1834–1908, French Ludovic Halévy was the nephew of the French composer Fromental Halévy (1799–1862) and first made his name as a novelist and playwright. Halévy worked as a civil servant until 1865, when he retired to write full time. By then he had already become friendly with Jacques Offenbach and in 1858, together with Hector Crémieux (1828–92), he ...
(Zhak Fran-swa’ Fro-mon-tal A-la-ve’) 1799–1862 French composer Halévy was born in France and entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of nine. From 1811 he studied with the composer Cherubini, who was a great influence on him. Halévy won the Prix de Rome in 1819 and taught at the Paris Conservatoire from 1827 (where his pupils included Bizet and Gounod). A ...
1799–1862, French Jacques-François-Fromental Halévy, who was born in Paris, studied there with several composers – of whom the most influential was Cherubini. Success at the opera house was rather long in coming, however, and Halévy had to endure rejections and failures before scoring his first success with Clari (1828), which was written for the Spanish mezzo-soprano ...
Carmen is the opera that has ensured Bizet’s lasting fame but which, somewhat uniquely, was partly fashioned by pressures from the directorate of the commissioning theatre, the Opéra-Comique. The revenue from this theatre was largely dependent on attracting the bourgeoisie, providing an evening out for chaperoned couples with an eye on marriage. Thus a setting including a ...
‘The Bat’ Composed: 1874 Premiered: 1874, Vienna Libretto by Carl Haffner and Richard Genée after Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy’s Le réveillon Prologue Falke wants revenge for a practical joke when Eisenstein left him sleeping, dressed as a bat, outside the Vienna law courts. Act I Eisenstein’s wife, Rosalinde, recognizes the voice serenading her as her ...
‘Fair Helen’ Composed: 1864 Premiered: 1864, Paris Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy Act I Since Pâris awarded Vénus the golden apple, her cult has become more popular than Jupiter’s. Hélène, wife of King Ménélas of Sparta, is waiting for Pâris to come and claim her. Disguised as a shepherd, Pâris enlists the help of ...
1838–75, French Out of 30 projected operas, Bizet only completed six but would no doubt have left more had his life not been cut short at the age of 36. Born in Paris into a musical family, he was prodigiously gifted and started lessons at the Conservatoire before he was 10. He was taught composition by Fromental Halévy ...
(Zhôrzh Be-za’) 1838–75 French composer When Bizet died at the age of 37, he was considered a failure by the French musical establishment. He had had several operas produced in Paris, but none of them had been wholly successful; now his latest work, Carmen, had caused a scandal. Bizet’s reputation was at its lowest ebb, but already ...
1831–97, French Henri Meilhac, the French dramatist and librettist, wrote most of his texts for operas in collaboration with other writers. Meilhac’s most renowned partnership, which began after a chance meeting outside a Paris theatre in 1860, was with Ludovic Halévy. They produced libretti for Bizet, Léo Delibes (1836–91) and most famously for Offenbach. Meilhac ...
(Zhak Of’-fen-bakh) 1819–80 French composer Offenbach’s tuneful, witty and often outrageous satires on Greek mythology and the Second Empire enthralled the French public, including the Emperor Louis-Napoleon. After only one year at the Paris Conservatoire, he joined the Opéra-Comique orchestra, studying with Halévy, and toured as a virtuoso cellist. After conducting at the Théâtre Français, he ...
Triumphantly premiered in Vienna’s Burgtheater on 26 December 1767, Alceste was the second of the three collaborations between Gluck and Calzabigi. Today it is probably more famous for the reforming manifesto of its preface than for its magnificent music. Like Orfeo, Alceste cultivates Gluck’s ideal of noble simplicity, with the whole opera based essentially on a single situation ...
1818–93, French Charles Gounod almost became a priest, and his first works comprised church music. However, the mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), a member of the Garcia operatic family, perceived Gounod’s potential and persuaded him compose opera. Eventually, he wrote 12 of them. Gounod composed Sapho (1851) for Viardot, but it did not make a distinctive ...
(Sharl Goo-no) 1818–93 French composer Gounod is best known as the composer of one of the most popular French lyric operas, Faust. His teachers at the Paris Conservatoire were the opera composers Jacques-François-Fromental Halévy (1799–1862) and Jean François Le Sueur (1760–1837) and in 1839 he won the coveted Prix de Rome. Alongside much sacred music, such as the florid ...
1814–97, French Cornélie Falcon’s singing career was brief. At 18 she made her debut at the Paris Opéra in 1832, singing the role of Alice in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s (1791–1864) Robert le diable. However, Falcon was a mezzo-soprano who wanted to be a soprano and ruined her full, resonant voice by forcing it too high. By 1838 her ...
1811–69, Italian The Italian soprano Giulia Grisi made her debut at age 17 in Bologna, singing in Rossini’s Zelmira. Three years later, in Milan in 1831, Grisi created the role of the priestess Adalgisa in Bellini’s Norma – a part he wrote especially for her. Her Paris debut followed in 1832, when she sang the title ...
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