1847–1903 · France, United Kingdom · Romantic
Augusta Holmès (1847–1903) was a French composer of Irish origin who wrote the words for almost all her own vocal works and remained under Wagner's influence throughout her life. The only one of her operas to reach the stage was La Montagne noire (1895). The site holds nearly fifty of her songs for voice and piano, from intermediate to advanced level.
Augusta Mary Anne Holmès was born on 16 December 1847 in Paris. Her father was an Irish officer, and her mother a writer of mixed Scottish-Irish descent. The girl's godfather was the poet Alfred de Vigny; it was rumoured that he was also her biological father. In 1855 the family moved to Versailles.
Her mother disapproved of her interest in music, and only after her mother's death, when Augusta was eleven, did the girl begin to study music — playing the organ and learning composition. Despite her gift for the piano, she was not admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, and afterwards studied only privately.
Her piano playing was taught by the local pianist Mademoiselle Peyronnet, while organ, harmony and counterpoint came from Henri Lambert, organist of Versailles Cathedral; she also studied with Hyacinthe Klosé. She was also a regular at the salon of the musician Antoine Guillot de Sainbris, where she took singing lessons and crossed paths with Charles Gounod and Ambroise Thomas.
She showed her first compositions to Franz Liszt. In the 1870s Holmès trained under César Franck, whom she later called her true teacher; she went on to lead the group of Franck's pupils who, in 1891, commissioned the sculptor Auguste Rodin to make a bronze medallion for his tomb.
Besides music she also studied painting, but the piano interested her more: she knew the works of Bach, Beethoven and Handel by heart, and, like her friend Saint-Saëns, Holmès was regarded as a child prodigy at the piano. She also sang her own melodies while accompanying herself, writing both the music and the words for them. In 1869 she attended the premiere of Wagner's opera "L'Or du Rhin" together with Liszt; he later wrote that he held the highest opinion of her extraordinary talent.
Holmès first heard Wagner's music at thirteen and stayed under its spell for the rest of her life; she kept a portrait of Wagner, her idol, in her workroom. During the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, she cared for the wounded and in those same months wrote two patriotic pieces — the war song "Vengeance!" and the ode "Dieu sauve la France".
In 1876 Holmès travelled to Bayreuth for the opening of the festival theatre and the premiere of Wagner's Nibelung cycle; at Tribschen, by Lake Lucerne, she met Wagner himself. That same year she finished her first symphony, "Roland furieux", which echoes Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" directly, with the same dense brass and galloping strings driving a bold melody; a year later came her second symphony, "Lutèce".
Holmès wrote the words herself for almost everything she set to music — songs, the libretto of the opera La Montagne noire, the poems behind the symphonic poems Irlande and Andromède. She finished her first opera, Héro et Léandre, in 1875, followed by Astarté and Lancelot du lac. None of these three scores ever made it to a stage.
Nineteenth-century notions of gender expected women composers to stay within smaller, "feminine" genres, and that shaped how Holmès's music was received: her gift was recognised, yet she was faulted for straying into styles seen as masculine territory. Reviewing the symphonic poem Les Argonautes, Saint-Saëns wrote that her music had, in his words, excessive virility, with orchestration so flamboyant that the brass seemed to explode like fireworks.
Among Holmès's symphonic poems, Irlande and Pologne stand out — both were called examples of programme music carrying a political message; she passed on the royalties from performances of Irlande to Irish nationalist organisations. Her other symphonic poem, Andromède, drew on Greek mythology.
The centenary of the French Revolution brought Holmès a commission for the Ode triomphale: staging it at the 1889 Exposition Universelle called for roughly twelve hundred musicians and choristers, and the premiere drew fifteen thousand spectators to the Palais de l'Industrie on 11 September. The following year, 1890, Holmès was named an Officier de l'Instruction publique; that same year the city of Florence commissioned a piece from her marking six hundred years since the death of Beatrice Portinari — the Hymne à la Paix was given there in May.
On 8 February 1895 the Paris Opéra staged La Montagne noire — the only one of Holmès's four operas to reach the stage; the production made her the third woman composer whose music that house had presented, after Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre and Louise Bertin. The opera ran for thirteen performances and was never revived in Paris; even so, Debussy singled out Holmès's talent.
After the opera's setback, Holmès markedly cut back on composing, limiting herself to a few songs with piano, a Fantaisie for clarinet and piano, and one last orchestral work, Le Jugement de Naïs. In 1902 came one more late score, the lyric suite La Belle au bois dormant.
Holmès became acquainted with Catulle Mendès — a poet who also worked as a critic and editor — in 1869; the two later shared a household and raised several children together. By 1885 the pair had gone their separate ways, and the children stayed with their father.
Having previously been drawn to Theosophy and Spiritualism, in 1902 Holmès converted to Catholicism and was baptised at the church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. She died on 28 January 1903 of a heart attack and was buried at the Cemetery of Saint-Louis; she bequeathed her musical manuscripts to the Paris Conservatoire.
The bulk of Holmès's catalogue is cantatas, symphonic poems and operas, alongside a handful of pieces for solo piano and a great many songs — well over a hundred of them. She herself mostly wrote large-scale orchestral works, yet it was her choral pieces that won the greater success.
Holmès's catalogue also includes smaller-scale scores: the symphonic suite "Au pays bleu" and the piece for soprano and orchestra "Une Vision de Sainte Thérèse" — both from around 1888 — as well as the earlier "Trois petites pièces" (1879), for flute, with piano accompaniment. Among her few solo piano pieces is the prelude "Ce qu'on entendit dans la nuit de Noël" (1890), which opened a collection that also included pieces by several of her contemporaries, among them Gabriel Fauré, Jules Massenet and Camille Saint-Saëns.
Her Christmas carol "Trois anges sont venus ce soir" became widely known: it was compared in success to Adolphe Adam's famous "Minuit, chrétiens", and was performed by singers such as Tino Rossi. Holmès also wrote for a solo instrument with piano — for instance, a Fantaisie for clarinet and piano in C minor (1900): the clarinet was the instrument Hyacinthe Klosé had once taught her. Some of her songs belong to the genre of "chansons populaires": one such set, from 1883 — "Mignonne", "Les Trois pages" and "La Princesse" — brings together three songs written in the style of folk song.
The site's sheet-music library holds nearly fifty (49) of her songs for voice and piano, from intermediate to advanced level: one song at intermediate level, eighteen at upper-intermediate, and thirty at advanced level. Among them are the complete seven-song cycle Les Sept ivresses (1882) and the complete six-song cycle Contes divines (1892–1895). At the more advanced end there are pieces such as "Chanson persane", "Chanson catalane" and the ballad "La guerrière"; at upper-intermediate level, one could continue with "Rêverie" or "Sérénade d'automne".
There is nothing here at a beginner level: intermediate is as accessible as this collection gets. A good place to start is "Noël", "Les lavandières, chanson populaire", "En chemin" and "L'Heure de Pourpre", at intermediate and upper-intermediate level, before moving on to the advanced "Garci Perez".