Women Composers of Solo Piano Music — The Long Nineteenth Century (Born 1800-1900)
This database documents solo piano music published by women born between 1800 and 1900, worldwide. Entries are verified against digitized scores (IMSLP, national libraries), peer-reviewed scholarship, and specialist databases. It includes historic landmarks such as Tekla Bądarzewska’s A Maiden’s Prayer (1856) — the century’s best-selling piano sheet music — and Estelle D. Ricketts’s Rippling Spring Waltz (1893), the earliest known published piano solo by a Black woman. Coverage of composers outside Europe and North America remains an active area of research; corrections and additions are welcome.
A note on score links. Links labeled IMSLP open the work’s permanent IMSLP page. Links labeled Find on IMSLP run a live search on IMSLP for the work and composer — used where older direct file links had expired, so these can never go stale. Links labeled Source open other archives or editions.
A note on piece dates. Publication dates survive for only a small fraction of this repertoire — itself a symptom of how women’s music was catalogued. Searches by piece date therefore distinguish explicit dates (shown in green) from estimated matches, inferred from the composer’s active years (age 15 to death). Estimates are clearly labeled and can be switched off.