Augusta Holmès
Augusta Mary Anne Holmès (16 December 1847 – 28 January 1903) was a French composer of Irish descent (her father was from Youghal, Co. Cork). In 1871, Holmès became a French citizen and added the accent to her last name.[1] She wrote the texts to almost all of her vocal music herself, including songs, oratorios, the libretto of her opera La Montagne noire and the programmatic poems for her symphonic poems including Irlande and Andromède.
Biography[]
Holmès was born in Paris to Irishman Charles William Scott Dalkeith Holmes from Youghal, County Cork.[2][3] and to Tryphina Anna Constance Augusta Shearer (1811–1858). Her godfather was Alfred de Vigny. Despite showing talent at the piano, she was not allowed to study at the Paris Conservatoire, but took lessons privately. She developed her piano playing under the tutelage of local pianist Mademoiselle Peyronnet, Versailles' cathedral organist Henri Lambert, and Hyacinthe Klosé. Also, she showed some of her earlier compositions to Franz Liszt. Around 1876, she became a pupil of César Franck, whom she considered her real master.[3] (She led the group of Franck's students who in 1891 commissioned for Franck's tomb a bronze medallion from Auguste Rodin.[4])
Camille Saint-Saëns wrote of Holmès in the journal Harmonie et Mélodie: "Like children, women have no idea of obstacles, and their willpower breaks all barriers. Mademoiselle Holmès is a woman, an extremist." Like other female composers from the nineteenth century including Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann, Holmès published some of her earlier works under a male pseudonym ("Hermann Zenta") because women in European society at that time were not taken seriously as artists and were discouraged from publishing.
For the 1889 celebration of the centennial of the French Revolution, Holmès was commissioned to write the Ode triomphale for the Exposition Universelle, a work requiring about 1,200 musicians. She gained a reputation of being a composer of programme music with political meaning, such as her symphonic poems Irlande and Pologne.
Personal life[]
Holmès never married, but she cohabited with the poet Catulle Mendès; the couple had five children, including:[5]
- Huguette Mendès (1871–1964)
- Claudine Mendès (1876–1937)
- Helyonne Mendès (1879–1955)
Holmès bequeathed most of her musical manuscripts to the Paris Conservatoire.
Selected compositions[]
Operas[]
- Héro et Leandre (1875) opera in one act[3]
- Lancelot du lac, opera in three acts (unpublished)
- La Montagne noire, opera in four acts (1885), Paris, Opéra, 8 February 1895
Cantatas[]
- Astarté, poème musical (1871, unpublished)
- Lutèce, symphonie dramatique (1877)
- Les Argonautes, symphonie dramatique (1880)
- Ludus pro patria, ode-symphonie (1888)
- Au pays bleu, suite symphonique (c.1888)
- Une Vision de Sainte Thérèse for soprano and orchestra (c.1888)
- Ode triomphale en l'honneur du centenaire de 1789 (1889)
- Hymne à la paix (1890)
- Hymne à Apollo (c.1890s)
- La Belle au bois dormant suite lyrique (1902)
- La Vision de la reine, cantata
Orchestral works[]
- Ouverture pour une comédie, symphonic poem (before 1870)
- Roland furieux (1876)
- Irlande, symphonic poem (1882)
- Andromède, symphonic poem (1883)
- Pologne, symphonic poem (1883)
- La Nuit et l'amour (1888)
Chamber music[]
- Minuetto, for string quartet (1867)
- Trois petites pièces for flute and piano (1879)
- Fantaisie in C minor, for clarinet and piano (1900)
- Molto lento, for clarinet and piano
Piano music[]
- Rêverie tzigane (1887)
- Ce qu'on entendit dans la nuit de Noël (1890)
- Ciseau d'hiver (1892)
Songs, song collections[]
(selective list)
- Les Sept ivresses: 1. L'Amour; 2. Le Vin; 3. La Gloire; 4. La Haine; 5. Le Rêve; 6. Le Désir; 7. L'Or (1882)
- Trois Chansons populaires: 1. Mignonne; 2. Les Trois pages; 3. La Princesse (1883)
- Noël: Trois anges sont venus ce soir (1884)
- En Chemin (1886)
- Hymne à Eros (1886)
- Fleur de neige (1887)
- La Chanson de gas d'Irlande (1891)
- Berceuse (1892)
- Contes divines (1892–5): 1. L'Aubepine de Saint Patrick (1892); 2. Les Lys bleus (1892); 3. Le Chemin de ciel (1893); 4. La Belle Madeleine (1893); 5. La Légende de Saint Amour (1893); 6. Les Moutons des anges (1895)
- Noël d'Irlande (1896)
References[]
- ^ Rollo Myers: "Augusta Holmès: A Meteoric Career", in The Musical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 3 (July 1967), p. 365: "Her surname was Gallicized by the addition of a grave accent on its last syllable."
