Cécile Chaminade plays her Air de Ballet opus 30, recorded in 1901 for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company in a time when the gramophone was a brand new invention (she was one of the first pianists to record for it).


Cécile Louise Stéphanie Chaminade (August 8, 1857- April 13, 1944). The following obituary appeared in Time Magazine, May 1, 1944, p. 54: "In Monte Carlo last week death came to the most famous woman composer who ever lived. Frail, white-haired, 86-year-old [actually 87] Cecil Louise Stéphanie Chaminade had been bedridden with a bone disease for well over a decade. Deprived of her royalties by the German occupation (her Jewish publishers in Paris had been liquidated), she died in comparative obscurity. The era that her fragile little piano pieces (most famed: The Scarf Dance) represented had long since closed. Hers had been the age of rubber plants, stereoscopic views and parlor trances over Ethelbert Nevin's The Rosary. Born in Paris, Chaminade started composing as a child, dedicating her first works (a group of nocturnes and "slumber songs") to her pet dogs and cat. She took lessons in composition from Benjamin Godard. Always a facile melodist, Chaminade soon rolled up a list over 550 compositions, which stand in the same relation to Frederic Chopin as strawberry soda to cognac. Many of them (The Flatterer, Pas des Amphores, La Zingara, Valse Caprice, Air de Ballet, etc.) got an international reputation...Scarf Dance ended by selling over five million copies." (Source: Laura Kerr, Scarf Dance (New York: 1953)

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