Chamber Music by Women Composers Schumann, Lebrun, Bond, Boulanger, and Carreño

By Georg Predota

Franz von Lenbach: Clara Schumann

Clara Wieck-Schumann (1819-1896) confided in her diary, “a woman must not wish to compose—there never was one able to do it. Am I intended to be the one? It would be arrogant to believe that.” Her husband Robert was supportive of Clara’s creative efforts, but his opinion on her role was inflexible. “To have children and a husband,” he writes, “who is always living in the realms of imagination do not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out. But Clara herself knows her main occupation is a mother, and I believe she is happy in the circumstance and would not want them changed.”

Clara and Robert Schumann

Such attitudes have actively discouraged or even barred women from pursuing careers as composers for a very long time. It forced Clara Schumann, one of the most talented and distinguished composer-pianist of the 19th century into a “struggle for self-assertion and survival amidst competition, personal disappointments, devastating sorrow, and the challenges of managing both family and career.” Yet despite these obstacles, Clara and other women have persisted in writing music, and their achievements have been hiding in plain sight for centuries. Music by women composers, living or dead, was rarely heard in major concert events. Thankfully this embarrassing situation is gradually changing, and we decided to advance this matter by showcasing some of the most exiting chamber music compositions written by women. Let’s get started with the G-minor Piano Trio, Clara Schumann’s best-known compositions. Composed in 1846, it is her masterpiece and sadly one of the few multi-movement works in her catalogue.  

Thomas Gainsborough: Franziska Danzi Lebrun

Franziska Danzi Lebrun (1756-1791) came from a highly talented musical family. Her mother Barbara Sidonia Margaretha Toeschi was a professional dancer and her father Innocenz Danzi a renowned cellist working at the Mannheim court. Her brothers Franz and Johann Baptist, in turn, were professional instrumentalists and successful composers. Franziska was trained as an operatic soprano, and she first publically appeared at the age of 16. Shortly thereafter, she was engaged by the Mannheim opera and highly sought after for her vocal dexterity. Contemporary composers such as Anton Schweitzer, Ignaz Holzbauer, and Antonio Salieri would cast her in leading roles in their most challenging operas. In 1778, Franziska married the composer and oboist of the Mannheim orchestra Ludwig August Lebrun. The couple frequently appeared in concert together, and played in Milan and Paris.

She sang on major operatic and concert stages throughout Europe to great acclaim, and the writer C.F.D. Schubart asserted that she could sing “A, three octaves above middle C with clarity and distinctness.” The family traveled to London in 1779, where Francisca sang at the King’s Theatre in operas by J.C. Bach and Sacchini. Her impact in London was such that the celebrated artist Thomas Gainsborough painted her portrait. However, her talents extended far beyond the stage to keyboard performance and music composition. That includes twelve sonatas for harpsichord with violin accompaniment published as her opus 1 and opus 2. First issued in London between 1779 and 1781, further editions were prepared in Paris and a number of German cities. Although not revolutionary, these charming chamber music compositions provide a delicious taste of mid to late 18th century musical taste. And did you notice that she shares her birth and death year with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?  

Victoria Bond

Victoria Bond (b. 1945) is an acclaimed composer, conductor, lecturer, and the artistic director of “Cutting Edge Concerts.” Major publications call her compositions “powerful, stylistically varied and technically demanding,” and her conducting “impassioned and full of energy and fervor.” In 2019, the Berlin Philharmonic Easter Festival in Baden-Baden, Germany premiered Bond’s opera Clara, based on the life of composer and pianist Clara Schumann. The German press wrote: “Victoria Bond gives each character a three-dimensional role, enriched with original musical colors.” Thus far, Bond has composed eight operas, six ballets, two piano concertos and numerous orchestral, chamber, choral and keyboard compositions. Victoria Bond is the first woman awarded a doctorate in orchestral conducting from the Juilliard School, and she has served with countless national and international symphony and chamber orchestras.

Victoria Bond

“Dancing on Glass” is based on the Chinese folksong Liu Yang River. It originates from Hunan Province and was a favorite of street musicians who often sang it accompanied by a drum. It also became the melody of a famous patriotic song celebrating Hunan’s most famous citizen, Mao Zedong. The song makes reference to the nine turns that the Liu Yang River makes before it flows into a lake. As such, the piece “is divided into nine sections, consisting of three solos, three duets and three trios.” According to the composer, “the title derives from the dance of light on the surface of the glass-like river. The sections flow into each other without a break, reflecting the changing character of the river.”  

