Charles Lecocq
He became the most prominent successor to Jacques Offenbach in this sphere, and enjoyed considerable success in the 1870s and early 1880s, before the changing musical fashions of the late 19th century made his style of composition less popular.
After study at the Paris Conservatoire, Lecocq shared the first prize with Georges Bizet in an operetta-writing contest organised in 1856 by Offenbach.
His comic operas Les cent vierges (The Hundred Virgins, 1872), La fille de Madame Angot (1872) and Giroflé-Girofla (1874) were all successes and established his international reputation.
It had been introduced by the composer Hervé and its principal exponent was Jacques Offenbach, who presented his works at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens from 1855.
[5] A jury of French composers and playwrights including Daniel Auber, Halévy, Ambroise Thomas, Charles Gounod and Eugène Scribe considered 78 entries; the five short-listed entrants were all asked to set a libretto, Le docteur miracle, written by Ludovic Halévy and Léon Battu.
[2] The composer's fortunes improved when he was engaged by Fromental Halévy's nephew William Busnach at the Théâtre de l'Athénée, for which Lecocq wrote the music for his first two-act piece, an opéra-bouffe called L'amour et son carquois (Cupid and His Quiver) presented in January 1868.
In April of that year he had his first substantial success with Fleur-de-Thé (Tea-flower) a three-act bouffe playing on the fashionable interest in the Far East.
Lecocq had Meilhac and Halévy as his librettists, but all three collaborators were hampered by Koning's insistence on a plot revolving around his star singer, Jeanne Granier, in a breeches role as a wandering minstrel boy, a hackneyed device which audiences regarded as a cliché.
His choice caused some surprise, as the theatre, run by the actor-manager Jules Brasseur, had no reputation for opérette or opéra-bouffe, and was distinguished by the sometimes indelicate content of its productions.
[20] The most successful of Lecocq's works for the Nouveautés were the opéra bouffe Le jour et la nuit (Day and Night, 1881) and the opéra comique Le coeur et la main (The Heart and the Hand, 1882), both variations on his familiar theme of wedding nights disrupted by farcical complications.
[2] Unlike his predecessor, Offenbach, and his successor, André Messager, Lecocq could not, or would not, alter his style to meet changing public tastes.
[24] His last important operetta, in Lamb's view, was the three-act opéra comique La belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty, 1900);[2] after which he wrote one more full-length work (Yetta, 1903) for Brussels and four short pieces for Paris.
[25][n 5] For the eight seasons from 2012 to 2020, the international Operabase archive records ten staged or planned productions of four pieces by Lecocq: six productions of La fille de Madame Angot, two of the 1887 three-act opéra comique Ali-Baba and one each of Le docteur Miracle and Le petit duc.
[28] Lamb writes that much of Lecocq's music is characterised by a light touch, although "he could also adopt a more lyrical and elevated style than Offenbach".
[2] Traubner comments that Lecocq consciously sought to elevate comic opera from the satirical and zany opéra-bouffe of his predecessors to the supposedly loftier genre of opéra-comique.
[32] When Giroflé-Girofla opened at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in 1874, the reviewer in the Chronique Musicale wrote that the music seemed to him superior to that of Offenbach – or even of earlier pieces by Lecocq, including La fille de Madame Angot – but that it was composed in a style that was possibly too refined to appeal to operetta audiences.
It is perhaps this lack of very obvious colouring that has led to his works being disproportionately neglected in modern times where only La fille de Madame Angot and, to a lesser extent, Le petit duc remain in the repertoire in France.
