Jump to content

Ludovic Halévy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Ludovic Halevy)
Ludovic Halévy
Halévy early in his career
Halévy early in his career
Born(1834-01-01)1 January 1834
Paris
Died7 May 1908(1908-05-07) (aged 74)
Paris
OccupationAuthor, librettist
ChildrenÉlie and Daniel
ParentsLéon Halévy
Alexandrine Lebas
RelativesLucien-Anatole Prévost-Paradol (half-brother)
Élie Halévy (paternal grandfather)
Louis-Hippolyte Lebas (maternal grandfather)
Fromental Halévy (paternal uncle)

Ludovic Halévy (1 January 1834 – 7 May 1908) was a French author and playwright, known for his collaborations with Henri Meilhac on the libretti for Georges Bizet's Carmen and comic operas by Jacques Offenbach, including La belle Hélène (1864), La vie parisienne (1866), La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) and La Périchole (1868)

Born in Paris to a musical and artistic family, Halévy worked as a civil servant after leaving school, and continued to do so, while pursuing a parallel career as a playwright, librettist and novelist. He generally wrote with collaborators, including Hector Crémieux, and on one occasion, his father, but his partnership with Meilhac, an old schoolfriend, produced the works for which he is chiefly remembered.

Life and career

[edit]

Early years

[edit]

Ludovic Halévy was born in the 10th arrondissement of Paris on 1 January 1834, the son of Léon Halévy and his wife, Louise Alexandrine, née Lebas. Léon was descended from a German Jewish family (originally Lévy) but converted to Roman Catholicism before his marriage; his wife was a member of a well-known and influential famiy, daughter of Louis-Hippolyte Lebas, architect of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, Paris.[1] Léon, whose elder brother was the composer Fromental Halévy, was a senior civil servant and a well-respected author.[2]

In 1845 Halévy entered the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.[3] He was an undistinguished scholar but he was well enough connected to secure admission to the French civil service after leaving school. His official career flourished but his chief interest was the theatre.[2] Concerned that his career prospects would suffer if he were publicly associated with the theatre he adopted the pen-name Jules Servières, under which he first collaborated with the composer Jacques Offenbach. Their bouffe musicale called Madame Papillon, a one-act knockabout piece with a cast of two, opened at the Bouffes-Parisiens on 3 October 1855.[4] Halévy abandoned the pseudonym the following January, when his real name was credited on bills for the duo's "chinoiserie musicale", Ba-ta-clan, but he returned to using it soon afterwards and did so for several years.[2]

In 1857 Offenbach organised a competition for young composers. A jury of French composers and playwrights including Daniel Auber, Fromental Halévy, Ambroise Thomas, Charles Gounod and Eugène Scribe considered seventy-eight entries; the six short-listed entrants were all asked to set the same libretto, Le docteur miracle, written by Halévy together with Léon Battu.[5] The joint winners were Georges Bizet and Charles Lecocq, with both of whom Halévy was later to collaborate again.[2][6]

Still cautious about the effect a reputation for writing operettas might have on his career, Halévy declined to have his name on the bills for his first outstanding success with Offenbach – Orphée aux enfers – and insisted that his co-librettist, Hector Crémieux, should receive all the credit and the royalties.[7] The piece opened on 21 October 1858 and ran for 228 performances, at a time when a run of 100 nights was considered a success.[8]

1860–1870

[edit]

In 1860 Halévy collaborated with his father on the libretto for Un mari sans le savoir ("A Husband Without Knowing It") with music by "Monsieur de Saint-Rémy" – in reality by the Duc de Morny who dabbled in operetta both as a librettist and as a composer.[9] Morny's patronage worked to Halévy's advantage in his official career, and soon after the première of Un mari sans le savoir Morny arranged for Halévy's appointment as secretary to the Corps législatif.[10]

In 1864 Halévy began a collaboration with the author Henri Meilhac which was to last until the latter's death in 1897. The two had become friends when both at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, sharing a distaste for school life and a preference for escaping it. They were strikingly different – one biographer writes, "with Meilhac the more ebullient and fanciful, and Halévy the more staid and craftsmanlike"[2] – but they remained close friends and now became inseparable collaborators.[11] Accounts differ about how the partners divided the work between them. According to Siegfried Kracauer, it was always Meilhac who outlined the skeleton of the plot and sketched the big scenes and situations, which Halévy "filled in with witty comment and dialogue".[12] Susan McClary writes, "In their collaborations, Meilhac wrote the prose dialogue, while Halévy provided the verse".[13]

Halévy later in his career.

Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians says of Halévy and Meilhac:

Their achievement lay to a considerable extent in exploiting to the full the existing forms of opéra comique with its combination of music and speech, its transparently artificial plot and its topicality, which often found expression in irreverent parody. ... Situations are contrived for concerted numbers, especially at the ends of acts, and solos and ensembles are both energetic and varied. The versification of the lyrics is deft, rhyme and vocabulary are amusing, and sentiments are expressed clearly. The spoken dialogues are crisp and laconic, sometimes colloquial and never pompous except in jest. with these means Halévy and Meilhac mocked everything they observed around them in a Second Empire society that took itself too seriously.[2]

