1841–1894 · France · Romantic
Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894) was a French composer and pianist. For nineteen years he worked as a civil servant and composed in his spare time, and from 1880 composing became his only occupation. He is best known for the orchestral rhapsody Espana. The site has two of his songs for voice and piano.
Emmanuel Chabrier was born on 18 January 1841 in the town of Ambert in the Auvergne, into the family of a lawyer, Jean Chabrier. He was the only son. His nanny, Anne Delayre, whom he called Nanine, remained close to him for the rest of her life.
He studied music from the age of six. In Ambert he was taught by a Spanish refugee named Saporta, and when his family settled in Clermont-Ferrand in 1852, lessons with Alexander Tarnovsky, a musician from Poland, were added to his schooling at the lycee. The earliest of Chabrier's pieces to survive in manuscript are for the piano.
Tarnovsky told the boy's parents that he had enough gift to become a musician. His father, however, wanted him to follow him into the law. In 1856 the father relocated everyone to Paris, so the son could enrol at the Lycee Saint-Louis.
From the lycee Chabrier moved on to the law school, yet he did not give up music and kept studying composition, violin and piano. After graduating from law school he joined the Ministry of the Interior. He worked there for nineteen years.
At the ministry he was held in good esteem, but music was his true passion and took his free time. His teachers in these years were Edouard Wolff (piano), Richard Hammer (violin), and Theophile Semet and Aristide Hignard (composition).
From 1862 Chabrier belonged to the circle of the Parnassians. His friends included Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Paul Verlaine, and with Verlaine he sketched out a comic opera modelled on Offenbach. He never finished it; only four fragments survive. His job severely limited his chances to write large-scale works.
In 1873 Chabrier married Marie-Alice Dejean, and they had three sons. In 1869 both of his parents died within eight days.
In Paris he built up a wide circle of friends. Among the composers were Gabriel Faure, Ernest Chausson and Vincent d'Indy; among the painters, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet, whose Thursday soirees he attended. Among the writers were Emile Zola and Alphonse Daudet.
In the 1870s Chabrier started work on several pieces for the stage. The first he finished was the three-act opera bouffe L'etoile (The Star), ordered by the Bouffes-Parisiens theatre. It was given 48 times in 1877. Nobody revived it while he lived, yet it drew the press's attention to him, and also that of the publishing house Enoch & Costallat, which printed his music until the end of his life.
After L'etoile he was no longer regarded as a talented amateur. In the same year, 1877, Camille Saint-Saens played his Impromptu of 1865 in public for the first time; it was his first really significant piano piece, and it already carried his individual stamp.
Chabrier took a keen interest in Wagner: in his youth he made his own handwritten copy of the whole score of Tannhauser, hoping to see how the composer worked. In Munich he first saw Tristan und Isolde and was moved to tears. After that he resolved to devote himself entirely to composing and, in 1880, left his post at the ministry.
The conductor Charles Lamoureux appointed him chorus master and repetiteur and put his music on the programmes of his orchestra. In 1881 the piano cycle Pieces pittoresques was first performed. In 1882 he and his wife travelled to Spain, and in 1883 came the rhapsody for orchestra Espana, his most famous work.
Espana was premiered in November 1883 under Lamoureux, to whom it is dedicated. The success came at once and was enthusiastic, and at the public's demand it was played many more times over the following months. The rhapsody is a mixture of popular tunes that the composer had heard and his own themes.
Chabrier worked on the serious opera Gwendoline, to a libretto by Catulle Mendes, from 1879 to 1885. The Paris Opera declined to stage it, and it was premiered in 1886 at La Monnaie in Brussels. It was well received, but it had to be withdrawn after two performances because its impresario had gone bust.
Next he turned to a new project, the comic opera Le roi malgre lui, and finished the score within six months. It was shown at the Opera-Comique in Paris in 1887. The reception was favourable and a long run seemed likely, but fire destroyed the theatre after the third performance.
Thanks to his friendship with the tenor Ernest van Dyck, and later with the conductor Felix Mottl, the managers of the opera houses in Leipzig and Munich took an interest in both operas. Chabrier happily travelled to Germany several times, and his music was performed in seven cities there. In July 1888 he received the Legion of Honour with the rank of Chevalier.
In his last years Chabrier was troubled by money problems after his bankers failed, and by failing health. He was also low because his stage works were so little performed in France. In January 1891 his beloved Nanine died, and it affected him greatly.
He became obsessed with a new opera, Briseis, inspired by a tragedy by Goethe, but completed only the first act. In December 1893 the Paris premiere of Gwendoline finally took place. The ailing composer sat with his family in a box beside the stage and enjoyed the music, but he did not realise that he had written it, nor that the clapping was meant for him.
The illness left him paralysed, and on 13 September 1894 Chabrier died in Paris, aged 53. He had wished to lie close to Manet's grave at the Passy cemetery, but there was no free plot there, so he was laid to rest in the Montparnasse cemetery.
Chabrier kept close company with painters, and they often painted and sketched him. He can be seen at the piano in Henri Fantin-Latour's Around the Piano, and in the stage box in Edgar Degas's The Orchestra of the Opera. Edouard Manet painted his portrait in oils in 1881.
Chabrier himself collected the paintings of his Impressionist friends: Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Renoir and Sisley. Among them was Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. His collection was sold at the Hotel Drouot on 26 March 1896.
Chabrier left a fairly small body of music. It is light, cheerful, bright and tuneful, and rich in harmony, rhythm and orchestral colour. He wrote no symphony, concerto, quartet, sonata or church music: his legacy consists of operas, songs, piano pieces and orchestral works, the best known being Espana and Joyeuse marche.
He had no conservatoire training, and that left him free to look for his own musical language. His music is marked by wide-ranging melodies with big leaps, melodies reinforced by the bass or played in octaves, and frequent cross-rhythms and syncopation. The pianist Roy Howat hears fast, stamping rhythms in Bourree fantasque, Joyeuse marche, and a number of the Pieces pittoresques.
He began as a composer for solo piano. He left about twenty completed mature pieces; most were published in his lifetime, while five finished works and the incomplete Capriccio (1883) were published only after he died. Among them is the cycle of ten Pieces pittoresques: Francis Poulenc ranked it, for its importance to French music, alongside Debussy's Preludes.
Some pieces are better known in their orchestral form. Four numbers from the Pieces pittoresques make up the Suite pastorale, and Ravel orchestrated the Menuet pompeux. Bourree fantasque was orchestrated by Felix Mottl in 1898. The trip to Spain also gave rise to the Habanera (1885), among his best-loved piano works.
For four hands Chabrier wrote Souvenirs de Munich, in which he turned five themes from Tristan und Isolde into a comic quadrille. Vincent d'Indy recalled playing the Trois valses romantiques with the composer: Chabrier stopped him during the first waltz and showed him that they should be played not like academic music but with unexpected accents, barely audible pianissimos and sudden flashes of fire.
Chabrier has forty-three published songs. He began writing them at about the age of twenty-one, and the first nine date from 1862 to 1866. In 1888 he arranged sixteen French folk songs. Most of his songs are for voice and piano.
The site currently has two of his pieces, both for voice and piano at the Advanced level: Ballade des gros dindons and Chanson pour Jeanne. The second is one of his mature songs, written while he was striving to get Gwendoline staged.