One of the most intriguing piano concertos of the late 19th century is unknown to the public – and no wonder: so far as I can work out, it has only been recorded once, on a speciality label devoted to neglected French repertoire. As I write this, there are only 11 copies available from Amazon and I recommend that you grab one quickly, because the Second Piano Concerto of Marie Jaëll (1846-1925) demands repeated listening.

The concerto’s harmonic language is superficially conventional: sweeping tunes decorated by arm-swinging arpeggios. But the melodies are lopsided and from time to time the soloist’s butterfly textures are reduced to single notes on which the finger lingers defiantly, exploring every possibility of touch.

The relationship between the pianist’s body and the keyboard was Jaëll’s lifelong obsession. In 1894, ten years after Liszt himself hailed her concerto as ‘a brilliant masterpiece’, she abandoned composition permanently to work on her whole-body ‘Method’ of playing the piano. This is based on the notion – not easy to get your head round – that the touch on the key relates to movement in the same way that vision depends on light. Jaëll, a young widow from Alsace, believed with religious passion that the production of sound can boost our capacity to acquire knowledge of the universe. Finger movements ‘become artistic only if their image pre-exists in the brain’, she wrote.

Jaëll’s biographer Catherine Guichard argues that she anticipated the discoveries of 21st-century neuroscience; also, less convincingly, that ‘in spirit, Marie Jaëll was close to quantum physicists’. (French scholars can’t resist this analogy, despite the famous Sokal hoax in which a physicist humiliated a postmodern journal by publishing an attack on scientific objectivity based on deliberate nonsense about ‘quantum gravity’.)

Ironically, reports of Jaëll’s own playing suggest that subtleties of colour were sometimes lost in the heat of the moment. To quote one critic:

Then Marie Jaëll seized – that is the word – the huge Érard Hall. Not a beautiful or pretty face, but one that is original, determined, even imperious. Her supple hands, with long, flexible fingers, resting on the keys, gained possession of them with the passionate violence of an ardent, unbridled and immoderate nature. In fact, her extraordinary virtuosity was as uneven as her somewhat barbaric character… even capable of wrong notes, striving for forceful effects: a string-breaker, some called her.

‘Some called her’ is a nice touch, but it doesn’t conceal the flick of the stiletto. The critic, one ‘Jacques Vincent’, was actually the social-climbing wife of a banker, the aptly named Angèle Berthe Venem. Marie Jaëll left no recordings, so we can’t judge. As for her compositions, she received a typically withered bouquet from Johannes Brahms. ‘How insipid they are, these young women pianists who always play the same pieces by Liszt,’ he wrote. ‘But speak to me of La Jaëll! Here is an intelligent, witty woman: she produces her own works for the piano, which are just as bad as those by Liszt.’

Brahms could be a nasty piece of work, but there’s no denying that Jaëll’s music displays an unevenness of inspiration. On the other hand, even her inconsistency is interesting.

The Second Piano Concerto, in addition to its mixture of virtuoso swagger and late-Lisztian austerity, reaches a pitch of hysteria worthy of Messiaen’s Turangalîla. Some of the solo pieces have the forced prettiness of Cécile Chaminade, queen of Parisian salon music. In contrast, her last significant composition, the piano cycle Ce q’on entend…, uses fragmentary motifs to describe Dante’s hell, purgatory and paradise. The best numbers are as disconcerting as Satie and more haunting. They use repetitive patterns to illuminate touch; you can’t listen to them without thinking of the American minimalists.

When the music blogger Emily Hogstad discovered Jaëll’s ‘restless, passionate compositions’, she wondered why the hell she didn’t know this woman. I think it’s precisely because her work is so restless – that, and the fact that she didn’t trick the right boxes. The cottage industry devoted to celebrating dead women composers requires cinematic back stories and music that’s easy on the ear; hence the apotheosis of Clara Schumann and Florence Price. But if you want proof that women of the era could move beyond well-carpentered clichés, then I recommend a dose of the Alsatian string-breaker.