The 1860s saw an unbroken series of eight opéras bouffes by Halévy, Meilhac and Offenbach. They started with a notable success, La belle Hélène, which opened on 17 December 1864. Despite some hostile criticism from Théophile Gautier ("To try to ridicule the heroes of Homer is almost to blaspheme") and Jules Janin ("perfidious Meilhac, treacherous Halévy, miserable Offenbach") the piece ran through most of 1865.[14] The three followed this hit with two more: La vie parisienne (1866) and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867).[15] Le château à Toto (1868) did less well,[16] but La Périchole (1868) was another success. It was based on Le carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, a comedy by Prosper Mérimée, who was to feature again in Halévy and Meilhac's work four years later.[17] Their last two collaborations with Offenbach in the 1860s – La diva (1869) and Les brigands (1869) – were less successful.[17] The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the downfall of the Second Empire caused a strong reaction against Offenbach from the public, who identified him with the fallen regime. He left the country for a time, taking refuge in London and Vienna.[18]

Carmen and later

[edit]

Although the two librettists were known for their comedies, in 1872 they undertook what was, for them, an unusual assignment. Halévy's cousin Geneviève (daughter of Fromental) was married to Bizet, whom the directors of the Opéra-Comique invited to write an opera in collaboration with Halévy and Meilhac. The librettists were enthusiastic about the composer's preference for a plot based on Prosper Mérimée's story Carmen;[19] they provided a libretto with the requisite tragic ending. Nonetheless, they regarded the piece as a side venture. Just before the premiere, Halévy wrote:

There are some very, very lovely and charming things in the score, and I dare hope for a happy evening for Bizet. His interests alone matter in this instance. The thing has little importance for Meilhac and me.[20]

The management of the Opera Comique was uneasy about presenting a tragedy, and Meilhac unsuccessfully urged Bizet to resist killing Carmen off at the end of the last act.[21] Their predictions of a failure proved accurate: the piece completed its scheduled run of forty-eight performances, but played to small audiences.[22]

This was the pair's only venture into tragedy. They wrote seven more libretti together, of which three were for Offenbach and four for Lecocq.[2] Grove comments on their efforts for Carmen: "perhaps the most famous product of the Halévy-Meilhac collaboration, but not a very typical one ... There is some justice in the complaint that the remarkable style of Mérimée’s original narrative is lost".[2]

When Offenbach returned to Paris from his voluntary exile he collaborated with Halévy, without Meilhac, on an opérette, Pomme d'api, and with both librettists on revised versions of La vie parisienne and La Perichole; the three collaborators' final work together was an opéra bouffe, La boulangère a des écus.(1875). Thereafter Halévy and Meilhac provided libretti for four opéras comiques with music by Lecocq: Le petit duc (1878), La petite mademoiselle (1879), Janot (1881) and La rousotte (1881), in the last of which there was also music by Herve and Marius Boullard.[2][23]

Halévy retired in 1882. Meilhac kept writing until shortly before his death in 1897.[24] Halévy died in Paris on 8 May 1908.[2]

Other works

[edit]

In addition to his theatrical works, Halévy published novels, short stories and satirical studies. He and Meilhac worked together on numerous non-musical comedies, from Ce qui plait aux hommes ("What Men Like", 1860) to la Petite Mère ("The Little Mother, 1880).[23]

Honours

[edit]

Halévy was elected as a member of the Académie française in 1881; he was appointed vice-president of the Society of Authors in 1882, and became an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1890.[23]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Hansen, pp. 2 and 17
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Smith, Christopher. "Halévy, Ludovic", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2002 (subscription required)
  3. ^ Hansen, p. 46
  4. ^ Yon, pp. 157–158
  5. ^ Yon, pp. 180–181
  6. ^ Gammond, p. 42
  7. ^ Gammond, p. 49; and Faris, pp. 62–63
  8. ^ Gänzl, p. 1150; and Esteban, p. 7
  9. ^ Yon, p. 246
  10. ^ Hansen, p. 160
  11. ^ Hansen, p. 54
  12. ^ Kracauer, p. 244
  13. ^ McClary, p. 18
  14. ^ Faris, pp. 126 and 134
  15. ^ Faris, pp. 141–142; and 147
  16. ^ Faris, p. 158
  17. ^ a b Faris, p. 160
  18. ^ Gammond, p. 102
  19. ^ McClary, p. 19
  20. ^ "Quoted" in McClary, p. 18
  21. ^ McClary, p. 23
  22. ^ McClary p. 28
  23. ^ a b c Martin, pp. 271–274
  24. ^ Saint-Albin, Albert and Henri Fouquier. "Mort de Henri Meilhac", Le Figaro, 7 July 1897, p. 1

Sources

[edit]
  • Esteban, Manuel (1983). Georges Feydeau. Boston: Twain. ISBN 978-0-8057-6551-9.
  • Faris, Alexander (1980). Jacques Offenbach. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-11147-3.
  • Gammond, Peter (1980). Offenbach. London: Omnibus Press. ISBN 978-0-7119-0257-2.
  • Gänzl, Kurt (2001). The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre (second ed.). New York: Schirmer. ISBN 978-0-02-864970-2.
  • Hansen, Eric (1987). Ludovic Halévy: A Study of Frivolity and Fatalism in Nineteenth-century France. Lanham: University Press of America. ISBN 978-0-81-915887-1.
  • McClary, Susan (2002). Georges Bizet: Carmen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52-139301-0.
  • Martin, Jules (1897). Nos auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques (in French). Paris: Flammarion. OCLC 9145330.
  • Yon, Jean-Claude (2000). Jacques Offenbach (in French). Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 978-2-07-074775-7.
[edit]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ludovic_Halévy&oldid=1281279643"