Daniel Auber

Daniel-François-Esprit Auber was a French composer, director of the Paris Conservatoire, and Broadway composer and book writer whose credits include Fra Diavolo, Azael, The Prodigal, and The Syren. He was born on 29 January 1782 in Caen, Normandy, where his mother was visiting at the time, though the family was of Norman extraction and based in Paris. He died on 12 May 1871 in Paris at the age of 89.

Auber came from an artistically connected family. His grandfather had served as the king's painter, responsible for sculpting and gilding royal coaches, while his father, Jean-Baptiste Daniel, held a position as an officer of the royal hunt at the king's small stables in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. The French Revolution forced his father to change occupations, and he established a print shop in the rue Saint-Lazare, where he maintained a salon attended by artists of various kinds. By his teenage years, Auber had become an accomplished violinist, pianist, and singer.

Though his father recognized his musical gifts, Auber initially prepared for a career in the family's print-selling business. Following the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, he traveled to London to study commerce and learn English, remaining there for sixteen months. During that period he gained some recognition as both a performer and composer. He returned to Paris in 1803 when the Napoleonic Wars resumed and remained in the city for the rest of his life. Back in Paris, he was admitted to the Société académique des Enfants d'Apollon, a prestigious association of musicians and painters of which his father had been a member since 1784.

Auber composed as an amateur during these early years, producing works including five cello concertos premiered by the soloist Lamare, at least three of which were originally published under Lamare's name before their true authorship became known. Praise for his violin concerto in 1808 led him to set a comic opera, Julie, for an amateur society in 1811. Luigi Cherubini, the dominant figure in Parisian operatic circles, attended a performance and subsequently took Auber on as a private pupil. Auber's first professionally staged opera, Le Séjour militaire, appeared in 1813. The sharp decline of the Auber family's finances and the death of his father in 1820 compelled him to pursue composition professionally and secure a steady income. Works including La bergère châtelaine (1820) and Emma (1821), both set to librettos by Eugène de Planard, found success in France and Germany.

In 1822 Auber began a collaboration with the librettist Eugène Scribe that lasted 41 years and yielded 39 operas. Their first joint work was Leicester, ou Le château de Kenilworth, a three-act opéra comique derived from Walter Scott's historical romance Kenilworth, which received 60 performances over five seasons following its January 1823 premiere at the Salle Feydeau. By 1825 Auber's standing in the profession was sufficient for the government of Charles X to name him a chevalier of the Legion of Honour. That same year he composed La Muette de Portici, a five-act grand opera with extensive ballet numbers and recitative in place of spoken dialogue, making it the first French grand opera. Its libretto originated with Germain Delavigne and was adapted by Scribe. After its February 1828 premiere at the Paris Opéra, productions followed in London in May 1829 and New York in November of the same year, and by 1882 the work had been performed more than 500 times in Paris alone. Auber further consolidated his international reputation with La Fiancée (1829) and Fra Diavolo (1830), both created with Scribe, the latter of which became one of his Broadway credits.

In 1829 Auber was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France, succeeding François-Joseph Gossec. He was appointed director of court concerts in 1839 under King Louis-Philippe, and in 1842, when Cherubini retired, he became director of the Paris Conservatoire, a post he held until his death in 1871. During those 29 years he expanded and modernized the institution. From 1852 until the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, he also served as director of the imperial chapel in the Louvre, for which he composed a substantial body of liturgical and religious music. Over the course of his career he composed 35 works in the opéra-comique genre. He never married, was known for his shyness, and never appeared before the public as a conductor, consistently too nervous to attend his own premieres. A devoted Parisian, he refused to leave the city during the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent siege of Paris, and died there shortly before the French government regained control of the capital.