Born in Lunéville of a military father, captain and then colonel in the artillery,[1] Marie Bobillier, a single daughter,[2] lived her childhood in several cities, including Strasbourg and Metz, before finally settling in Paris in 1871.
[5] Her first publication, Histoire de la symphonie à orchestre[6] (1882), won a prize in Brussels (Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium), engaging her ever-increasing reputation in the French musicological world.
[3] 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 (1906), 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,[7] completed and published by Amédée Gastoué in 1926.
[10] 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.