opera”) that would have a far-reaching impact throughout Europe and North America for the next several decades.

Jeanne-Louise developed her musical instincts and compositional skill in this climate of sumptuousness, in which lavish opera productions coexisted with simpler sentimental romances by popular composers like Loïsa Puget (1810–1889) and August Panseron (1796–1859), and an expanding culture of virtuoso salon and concert performances brought these two modes of expression together for an adoring public. Her early compositions show her to be an inventive creator of popular virtuoso works, well versed in the dominant piano styles and genres of her day, but not a slavish imitator of others. In 1821, when she was seventeen years old, Jeanne-Louise married the flutist, composer, and publisher Aristide Farrenc (1794–1865), who would prove to be a supportive partner and collaborator on musical projects. Aristide encouraged his wife to continue her studies with Reicha, to publish her compositions (her early works were published by his firm), and to perform publicly. Louise Farrenc, as she would be known from then on, published one of her own compositions for the first time in 1822, when Aristide’s firm issued her Variations brillantes on a theme by Aristide, Op. 2. By 1825, she had published a series of quadrilles – a social dance popular in the parlors and salons of Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century – based on melodies from popular operas of the early 1820s. (Aristide Farrenc’s firm published them without opus numbers in 1825; they paraphrased melodies from C. M. von Weber’s Der Freischütz, Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail, and Meyerbeer’s Il Crociato in Egitto. Around 1830 she also published a set of quadrilles on national airs.⁶) In the next fifteen years, she would compose and publish over twenty solo piano works in the virtuoso style, mostly sets of variations and rondos. About half of these were based on popular opera melodies being heard in Paris’s theaters and salons at the time, including Rossini’s La Cenerentola and Zelmire; Bellini’s Il Pirata, I Capuleti e I Montecchi, and Norma; Donizetti’s Anna Bolena; George Onslow’s Le Colporteur; Weber’s Euryanthe; and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. The majority of Farrenc’s piano compositions in these years were issued in simultaneous editions by Aristide’s firm in Paris and by various international publishers: J. Duff in London, Peters in Leipzig, Simrock in Bonn, Aible in Munich, and Böhme in Hamburg. In this decade, Farrenc also made arrangements of popular works by pianists Henri Herz and Franz Hünten, primarily for German publishers. These arrangements gave her further insight into the virtuoso techniques of her day, which she would then use in her own compositions, in addition to building her reputation with publishers and audiences. Her original compositions published in the 1830s often bore dedications to important patrons and performers in Farrenc’s growing network of French musicians; the majority of these honor other women, mostly pianists. Farrenc dedicated two works to the salon hostess and piano teacher Sophie Pierson-Bodin (1819–1874), who was her only dedicatee to receive multiple dedications: the Variations sur une galopade favorite hongroise, Op. 12 (1833) and the Trente Études dans tous les tons majeurs et mineurs, Op. 26 (1839). Farrenc also dedicated her Variations brillantes sur la cavatine d’Anna Bolena de Donizetti, op. 15 (1835) to the composer and pianist Leopoldine Blahetka (1809–1885), a child prodigy who had established a virtuoso career in Vienna, then gave several tours throughout Europe in the next two decades; she and her family moved to France in 1830. Farrenc’s dedications of her published works to fellow professional women musicians like these, as opposed to wealthy amateurs, helped her to build and sustain a network of professional women in Paris and its environs. That ever-expanding network would support and sustain her throughout her career, and she would use it to lift up other young women, including her pupils, over the next several decades.

The first mention in the press of Louise Farrenc as a performer comes from January 1828, when she and Aristide played in a soirée hosted by the piano manufacturer Jean-Henri Pape. Throughout the nineteenth century, it was common for instrument builders to host concert series in specially built recital halls or large salons at their homes or factories. These allowed them to build and maintain collaborative relationships with artists who would purchase and promote their instruments and to demonstrate the latest developments in instrument design and manufacture. Demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between builders and players of instruments, reviews of major concerts in these years frequently mention the piano builder who provided instruments for the evening’s performance and praised new features that enhanced the sound. During her lifetime, Farrenc and her students would play at the Salle Pleyel, the Salle Érard, and the Salle Saxe, in addition to private salons and larger theaters. The program at Pape’s soirée opened with a Fantaisie for flute and piano “composed and executed by Monsieur and Madame Farrenc,” and Louise performed with Hieronymus (Jérome) Payer a set of variations for two pianos (composed by Payer) in the concert’s second half.⁷