Nadia and Lili Boulanger sisters, 1913

For a very long time, the famous Prix de Rome competition was closed to women. Only in 1903 did the Education Minister Joseph Chaumié make the surprise announcement at a press dinner that the Prix de Rome would be open to women from that year. This unexpected announcement took the “Académie” by complete surprise, and they mercilessly schemed to prevent women from receiving that coveted prize. After her sister Nadia gave up her attempts to win the Prix de Rome, Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) decided to compete for the prize. She studied privately and at the Conservatoire, and after an unsuccessful first attempt in the 1912 competition, she won the Prix de Rome in 1913. She was the first woman to win the prize for music, and her success made international headlines. As the local press wrote, “The suffragettes smash windows and burn houses, but a maiden of France has gained a much better victory.”

Lili Boulanger

Already in early childhood, Lili fell ill with bronchial pneumonia, and she was almost constantly ill for the rest of her life. “Her frail health conditioned her life, through the need of constant care, and her musical career, as she had to rely on private composition and instrumental tuition rather than a full musical education.” But while her dependence on others was often overwhelming, she did enjoy complete intellectual and artistic autonomy. Lily once wrote, “I feel discouraged … not because of the suffering, not because of boredom, but because I understand that I would never be able to have in me the feeling that I have done what I would like to do, but what I have to do, since I cannot follow whatever it is with being interrupted for a long time so that my efforts cannot be sustained!” Lili did compose over 50 works, and her “D’un soir triste” exists in two fabulous versions: one for violin or flute and piano, the other for cello and piano.

Teresa Carreño

Teresa Carreño (1853-1917) originally hailed from Caracas, Venezuela, but her family moved to New York in 1862. Teresa had a highly ambitious father, and she demonstrated extraordinary talent for piano performance, improvisation, and composition. She became a student of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and was playing before President Abraham Lincoln at the White House when she was ten years old. The family moved to Paris in 1866, and Carreño played for Franz Liszt. He told the young prodigy, “My dear little Teresita, God has surely given you the greatest gift of all, that of genius. Work, develop your talents, but above all stay true to yourself, and in time you will be one of us.” Carreño performed in concerts throughout the world, and she was “among the first female pianists to tour the United States.”

Carreño served as a role model for new generations of American women who entered musical life as professional performers and composers. In fact, Carreño composed approximately 80 works that mostly date from the early stages of her career. She included them in her concerts, and “they reflect the influence of the style of virtuoso composers, especially Gottschalk, along with an assimilation of Venezuelan rhythmic and formal elements.” Although she mainly composed for the piano, Carreño did approach larger forms in her serenade for string orchestra and her delightful String Quartet in B minor. A scholar writes, “ In 1896, Teresa Carreño, the famous piano virtuosa composed a string quartet which shows a thoroughly sound grasp of quartet technique and style, Particularly praiseworthy is the concise construction of each of the four movements… From the time of its first appearance, this Quartet has received considerable notice.”

Please join us next time for more chamber music composed by women, including works by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Julia Frances Smith, Germaine Tailleferre, Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen, and Mélanie Bonis.

YUJA, PIANO RECITAL JAPAN TOUR

 YUJA, PIANO RECITAL JAPAN TOUR

June 6-15, 2026

Musicians and Artists: Forte and 6 Impressionists

by Maureen Buja

Aldo Forte created Impressionist Prints: Six Masters in Two Galleries, using artworks by 6 of the greatest impressionists. Each painting captures a particular idea within Impressionism.

Aldo Rafael Forte

He opens with Monet’s work in London. Monet’s 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise, was the work that gave Impressionism its name, and so Forte makes reference to that in the name of his movement. The work he’s focusing on, however, comes from some 30 years later. Monet was in London in the autumn of 1899, and the early months of 1900 and 1901. Over those visits, he painted nearly 100 paintings of the Thames River from the viewpoint of his window in the Savoy Hotel or from the terrace at St Thomas’ Hospital. Those included about 19 paintings in which the Houses of Parliament were the subject, showing Parliament at sunset, in the fog, under a stormy sky, with the sun breaking through the fog, etc. Sunrise was never a time when he painted Parliament.

