Emmanuel Chabrier

Emmanuel Chabrier served for 19 years as a career bureaucrat in the French Ministry of the Interior, pursuing his passion for music in spare time and holidays before a trip to Munich in 1880 to hear Wagner's Tristan und Isolde convinced him that he must devote his life to art. By then, he was already a familiar figure on Paris's cultural scene: a friend of Verlaine and Manet, an early collector of the paintings of Cézanne and a popular guest in the city's salons, loved for his boyish enthusiasm, his flamboyant piano playing and his irrepressible charm. Chabrier was encouraged in his composing by (among others) Chausson, Fauré and Henri Duparc, and his music combines exquisite craftsmanship, subtlety and wit with a sense of humour so exuberant that it occasionally breaks through conventional taste into cheerful (and unashamed) vulgarity. His largest surviving works are his operas Gwendoline (1886) and Le roi malgré lui (1887), but two flamboyant, gloriously colourful orchestral miniatures, Joyeuse marche (1888) and the rhapsody España (1883), are among the happiest musical souvenirs of the belle époque. Chabrier's exquisite solo mélodies are beloved by connoisseurs of French song, while his 1877 comic fantasy L'étoile might be simultaneously the funniest and most beautiful of all French operettas.