Augusta Holmès, complete: all 73 pieces in our source corpus
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Augusta Holmès (1847–1903) was the most important French woman composer of the late 19th century, part of César Franck's circle and championed by Saint-Saëns. PracticeClef now carries all 73 of her pieces from our source corpus — every playable engraving we have access to, not every piece she ever wrote (her orchestral and opera output sits outside this collection). That makes her the largest single-composer collection by a woman anywhere in the catalog. You can browse the whole set on her composer page.
Nearly all of it is mélodie: the piano part of a voice-and-piano song. We say that plainly once, here — these are piano-only engravings of songs originally written for voice and piano, and the vocal line is not included. As accompaniment repertoire they stand on their own, and the collection spans our published 1–9 difficulty scale from 3 to 8, with most pieces clustering in the intermediate 6–7 range.
Six pieces that show the range
Un rêve, à 2 voix — Augusta Holmès
This piece is in B major, sits at level 8 of 9, and takes about 4 minutes to play.
Written for two voices over one piano part, this is a genuine rarity: practice repertoire for accompanying a vocal duo rather than a solo singer. The piano writing carries its own harmonic interest independent of the two lines above it.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Dans les bois, à 2 ou 4 voix — Augusta Holmès
This piece is in Gb major, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about 5 minutes to play.
The other duet accompaniment in the collection, flexible enough for two or four voices above it. It's one of the longer pieces in the set, giving the piano part room to develop on its own between vocal entries.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Ogier le Danois — Augusta Holmès
This piece is in Ab major, sits at level 7 of 9, and takes about 4 minutes to play.
One of several story-scena settings in the collection, built around the Old French legend of the knight Ogier the Dane. The writing has the narrative sweep of a ballade, with the piano carrying much of the storytelling.
Open this score when you want to play it.
La chanson de Jean Prouvaire — Augusta Holmès
This piece is in D major, sits at level 5 of 9, and takes about 3 minutes to play.
A setting connected to Jean Prouvaire, the student-poet of Hugo's Les Misérables — a literary thread running through the story-scena cluster of this collection. A thinner two-voice texture makes it an approachable entry point into Holmès's style.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Chanson catalane — Augusta Holmès
This piece is in Bb major, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about 3 minutes to play.
Part of a small Mediterranean-flavored cluster in the collection, built on habanera-inflected chromatic figures over a steady dance pulse before settling into its home key.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Chanson du chamelier — Augusta Holmès
This piece is in G major, sits at level 4 of 9, and takes about 6 minutes to play.
The "camel driver's song," and the other half of that Mediterranean/exotic pairing — one of the longer pieces in the set at a modest difficulty, making it a good first Holmès piece for an intermediate player.
Open this score when you want to play it.
What else is in the 73
Beyond these six, the collection includes further pieces in the same story-scena vein (Le brick l'Espérance, Le retour du paladin) and further Mediterranean-tinged settings (Sous les orangers, À Trianon), alongside dozens of shorter mélodies across every key and mood Holmès worked in. All of it carries the same provenance record on its own piece page: public domain, lint-checked, render-validated, and graded.
Explore it
The full set is on her composer page, or browse the whole library and filter by composer, difficulty, or era. Connect a digital piano for live note feedback. Turn on Wait mode when you want the cursor to advance after you play the written notes. See the docs for setup. No account is needed.
A note on the numbers. Every count in this post is checkable against the live catalog: piece counts, keys, and difficulty grades come from each piece's own metadata record on our published 1–9 difficulty scale. “Complete” means every playable engraving in our source corpus — not every piece Holmès ever wrote. Duration figures are estimates derived from the score, not measured performances.