We’ll take one of the many views as indicative of Forte’s inspiration, in this case, the House of Parliament, painted in 1900 and 1901, where the sun is starting to set, and the buildings are outlined against the sky and reflected in the water.

Monet: Houses of Parliament, London, 1900–1903 (The Art Institute of Chicago)

Forte divided his Impressionist Prints into two Galleries. The first has paintings by Monet, Degas, and Van Gogh, and the second by Renoir, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Forte’s music emphasises the loneliness of the building on the river through the use of an upward running motif in the English horn. At the same time, there’s a solidity and presence of the building in the music.  

Next, we’re in Degas’ world of the stage and dance. Instead of focusing on the backstage world of the corps de ballet, we’re in the audience, in a box, looking down onto the triumphal acknowledgement of the prima ballerina at centre stage. The backstage world intrudes in the back, with the other dancers waiting to make their appearance, and a stage manager on the left, watching to make sure all is going as it should.

Degas: Ballet / The Star / Dancer on the Stage, 1876–1877 (Musée d’Orsay)

Forte takes the upward-running motif from his first movement and animates it by making it faster and longer. We can hear the dancer’s whirls and twirls in the music, the actions of the corps de ballet as it acts as her backdrop against her virtuosic actions, building to her solo climax.  

Now we’re in the other world of impressionists: the outdoors. In one of his final works, Van Gogh captured an intense yellow wheatfield, cut through by dark lanes, with the sky filled with flying crows. The sky is a bright blue with clouds just appearing on the horizon.

The lack of figures in the expansive landscape and the uncertain direction of the crows’ flight give a tremendous sense of isolation in the image. For Van Gogh, crows were considered the most observant of birds and symbolised both death and rebirth. The end of the road is invisible, but by leading it to the cloud, it seems to have a more optimistic spirit.

Van Gogh: Wheatfield With Crows, 1890 (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum)

Forte sees the building clouds as foretelling storms, or is the storm within the artist? A robust bass melody is highlighted by the woodwinds above while the percussion keeps up a driving pressure. The winds whirl and perhaps there’s even some thunder and lightning, all in keeping with the movement in the painting.   

Thus closes Gallery I, and we go on to Gallery II, opening with high fashion.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Parisienne made its first public appearance at the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. The elegant woman in blue turns to the viewer as she pulls on her gloves. Originally, she stood before a doorway on the left and a curtain on the right, but Renoir removed these to leave her floating in an indeterminate background. One early critic bemoaned what he couldn’t see, declaring that ‘Her dress does not reveal enough of her body. There is nothing more annoying than locked doors’. Twenty years later, it was described as ‘simple, fresh, and beautiful’.

Renoir: La Parisienne, 1874 (Cardiff, Wales: National Museum / Amgueddfa Cymru)

Forte picks up the many shades of blue in his setting, to which he has added the title ‘Elegance and Beauty’. After the frenetic action of the wheatfield and crows, the woman’s stillness rings through.

The strongest proponent of pointillism, Georges Seurat, sought to demonstrate what could be achieved with the style. In Circus Sideshow, Seurat gives us the strongest contrast he could by depicting a nighttime outdoor scene lit by the artificial light of the Circus Corvi. The nature of pointillism still gives us sharply defined pictures, but the juxtaposition of colours enables the artist to depict many kinds of shadows, as befits a nighttime scene. Behind the man on the right is the head of the line for the box office, while the players draw attention for the scenes behind the canvas.

Seurat: Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque), 1887–1888 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Forte makes the dotting of pointillism the basis of his setting, with a swooping imagining of what the central trombonist is doing. The other wind instruments twitter behind him and try to set up a dramatic anticipation for the rest of the unseen sideshow.

The cabaret Moulin Rouge was founded in 1889 and is known as the home of the cancan. Bringing wealthy Parisians to Montmartre, where they could meet people from all walks of life, proved profitable. The original café-concert was soon outstripped in fame by its cabaret, and the posters for the house, made by Jules Chéret, Alfred Choubrac, and, most famously, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, brought fame to the dancers of the house, including La Goulue, Jane Avril, la Môme Fromage, Grille d’Egout, Yvette Guilbert, and others. In this image, La Goulue, with her back to the viewer, arranges her hair. Seated at the table are dancers La Macarona and Jane Avril (noted for her red hair), as well as photographer Paul Sescau, poet Édouard Dujardin, and vintner Maurice Guibert. The face lit in shocking green is the singer May Milton – a deliberate move on the artist’s part to emphasise the Moulin Rouge’s innovative use of electric light. The two men at the centre back are the diminutive artist and his cousin, the physician Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran. Toulouse-Lautrec places the viewer in the middle of the action, and with the singer May Milton at your table, you must be famous!

