Louis Gallet

Louis Gallet (14 February 1835 in Valence, Drôme – 16 October 1898) was a French writer of operatic libretti, plays, romances, memoirs, pamphlets, and innumerable articles, who is remembered above all for his adaptations of fiction —and Scripture— to provide librettos of cantatas and opera, notably by composers Georges Bizet, Camille Saint-Saëns and Jules Massenet.

He proposed as collaborator Louis Gallet, whom Saint-Saëns did not know, and the result was the slight piece La princesse jaune; it was notable as the first japonerie on the operatic stage, Japan having only very recently been opened to Western trade and the first Japanese woodblock prints having been seen in Paris only two years previously.

The two worked together harmoniously for years, and it was Saint-Saëns who recommended Gallet as music critic for the Nouvelle Revue, though he was not a musician.

In his libretto for Massenet's Thaïs, he employed an unrhymed free verse that he termed, in Parnassien fashion, poésie melique which, like its classical Greek predecessors, was designed for a declamation with accompaniment (melodrama).

In Gallet's hands, declamation rose by degrees into a freely-structured aria that was raised above the level of prose by its sonorities and syntactical patterns, formulas that were finely suited to the musical techniques of both Saint-Saëns and Massenet.