His mother had briefly been married to a Paris-born Englishman, Ernest Denis-Street, and her son, christened Ernst August Georg, was given the surname Street.
Together with André Messager, Maurice Lefèvre and Raoul Pugno, Street regularly played through the score of Bizet's Carmen, which they regarded as "the opera of the century".
[3] The musical scholar Alan Walker comments that it was partly due to the advocacy of Street and Messager that the Paris Opéra took Carmen into its regular repertory.
[4] Street's opérette Mignonette (1896), was a parody of Ambroise Thomas's opera Mignon, written thirty years earlier.
[5] Later in his career, Street became music critic for the newspapers L'Éclair and Le Matin, and was the founding editorial secretary of the latter.