Toulouse-Lautrec: At The Moulin Rouge, 1892–1895 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Forte takes us directly to the dance floor, the orchestra plays, the trombones swoop, and suddenly, we’re in the middle of a can-can. Our attention is constantly shifted from here to there as famous people enter, the dancers take to the stage, and the clever use of the Can-Can melody in the low brass, with the upper winds flittering away, gives us the perfect image of the dancers’ skirts in motion.

Forte paints the many worlds of impressionism in music with great success. There are references to the images in the painting, but he also leaves space for your own imagination. Considered as a set of mini tone poems, they’re great fun!

Forgotten Pianists: Stanislav Neuhaus

 by Maureen Buja  May 3rd, 2026

Russian pianist Stanislav Neuhaus carried on the tradition of his father, the pianist and teacher Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964). Heinrich taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1922 to 1964 and was the author of The Art of Piano Playing (1958), considered the most authoritative approach to the subject, which is still available today.

Stanislav Neuhaus

Stanislav Neuhaus (1927–1980) was the son of Heinrich’s first wife, Zinaida, who married the writer Boris Pasternak in 1931 and took Stanislav with her. Despite living with his stepfather, he studied piano with his father, graduating in 1950, continuing postgraduate studies until 1953, and later becoming one of his father’s three assistants, along with Lev Naumov and Yevgeny Malinin.

Stanislav was always in the shadow of his father, considered one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. His father’s pupils included both Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter, and as his father’s assistant, Stanislav would have had teaching responsibilities as well. Outside his work for his father, he had his own teaching studio, beginning in 1957, with students including Vladimir Krainev, Radu Lupu, Brigitte Engerer, and his own son, Stanislav Bunin. In recognition of his artistic achievements, he was designated a People’s Artist of the RSFSR in 1978.

Despite that shadow, Stanislav made his own name and was recognised by Aram Khachaturian, in the paper Soviet Musician, as ‘the best pianist in the Moscow Conservatory’. The International Stanislav Neuhaus Piano Competition, held in Chelyabinsk, Russia, at the Chelyabinsk State Institute of Culture, was named in his honour – the last one was held in 2021.

Few recordings seem to be available, but fortunately, there are many videos of his work.

A Chopin program created for The Golden Era of Russian Pianism, vol. 1, gives us a broad selection of études, ballades, a waltz, and a scherzo. Even from this, we can get a feeling for the emotion and interpretation that he brought to his performances.   

Chopin’s Étude Op. 10, no. 3 gives us a better view of his performance style.

Stanislav Neuhaus plays Chopin Etude Op.10-3   

A 1973 live recording of Neuhaus playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 draws us deeply into Russian pianism at its greatest.   

A 1954 video shows Neuhaus’ interpretation of Debussy.

Stanislav NEUHAUS plays DEBUSSY Clair de lune     

We’ll close with a work for piano 4 hands, Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448, played by Heinrich and Stanislav Neuhaus.

Nocturnes and the Fascination of Night Music Susan Tomes

 by Frances Wilson  April 24th, 2026

Browse streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, as well as broadcasters like the BBC, and you will find curated playlists of music for relaxation, calm, winding down, nighttime, and sleep. That Max Richter’s Sleep – his landmark 2015 concept album and “eight-hour lullaby” designed to be listened to while sleeping – has surpassed 2 billion streams across all platforms is a testament to the popularity of this genre of music.

Susan Tomes

Why has the night inspired composers for so many years? In her new book Nocturnes and the Fascination of Night Music, pianist and writer Susan Tomes looks for answers, exploring one of classical music’s most expressive forms. The nocturne is closely linked to the piano and the quiet, thoughtful moods of the evening. Susan Tomes calls the nocturne “the origin of today’s sleep music….a short, lyrical and usually tranquil piece evoking night.”

When we think of nocturnes, Chopin often comes to mind. He elevated the form, transforming charming salon pieces into concert works, full of expression and pianistic detail. His nocturnes are amongst the most loved pieces for pianists and audiences alike, regularly appearing in concerts and recordings.

