Classical music has long been dominated by men – not because women weren’t composing, but because they were excluded from the classical music canon.

The concept of a canon – from the Greek kanon, meaning ‘rule’ – refers to the so-called timeless masterpieces that define any given art form. In music, the classical music canon was formed during the nineteenth century – a time when women had few rights and little access to public life. Many women composers – including Louise Farrenc, Fanny Hensel, Emilie Meyer, Clara Schumann, Augusta Holmès, Cécile Chaminade, Ethel Smyth, Amy Beach and Lili Boulanger – actually flourished as composers during the nineteenth century and wrote many works alongside their male peers, although their works were not included within the classical music canon.

The classical music canon became deeply rooted through concerts, history books and music education. As a result, many people have never heard a single piece by a woman composer, let alone know their names.

In this article, and also in the accompanying video, we’ll be sharing the stories of a range of nineteenth-century women composers: who they were, what they composed, and what they achieved in their lifetimes.

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Fanny Hensel (born Mendelssohn, 1805–1847) and Clara Schumann (1819–1896) are currently two of the most well-known women composers of the nineteenth century. They were both related to famous male composers – Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) and Robert Schumann (1810–1856) – which has tended to shadow their achievements until relatively recently.

Like her more well-known brother, Fanny Hensel was also a German pianist and composer. Unlike her brother, the Mendelssohn family strongly discouraged a public career as a professional musician for her, although they couldn’t stop her from pursuing a remarkable semi-private career within her renowned Berlin musical salon, known as the Sonntagsmusiken.

Hensel composed nearly 500 works, including piano pieces, chamber music, cantatas, and over 250 songs. Despite her vast output, she was best known during her lifetime for her influential salon, where she organised concerts and appeared as a pianist and conductor.

Fanny Hensel (born Mendelssohn)

Clara Schumann was a German composer, teacher and pianist. She composed a substantial body of piano music, songs, her Piano Trio in G Minor, and her Piano Concerto in A Minor (which she started work on at the age of only 13!).

Clara Schumann

Clara Schumann was trained as a concert pianist by her father, the famous piano pedagogue, Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873), who vehemently opposed her marriage to the composer Robert Schumann. In one of the most famous musical tugs of love, Clara and Robert eventually even had to go to court to marry without Wieck’s consent.

During their famous musical marriage, Clara Schumann gave birth to eight children, composed, championed Robert’s works (which were relatively unknown at the time), and taught extensively. After the death of Robert in 1856, Clara Schumann spectacularly revived her career as a pianist and supported her family by pursuing one of the most celebrated concert careers of the nineteenth century.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) is arguably the most famous composer of the nineteenth century. His works had a major impact on the development of nineteenth-century music and on concert life. He was particularly renowned as a composer of symphonies. After his death, it became the dream of every male composer who followed him to write a symphony which could measure up to his. It was not only men who were writing symphonies in the early nineteenth century, however. Louise Farrenc (1804–1875) and Emilie Mayer (1812–1883) both composed symphonies, alongside works in a wide range of other musical genres.

Louise Farrenc was a French composer, pianist, teacher and music scholar. She was born into the famous French Dumont family of artists, although she herself favoured music. By her mid-teens she was already a professional concert pianist and also a promising composer. In 1821, she married her fellow musician, scholar and music publisher Astride Farrenc (1794–1865).

Louise Farrenc

As a composer, Farrenc produced large bodies of piano and chamber music, two Concert Overtures, and three Symphonies. In 1842, she became a piano professor at the Paris Conservatoire. At the Conservatoire, she successfully fought for equal pay, earning the same salary as her male counterparts.

Emilie Mayer was a German composer, pianist and sculptor. She was commonly described as the ‘female Beethoven’ during her lifetime and is considered one of the most prolific German woman composers of the Romantic era.

Mayer studied with the well-known German song composer Carl Loewe (1796–1869) and travelled and performed throughout Europe. She composed extensively, including eight Symphonies, a Piano Concerto, an Opera, and many Orchestral Overtures, as well as chamber works, piano pieces and songs. Mayer was highly regarded during her lifetime and her music was widely performed.

