Fourteen women composers, complete in PracticeClef’s catalog
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PracticeClef's public-domain catalog currently has 23 composers marked “complete,” meaning every playable engraving of theirs in our source corpus is live — not literally every piece a composer ever wrote, just everything we have that could be engraved and graded. Fourteen of those twenty-three are women, and together their collections add up to 444 pieces: Augusta Holmès (73), Josephine Lang (52), Johanna Kinkel (45), Louise Reichardt (40), Cécile Chaminade (35), Clara Faisst (30), Fanny Hensel (29), Liza Lehmann (29), Corona Schröter (25), Pauline Viardot (21), Mathilde Kralik (18), Marie Jaëll (17), Clara Schumann (17), and Clémence de Grandval (13). Some of these names are well known; most of the actual sheet music has been sitting out of print and out of reach, so having a complete, playable set is a genuine discovery for anyone practicing this repertoire.
Almost everything below is the piano part of a voice-and-piano song — the accompaniment only, not the vocal line, labeled as a piano part on every page. Difficulty is PracticeClef's published 1–9 scale, and every duration below is a score-derived estimate, written with a “~”, not a measured performance time.
Six pieces worth hearing
A small sample across composers and difficulty levels — from an upper-beginner miniature to the hardest piece any of these fourteen collections contains.
La guerrière, ballade héroïque — Augusta Holmès
This piece is in B minor, sits at level 7 of 9, and takes about 2 minutes to play.
One entry from the largest women's collection in the catalog: a heroic ballade with dense, fast-moving chording throughout, among the busier scores in this list at over 25 notes per measure at the printed tempo.
Open this score when you want to play it.
The Yellowhammer — Liza Lehmann
This piece is in B major, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about one minute to play.
From Lehmann's Bird Songs cycle: the body sits in B-flat under a two-flat signature, then closes a half-step higher in B major — in our edition that closing chord dovetails directly into the opening sonority of the next song in the set, The Wren. Lehmann (1862–1918) was the first president of the Society of Women Musicians, founded in 1911.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Clair de lune — Marie Jaëll
This piece is in E major, sits at level 5 of 9, and takes about 4 minutes to play.
Jaëll — Liszt's pupil and later his teaching assistant — wrote her own Clair de lune as part of the 1893 song set Les Orientales, unrelated to Debussy's much better-known piece of the same name (also in our catalog).
Open this score when you want to play it.
Le bohémien — Clémence de Grandval
This piece is in E major, sits at level 8 of 9, and takes about 4 minutes to play.
The hardest piece in this roundup: a gypsy-idiom showpiece that works its way from the minor mode to a parallel E-major close, with dense chording throughout. Grandval published under pseudonyms for much of her career, a common survival strategy for women composers of her generation.
Open this score when you want to play it.
An den Mond — Corona Schröter
This piece is in Eb major, sits at level 5 of 9, and takes about 30 seconds to play.
A half-minute miniature: Schröter, who sang in Goethe's Weimar circle, sets his famous moon poem in a spare E-flat major that closes on a plain tonic chord. The shortest piece in this list — and Schröter's 25-piece set is the catalog's only complete Classical-era collection; every other complete composer here is Romantic or later.
Open this score when you want to play it.
L'anneau d'argent — Cécile Chaminade
This piece is in F major, sits at level 5 of 9, and takes about one minute to play.
Chaminade's best-known mélodie, and a gentle entry point into her 35-piece complete set, one of the five largest women's collections in the catalog.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Explore the rest
These six are a starting point, not the whole story — between them, the fourteen women's collections above run from Classical-era strophic song to advanced Romantic showpieces. The full library is free to browse and play; filter by composer or difficulty to find where each collection sits. No account is needed to open a piece and start playing.
A note on the numbers. Every piece count, key, difficulty grade, and duration in this post is checkable against the piece's own metadata record in the live catalog. “Complete” means every playable engraving in our source corpus is live for that composer — not every piece they ever wrote. Duration figures are estimates derived from the score, not measured performances, and are written with a “~” for that reason.