Maria Wodzińska: Frédéric Chopin, 1836 (Wasaw: National Museum)

But before Chopin, there was John Field, an Irish composer and a pupil of Muzio Clementi, who is credited with creating the genre.

Anton Wachsmann: John Field, ca 1820 (Gallica: btv1b84179686)

Susan Tomes looks back to the early nineteenth century, when composers began to write music that captured the quiet, emotional atmosphere of night. She points to pieces that seem to anticipate the nocturne, such as the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 467.

Field is, of course, the key figure in the development of the Nocturne, and Tomes devotes considerable attention to his life and career, as well as to the emergence of the genre in his hands.

From there, she traces its evolution through some of the most celebrated figures in classical music – from contemporaries of Chopin like the Schumanns and the Mendelssohn siblings to Chopin’s ‘successor’, Gabriel Fauré, whose early Nocturnes seem close to Chopin’s while his later ones are bleaker, more challenging but no less passionate. Close attention is also paid to some of Fauré’s contemporaries, Tchaikovsky, Vincent d’Indy, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Chaminade, for example, before Tomes reaches Claude Debussy.

Debussy may have written only one Nocturne, but his sensitivity to the atmosphere of the evening and nighttime is clearly demonstrated in pieces such as Les sons et parfums tournent dans l’air du soir (Preludes, Book 1) and La soirée dans Grenade from Estampes.

Atelier Nadar: Claude Debussy, ca 1890–1910

The piano is at the heart of this story. Tomes explains that its wide range and expressive sound make it perfect for nocturnes. The piano’s intimacy, especially in the smaller, quieter instruments that Field and Chopin played, makes nocturnes feel personal and private, as if they are meant for quiet evening listening instead of big performances. This closeness is a big part of why they remain so appealing.

The latter half of the book brings us right up to the present day. Here Tomes explores wider examples of “night music” – Bartok’s haunting, often unsettling evocations, for example, The Night’s Music from the Out of Doors suite. Tomes highlights the composer Lowell Liebermann (b.1961), who follows “the conceptual line laid out by Faure in his later Nocturnes”, and who, like Bartok, presents nighttime as disquieting and austere. Here, Tomes shows how the nocturne developed from gentle lyricism into a far richer and more complex expressive form.

Lowell Liebermann

A recurring theme throughout the book is the relationship between music and human experience. Night, Tomes suggests, is a time when the boundaries between waking and dreaming blur, thoughts become more fluid and emotions more pronounced. Composers have long been drawn to this atmosphere, using music to explore solitude, memory, and imagination.

The book also looks beyond music to examine how the idea of the nocturne appears in other arts. Painting, literature, and modern culture all share a fascination with night as a source of inspiration. By placing music in this broader context, Tomes reveals the nocturne not just as a genre but as part of a larger tradition focused on mood, atmosphere, and the passage of time.

Nocturne by Whistler Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea (1871), James McNeill Whistler (Tate Gallery, London)

What sets Tomes apart is that she doesn’t see nocturnes as merely soothing or decorative. She presents them as deeply expressive pieces that span a wide range of emotions. Some nocturnes evoke calm, reflection, or a dreamlike feeling, while others suggest restlessness, unease, or even drama. In this way, the nocturne is not just a musical ‘lullaby’ but a genre that captures the uncertainty of night itself.

Susan Tomes writes with clarity and warmth, combining scholarly knowledge with the perspective of a practising musician, offering detailed analyses of works and notes on performance – invaluable insights for pianists and teachers.

As with all her other writing, her approach is accessible, with her reflections grounded in her lived experience as a performer, thereby offering readers a sense not only of how nocturnes are constructed but also of how they feel to play and to hear. Rich in insight, detail, and musical examples, this engrossing, highly readable book is a must for musicians and music lovers.

Nocturnes and the Fascination of Night Music reminds us that night is not merely the absence of day, but a rich and evocative world in its own right, full of nuance, mystery, and creative possibility.

Vienna International Virtuoso Festival

 Vienna International Virtuoso Festival

Calling all musicians!

Submit your video to the Vienna International Virtuoso Music Competition 2026 and gain global recognition!

• Solo Open Category: Piano, Strings, Winds & more!

• Chamber Music: Duos, Trios, Quartets & Ensembles

Registration Deadline: May 15th, 2026. Apply now at www.viennavirtuosofestival.com/apply

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