On 15 May 1842, Farrenc was appointed to a permanent piano professorship at the Paris Conservatoire, a position she held for three decades as the only woman on its faculty.
On 15 May 1842, Louise Farrenc was appointed Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire, one of the most prestigious and influential music institutions in Europe. This appointment was extraordinary: for the entire nineteenth century, she was the only woman to hold a permanent, salaried professorial chair at the Conservatoire, an institution otherwise dominated entirely by men in senior faculty and leadership roles.
Farrenc held this position for thirty years, until her retirement in 1872, training generations of pianists including several who went on to win the Conservatoire's prestigious performance prizes. Her class was renowned for its rigor and for producing prizewinning students, cementing her reputation as one of the finest piano pedagogues of her generation.
The appointment is historically significant not only for its rarity but for the precedent it set regarding women's professional standing in institutional music education. Despite her evident excellence, Farrenc was initially paid less than her male counterparts for equivalent work. This appointment, and her subsequent decade-long fight for equal pay, positioned her as an early and largely unheralded advocate for gender equity in professional compensation, decades before such advocacy became a broader movement.