André Charles Prosper Messager (; 30 December 1853 – 24 February 1929) was a French composer, organist, pianist and conductor. His compositions include eight ballets and thirty , opérettes and other stage works, among which his ballet (1886) and (1898) have had lasting success; (1897) and (1919) were also popular internationally.
Messager took up the piano as a small child and later studied composition with, among others, Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré. He became a major figure in the musical life of Paris and later London, both as a conductor and a composer. Many of his Parisian works were also produced in the West End and some on Broadway; the most successful had long runs and numerous international revivals. He wrote two operatic works in English, and his later output included musical comedies for Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps.
As a conductor, Messager held prominent positions in Paris and London, at the head of the Opéra-Comique, the Paris Opéra, the , and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Although as a composer he is known chiefly for his light works, as a conductor he presented a wide range of operas, from Mozart to Richard Strauss, and he acquired a reputation as a conductor of Wagner. In Paris he conducted the world premieres of Debussy's , Massenet's and Charpentier's Louise. At Covent Garden, he gave the British premieres of operas by Saint-Saëns and Massenet.
Messager's music became known for its melodic and orchestral invention, musical craftsmanship, and characteristically French elegance and grace. Although most of his works have been infrequently revived, historians of music consider him the last major figure in French opéra comique and opérette.
Life and career
Early years
Messager was born at Montluçon, Allier, in central France on 30 December 1853, the son of Paul-Philippe-Émile Messager, a prosperous local tax collector, and his wife Sophie-Cornélie, née Lhôte de Selancy.Augé-Laribé, p. 16 He recalled, "You would not find any musicians among my ancestors. When very young I learned the piano; but later on my intentions to become a composer met with such opposition from my father".Quoted in Wagstaff, pp. 157 and 161 At the age of seven he was sent as a boarder to a Marist school where he continued his interest in the piano.Wagstaff, John and Andrew Lamb. "Messager, André", Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed 15 March 2018
Towards the end of the 1860s disastrous stock-market speculation brought Messager's family financial ruin and they could no longer afford to keep him at the Marist school.Wagstaff, p. 161 They dropped their objection to music as a profession, viewing a post as a church organist as a respectable and steady career. He was awarded a bursary to study at the École Niedermeyer in Paris, an academy known for its focus on church music.Ferchault, Guy, and Jacqueline Gachet. "Niedermeyer, (Abraham) Louis" , Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed 11 April 2018 Fournier, Jean Claude. "André Messager", Opérette – théâtre musical, L'académie nationale de l'opérette (French text), accessed 15 March 2018 This was at the time of the Paris Commune uprising (1871), and to escape the violence in the city the school was temporarily evacuated to Switzerland.Jones, p. 27 Messager studied piano with Adam Lausset, organ with Clément Loret,Slonimsky, Nicolas (ed). "Messager, André (Charles Prosper)", Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, vol. 4, Schirmer Reference, New York, 2001, accessed 18 March 2018 and composition with Eugène Gigout, Gabriel Fauré and (after leaving Niedermeyer's school) Camille Saint-Saëns.Duteurtre, pp. 42 and 83 The musicologist Jean-Michel Nectoux comments that after his studies Messager developed into one of the finest orchestrators of the period.Nectoux, p. 262
Fauré and Messager quickly moved from being master and pupil to being firm friends and occasional collaborators.Jones, pp. 51–63 In 1874 Messager succeeded Fauré as organiste du chœur (choir organist) at Saint-Sulpice, Paris, under the principal organist, Charles-Marie Widor.Nectoux, p. 19 In 1876 he won the gold medal of the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique with a symphony, the work being warmly received when performed by the Concerts Colonne at the Théâtre du Châtelet in January 1878. He won further prizes for his cantatas Don Juan et Haydée and Prométhée enchaîné.
In 1879 Fauré and Messager travelled to Cologne to see Wagner's Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, and later to Munich for the complete Ring cycle, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Tannhäuser; in 1888 they went to Bayreuth for Die Meistersinger and Parsifal.Nectoux, p. 39 They frequently performed as a party piece their joint composition, the irreverent Souvenirs de Bayreuth (c. 1888). This short, skittish piano work for four hands burlesques motifs from The Ring.Blanche, Jacques-Emile in La Revue musicale, December 1938, pp. 186–187, quoted in Nichols p. 15 The two composers had a more serious collaboration, their Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville (1881).Nectoux, pp. 114–115
First successes
In 1878 Messager was appointed conductor at the Folies Bergère, and he began his career composing for the stage with two short ballets, Fleur d'oranger (1878) and Les Vins de France (1879).Duteurtre, p. 116 In 1880 a former manager of the Folies, M. Comy, was appointed to run the new Eden Théâtre in Brussels. At his invitation, Messager resigned from the Folies in 1880 and became conductor of the Eden."The Drama in Brussels", The Era, 20 June 1880, p. 12; and Wagstaff, John, and Andrew Lamb. "Messager, André". Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed 15 March 2018 He returned to Paris in 1881 as organist of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis church, and from 1882 to 1884 he was organist and choirmaster at Ste Marie-des-Batignolles, a small church in the north west of Paris, where his assistant was another young composer, Claude Terrasse.
