Edmond Audran

Edmond Audran, photo by Pierre Petit, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Edmond Audran (11 April 1842 – 17 August 1901) was a French composer best known for several internationally successful operettas, including Les noces d'Olivette (1879), La mascotte (1880), Gillette de Narbonne (1882), La cigale et la fourmi (1886), Miss Helyett (1890), and La poupée (1896).

Life and career

He was born at Lyon, the son of Marius-Pierre Audran (1816–87), who had a career as a tenor at the Opéra-Comique. Audran studied music at the Ecole Niedermeyer under Jules-Laurent Duprato, where he won the prize for composition in 1859. In 1861 his family to Marseille, where his father became a singing teacher and later director of the conservatory. Audran accepted the post of organist of the church of St Joseph there. For that church, he wrote religious music including, in 1873, a mass that was also performed in Paris at St Eustache. He made his first appearance as a dramatic composer at Marseilles with L'Ours et le Pacha (1862), a musical version of one of Scribe's vaudevilles. This was followed by La Chercheuse d'Esprit (1864), a comic opera, also produced at Marseille.

Audran wrote a funeral march on the death of Giacomo Meyerbeer, which was performed with some success, some songs in the Provençal dialect, and various other sacred pieces. He produced a mass (Marseille, 1893), an oratorio, La Sulamite (Marseille, 1876), and numerous minor works, but he is known almost entirely as a composer of light opera. His first Parisian success was made with Les noces d'Olivette (1879), a work which speedily found its way to London (as Olivette) in an English translation by H. B. Farnie and ran for more than a year at the Strand Theatre (1880–81).

Audran's music has met with as much favour in England as in France, and all save a few of his works have been given in English adaptations in London theatres. Besides those already mentioned, the following have been the most successful of Audran's many comic operas: Le grand mogol (Marseille, 1876; Paris, 1884; London, as The Grand Mogul, 1884 with a libretto by Farnie, starring Florence St. John, Fred Leslie and Arthur Roberts),^[1] La mascotte (Paris, 1880; London, as The Mascotte, 1881), Gillette de Narbonne (Paris, 1882; London, as Gillette, 1883), La cigale et la fourmi (the grasshopper and the ant) (Paris, 1886; London, as La Cigale, 1890; English version by F. C. Burnand),^[2] Miss Helyett (Paris, 1890; London, as Miss Decima 1891; English version by Burnand), La poupée (Paris, 1896; London, 1897).

Audran was one of the best of the successors of Jacques Offenbach. He had little of Offenbach's humour, but his music is distinguished by an elegance and a refinement of manner which lift it above the level of opera bouffe to the confines of genuine opera comique. He was a fertile if not a very original melodist, and his orchestration is full of variety, without being obtrusive or vulgar. Many of his operas, La mascotte in particular, reveal a degree of musicianship which is rarely associated with the ephemeral productions of the lighter stage. La mascotte is credited with bringing the word "mascot" into the English language.

Audran died in Tierceville in Seine-et-Oise.

Works

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• List of works at Blancmesnil.fr, accessed 30 October 2009
• Musical Theatre Guide page, accessed 30 October 2009
• Traubner, R. Operetta: a Theatrical History (1983) New York

External links

• Free scores by Edmond Audran in the International Music Score Library Project