Elsa Barraine

She won the Prix de Rome in 1929 for La vierge guerrière, a sacred trilogy named for Joan of Arc,[1] and was the fourth woman ever to receive that prestigious award (after Lili Boulanger in 1913, Marguerite Canal in 1920, and Jeanne Leleu in 1923).

[1] She attended the Conservatoire de Paris and studied composition with Paul Dukas, whose impressive list of students includes Yvonne Desportes, Maurice Duruflé, Claude Arrieu, and Olivier Messiaen.

[3] Her piece Harald Harfagard (1930), symphonic variations based on the poetry of Heinrich Heine, was the first composition of Barraine's to gain public recognition.

[2] Like her contemporaries who formed La Jeune France, André Jolivet, Olivier Messiaen, Daniel-Lesur, and Yves Baudrier, she strove to reintroduce humanism to composition, an art becoming increasingly more abstract.

[7] Examples of the former include Claudine à l’école (1950), her ballet based on a book by Colette which explores women's sexuality, and her anti-fascist symphonic poem Pogromes (1933).

The quintet has eight movements, the Theme and seven Variations which are named after fictional women with different personality types ("Angélique; Berthe, aux sonorités dures; Irène, sinueuse; Barbe, fugato burlesque; Sarah; Isabeau de Bavière, avec son chapeau conique et son voile flottant; Léocadie, vieille fille sentimentale du temps jadis").