Ferdinand Hérold

His operas influenced later composers from Bizet and Offenbach to Wagner and Smetana.The Herold family was of Alsatian origin (the surname was written without an acute accent).

[4] Shortly after this, the Napoleonic empire began to disintegrate, and Hérold left Naples, making a circuitous journey back to Paris.

[12] Hérold arrived back in Paris in August 1815, where he took the post of maestro al cembalo (deputy conductor and répétiteur) at the Théâtre Italien.

[13] He had another success with La Clochette (The Bell, 1817), based on the story of Aladdin and his lamp;[4] it ran well in Paris and was seen in Vienna (with additional numbers by Franz Schubert)[n 2] After these, he had difficulty finding adequate librettos, and suffered four failures in a row between 1818 and 1821, following which he gave up composing operas for more than two years.

The biographer Thomas Betzwieser writes that in Le Muletier Hérold "found his own language for the first time" so that this work marks the emergence of his personal style.

They had three children: Ferdinand, who became a lawyer and subsequently a senator; Adèle, who married a member of the Paris Conseil municipal; and Eugénie, a gifted musician, who, like her father and grandfather was consumptive, and died aged 20.

[4] The work had a tentative start because of a financial crisis at Opéra-Comique and the defection of the company's leading tenor, but it quickly became one of the most popular opéras comiques of the 19th century, in France and elsewhere, being staged in the US and Britain in 1833.

His strength was taxed by the need to rehearse a new leading lady at short notice when the soprano cast for the role withdrew after her demand for higher fees was refused.

[4] The musicologist Gustav Choquet wrote in 1904 that Hérold's early symphonic, choral and chamber works show that the composer could have excelled in concert works had he continued in that type of composition, but the stage "possesses an irresistible attraction for a man gifted with ardent imagination and capacity for expressing emotion", leading Hérold to opera and the ballet.

[22] Hérold, and his friend Adolphe Adam (son of his godfather and piano teacher), made the first steps to elevating ballet scores to a higher musical level.

[23] Hérold continued the practice of using familiar operatic tunes (partly to aid audiences' comprehension of mime scenes),[24] but he borrowed carefully and with discrimination.

[25] Although Hérold's name is associated in the public mind with the music for La Fille mal gardée, the score he wrote for the Opéra in 1828 differs substantially from that played in modern productions of the ballet.

[22] Betzwieser comments that despite many deficiencies in the librettos of his early operas, Herold's talent for music drama was clear from the outset, and that he advanced the genre of opéra comique with his colourful and varied orchestration, and his gift for smooth transition between the spoken and sung sections of his works.

He added that although its immediate successors showed the composer's industry and fertility, operas like Le premier venu (1818), Les Troqueurs (1819), L' Amour platonique (1819), and L'Auteur mort et vivant (1820) had "librettos that were neither interesting nor adapted for music" .

In Betzwieser's view Marie represents "a crucial turning point in Herold's writing", and the poet Gérard de Nerval described the work as the "golden link" between Hérold's early operas and the later masterpieces Zampa and Le Pré aux clercs.

[4] For Zampa, a variant of the Don Juan story – with a female statue rather than a male one bringing nemesis to the antihero – Hérold wrote an overture that contains five different themes related to the action and score of the opera.

[4] Berlioz found things to praise in Zampa but thought Hérold lacked a style of his own, yet was neither Italian, nor French, nor German: "His music strongly resembles those industrial products made in Paris according to processes invented elsewhere and slightly modified; it is Parisian music", which, Berlioz thought, was why the Parisian middle classes loved it.

Forbes finds the score "a chain of fine numbers, extremely melodious and pretty, but also dramatically well suited to the various characters", with a balance between comedy and romance.

Wagner and Smetana both knew the opera well, and in another 2016 analysis, Damien Colas writes that echoes of Le Pré aux clercs may be found in the former's Das Liebesverbot (1836) and the latter's The Bartered Bride (1866).

[31] In The Oxford Companion to Music (2011) Sarah Hibberd writes, "the power of Le Pré aux clercs in particular suggests that [Hérold] might have fulfilled his ambition to compose a grand opéra had he lived".