Emmanuel Chabrier

For nearly twenty years Emmanuel Chabrier kept a desk at the Ministry of the Interior and composed, resigning only in 1880, at thirty-nine, to write music full time; hearing Tristan und Isolde in Munich deeply affected him. Born at Ambert in the Auvergne, he lived in Paris among painters and poets, collected Impressionist paintings, and wrote with an ear untutored by the Conservatoire. The journey to Spain in 1882 produced the rhapsody España; but the comic opera L'étoile, the Dix pièces pittoresques, the Joyeuse marche, the songs and Gwendoline are also part of his output. His music influenced Debussy, Ravel, Satie and Poulenc. He died in 1894, at fifty-three. The son of a lawyer, he was schooled at Clermont-Ferrand and then in Paris, where he took a law degree in 1861; his friends there included Faure, Chausson and d'Indy, and the painters Manet and Degas. He assisted Charles Lamoureux in bringing German music before Parisian audiences, and the opera Le roi malgre lui, completed in 1887, was staged with success in Leipzig and Munich. Paralysis overtook him in 1893.