It is a shame: despite my frequent hunting for new, forgotten pieces of classical music, it was only this week that I discovered the music by Mel (Mélanie Hélène) Bonis (1858-1938). She was a woman, what probably makes her music even more obscure than that of forgotten male colleagues. To conceal her gender during a time when compositions by women were not taken seriously (as were novels written by women, think about the pseudonyms used by Jane Austen and George Eliot), she shortened her first name to “Mel.”
Mel Bonis was born into a strictly Catholic lower middle-class family. Her parents did not encourage her interest in music, but a professor at the Conservatoire persuaded her parents to allow her to receive formal music lessons. Among her fellow students were Gabriel Pierné and Claude Debussy, but also a young poet and singer called Amédée Hettich. She fell in love with Hettich, but her parents disapproved and forced her to marry a 22 year older industrialist, a widower who hated music and who already had 5 children from a previous marriage. Bonis did her so-called duty and even had 3 children of her own by him. But in the early 1890s she met Hettich again and her interest in music (and in Hettich who was now also married) was rekindled. She started composing in earnest but in 1899 also had a daughter by Hettich, who was as was usual at that time put in the care of a third party. Her parents later would both recognize her - for Mel Bonis a necessity as one of her sons had fallen in love with his half-sister (!). Until WWI Mel Bonis devoted all her energies to composition. She became a highly esteemed composer, and when Saint-Saens first heard her piano quartet, he exclaimed, “I would never have believed that a woman could be capable of writing something of this kind." (In fact, that doesn't sound like real praise to me!) Bonis composed about 300 works, including works for piano solo and four hands, organ pieces,
chamber music, mélodies, choral music, a mass, and works for orchestra,
all in the French late-Romantic style.
Bonis was too modest for self-promotion. After WWI, her music fell into obscurity, and she became bedridden from arthritis. She continued to compose, however, and it seems a lot of her late music has not been performed yet.
Among the 20 pieces of chamber music Mel Bonis wrote, are also two piano quartets. Here is her Piano Quartet No 2 in D Major Op. 124, played by the Rudersdal Chamber Players at the Rudersdal Summer Concerts of 2020. The movements are: moderato, allegretto, lent, and allegro. This is in fact one of Mel Bonis' late works, written in 1927 when she was 69 years old. Bonis published the work at her own expense, but it seems it was never publicly performed during her lifetime.
Discussion of Piano Quartet No 2 at Earsense
Mel Bonis profile at Interlude
Website dedicated to Mel Bonis