Until recently it was widely accepted that female composers avoided writing symphonies – but examples galore show that this assumption could not be further from the truth, as Rebecca Franks explains
A recently published history of the forgotten women of classical music set out to ‘glory in the songs and sonatas that they did write, rather than grieve for the operas and symphonies that they could not’. While those songs and sonatas are important, they do not present the whole story. For over the centuries, women have written symphonies. A good number, in fact. Just as the novel is a building block of Western literature, so is the symphony a fundamental part of Western orchestral music – and women have always been part of its history.
Accounts of its development usually start with the ‘father of the symphony’, Haydn, before exploring how Beethoven revolutionised the form, then turning to the Romantic composers as they took it into transcendent territory. Despite the proliferation of styles in the 20th century, the symphony has endured – though today it is symphonic writing more broadly defined than the specific multi-movement form that is now seen as a badge of honour for a composer. That narrative rarely includes pieces by women; but here now, in this alternative history of the symphony, their work takes centre-stage.
Let’s rewind to the 18th century, when the very idea of a symphony was coalescing, drawing on the Italian opera overture, Baroque church and chamber sonata, and ripieno concerto. Amid this time of orchestral innovation emerged Marianna Martines (1744-1812), a Viennese composer, harpsichordist and singer who studied with Haydn and played piano duets with Mozart. Her great successes lie in the realm of vocal music, but in 1770 she also planted the flag for women symphonists. Her lively Sinfonie in C, also described as an Ouverture, is most likely the first symphony by a woman.
It was in the 1840s, though, that women really got going with symphonic writing. Louise Farrenc’s three symphonies lead the way. ‘Her exceptional talent… unites a feeling for melody with the science of sound,’ wrote the critic Henri Blanchard after hearing the 1841 premiere of the First Symphony, while her Third Symphony of 1847 was programmed alongside Beethoven’s Fifth. A piano prodigy who became one of the first female professors at the Paris Conservatoire, Farrenc could easily have stuck to being a performer, but composition lessons with Anton Reich