Two years later, in July 1830, the Farrencs gave a major concert featuring works by their friend Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837), who also played an improvisation at the end of the concert. The announcement and subsequent review in the Revue musicale described the event as a concert “given by Mme Farrenc,” probably because she appeared on the program as featured pianist in the ensemble work that opened the concert and as piano soloist later in the evening.⁸ The recurring columns “News from Paris” and “News from the departments” were typically unsigned, but the reviewer was probably François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871), who had founded the Revue musicale in 1827. Fétis served as both editor and head critic for the journal, and he wrote lead articles for it that presented his original research into the history of music and the science of sound. (In 1835. the Revue musicale merged with a musical newspaper published by Maurice Schlesinger, and the resulting Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris became one of the most important journals devoted to concert music in France until it ceased publication in 1880.) Fétis was a friend and colleague of Aristide Farrenc, who would work with him on musicological studies and historical concerts until Aristide’s death in 1865.⁹ Fétis championed Louise Farrenc’s orchestral compositions in Brussels after he moved to that city in 1833 to become director of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels.

The July 1830 review described Louise Farrenc’s performance using language that would become common in discussions of her and her works over the next decade:

The association of Farrenc and her music with “serious study” and with an apparent refusal to succumb to mere “frivolity” and “mechanical” virtuosic display would become an important aspect of her public persona. As with other women pianists of her generation, critics valued Farrenc’s adherence to a classical ideal of restraint and balance in her programming and performance, noting that she played with greater understanding and depth than lesser (usually unnamed) contemporaries.¹¹ Significantly, the Hummel Military Septet that was premiered on this concert is a mixed large-ensemble work for piano, flute, clarinet, trumpet, violin, violoncello, and double bass. Because it was a newly composed work by a popular and well-respected composer and because of its unusual and characteristic instrumentation – the interplay of trumpet and other winds suggested military bands for contemporaneous listeners, and Hummel used them to good effect with fanfares and other martial topics that capitalized on this association – the work made a strong impression on listeners and critics. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, chamber music concerts included works like this, at least in part, to capture the attention of Parisian audiences through novelty and variety of timbres. That the Farrencs recognized this useful aspect of wind chamber music already in their 1830 debut concert points forward to Louise’s engagement with wind players later in her career up to and beyond the creation of her Nonet.

A few days after Louise Farrenc’s successful 1830 concert, Parisians took to the streets to protest the July Ordinances, a set of restrictive laws enacted by Charles X’s government in an attempt to hold onto power despite increased opposition to its conservative policies from progressive representatives in the Parliament. The July Revolution, also known as the “Three Glorious Days,” established a new constitutional monarchy in France. The crown moved from the Bourbon family to the house of Orléans, and the provisional government adopted a new charter that further limited the monarch’s powers and concentrated voting and governing rights within the ranks of the landed gentry and rich bourgeoisie. The July Monarchy oversaw a rapid industrialization in France in the 1830s and 1840s, including the expansion of railway systems and factory networks that began to concentrate the population in cities and larger towns. For the upper middle classes, to which Aristide and Louise Farrenc belonged, these were good years, as the new king Louis Philippe and his cabinet instituted policies and government subsidies that were favorable to business and supported a growing bourgeoisie. Paris became the “capital of Europe,” with musicians flocking to the city to study at the Conservatory, to perform at the many opera houses and theaters (or to have their compositions performed there), and to give concerts. The violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini conquered Paris in 1831, and his performances there and throughout Europe at this time inspired a generation of performers, not only violinists, to explore new techniques on their own instruments. The pianists Fryderyk Chopin, Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, Sigismond Thalberg, and Franz Liszt would each create a new, distinctive approach to the piano in the 1830s alongside contemporaries like Henri Herz, Ferdinand Hiller, and Ferdinand Ries.

Despite the brief disruption of the 1830 revolution, the Farrenc family continued to make music, to grow their business, and to expand their network of professional contacts beyond the borders of France throughout the 1830s. (Their daughter Victorine Farrenc was born in 1826. She would become Louise’s star pupil; a gifted pianist and composer of songs, she was praised in the Parisian press for her performances of her mother’s works as well as canonic works by Hummel and Beethoven, until she became debilitatingly ill as a teenager. She died in 1859, just thirty-three years old.) Although she did not engage in the career of a traveling virtuoso, Louise did travel with Aristide to England at least twice in the early 1830s, as we know from his letters to Hummel. Aristide mentions that Louise’s performances there were well received and led to publication contracts. She may have accompanied him on trips to German and Austrian cities in these decades, too, to negotiate with publishers and connect with musicians who might perform her works, but documentation does not survive to confirm any further travel outside France.

