Marie Bobillier


Marie Bobillier, real name Antoinette Christine Marie Bobillier was a French musicologist, music critic, writing under her pseudonym Michel Brenet.

Biography

Born in Lunéville of a military father, captain and then colonel in the artillery, Marie Bobillier, a single daughter, lived her childhood in several cities, including Strasbourg and Metz, before finally settling in Paris in 1871. She learned to play the piano, but a scarlet fever contracted at the age of thirteen rendered her disabled, influencing her decision to devote her life to research, after having been to the Pasdeloup concerts. She was one of the first French women musicologists.
Her first publication, Histoire de la symphonie à orchestre, won a prize in Brussels, engaging her ever-increasing reputation in the French musicological world. With a rigorous method that drew on the most reliable sources and documents, she made a series of publications – several valuable studies devoted to vocal music by Ockeghem, Goudimel, Palestrina, Sébastien de Brossard, Handel, Haydn, Grétry and Berlioz. Bobillier also approached classical and medieval instrumental music and left a precious and independent Dictionnaire pratique et historique de la musique, completed and published by Amédée Gastoué in 1926.
Her book Notes sur l’histoire du luth en France paved the way for further research in this area. Her major works are Les musiciens de la Sainte-Chapelle du Palais, Les concerts en France sous l’ancien régime and La librairie musicale en France de 1653 à 1790, where she demonstrates her great scholarship and competence as a music historian. Jean-Marie Fauquet summed up Marie Bobillier's work in one sentence: "It is of exceptional quality, both in terms of the variety of subjects dealt with and the method applied".
As a critic or musicologist, she collaborated with magazines such as ', of which she was one of the founders with Jean Chantavoine, Louis Laloy and Lionel de La Laurencie – she wrote bibliographies of French, German, English and Italian books, in the Revue musicale, the ', the Archives historiques, artistiques, littéraires, Le Correspondant, the Courrier musical, the Guide du concert, the Journal musical, Le ménestrel and the Tribune de Saint-Gervais, etc.; Abroad, she collaborated with the Rivista Musicale Italiana and the Musical Quarterly. She also contributed to Lavignac's Encyclopedia of music. Endowed with a very reserved personality and while "the stage frightened her", she gave a few lectures but declined participating in learned societies.
She left notes, quotations and transcripts, accumulated throughout her research, bound after her death in nineteen volumes, and preserved under the name Documents sur l’histoire de la musique at the Bibliothèque nationale.
Her pseudonym comes from the village of Les Brenets in the Doubs department, where her father's family came from. She died in Paris on 4 November 1918, aged 60.

Works

Monographs

  • Musiciens d’autrefois
*

Articles

Gounod et la musique sacrée ?, Le Correspondant, 10 December 1893. Quatre femmes musiciennes : Jacquet de La Guerre, Hélène de Montgeroult, Louise Bertin, Louise Farrenc, L’Art 2nd series, volume 4,,,, .Les Opéras féminins, Gazette musicale de la Suisse Romande, 28 February 1895,.
  • "Jean Mouton", Tribune de Saint-Gervais 5,.
  • "Guy d’Arezzo", Ponthus Teutonicus et l’abbé Odon », Tribune de Saint-Gervais 8,.L’amitié de Berlioz et de Liszt, Guide musical 50,.
  • .Mme de Genlis musicienne, Revue musicale S.I.M. 2, .
  • * on archive.org, Deux traductions françaises inédites des institutions harmoniques de Zarlino .
  • * on archive.org, Participe à la bibliographie uniquement
  • * on archive.org, Bibliographie des bibliographies musicales, Année musicale,,

Publisher

Marie Bobillier published music scores by Alexandre-Pierre-François Boëly at M. Senart.30 caprices, opus 2
  • 24 pieces for piano, opus 22
  • Pieces for piano, opus 34
  • Pieces for piano, opus 47
  • Pieces for piano, opus 48
  • Pieces for piano, opus 50
  • Pieces for piano, opus 51
  • Pieces for piano, opus 52
  • Pieces for piano, opus 55