When Clara Schumann wrote, ‘A woman must not desire to compose – not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to?’ she can’t possibly have known about her illustrious predecessors, who include the 12th-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen, Francesca Caccini, jewel of the Medicis, or Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, France’s first female opera composer.
Clara was by no means alone yet, even today, female composers of the past are still not on an equal footing with their male counterparts. Here's our guide to the female composers from history whose music should be more widely appreciated than it is today....
While you're here, why not also have a look at our round-up of the best living female composers making music today?
Famous female composers
1. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)
Abbess, visionary, leader, poet, dramatist, herbalist and composer, Hildegard von Bingen stands out in music history as an artist in control of her context.
Her musical legacy, of nearly 80 surviving works including a morality drama Ordo Virtutum, is one of the largest of any Medieval composer. She wrote for her own convents and nearby monasteries, supervising the copying of manuscripts.
Hildegard von Bingen's collection of pieces following the liturgical forms of antiphons, responsories, sequences and hymns is entitled Symphony of the Harmony of Heavenly Revelations. Her musical style is characterised by great boldness, as ecstatic melodies vault upwards in wide intervals of fourths and fifths, and a dramatic use of flowing lines, with soaring arches encompassing more than an octave.
2. Barbara Strozzi (1619-77)
One of 17th-century Venice’s most famous singers, Barbara Strozzi was also the composer of eight volumes of dramatic vocal music.
Probably the illegitimate daughter of a servant and Giulio Strozzi, the enlightened dramatist and librettist, she became his ‘elected’ daughter, and pupil. After her father’s death, Strozzi relied on composition for her livelihood. She wrote eight volumes of dramatic vocal music, and also enjoyed a highly successful singing career.
Chromatic tensions, expressive lines and long virtuoso runs mark Barbara Strozzi's style, whose flamboyance hints at her own vocal powers.
3. Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665-1729)
The 'Sun King' Louis XIV, no less, was a patron of the Parisian harpsichord prodigy Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre. She played for him at the age of five, and was taken under the wing of Madame de Montespan until she married the organist Marin de La Guerre, which enabled her to pursue her career.
Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre's name appears in one of the first published collections of harpsichord music, dating from 1687. She also wrote secular Cantates françoises and the first opera by a woman to be staged in France, Céphale et Procris (1694).
Try her violin sonatas, with their bold, structural freedom and sense of drama, and which the Sun King reportedly found ‘most fine, but also original – a quality that today is extremely rare.’
4. Louise Farrenc (1804-75)
One of France’s major composers of the 19th century, Louise Farrenc was also influential as performer and professor at the Paris Conservatoire.
Among her most popular pieces are two piano quintets, the beguiling and original Op. 44 Piano Trio with clarinet and cello, the Wind Sextet and the ambitious Nonet. She also wrote several symphonies, the Third praised by a critic as a ‘strong and spirited work’. We had no hesitation in naming Louise Farrenc as one of the greatest French composers of all time.
5. Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-47)
One has only to hear Fanny Mendelssohn’s String Quartet to know how fiery a talent was lost through her early death. She and her famous brother Felix Mendelssohn studied composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter who wrote to Goethe that Fanny ‘could give you something of Johann Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special.’
Her own father was tolerant rather than supportive, while Felix, while respecting her talent, clearly felt ‘she is too much all that a woman ought to be for this’. A typical response to any of the female composers featured in this list, that makes you roll your eyes in despair.
Queen Victoria herself made the gaffe of ascribing her ‘favourite’ Mendelssohn song, ‘Italien’, to Felix, only to discover it was by his sister Fanny.
Fanny Mendelssohn penned 460 pieces, including the turbulent Piano Trio in D, Quartet in E flat, a Piano Sonata in G minor, exquisite songs and the piano cycle Das Jahr. She suffered her fatal stroke while conducting one of Felix’s oratorios.