By the late 1830s, Farrenc’s compositions had begun to garner critical attention in France and abroad, which would bring new opportunities in the 1840s. In 1836, Robert Schumann included Farrenc’s recently published Air russe varié, Op. 17, in an omnibus survey of nine variation sets by various composers. After typically acerbic comments about what he sees as the mediocre and vapid productions of the average virtuoso and a lukewarm assessment of works by Franz X. Chwatal and H. W. Stolpe, Schumann turns to Farrenc’s variations. His paragraph provides unusually high praise, and it does so without qualifying his remarks by expressing surprise that they were composed by a woman (as many contemporaneous reviews would do throughout the 1840s). For these reasons, his review merits quotation in full:

Schumann identifies two traits that infuse almost all of Farrenc’s mature compositions: Her propensity to create themes that lend themselves to learned manipulations of motives, which we might also link forward to developmental processes employed by Brahms and his generation in the later nineteenth century, identified by Arnold Schoenberg as “developing variation”; and her subtle mixture of Romantic elements within a Classically oriented work. Like many of her contemporaries and the slightly younger generation that Schumann represents, Farrenc’s music conveys heightened drama through an expanded harmonic palette (compared to the music of Haydn and Mozart, for example) and a strong lyrical impulse, both of which impact her formal designs in the mature chamber music. Yet, Farrenc rarely took these innovative techniques to their extreme. Like other popular French composers of instrumental music in this transitional era, such as George Onslow, Farrenc found a “middle path” or juste milieu between the Classical styles or conventions of the past and the new techniques being explored by her most daring contemporaries, such as Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner. We will return to the notion of the juste milieu shortly.

Farrenc performed her Air russe varié and several of her other compositions in a solo matinée concert at the Salle Pleyel in 1838. The critical response from established Parisians was similarly glowing. The anonymous reviewer for La France musicale described the Air russe varié as “unquestionably one of the outstanding works published in this genre,” and noted that it “rises above the conventional form.”¹³ Antoine Elwart, writing for the Revue et gazette musicale, praised the composer’s “vigorous” and “virile” style while noting that,

The eight Études that Elwart mentioned represented a selection of numbers from Farrenc’s Trente Études (published 1839). This major work would be one of her most important compositions of the 1830s because it solidified her reputation as a consummate musician of the modern day. It began to position Farrenc as a composer not only of fashionable works in genres associated with pianistic virtuosity, but also of learned pieces in a more “serious” or academic style. These pieces demonstrated her mastery of pianistic technique, compositional depth, and integration of modern harmonic and melodic tastes within a style that appealed to listeners with a variety of backgrounds. When Maurice Bourges, one of Paris’s most influential critics, published a lengthy and detailed review of the Études in 1840, he suggested that they should be required study for all pianists.¹⁵ That review alongside positive responses to performances of Farrenc’s two concert overtures and her set of variations for piano and orchestra (the “Gallenburg” Variations, Op. 25) smoothed her transition from virtuoso pianist-composer to composer of chamber music and other works in “classical” genres.

Between about 1839 and 1850, Farrenc completed a series of chamber works that included two quintets for piano and strings (Op. 30 and Op. 31), two piano trios (Op. 33 and Op. 34), two sonatas for violin and piano (Op. 37 and Op. 39), and the Nonet for Winds and Strings (Op. 38). She also completed three symphonies in this period (Op. 32, Op. 35, and Op. 36), solidifying her reputation as a composer of serious music. After 1850, she would go on to write a sextet for piano and winds (Op. 40), a trio for clarinet with cello and piano (Op. 44), a trio for flute with cello and piano (Op. 45), and a sonata for piano and cello (Op. 46). All of these chamber works were published in her lifetime except the nonet and sextet. (The clarinet trio and flute trio were published with alternative violin parts to replace the wind instruments.) This body of works is the direct result of a change in priorities and musical ambitions at the end of the 1830s, for Farrenc individually and for musicians and audiences like her in Paris and beyond.

The Composer of “Serious” Music, 1840s to 1860

During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the musical cultures of Europe gradually incorporated the principles of Romanticism into their artistic work and aesthetic, which led composers and musicians to create new genres, to expand their expressive horizons, and to develop new compositional techniques (like the expanded harmonic language, lyrical impulse, and longer, more complex forms pioneered by Schubert and Beethoven in the 1820s). The generation that came of age in the 1830s, including Robert and Clara Schumann, Fredyreck Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner, led the charge in creating new genres to fulfill the Romantic desire to intermingle different art forms, or, to merge the poetic and painterly with the musical. In this, they followed the inspiration of writers and artists who had flourished a few decades earlier, at the turn of the century.

