Death of Louise Farrenc in Paris

Louise Farrenc died in Paris on 15 September 1875, at the age of 71. By the time of her death, she had built a legacy as one of the most accomplished French composers of the Romantic era, having produced three symphonies, numerous chamber works, overtures, and piano compositions that were praised in her lifetime by critics and fellow musicians, including Robert Schumann and Hector Berlioz.

Her death came after a long and multifaceted career as composer, virtuoso pianist, and the first woman to hold a permanent professorship at the Paris Conservatoire. In her final years she had largely stopped composing following the death of her only daughter, Victorine, in 1859, a loss from which she never fully recovered creatively, though she continued teaching and remained active in editing a significant historical anthology of keyboard music, Le Trésor des pianistes, with her husband Aristide Farrenc.

Following her death, much of Farrenc's music fell into obscurity for over a century, a fate shared by many women composers of the era whose works were excluded from the standard concert repertoire despite critical acclaim during their lifetimes. It was not until the late twentieth and early twenty-first century revival of interest in women composers that her symphonies and chamber works began to be rediscovered, recorded, and performed again, restoring her rightful place in the history of French Romantic music.