Emmanuel Chabrier

His bourgeois family did not approve of a musical career for him, and he studied law in Paris and then worked as a civil servant until the age of thirty-nine while immersing himself in the modernist artistic life of the French capital and composing in his spare time.

His lack of academic training left him free to create his own musical language, unaffected by established rules, and he was regarded by many later composers as an important innovator and a catalyst who paved the way for French modernism.

He continued his studies, with teachers including Edouard Wolff (de) (piano), Richard Hammer (violin), Théophile Semet (fr) and Aristide Hignard (both composition).

[8] In a study of the composer published in 1935 Jacques-Gabriel Prod'homme commented that it would be wrong to class Chabrier as merely an amateur in this period: "For, while in quest of the technique of his art, he displayed a curiosity in the painting and literature of the 'modernists' of his day that, among musicians, had few parallels.

Among his friends were Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Paul Verlaine; with the latter he planned a comic opera in the fashionable style of Offenbach, Vaucochard et fils Ier.

[9][n 2] He did not set any poems by Villiers de L'Isle Adam or Verlaine, although the latter wrote a sonnet À Emmanuel Chabrier (published in Amour, 1888) as a remembrance of their friendship.

[11] There are several descriptions of Chabrier's piano-playing at around this time; many years later the composer Vincent d'Indy wrote, "Though his arms were too short, his fingers too thick and his whole manner somewhat clumsy, he managed to achieve a degree of finesse and a command of expression that very few pianists – with the exception of Liszt and Rubinstein – have surpassed.

[15][17][18] Chabrier's friends in Paris included the composers Gabriel Fauré, Ernest Chausson, and Vincent d'Indy;[19] painters including Henri Fantin-Latour, Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, whose Thursday soirées Chabrier attended; and writers such as Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Jean Moréas, Jean Richepin and Stéphane Mallarmé.

He secured the commission through his many contacts in the world of arts and letters: he had met the librettists, Albert Vanloo and Eugène Leterrier through the painter Alphonse Hirsch, whom he had got to know as a member of Manet's set.

[26] This event led Chabrier to conclude that he must single-mindedly pursue his vocation as a composer, and after several periods of absence he left the Ministry of the Interior in late 1880.

In a 2001 study, Steven Huebner writes that there may have been additional factors in Chabrier's decision: "the growing momentum of his musical career … his high hopes for the Gwendoline project, and the first signs of a nervous disorder, probably the result of a syphilitic condition, that would claim his life 14 years later.

[28] Mendès wrote texts that were set by at least seven French composers, including Fauré, Massenet, Debussy and Messager; none of his operatic works were successful, and Johnson rates the libretto for Gwendoline as "catastrophic".

It met with what Poulenc calls "immediate and rapturous success", made Chabrier's reputation, and by public demand received multiple performances over the next months.

[31] Admirers included de Falla, who stated that he did not think any Spanish composer had succeeded in achieving so genuine a version of the jota as in the piece,[32] The Paris Opéra declined to present Gwendoline, which was premiered at La Monnaie in Brussels under Henry Verdhurdt in 1886.

[33] While striving for a staging of his opera Chabrier was also working on some of his mature songs – Sommation irrespectueuse, Tes yeux bleus, Chanson pour Jeanne, Lied, as well as a lyric scene for mezzo, women's chorus and orchestra La Sulamite and the piano version of the Joyeuse Marche.

[36] Chabrier left a rich and exuberant body of correspondence; Myers sees the "letter-writer's gift of spontaneous self-expression, with no undertones of insincerity or of writing for effect".

[49] Poulenc wrote, "The fact that Chabrier always composed at the piano – as did Debussy and Stravinsky – did not prevent him from finding a rare orchestral colour: a unique achievement at a time when Franck, d'Indy and Saint-Saëns hardly ever emerged from well-worn paths".

[54] The critic Elizabeth Forbes calls the score, "light as thistle-down … in the best tradition of Offenbachian opéra bouffe, with each singer perfectly characterized in his or her music".

[59] Arnold and Nichols comment that the work is considerably less Wagnerian than has often been supposed: "certainly the modal, asymmetrical, loosely articulated theme of the overture is individual to a degree".

[53] Arnold and Nichols write that some of Chabrier's best music went into his comic opera Le Roi malgré lui (Opéra-Comique, 1887), "but unfortunately the work is saddled with one of the most complex and incomprehensible librettos of all time".

[61] After the same production, the critic Rupert Christiansen wrote, "Le Roi malgre lui doesn't know whether it's a Carry On farce by Offenbach or a nationalist epic by Wagner.

[64] Although the piano works are not the best known part of Chabrier's oeuvre, Poulenc put the cycle Pièces pittoresques on a par with Debussy's Preludes in its importance for French music.

Although Wagner's Tristan und Isolde had made a deep impression on him, his irreverent nature led him to arrange five themes from the opera into a comic quadrille.

"[69][n 10] Vincent d'Indy wrote, after studying the Trois valses romantiques and playing them with the composer: "I thus worked on these three waltzes con amore, doing my best to perform all the indications marked with the greatest precision... and there are many of them!

And then I had a marvellous lesson in playing alla Chabrier; contrary accents, pianissimi to the point of extinction, sudden fire-crackers bursting out in the middle of the most exquisite softness, and also indispensable gesturing, giving over the body, too, to the intention of the music".

[74] In 1888 Chabrier made sixteen arrangements of French folk songs for an anthology called Le plus jolies chansons du pays de France.

A later group of songs (1889) with a linking theme is what Chabrier called his "poultry farm", to lyrics by Edmond Rostand and Rosemonde Gérard, with subjects including fat turkeys, little ducklings, pink pigs and chirping cicadas.

[74] The musicologist David Charlton evaluated his influence by saying "While the musical language of Reyer, Massenet and Saint-Saens presented syntheses of current practice, that of Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–1894) was a catalyst: his work became the cradle of French modernism".

Huebner remarks on echoes of Chabrier in Debussy's "La soirée dans Grenade" in Estampes, and the piano prelude "Général Lavine – excentric".

[87] Johnson comments that although it now seems extraordinary that the owner of such magnificent works of art should have money worries, this was before Impressionist paintings became sought-after and expensive, and "in any case, this was a composer who regarded his collection as a spiritual necessity rather than a financial asset".