As a counterpart to the science- and reason-oriented philosophy of the Enlightenment, which dominated literary culture in much of the eighteenth century, philosophical and literary Romanticism privileged unfettered emotion, imagination, mystery, and spirituality. Romantics attempted to cast off conventional expectations and forms and to pursue what they considered more innate and personal styles in poetry, drama, and music. The movement began with writers and musicians like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who had both sought the origins of human culture in the arts and language of the past. Herder and Rousseau collected folk songs and created translations and pseudo-translations of poems and songs from throughout Europe, North America, and other colonized regions, an activity that would later provide materials and inspiration for fantastical exotic works depicting faraway lands and people with what were considered bizarre or barbaric social customs. They and their followers in the next generation of writers celebrated folk and indigenous cultures (for example, François-René de Chateaubriand’s novels and theoretical writings about the “noble savages” of the Americas). Farrenc’s choice of “a Russian air” for her Op. 17 set of variations is indicative of this newfound love of exotic folk materials; she also composed variations on Swiss and German themes (Air Suisse varié, Op. 7; Variations sur un thème Allemand, Op. 28) that capitalize on folklore’s appeal with audiences and musicians.

Linked to this fascination with people and cultures living in a “natural” state – which is to say outside the strictures of formal aristocratic courts, the legal and economic responsibilities of cities, and other cosmopolitan bureaucracies – was a newfound reverence for the distant past, especially for the art and architecture of the Middle Ages, which led to new literary and artistic forms. French and German Romantics alike were inspired by new editions and translations of Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante, whose dark tragedies about human failings especially resonated with a generation of artists that came of age during or in the shadow of the Napoleonic wars. Gothic novels and poetic sagas explored the macabre and grotesque, the otherworldly, and unappreciated and lonely geniuses shunned by polite society but firm in their commitment to truth and art. Cornerstones of the literary movement include the epic poems of Ossian from the 1760s, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774, 1787) and Faust (1808, 1831), Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), and Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), all of which inspired multiple musical works in the form of operas or music dramas, programmatic tone poems, sets of character pieces, and song settings throughout the nineteenth century.

Despite the popular appeal of Romantic themes and musical innovations, especially on the operatic stage, an influential group of critics and editors in Paris (and, to a lesser degree, in other cities throughout Europe and North America) found the new style too brash, too chaotic, and dangerous. Much as the leaders of the July Monarchy sought to find a workable compromise between the excesses of anarchy and absolutism, French critics supported composers exploring a middle way, or juste milieu, in instrumental music that would reinterpret the Classical past for the modern age without slipping into the extremes of Romanticism. Henri Blanchard summarized the taste of influential conservative critics in an 1845 review of a symphony in C minor by Carl Czerny that, to his ear, too closely imitated Beethoven’s infamous model in the same key (his fifth symphony):

Critics were not alone in their desire for a “middle way” or “happy medium” between Classicism and Romanticism, especially as an alternative to the programmatic music of Félicien David, Hector Berlioz, and Franz Liszt. In the 1840s, many composers and musicians who had been associated with the first wave of musical Romanticism turned their attention backwards in time and sought renewal in older forms and genres. Fryderyk Chopin gave one of his very rare public concerts in April 1841 at the Salle Pleyel, and afterwards began what Jim Samson calls “a reexamination of his artistic aims” that included close study of counterpoint treatises and increased perfectionism in his new compositions.¹⁷ The 1840s also saw Robert Schumann turn from the art songs and idiosyncratic character pieces or musical miniatures for piano that had been his focus in the previous decade toward the symphony and chamber music. He produced his first two symphonies alongside other orchestral works and three string quartets, the piano quintet and piano quartet, two piano trios, and several other chamber works in this decade. In short, the 1830s had been characterized by the introduction and absorption of literary and philosophical Romanticism into musical life throughout central Europe, inspiring new approaches to composition and performance traditions as well as new genres. The 1840s, then, would be characterized by a return to earlier traditions and, for many composers, a dedication to infusing large-scale instrumental forms with this new Romantic aesthetic. The same tendency is evident in the works and activities of Louise Farrenc and her associates, particularly the women pianists who would cultivate an avid audience for chamber music in Paris during the 1840s (as we will see in greater detail in Chapter 1).

