Mel Bonis was born Mélanie Bonis in Paris in 1858, into a family of modest means which nevertheless owned a piano at a time when said instrument was popular across a wide swathe of society. She taught herself music and practiced musical improvisation. A family friend noticed her talent: around age eighteen, she became a private student of César Franck’s. She entered the Paris Conservatory in 1877 to study harmony with Ernest Guiraud, whom she followed when he was given a composition professorship, and also audited César Franck’s organ class. It is around this time that she chose her gender-ambiguous pseudonym, a testament to her awareness of the difficulties faced by women composers. Her last year at the Conservatory was interrupted when her parents decided to pull her out in order to prevent her from marrying a classmate. She taught piano lessons, and met the father of one of her students – Albert Domange, a wealthy, twice-widowed captain of industry, whom she married in 1883. She focused on her roles as a wife and mother, bearing three children, without entirely giving up on composing. Around 1890, she reconnected with her first love, critic and singing instructor Amédée Hettich, leading to her return to music. She became a professional composer and was recognised by the composers of her time, and in 1910 she became the first woman elected Secretary of the Société des Compositeurs de Musique. Her vast body of work – nearly two hundred pieces – has been the subject of rediscovery in the past twenty years, most notably her Femmes de légende for piano, her chamber music pieces, and her three orchestral works Salome, Ophelia, and Le Rêve de Cléopâtre, which rank among the greatest works of early 20th century French music.

– Florence Launay –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]