The French composer of Irish parentage Augusta Holmès (1847–1903) also focused on writing large-scale orchestral works. Although Holmès published some of her early works under a male pseudonym (‘Hermann Zenta’), she later published under her own name.

As a composer, Holmès is particularly well known for her symphonic poems, including Irlande (1882) and Pologne (1883), which often carry powerful political and patriotic messages. In 1889, she was commissioned to write the Ode Triomphale as part of the Exposition Universelle (World Fair) which was organised to mark the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. This work – which was so grand it required 1,200 musicians – was performed as part of the official state commemorative celebrations in Paris in September 1889.

Born slightly later than Holmès, her sister French composer Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944) unfortunately fared rather less well when she also initially tried to establish her reputation as a composer of large-scale orchestral works. Her early large-scale works – which included a Suite d’Orchestre (1881), a Comic Opera (1882), a Symphony (1884), a Ballet Symphony Callirhoë (1888), her Konzertstück (1888), and a Concertino for Flute and Orchestra (1902) – were criticised in the contemporary music press as trying to be too ‘masculine’ and ‘virile’.

Cécile Chaminade

Following the gendered and also somewhat hostile reaction from the (largely male) music critics towards these early large-scale compositions, Chaminade turned her attention instead to writing piano works. She was a gifted pianist herself and also a remarkably astute business-woman. Her piano works became extremely popular, and she found a massive following for her compositions among amateur pianists. In the US, her music inspired so much passion that hundreds of Chaminade music clubs were founded.

The English composer, conductor, and author Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was a close contemporary of Chaminade. She wrote and published a wide range of works: six operas, a Mass, chamber music and songs. Smyth’s opera Der Wald (1901) made history in 1903 as the first by a woman to be staged at the New York Metropolitan Opera.

But Smyth wasn’t only a composer. She was also a passionate suffragist. In 1910 she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union and focused on campaigning for women’s rights. In 1911 she composed a suffragist anthem entitled The March of the Women, which she dedicated to Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928). Smythe was even prepared to go to prison to ensure that women were given the right to vote, serving two months in Holloway in 1912 for smashing a cabinet minister’s window.

The American composer and pianist Amy Beach (1867–1944) had a major impact on the development of American classical music. Beech made her début with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1883, when she was only 15. She then pursued a highly successful career as an acclaimed concert pianist until she married the society doctor and well-known surgeon Dr Henry Harris Aubrey Beach (1843–1910). In 1885 Beach’s husband got her to agree to severely curtailing her concert career after their marriage – restricting her public recitals to just one a year. Instead, he encouraged her to focus her efforts on composition. After her marriage, she became known as Mrs H.A.A. Beach.

Beach flourished as a composer, writing over 300 works, including her Mass in E flat (1892), ‘Gealic’ Symphony (1896), and over 115 songs. After her husband died in 1910, she revived her career as a concert pianist and thereafter spent her winters touring as a pianist and her summers composing. In 1925, she co-founded and became first president of the Society of American Women Composers.

Born at the very end of the nineteenth century, the French composer Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) had a profound impact on French music, despite dying tragically young at the age of only twenty-four.

Boulanger was born into a musical family – her mother was a singer, her father a composer, and her sister Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) would become a renowned teacher and conductor. Her precocious musical gifts were apparent from the age of just two. Unfortunately, she also became ill with bronchial pneumonia at the same age, and her immune system was permanently weakened. She was ill for almost the rest of her life, suffering from regular flare-ups of the chronic intestinal tuberculosis which ultimately led to her early death.

Boulanger became the first woman to win France’s famous composition competition, the Prix de Rome (which women had only been allowed to enter since 1903), in 1913 for her cantata Faust et Hélène. Despite her brief career, Lilian Boulanger also composed dozens of compositions, including piano works, songs, and several large-scale works for choir and orchestra.