In the 1830s and 1840s, Paris also experienced a renaissance of instrumental music that critics and professional musicians, such as violinist and quartet leader Pierre Baillot (1771–1842), had been working to achieve for the previous two decades. New concert series for orchestral and chamber music took root, offering Parisian listeners a wealth of Classical and newly composed works. In 1828, the faculty and students of the Paris Conservatory, led by conductor François Habeneck (1781–1849), had founded an orchestral concert series under the auspices of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire that set the tone for instrumental music-making in Paris throughout the nineteenth century. Habeneck, who led the orchestra until 1848, introduced the symphonies of Beethoven to Paris and helped to build an audience for these and other “serious” (Viennese Classical) works among concert goers. Subsequent groups and concert series sought to duplicate the success of that series in other musical arenas, and in later decades rival organizations such as Hector Berlioz’s Philharmonic Society tried to counter what they saw as the overly conservative programming of the Conservatory concerts with new series of their own.

The flourishing of concert series created new opportunities for composers like Louise Farrenc, who turned her attention and compositional energy towards chamber music and the symphony around 1839 and largely abandoned the composition of piano showpieces for the next decade. (Her set of variations for four-hand piano duo on themes from Bellini’s I Capuletti, Op. 29, was published by 1841 and probably composed around 1839–1840; it is the last work in that style by Farrenc. The piano music she published in the 1850s and early 1860s consists of sets of Études, Mélodies, and single-movement character pieces like the Nocturne, Op. 49, and the Valse Brillante, Op. 48.) In the wake of her successful 1838 solo concert and the positive reviews of her music by prominent critics, Farrenc composed two piano quintets for the popular Parisian instrumentation (piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass) but using the Viennese four-movement structure with sonata forms in each of the outer movements.¹⁸ Shortly after their publication, Georges Kastner reviewed these two works in a lengthy and detailed article in the Revue et gazette musicale.¹⁹ Farrenc designed them with the Parisian public in mind and crafted the two quintets to demonstrate her compositional skill while also captivating listeners through virtuosic passagework for the piano, and they show her navigating the competing demands of critics and audiences during a transitional period in musical culture. Over the next ten years, Farrenc would continue to make judicious choices attuned to the needs and desires of her surroundings in three symphonies – each of which would be performed to critical acclaim in Paris and Brussels in the 1840s and 1850s, though they remained unpublished in Farrenc’s lifetime – as well as two piano trios and two violin sonatas, all composed in the 1840s and published in the early 1850s.

Farrenc’s reputation expanded in this era beyond that of a skilled pianist-composer with a sophisticated technique and taste, to include considerable renown as a teacher of music. In 1841 Helene von Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the Duchess d’Orléans (crown princess of France) engaged Louise Farrenc as a music teacher for herself and her children on the recommendation of the composers Fromental Halévy (1799–1862) and Daniel Auber (1782–1871); the latter was then serving as director of court concerts for the royal family. (Farrenc dedicated her second piano quintet to the duchess when it was published in 1842.) A year later, in summer 1842, Auber became director of the Paris Conservatory and offered Farrenc a position as Professor of Piano there. She began her thirty-year tenure at this institution in September 1842.

Farrenc excelled as a teacher of piano at the Conservatory, as demonstrated by the success of her students at competitions. The Revue et Gazette musicale published results of the Conservatory’s annual exercises throughout the century, and Farrenc’s pupils regularly finished in the top positions of their classes. In 1845, the piano department apparently adopted her Trente Études as a required component of the curriculum, further endorsing her role as a leading pianist and pedagogue.²⁰ Despite these affirmations, Farrenc was paid less than her male colleagues, including the pianist Henri Herz, who was hired in the same year and at the same rank, and the string players Jean-Delphin Alard and Auguste Franchomme, who were both hired after Farrenc. In November 1850, after the successful premiere and positive buzz generated by the Nonet for winds and strings and performances of her symphonies in Paris and abroad, Farrenc confronted Auber about this salary disparity and convinced him to raise her pay to equal that of her male colleagues (1,200 francs).²¹ In her letter dated November 11, 1850, Farrenc notes that she had approached Auber about the salary disparity over a year earlier and now sought some definitive action from him on the matter. It seems that her persistence and the trajectory of excellence that she could now demonstrate were persuasive.

No artist works in a vacuum. This discussion has shown some of the ways that Farrenc’s career responded to changes in musical culture from her piano-centric compositions and performances in the 1820s and 1830s to a more Classically oriented concert style in the 1840s and 1850s. Those changes connect to shifts in musical practice and the broader cultural context of Paris and its distinct musical institutions. Chapter 1 illuminates how Farrenc and her music, specifically the Nonet for winds and strings, reflect the specific activities of musicians in her inner circle and their efforts to sustain an audience for chamber music in Paris during the years surrounding the Revolutions of 1848.