Mel Bonis

Mel Bonis was born Mélanie Bonis in Paris in 1858. Her father worked in a watch factory, and her mother made decorations for clothes. They were not musical, and they did not want her to study music. There was an old piano at home, and she taught herself to play it. When she was about 12, a friend of the family persuaded her parents to pay for lessons. Later he introduced her to the composer César Franck, who taught her the piano and encouraged her.

At 18 she entered the Paris Conservatoire, the city’s great music school. Debussy, four years younger, was a student there at the same time. In 1880 she won first prize in harmony. She signed her music “Mel,” a short name that hid that she was a woman, so that publishers and critics would judge her music fairly. At the Conservatoire she fell in love with a student, the singer and poet Amédée Hettich. He wanted to marry her, but her parents said no and took her out of the school. In 1883, at 25, they married her to Albert Domange, a rich factory owner 22 years older, who had five children and took little interest in music. They had three children together, and for about ten years she wrote almost nothing.

In 1891 a waltz she had written won first prize in a magazine’s competition. In the 1890s she met Hettich again. He was now a singing teacher and a music critic. He encouraged her to compose and helped her to find publishers. Most of her roughly 300 works were written between then and 1914. In 1899 she had a daughter with Hettich, whom she kept secret for many years. She stayed close to her all her life.

It is said that she was once found at three in the morning, still working on one difficult passage. In 1910 she became the first woman secretary of the association of composers in Paris. At about 50 she took lessons in writing for orchestra from a younger composer. She also had fun with false names. Some piano pieces came out under a man’s name, and she signed the words of her comic songs with silly invented names. She was a deeply religious Catholic, and she played the organ in church. Allons prier! (Let Us Pray) is a song to the Virgin Mary, published in 1906.

She died near Paris in 1937, at 79. After her death her music was forgotten. In the 1990s a German cellist found one of her pieces and began to look for more, and her family’s papers were found in a basement.

Her parents, her marriage and the ideas of her time all stood in her way. Still, Mel Bonis wrote about 300 works, and today they are being played and recorded again. Piano teachers still use her pieces for children.