Biography (read more)
Emmanuel Chabrier was born at Ambert, in the Puy-de-Dôme, on 18 January 1841. His bourgeois family discouraged a musical career, so he read law and entered the Ministry of the Interior, where he worked as a civil servant for nineteen years while composing in whatever time was left to him. His life was lived among artists rather than officials: he was a close friend of Édouard Manet, collected Impressionist paintings before they became fashionable, and knew Gabriel Fauré, Ernest Chausson and Vincent d’Indy.
In March 1880 he travelled to Munich and heard Tristan und Isolde for the first time. He was moved to tears, telling d’Indy that he had waited ten years of his life to hear the A in the cellos in the prelude, and he resigned from the ministry that same year to compose full time, at the age of thirty-nine. Charles Lamoureux engaged him as chorus master and répétiteur and programmed his music with the Lamoureux Orchestra. His last years were shadowed by general paresis, most likely a consequence of syphilis, and he died in Paris on 13 September 1894, at fifty-three, leaving the opera Briséïs unfinished. He is buried in Montparnasse cemetery.
Chabrier’s best-known work is España, the orchestral rhapsody first heard in November 1883 under Lamoureux, its dedicatee, to immediate and rapturous success; the Joyeuse marche has had a comparable life in the concert hall. For the stage he wrote L’étoile, Gwendoline and Le roi malgré lui, the last of which was favourably received at its Opéra-Comique premiere but lost its run when the theatre burned down after the third performance.
His piano music has been quite as consequential. The ten Pièces pittoresques, first played in 1881, drew from César Franck the remark that the audience had just heard something extraordinary, music linking their own time with that of Couperin and Rameau. The Bourrée fantasque and the Trois valses romantiques both reached the orchestra through Felix Mottl, who scored the first in 1898 and the second in 1900; Chabrier’s own orchestration of the Bourrée, begun in 1891, was completed by Robin Holloway in 1994. Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Satie and Stravinsky all acknowledged what they owed him, and he is generally placed as a catalyst of French musical modernism rather than as a figure of the establishment.
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