Musicians - Ambroise Thomas

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	Musicians - Ambroise Thomas

(Charles Louis) Ambroise Thomas (Metz August 5, 1811 - Paris, February 12, 1896) was a French opera composer, best-known for his operas Mignon (1866) and his Shakespearean Hamlet (1868).

The son of a musician, he learned to play the piano and violin as a child. He studied under Jean-François Le Sueur at the Paris Conservatoire, and won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1832 for his cantata, Hermann et Ketty. His first opera, La Double Echelle (1837), was produced at the Opéra Comique.

For the next quarter of a century Thomas's productivity was incessant, and most of his operatic works belonging to this period enjoyed a great, if ephemeral, popularity. They are hampered by their libretti, but a few of them are occasionally revived as historic curiosities or recorded as vehicles for bel canto singers: Le Caïd (1849), Le Songe d'une nuit d'été (1850; loosely adapted from Shakespeare), Psyché (1857). Some of his overtures appear on concert programs: the overture to Raymond (1851), for instance, receives the occasional revival.

To his theatrical successes, Thomas added administrative achievements. In 1856 he acquired a professorship at the Conservatoire, where he taught, among others, Massenet, one of the few French composers of the younger generation whose music interested him. He succeeded Auber as director of the Conservatoire in 1871, retaining his post until his death. Baffled by the musical unconventionalities of César Franck and certain other Conservatoire colleagues, he nevertheless was rather well liked as a man, even by those who found his output old-fashioned.

With Mignon (premiered at the Opéra Comique in 1866), Thomas achieved his first great acclaim outside, as well as within, France. Goethe's tale had provided inspiration for a highly sentimentalized libretto; Marie Galli-Marié (1840–1905), it was said , "had modelled her conception of the part upon the well-known picture by Ary Scheffer" (illustration). Mignon was a success all over Europe, to audiences that had embraced Charles Gounod's indirectly Goethe-inspired sentimental Faust (1859); and in Paris Mignon received more than a thousand performances by 1894, thereby becoming one of the most successful operas in French history . It turns up now and then even now, more often in the form of extracts for concert (or recording) use than in complete stagings. One of its arias, "Connais-tu le pays", was for generations among the most famous operatic excerpts by any composer.

Thomas turned to Shakespeare again for his Hamlet (Paris Opera, 1868), with a libretto by the seasoned team of Jules Barbier and Michel Carré; it enjoyed a long vogue, and like Mignon it continues to have a certain following.

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