More famous female composers
6. Clara Schumann (1819-96)
‘Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before. But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing.’ So wrote Robert Schumann, the man who both inspired and hampered his pianist-wife’s creative career, as did her ultimate need to support six children.
Clara Schumann composed her own virtuoso piano music from a young age, including her Variations on a theme by Bellini and bravura Piano Concerto in A minor, written at just 16. Her later, sombre, unfinished Konzertsatz in F minor and Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann Op. 20 reveal the blossoming of an individual voice, as does the graceful, rigorous G minor Piano Trio Op. 17, and quietly desperate Romances Op. 21/22.
A towering musician, Clara Schumann's influence on the repertoire, on the recital format and on an approach to the piano that favoured searching musicianship over display are as important legacies as her music.
Read our reviews of the latest Clara Schumann recordings
7. Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)
A brave suffragette and a skilled composer, Ethel Smyth refused to remain trapped by Victorian conventions. Cheerfully independent, she defied her father by studying composition at the Leipzig Conservatory though, disappointed by the standards, she moved on to study privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg, who introduced her to Brahms and Clara Schumann.
The salon world of ‘feminine’ songs and piano miniatures was not one for Ethel Smyth. From the off she was composing in ambitious, large-scale forms, including the Double Concerto for horn and violin, the Mass in D and six operas. Der Wald was staged at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1903, while her comic opera The Boatswain’s Mate drew contemporary praise for its delightful, conversational style.
8. Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-53)
Ruth Crawford Seeger is a key figure in this list – not for the size of her output, but its radical originality. Here was a woman who could ‘sling dissonances like a man’.
Who was Ruth Crawford Seeger?
In March 1930 Ruth Crawford Seeger was the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Europe. In Berlin she composed the visionary and wordless Three Chants, followed by her most famous work, the String Quartet (1931), an astonishingly original and coherent masterpiece which continues to influence composers today. In her works of this period one senses a mind interrogating the essential construction of music with a forensic focus and wild freedom.
- We also named Ruth Crawford Seeger one of the best American composers of all time. She was also stepmother to Pete Seeger, one of the greatest folk singers ever.
9. Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944)
Cécile Chaminade published over 400 compositions and had an international following that included Queen Victoria. Born in Paris to musical parents, Chaminade studied with teachers at the Paris Conservatoire before embarking on a career as a virtuoso pianist.
When she visited the US in 1908, Chaminade was subjected to a huge amount of criticism from the press, much to do with the idea of what sort of music a woman should or should not compose. When she composed lighter, sweeter music she was criticised for writing ‘overly feminine’ music.
Conversely, when she performed her larger-scale, more developmental music she was lambasted for attempted to write music in the style of a man. Her Flute Concertino remains a staple of the repertory today, and her other large works have been compared to the works of Wagner and Liszt.
10. Amy Beach (1867-1944)
By the time Amy Beach was one year old, she could sing over 40 songs. When she was five, she composed works for piano in her head (without an instrument), and aged seven she gave her first public recital of music by Chopin. This prodigious musical intelligence continued throughout Beach’s teenage years, though it was tempered first by her parents and then by her husband.
Her Mass in E flat major was the first by a woman to ever be performed by the Handel and Haydn Society, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered her Gaelic Symphony and Piano Concerto, with Beach herself as the soloist. Beach also wrote many chamber music works and songs, two of which (Ecstasy and The Year at the Spring) sold thousands of copies and gave her an income for the rest of her life.
After her husband’s death in 1910, Amy Beach went on a concert tour of Europe, though she was forced to return by the outbreak of World War One. After that, she spent winters touring the US, and summers composing at her estate in New Hampshire until she retired to New York City in 1940.
