biography
| name: |
Chabrier, (Alexis) Emmanuel
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pronunciation:
[shabreeyay]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1841–94)
|
| biography:
| Composer, pianist, and conductor, born in Aubert, C France. After law studies in Paris he became secretary at the ministry of the interior, and devoted himself fully to music in 1879 after hearing Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. His mastery of musical writing was striking, as he was self-taught, proposing new rhythms, melodies, and harmonies. He became assistant to Lamoureux, who created the ‘Nouveaux Concerts’. Chabrier's first work was a Grande Valse (1857), and he went on to write Pièces Pittoresques and Bourrée Fantasque for piano, the orchestral works Espana (1883) and Joyeuse Marche, an opera Gwendoline (1886), and opera-bouffes Le Roi Malgre lui and L'Etoile, where he shows his ‘grand art gai’, as in his ‘volailleries’, tunes inspired by lines from Rostand and R Gérard. Several of his best-known pieces, notably his orchestral rhapsody España, were inspired by the folk music of Spain. A friend of the great painters and writers of his day, he has been saluted as the inventor of modern music by Debussy and Ravel, Stravinsky, Mahler, and Poulenc (who dedicated a book to him in 1961). |
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