Composing Herself

Women Who Wrote Music Before They Were Allowed To

By: Richard Fleischman

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A luminous history of the women who redefined genius.

In Composing Herself, historian Richard Fleischman restores the lost voices of Romanticism’s greatest women composers—Clara Wieck Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Louise Farrenc, Pauline Viardot, Cécile Chaminade, Amy Beach, Augusta Holmès, Lili Boulanger, Teresa Carreño, and Ethel Smyth. Their music shaped the emotional and moral imagination of the nineteenth century, even as their names were written out of its histories.

Drawing on letters, scores, and newly revived performances, Composing Herself reveals how these women turned private discipline into public art and silence into sound. More than a chronicle of forgotten composers, it is a story about freedom—intellectual, creative, and human.

Part of The Herself Series: Three volumes exploring how women created art, music, and ideas in worlds that denied them authorship.