Read our reviews of the latest Amy Beach recordings
More famous female composers - from Britain, France and the US
11. Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979)
Rebecca Clarke was born in Harrow to a German mother and American father. Her early life was dictated by her controlling and often-abusive father who, she revealed in her late memoirs, would regularly beat his children for minor offences such as nail-biting. He withdrew Clarke from the Royal Academy of Music after her harmony teacher proposed to her, and later banished her from the family home, forcing Clarke to leave the Royal College of Music, where she had been CV Stanford’s first female pupil.
She supported herself as a professional viola player, and in 1912 she became one of the six first female musicians to play in a professional orchestra when Proms founder Sir Henry Wood admitted her to his Queen’s Hall Orchestra. Clarke’s greatest composing success came during her years in the US when her Viola Sonata, was written for the 1919 Berkshire Festival of Music Competition in America, tied with a sonata by Ernst Bloch.
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Clarke became stranded in the US, where she was forced to live with her brothers. Desperate for independence, she took a role as a governess in 1942, a move that marked the end of her composing career.
12. Lili Boulanger (1893-1918)
A prodigy who died at just 24, Lili Boulanger made history when, at 19, she became the first woman to win the Paris Conservatoire’s Prix de Rome with her cantata Faust et Hélène. In doing so she trumped her sister Nadia (another of the great female composers, who had entered four times, winning second prize in 1908).
Ill health plagued Boulanger’s short life – bronchial pneumonia as a toddler probably led to Crohn’s Disease – but she was ambitious, phenomenally gifted and determined to make her mark. Her music displays a voice of smart originality, an ear for piquant colour and atmosphere, and a flair for text setting.
We named Lili Boulanger one of the greatest ever composers who died before 40.
13. Florence Price (1887-1953)
As an African-American female, Florence Price had to overcome prejudice on two fronts to become a composer. And despite growing recognition for her music, most of her 300 or so compositions are yet to be published. Born in Arkansas, Price studied with her mother and then at the New England Conservatory and, privately, with George Whitefield Chadwick.
She came to national fame in 1923, when her Symphony in E minor won the Wanamaker Competition; its premiere a decade later by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra made Price the first African-American woman to have an orchestral work performed by a major American orchestra – an ensemble at the time peopled entirely by white men.
Price wrote several other large-scale orchestral works, blending spirituals, African-American dance rhythms, jazz and classical idioms, and was also a prolific song composer. It was her arrangement of My Soul’s Been Anchored in de Lord that Marian Anderson sang at the end of her historic performance at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939.
14. Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-94)
A blue plaque in the Essex village of Shottesbrook proudly lists Dame Elizabeth Maconchy as a former resident. She moved there in her 1950s, having already established herself as a prolific composer. Born in Hertfordshire, she spent her childhood in Ireland before returning to London to study under Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music.
Her composing debut came in 1930 when the Prague Philharmonic performed her Piano Concerto. Maconchy’s chamber works range from a cycle of 13 string quartets to works for double bass and piano and for oboe and harpsichord.
Her operas include The Sofa (1957), a mischievous story about a prince who is turned into a piece of furniture, and The Departure (1961), in which a mezzo-soprano plays the victim of a fatal car crash. Her choral works are no less diverse, ranging from carols, including 'Nowell! Nowell! Nowell!', to mystic pieces like Sun, Moon and Stars.
15. Ruth Gipps (1921-1999)
British composer Ruth Gipps was fabulously stubborn during her lifetime, refusing to be boxed in to a single category. Musically, she straddled various careers as a composer, conductor, pianist, oboist and teacher.
As a composer too, Gipps refused to follow the pack and turned her back on atonality and modernist trends that were dominating the music scene of the time. Instead, she mastered an unashamedly Romantic musical style, often celebrating the majesty of rural England.
After many years of neglect, her music finally saw something of a renaissance with her centenary year in 2021, when her Second Symphony was given its very first outing at the BBC Proms.
We also included Ruth Gipps in our list of the best English composers of all time.
Written by Helen Wallace, Oliver Condy, Elinor Cooper, Rebecca Franks, Jeremy Pound and Freya Parr
