Cécile Chaminade (August 8, 1857 - April 13, 1944) was a French composer and pianist who came from a musical family. It was still rare at the time for a woman to be a performer, let alone a composer, even though family friend Georges Bizet called her "My Little Mozart." She was generally successful during her lifetime, and in 1913, she was awarded the Légion d'Honneur, a first for a female composer. But her compositions became largely forgotten in the second half of the twentieth century, despite publishing more than four hundred pieces over her eighty-six years. Here's one of her many works for the piano, the Theme and Variations from Opus 89, as played by Marc-André Hamelin in Amsterdam, 1998:
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