1823–1892 · France · Romantic
Édouard Lalo (1823–1892) was a French composer from Lille who played the violin and the viola. He is best known for the Symphonie espagnole for violin and orchestra. He also wrote the opera Le Roi d'Ys, a cello concerto and a piano concerto. Pianists meet him through his songs and through chamber works with a piano part.
Édouard Lalo was born in Lille, in the north of France, on 27 January 1823. His father was a former captain of light infantry and a knight of the Legion of Honour. In 1833 the boy entered the conservatoire of his home town and began to study the violin, and perhaps the cello as well. His teachers there were Müller and Baumann.
In 1839 Lalo went to Paris to continue his musical education, although his father opposed it. There he studied the violin with Pierre Baillot and then with François Antoine Habeneck. In 1828 Habeneck became the first conductor of the orchestra of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire.
Lalo took composition lessons from Julius Schulhoff: in 1843 this pianist began to introduce him to the writing of music. Later he improved his craft in the company of Joseph-Eugène Crèvecœur, who had won the second Prix de Rome. The earliest compositions known today are songs with piano accompaniment from 1848. In that same year he showed two of his scores to Hector Berlioz.
He became friends with the violinist Jules Armingaud, the only person he confided in, and with the violinist and composer Pablo de Sarasate. His friends also included the painters Maurice Courant and Auguste Delacroix. Sarasate later gave the first performance of Lalo's Symphonie espagnole.
For several years Lalo worked in Paris as a string player and teacher, playing the violin and the viola in orchestras. He joined the string quartet led by Jules Armingaud, first as the violist and later as the second violinist. The quartet's aim was to promote the works of German masters. For this ensemble Lalo wrote a string quartet of his own.
Lalo's early works were mostly for small forces: two piano trios, a violin sonata (1856), six romances to poems by Béranger (1849) and a cycle of songs to poems by Victor Hugo. He destroyed two early symphonies. Music from his first opera found a second life in other works, for example the Divertissement for orchestra (1872) and the Symphony in G minor (1886). In 1870 he wrote three songs to poems by Alfred de Musset, and in 1879 five songs to poems by Lamartine, Armand Silvestre and Victor de Laprade.
Until 1865 Lalo lived modestly, in Puteaux among other places, with his first wife. After she died, he married in 1865 one of his pupils, the young singer Julie, and lived more comfortably in Paris, on the Boulevard Malesherbes among other places. On Friday evenings he held musical gatherings at home, and he also went to other private musical salons in the capital.
Marriage turned Lalo's thoughts to opera. His first opera, Fiesque (1866), based on Schiller's play about the conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa, was turned down by the theatres and was performed in full only in 2006: a concert performance in July at the Montpellier festival, and the first staging in 2007 in Mannheim. This put him off working for the stage for a long time. Only in 1875 did he begin his second opera, Le Roi d'Ys, based on the Breton legend of the drowned city of Ys.
He finished the opera in 1881, and it then waited another seven years for a staging. The first night in 1888 at the Opéra-Comique brought Lalo a resounding success. He did not live to finish a third opera, La Jacquerie.
The overture to Le Roi d'Ys was already heard by the public in 1877, at popular concerts and at the Paris Conservatoire. Soon after the staging the score won the Monbinne prize of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The ballet Namouna was commissioned by the Paris Opéra and shown in 1882, with choreography by Lucien Petipa. Part of the press and of the opera regulars received it coldly, while Debussy, Fauré and Chabrier greeted it with enthusiasm. It has stayed in the repertoire as orchestral suites.
Lalo's contemporaries received his concert works better than his stage works. It began with the Symphonie espagnole for violin and orchestra (1874), a five-movement concerto brilliantly played by his friend Pablo Sarasate. The next two works for violin and orchestra, the Norwegian Rhapsody and the Russian Concerto (1879), were popular too. He also wrote Russian Songs, intended for cello and piano.
Lalo wrote the cello concerto (1877) in consultation with Adolphe Fischer, who became its first performer. The work is still part of the standard repertoire of cellists. His piano concerto dates from 1889. Claude Debussy thought highly of Lalo's music and wrote about the orchestral suite from Namouna.
Lalo was a reserved man who disliked talking about himself, and many of the letters he wrote and received were destroyed. He wrote songs and orchestral works with zeal, and they were valued more abroad than in France. Charles Gounod, who liked his music, supported him more than once. From 1873 Lalo belonged to the Legion of Honour, in 1876 he sat on two competition juries of the Paris Conservatoire, in 1878 he won the Institut's Chartier prize for chamber music, and on 1 January 1889 he was made an officer of the order.
On 28 March 1891 the pantomime Néron, in three acts with choruses and a text by Paul Milliet, was given at the Hippodrome by the Pont de l'Alma. Lalo died at home in Paris, in the 17th arrondissement, in April 1892, and was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery. His opera La Jacquerie remained unfinished: Arthur Coquard finished it after his death, and it was first given in Monte Carlo on 9 March 1895.
Lalo's son Pierre (1866–1943) took up music criticism; from 1898 until he died, his articles appeared in Le Temps and in other French journals.
Lalo's music has strong melodies and colourful orchestration, together with a German solidity that sets him apart from other French composers of his time. He admired the Wagnerian orchestra but followed his own personality. As a performer and as a composer he helped to revive chamber music in France. His string quartet shows some influence of Beethoven, yet it also has a rhythmic vigour of its own. The composer Florent Schmitt called the Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 26, a splendid and original work that, together with Fauré's almost contemporary first quartet, in his words marks the official arrival of modern French music in the purest and noblest of its fields.
The Symphonie espagnole is one of the first French orchestral works to draw on Spanish folklore and dance rhythms. The same interest in folk music shows in the Norwegian Rhapsody, the Russian Concerto and Le Roi d'Ys, based on a Breton legend, where Lalo deliberately avoided a Wagnerian music drama. He preferred short forms and showed melodic and rhythmic invention in them. Today violinists play the Symphonie espagnole, the Cello Concerto in D minor returns to the platform from time to time, and the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham was fond of the Symphony in G minor.
Lalo wrote quite a number of songs. Among the titles of the six romances to poems by Béranger (1849) are La Pauvre Femme and Le Vieux Vagabond; the Hugo cycle includes Ballade à la lune and Amis, vive l'orgie. In 1870 came three songs to poems by Musset, and in 1879 five songs, among them La Chanson de l'alouette.
Beyond the concertos, his orchestral music includes the Divertissement (1872), the Symphony in G minor (1886) and the Scherzo in D minor, which is among his most colourful pieces. The ballet Namouna lives on in the repertoire as orchestral suites. Lalo also wrote operas for the stage: Le Roi d'Ys, Fiesque and La Jacquerie.
Pianists will find Lalo mostly among his songs and chamber works with a piano part: two piano trios, the violin sonata, the Russian Songs for cello and piano, and cycles of songs to poems by Béranger, Hugo, Musset and other poets. The piece L'Esclave on this site is also written for voice and piano; its level is "Intermediate+". His large work for piano and orchestra is the concerto of 1889.