Ex. 11-8: Sérénade Printanière

No. 1 of Augusta Holmès's Les Sérénades, a set of five songs — one for each season, plus a "Sérénade de toujours" (Serenade for Always). It was published in Paris by Brandus in 1883–84. Holmès wrote the words herself, as she did for almost all her music. The poem bursts out: "Hier comme aujourd'hui, ce soir comme demain, je t'adore!" (Yesterday as today, tonight as tomorrow, I adore you!).

Holmès refused the idea, common in her day, that a woman should write only pretty little songs to be played at home. Alongside songs like this one, she composed huge works — an Ode triomphale for the 1889 Paris Exposition that called for some 1,200 performers, and a grand opera, La Montagne noire (The Black Mountain), staged at the Paris Opéra in 1895.

She stood at the center of Paris's musical world, and several leading composers were drawn to her. Camille Saint-Saëns proposed marriage; she turned him down, but the two stayed friends for life. She also studied with César Franck. His Piano Quintet in F minor (1879) is often said to pour out an unspoken passion for her — and Franck's wife is said to have disliked the piece.

Holmès was a passionate admirer of Wagner and visited him in 1869. For about twenty years she lived with the poet Catulle Mendès, who was himself an early supporter of Wagner, and they had five children — this was her life around the time she wrote these serenades. Renoir painted three of those children in The Daughters of Catulle Mendès (1888), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

From the album Fleurs Jetées: Songs by French Women Composers by Rebecca De Pont Davies and Lontano (1996)
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