- ^ Une musicienne versaillaise: Augusta Holmès, archive.org
- ^ Jump up to: a b c Arthur Elson: Woman's Work in Music (Boston: The Page Company, 1903), digitized by Google.
- ^ Daniele Gutmann: "Rodin et la Musique", in: Revue Internationale de Musique Française, February 1982, p. 105.
- ^ "Auguste Renoir | The Daughters of Catulle Mendès, Huguette (1871–1964), Claudine (1876–1937), and Helyonne (1879–1955) | The Met". metmuseum.org. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 13 February 2017.
Bibliography[]
- Rollo Myers: "Augusta Holmès: A Meteoric Career", in: The Musical Quarterly 53 (1967) 3, pp. 365–76
- Gérard Geffen: Augusta Holmès, l'outrancière (Paris: P. Belfond, 1987), ISBN 2-7144-2153-9
- Karen Henson: "In the House of Disillusion: Augusta Holmès and La Montagne noir", in: Cambridge Opera Journal 9 (1997) 3, pp. 232–62
- Michèle Friang: Augusta Holmès ou la gloire interdite (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2003), ISBN 2746702983
- Mariateresa Storino: "Chère Illustre": Franz Liszt ad Augusta Holmès, in: "Quaderni dell'Istituto Liszt" 9 (2010), pp. 1–44
- M. Storino: Franz Liszt and Augusta Holmès: Portrait of a Musical Friendship, in: Liszt et la France, ed. by Malou Haine and Nicolas Dufetel (Paris: Vrin, 2012), pp. 263–274; ISBN 978-2-7116-2369-3
- Nicole K. Strohmann: Gattung, Geschlecht und Gesellschaft im Frankreich des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts: Studien zur Dichterkomponistin Augusta Holmès (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2012), ISBN 978-3-487-14701-7
- M. Storino: Solidarietà dei Popoli e idea di Patria: i poemi sinfonici di Augusta Holmès, in: Music and War in Europe from French Revolution to WWI, ed. by Etienne Jardin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 357–377; ISBN 978-2-503-57032-7
External links[]
- Free scores by Augusta Holmès at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
- Free digital scores by Augusta Holmès in the OpenScore Lieder Corpus
- Holmes and Duparc: A tale of two composers. BBC Radio 3 Composer of the Week, 6–10 July 2020
| hide Authority control  | |
|---|---|
| General |
|
| National libraries | |
| Biographical dictionaries | |
| Other |
|
- 1847 births
- 1903 deaths
- 19th-century classical composers
- 19th-century French composers
- 19th-century women composers
- 20th-century classical composers
- 20th-century French composers
- 20th-century French women musicians
- 20th-century women composers
- Burials at the Cemetery of Saint-Louis, Versailles
- Female opera composers
- French classical composers
- French female classical composers
- French opera composers
- French people of Irish descent
- French Romantic composers
- Irish classical composers
- Irish female classical composers
- Musicians from Paris
- Pseudonyms