Edmond Audran

Achille Edmond Audran, born in Lyon, France, on 12 April 1840, was a French composer whose comic operas and operettas achieved international success across Europe and the United States, including Broadway productions of The Mascot, Olivette, and La Poupée. He died on 17 August 1901 in Tierceville, on the north coast of France, at the age of 61.

Audran came from a musical family; his father, Marius-Pierre Audran (1816–87), was a tenor at the Opéra-Comique. He studied at the École Niedermeyer under Jules Duprato, winning the prize for composition in 1859. When his family relocated to Marseille in 1861, where his father took a post as singing teacher and later became director of the conservatory, Audran established himself as organist at the church of St Joseph. In that role he composed religious music, including a mass completed in 1873 that received a performance in Paris at St Eustache, as well as an oratorio, La sulamite, premiered in Marseille in 1876, and a motet, Adoro te, performed in Paris in 1882. His earliest dramatic works also date from the Marseille period: L'Ours et le Pacha, a musical adaptation of a vaudeville by Eugène Scribe, appeared in 1862, followed by the comic opera La Chercheuse d'Esprit in 1864. Among the operettas he wrote while still in Marseille, Le grand mogol (1877), with a libretto by Henri Chivot, proved the most successful and was subsequently revised for Paris, London, and New York.

Audran moved to Paris in 1879, and his fortunes changed rapidly. Les noces d'Olivette, also from 1879, generated what contemporaries described as an enormous vogue. An English adaptation by H. B. Farnie, presented in London as Olivette at the Strand Theatre, ran for more than a year from 1880 to 1881. The following year, La mascotte (1880) succeeded so thoroughly in Paris that the management of the Bouffes-Parisiens entered into a five-year exclusive contract with Audran, binding him to compose for no other Paris theatre. La mascotte reached New York in 1881 and London the same year, where the cast included Lionel Brough and Henry Bracy. The work has been revived occasionally and recorded, and the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins credits it with introducing the word "mascot" into the English language, tracing the term to the French dialect word masco, meaning "witch," and noting that the word first appeared in English the year after the operetta's Paris premiere on 29 December 1880.

Subsequent works extended Audran's reach across multiple cities. Gillette de Narbonne premiered in Paris in 1882 and reached London the following year as Gillette, with a libretto by H. Savile Clarke and additional music by Walter Slaughter and Hamilton Clarke. La cigale et la fourmi opened in Paris in 1886 and arrived in London in 1890 as La Cigale, in an English version by F. C. Burnand, with a cast that included Geraldine Ulmar, Eric Lewis, and Lionel Brough. Miss Helyett followed in Paris in 1890 and in London in 1891 as Miss Decima, again with a libretto by Burnand. La poupée, which premiered in Paris in 1896, reached London in 1897 with a libretto by Arthur Sturgess and starred Courtice Pounds and Willie Edouin, and was also produced on Broadway. While most of Audran's stage works were first presented in Paris before traveling abroad, four premiered elsewhere: Indiana in Manchester in 1886, La paradis de Mahomet in Brussels in 1887, and both Photis and La reine des reines in 1896, in Geneva and Strasbourg respectively. His most frequent libretto collaborators were Maxime Boucheron, Henri Chivot, Alfred Duru, and Maurice Ordonneau.

During his final years Audran suffered mental and physical illness that forced him to withdraw from Parisian society. The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition placed him among the foremost successors of Jacques Offenbach, noting that while he lacked Offenbach's humor, his music displayed an elegance and refinement that elevated it above standard opera bouffe, and that La mascotte in particular revealed a degree of musicianship uncommon in lighter stage works. The critic Philip Hope-Wallace, writing in 1957, observed that Audran's overtures to La Mascotte, La Poupée, and Miss Helyett remained in circulation on seaside bandstands, and noted that Audran himself did not hold La Mascotte in especially high regard, considering his other works more subtle. A French recording of La mascotte was issued that same year.