WIU School of Music Staff

Augusta Holmès was born in 1847, of Irish parents living in Paris. To English speakers, her name appears as “Augusta Holmes,” but her strong empathy for France led her to spell and pronounce her name with a French accent.

Clara Wieck seemed destined to be a musician. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, one of the most respected piano teachers in Germany, taught her both piano and the business of being a practicing musician. To capitalize on the early 19th century fascination with child prodigies he arranged for her first solo concert in Leipzig’s Gewandhaus when she was just nine.

The Mendelssohn household was a hothouse of musical prodigy. Fanny Mendelssohn and her younger brother Felix soon outgrew their mother’s piano teaching abilities, entering the Berlin Singakademie in their teens. The two would be lifelong musical advisors to each other (creating their own Bach and Beethoven-influenced “Mendelssohnian” style) and Fanny would often serve as Felix’s surrogate, overseeing performances of his works.

Louise Farrenc came from a long family line of noted painters and sculptors, so maybe it should be no surprise she would be an artistic titan herself.

A celebrated early romantic Polish piano virtuoso moves to Paris and wows Europe… a decade before Frederic Chopin… and she is a She.

Though the charming miniature that today is most famously associated with her may have actually been a hoax, there’s no denying the success in her time… and triumph over odds… of Maria Theresia von Paradis.

There’s no place like home… especially if that home was the family apartment of classical composer Marianna von Martines. The family flat occupied the third floor of the Altes Michaelerhaus--- on a plaza shared with one of Vienna’s oldest churches, as well as the famed Old Burgtheater, where three of Mozart’s operas and Beethoven’s first symphony all premiered. And that home contained a secret weapon: a roommate by the name of Pietro Metastasio, Poet laureate of the Austrian Empire, author of over 30 opera librettos, and famed throughout Europe.

The first woman in France to compose an opera, Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre was born in 1665, a member of the instrument-making Jacquet family of Paris. A precocious musician, Elisabeth at age 5 was already performing harpsichord at the court of Louis XIV, and “The Sun King” would become an important patron of Jacquet de La Guerre… she would remain at court until it moved to the new palace at Versailles in 1682.

A daughter of a nobleman, a lover of a nobleman, but never quite a member of the nobility itself, composer Barbara Strozzi lived, what seems to us, an unconventional life in Venice’s golden age.