Gustave Charpentier

Gustave Charpentier (1860–1956) is remembered for a single opera, and it was enough. The son of a baker from Dieuze in Lorraine, he studied violin in Lille with the help of a patron and entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1881, where Massenet taught him composition and where he enjoyed shocking his professors. The Prix de Rome of 1887, for the cantata Didon, gave him the years in Italy in which he wrote the suite Impressions d'Italie and began Louise, for which he also wrote the libretto. Back in Montmartre he finished it, and the Opéra-Comique premiere on 2 February 1900 under André Messager was an immediate triumph: a realistic portrait of working-class Paris, often called a French cousin of verismo, it travelled quickly across Europe and America. In 1902 he founded the Conservatoire Populaire Mimi Pinson to give free artistic training to the working girls of the city. The sequel, Julien, failed, and for the remaining half-century of his long life he composed almost nothing more. Louise's aria was sung at the gala concert of Raina Kabaivanska's master class on 30 September 2010, conducted by Nayden Todorov. The sequel reached the stage in 1913, and the decades after it were not idle: during the First World War he set up the Œuvre de Mimi Pinson and the Cocarde de Mimi Pinson for wounded soldiers, and in 1934 he conducted a recording of Impressions d'Italie with a Paris orchestra. His Légion d'honneur of 1900 was raised to Commandeur in 1930 and to Grand Officier in 1950.