Louise Farrenc was born in 1804, just a few years before Schumann and Mendelssohn, and her music inhabits the same early Romantic world as theirs, with its roots particularly in Beethoven and sometimes indebted also to Weber. Farrenc lived and studied in Paris, where her piano teachers included Hummel and Moscheles; she went on to have a successful career as a pianist, and became a professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire – the institution’s only female professor in the whole of the 19th century – but at that time women were unable to study composition there, and so from the age of 15 she took lessons privately with Anton Reicha.
