Émile Fabre (24 March 1869 in Metz, France – 25 September 1955 in Paris) was a French playwright and general administrator of the Comédie-Française from 1915 to
1936.:227 He was greatly influenced by Balzac as a young man, and most of his best-known plays deal with the sacrifice of personal happiness to the pursuit of wealth.Garreau, Joseph E. (1984). "Fabre, Émile" in Stanley Hochman (ed.) McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, Vol. 1, p. 136. He also wrote the libretto for Xavier Leroux's opera Les cadeaux de Noël (The Christmas Gifts) which was a great success when it premiered in Paris in 1915.Le Figaro (13 April 1917). "Courrier des Théâtres", p. 4
Career at the Comédie-Française Fabre was appointed general administrator of the Comédie-Française on 2 December 1915.:227 According to Susan McCready,During Fabre's tenure, the Comédie-Française moved from the center of the theatre scene, where theatrical creation and innovation are paramount, to its periphery, where [ . . . ] its role was increasingly limited to the preservation of the past.:2In 1922 he organised the Cycle Molière, in which all of Molière's plays were performed in chronological order.:231
The success of this event, encouraged him to organise the Centennial of Romanticism in 1927, the 100-year anniversary of Victor Hugo's Preface de Cromwell (Qe Waleffe).:232 Over the course of the Centennial the theatre staged twenty-one Romantic plays.
He resigned from the position 15 October 1936.:227
Plays Fabre's plays include: L'Argent (Money), 1895 La Vie publique (Public Life), 1901 Les Ventres dorés (Gilded Stomachs), 1905 Les Sauterelles (The Locusts), 1911
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