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Augusta

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“What’s that music you’re playing? I emphatically dislike it.” So said Cesar Franck’s wife when he played a piano version of his Quintet. She may have been reacting to the unusual passion in the piece–passion aroused by an extraordinary student of Franck’s.

The student was Augusta Holmes, the daughter of an Irish army officer. At twenty-two, she was eager to break away from her family, so Augusta set out for Beyreuth to satisfy her craving for the music of Wagner. Among her companions was Catulle Mendes whose bride had taken a fancy to Wagner. Mendes wasted little time in becoming Augusta’s lover.

Returning to Paris, Augusta established a salon where she entertained an entourage of admiring writers, painters, and musicians with her remarkable singing. Among them was one of France’s most distinguished composers, Camille Saint-Saens. “We were all in love with her,” he recalled many years later. “Any one of us would have been proud to have made her his wife.” Saint-Saens wrote two sonnets in praise of her beauty. Saint-Saens’ disdain for Franck’s Quintet may well have came from the jealousy he felt when she began taking lessons from Franck.

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It was a perfectly respectable relationship but the attention Franck lavished on his new student made Franck’s marriage less than comfortable. Vincent d’Indy admitted to falling under her spell after she sang her version of the Danse Macabre. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was struck by her appearance, which he described as “very décolleté.”

Before long, Augusta’s musical ambitions drew her on to bigger things, including composing operas, without much success. By the turn of the century she was a shadow of her former self, keeping a small apartment near the Paris Opera where she maintained a roomful of souvenirs to remind her of her years among the brightest artists France had to offer.