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Historical records matching Emmanuel Chabrier
About Emmanuel Chabrier
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo6avrl21Vw Espana - Emmanuel Chabrier
Emmanuel Chabrier From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Emmanuel Chabrier in 1882 Emmanuel Chabrier (pronounced: [%C9%9Bman%C9%A5%C9%9Bl ʃabʁie]; January 18, 1841 – September 13, 1894) was a French Romantic composer and pianist. Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, España and Joyeuse marche, he left an important corpus of operas (including the increasingly popular L'étoile), songs, and piano music as well. These works, though small in number, are of very high quality, and he was admired by composers as diverse as Debussy, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Satie, Schmitt, Stravinsky, and the group of composers known as Les six. Stravinsky alluded to España in his ballet Petrushka, Ravel wrote that the opening bars of Le roi malgré lui changed the course of harmony in France, Poulenc wrote a biography of the composer, and Richard Strauss conducted the first staged performance of Chabrier's incomplete opera Briséïs. Chabrier was also associated with some of the leading writers and painters of his time. He was especially friendly with the painters Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, and collected Impressionist paintings before Impressionism became fashionable. A number of such paintings from his personal collection are now housed in some of the world's leading art museums.
Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier was born in Ambert (Puy-de-Dôme), a town in the Auvergne region of central France. His father was an attorney; his childhood nanny Anne Delayre (whom Chabrier called 'Nanine') remained close to him throughout her life. He began his music lessons at the age of six; the earliest of his compositions to survive in manuscript are piano works from 1849. His family moved to Clermont-Ferrand in 1852 where he prepared for a legal career, studied at the Lycée imperial and had practical and theoretical music lessons with Alexander Tarnowski, a Polish-born composer and violinist. A piano piece from this period, Le Scalp!!!, was later modified into the Marche des Cipayes. In 1882 Chabrier visited Spain, which resulted in his most famous work, España (1883), a mixture of popular airs he had heard and his own imagination. In the view of his friend Duparc, this composition for orchestra demonstrated an individual style that seemed to come from nowhere; other contemporary musicians were more condescending. On 13 July 1888 Chabrier was nominated to the order of Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. In his final years, Chabrier was strained by financial problems caused by the collapse of his bankers, suffered from failing health brought on by the terminal stage of syphilis, and depression about the neglect of his stage works in France. The death of his beloved 'Nanine' in January 1891 greatly affected him. He became obsessed with the composition of his opera Briséïs, which was inspired by a tragedy of Goethe and melodic echos of Wagner, but he completed only one act. At the Paris premiere of Gwendoline, which finally took place in December 1893, the ailing composer in a box did not understand that the applause was for him. In 1892 he had written to his friend Lecocq: "Never has an artist more loved, more tried to honour music than me, none has suffered more from it; and I will go on suffering from it for ever". He succumbed to general paralysis in the last year of his life, dying in Paris at the age of 53. Although he had asked to be buried near the tomb of Manet, he was laid to rest in the cemetery of Montparnasse.
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Emmanuel Chabrier's Timeline
| 1841 |
January 18, 1841
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Ambert (Puy-de-Dôme), Auvergne, France
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| 1894 |
September 13, 1894
Age 53
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Paris, France
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