Cécile Chaminade (1857 – 1944) was a French composer of the late Romantic period. She showed great musical aptitude as a child, playing piano and composing music for her cats, dogs, and dolls, and although her father denied her wish to study at the Conservatoire de Paris, he hired private teachers from the Conservatoire for her. Beginning in 1878, she gave performances of her own music in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and eventually England and the United States.

Chaminade wrote in a variety of genres and forms, including works for solo piano, accompanied songs, orchestral pieces, and a comic opera. Her style was highly tuneful and melodic, very much of a piece with the French Romanticism of composers like Saint-Saens, but increasingly anachronistic as the years went by and her contemporaries grew more daring in their impressionism. Perhaps partly for this reason, she never enjoyed the popularity in Paris that she did abroad. She was widely celebrated, though: she received the Jubilee Medal from Queen Victoria, the Laurel Wreath from the Athens Conservatory, and the Order of the Chefakat from Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II, and she was the first female composer to be made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour. One of her organ preludes was played at Queen Victoria’s funeral.

She made a few gramophone and piano roll recordings in the 1900s, but as she got older, she composed less, and worsening health caused her to stop touring in the 1920s. Her popularity soon began to fade, and she remains unjustly forgotten today. Part of this, of course, is because she was a woman; her compositions and performances sometimes received blatantly sexist criticism, as from the New York Post’s review of a Carnegie Hall concert: “[Chaminade’s music] has a certain feminine daintiness and grace, but it is amazingly superficial and wanting in variety. . . . But on the whole this concert confirmed the conviction held by many that while women may some day vote, they will never learn to compose anything worth while. All of them seem superficial when they write music. . . .”

Here is her most well-known work, the Flute Concertino in D major, op. 107. Incidentally, this is a piece I studied when I used to play the flute.