Composer, born in Metz, NE France. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where he became a professor of composition (1852) and director (1871). He wrote many light operas for the Opéra Comique and the Grand Opéra, of which Mignon (1866) is the best known. He also composed cantatas, part-songs, and choral pieces.
(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).
His parents were music teachers and prepared him to become a musician. In 1828, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Jean-François Le Sueur while at the same time continuing his piano studies privately with the famous virtuoso pianist Kalkbrenner. It was during his Italian sojourn that he wrote all of his chamber music--a piano trio, a string quintet and a string quartet, all of which reflect his new style of writing.
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;
To his theatrical successes, Thomas added administrative achievements.
With Mignon (premiered at the Opéra Comique in 1866), Thomas achieved his first great acclaim outside, as well as within, France. 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 . 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.
His last opera, Françoise de Rimini (Paris Opéra, 1882) based on a passage from Dante's Inferno, failed to stay in the repertoire. Seven years later La Tempête, a ballet (and yet another treatment of a Shakespeare play), was produced at the Opéra, again with very little effect.
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