Emilie Mayer (1812–1883) was a prolific German composer and one of the few women of that era to receive critical acclaim while writing large-scale works for orchestra. Born in Friedland as the daughter of a renowned pharmacist, she would lose her mother at the young age of two (or perhaps three; sources disagree). While she did show musical talent early, it wasn’t until after her father’s suicide in 1840—and the inheritance that afforded her—that she truly began her musical career. She had studied briefly with the organist Carl Heinrich Ernst Driver, but following her father’s death, she moved to Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), where she studied with Carl Loewe. Loewe believed that Mayer had considerable natural talent but not much theoretical knowledge, remarking, “You know nothing and everything at the same time, Emilie! … I shall be the gardener who helps the talent that is still a bud resting within your chest to unfold and become the most beautiful flower!” He also claimed that he had never met anyone with as much talent as she had.

After Mayer made considerable progress under his tutelage, he bade her move to Berlin to study orchestration under Wilhelm Wieprecht and counterpoint under Adolph Marx, which she did. These teachers echoed the support that Driver gave her; indeed, Marx wrote an article in the Berlin Musikzeitung Echo to call for better music education for women in general, so convinced was he of Mayer’s abilities. This association allowed her to have a concert of her own music at the Royal Theater in Berlin in 1850, and her career was well and truly launched. In her time, she would complete eight symphonies and seven overtures along with a mountain of shorter or chamber works. Those chamber works are where she would put her focus at the end of her career; finding it increasingly difficult to overcome the musical misogyny of the day, she chose to go the path of least resistance and concentrate on more stereotypically feminine forms of chamber music. She would release one last concert overture on Faust at the age of 69, but that would be her last great work as she would die from pneumonia only a couple of years later.