François-Adrien Boieldieu

François-Adrien Boieldieu was a French composer born in Rouen on December 16, 1775, known primarily for his operas and sometimes referred to as "the French Mozart." His Broadway credits include First Come, First Served. He died on October 8, 1834, in Varennes-Jarcy.

Boieldieu received his early musical training from the choirmaster and organist of the cathedral in Rouen. His first compositions, La fille coupable (1793) and Rosalie et Mirza (1795), were set to texts written by his father and earned him immediate recognition. These works emerged during the Reign of Terror, a period when Rouen was among the few French cities sustaining an active musical life, including concerts featuring violinist Pierre Rode and tenor Pierre-Jean Garat.

He subsequently moved to Paris, where he initially worked as a piano tuner. The city's operatic landscape at the time was shaped by competition between two companies: the Favart, which emphasized patriotic spectacles and lighter works by Étienne Méhul, and the Feydeau, which staged the heroic dramas of Luigi Cherubini and Jean-François Le Sueur. Boieldieu contributed to both institutions, offering La famille suisse and L'heureuse nouvelle to the Feydeau in 1797 and Zoraime et Zulmare to the Favart in 1798, the latter bringing him considerable success. He was appointed second-class professor of piano in 1798. His compositional approach, influenced by André Grétry, favored unornamented melody supported by light but carefully crafted orchestration. Hector Berlioz characterized his music as possessing a pleasing and tasteful Parisian elegance. In 1800, Boieldieu achieved a major triumph with Le calife de Bagdad.

Following the breakdown of his marriage to dancer Clotilde Mafleuroy, Boieldieu departed for Saint Petersburg in 1804 to serve as court composer to the Russian tsar, a position he held until 1810. During those years he composed nine operas, among them Aline, reine de Golconde (1804) and Les voitures versées (1808). He was also initiated as a Freemason in Paris at the lodge Les Arts et l'Amitié, affiliated with the Grand Orient of France, and held membership in the lodge Palestine and honorary membership in Les Amis Réunis, both in Saint Petersburg.

Upon returning to France, Boieldieu regained his Parisian audience with a succession of works including La jeune femme en colère (1811), Jean de Paris (1812), and Le nouveau seigneur du village (1813). In 1817 he succeeded Méhul as one of the forty members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He was appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire in 1820, the same year he received the Légion d'honneur. Beyond opera, his Harp Concerto in C, composed in 1800–1801, is regarded as a significant work in the harp repertory.

His operatic masterpiece, La dame blanche, appeared in 1825. Drawn from episodes in two novels by Walter Scott, with a libretto by Eugène Scribe centered on the recognition of a long-lost child at a moment of crisis, the opera was among the early works to introduce the fantastic into the genre. Its style influenced later operas including Lucia di Lammermoor, I puritani, and La jolie fille de Perth. The work was revived at the Salle Favart in 1997 and recorded by conductor Marc Minkowski.

In his later years, Boieldieu gradually lost the ability to speak, likely as a result of laryngeal cancer. The bankruptcy of the Opéra-Comique and the revolution of 1830 compounded his difficulties, and Adolphe Thiers arranged a state pension of 6,000 francs to prevent him from falling into poverty. His last public appearance came on September 25, 1834, at the premiere of his pupil Adolphe Adam's Le chalet. Boieldieu died weeks later. His heart was interred in Rouen on November 13, 1834, in a tomb funded by the city and designed by Charles Isabelle, while his body was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. He had a son, the composer Adrien Louis Victor Boïeldieu, with French opera singer Antoinette Lemonnier, a member of the Opéra-Comique.