Messager's career took a new turn in 1883 when the composer Firmin Bernicat died leaving an unfinished opérette, François les bas-bleus. Messager was invited to complete it; he orchestrated the entire work and composed between twelve and fifteen numbers.Wagstaff, p. 45 It was staged in November 1883 at the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques and was an immediate critical and popular success."The Drama in Paris", The Era, 17 November 1883. It was later produced in London and New York. In 1883, while deputising for Saint-Saëns as the soloist at a concert in Le Havre, Messager met a young woman, Edith Clouette, whom he married in the same year.Augé-Laribé, p. 50 Fauré played the organ at the ceremony, and composed a mildly cynical song, "Madrigal", as a wedding present.Nectoux, p. 108 There was one child of the marriage, Jean André Emile Charles (1886–1952)."André Messager" , Association l'Art Lyrique Français, accessed 7 April 2018
In December 1883 Messager and Emmanuel Chabrier gave the first performance of the latter's Trois valses romantiques at the Société Nationale de Musique. The concert also included the premiere of the two-piano version of España, arranged by Messager.Myers, p. 47; and Wagstaff, p. 77 Messager and Chabrier were close friends until the latter's death in 1894. Both were known for their comic operas and opérettes, but Chabrier's one serious opera, Gwendoline, appealed strongly to Messager, who vowed to conduct it in Paris, which he later did. He also prepared a piano reduction of the orchestral parts for the vocal score of the work.
Following the success of François les bas-bleus Messager accepted simultaneous invitations to compose a ballet for the Opéra and an opérette for the Folies-Dramatiques. The opérette, La Fauvette du temple, first performed on 17 November 1885, confirmed Messager's early reputation. It ran well into the following year in Paris, and he was able to sell the British rights immediately, though the work was not staged in London until 1891."The Drama in Paris", The Era, 13 February 1886; "The Theatres", The Daily News, 30 November 1885, p. 2; and "Occasional Notes", Pall Mall Gazette, 17 November 1891, p. 2 The ballet, Les Deux Pigeons, which became one of Messager's best known works, took longer to reach the stage. It was put into rehearsal at the Opéra, but the staging, which showed a tree being struck by lightning in a storm scene, was considered a fire hazard by the police, and the production was temporarily shelved."The Drama in Paris", The Era, 25 October 1884, p. 15
A month after the opening of La Fauvette du temple the Bouffes-Parisiens premiered Messager's opéra comique La Béarnaise, with Jeanne Granier in the title role. It ran for three months and was successfully produced in Britain the following year with a cast including Florence St. John and Marie Tempest, running for more than 200 performances."La Bearnaise", The Era, 2 October 1886, p. 9; "The London Theatres", The Era, 9 October 1886, p. 14; and "The Drama in America", The Era, 2 July 1887, p. 16 The Times said of this production that it gave Messager a secure footing in London, which led to important results later in his career.Obituary, "M. André Messager", The Times, 25 February 1929, p. 17 A production of La Béarnaise in New York followed in 1887, under the title Jacquette.
In 1886 Les Deux Pigeons was finally produced at the Paris Opéra and was a box office triumph. It was Messager's last popular success for four years. His attempt at a more serious opera, Le Bourgeois de Calais (1888), was not well received. Richard Traubner remarks in Operetta: A Theatrical History on its "boring historical plot, bad lyrics, and a banal score"; a contemporary critic wrote, "That Le Bourgeois de Calais will have a successful career there is not the faintest chance, for all the patriotic bolstering in the world could not make it an attractive piece.""The Drama in Paris", The Era, 16 April 1887, p. 8 Messager followed this with a musical fairy tale, Isoline (1888), which was slightly better received, and a three-act opérette, Le Mari de la reine (1889), which failed, although Messager thought it "the best of my flops".Traubner, p. 223
Fin de siècle
Messager's fortunes revived in 1890 with La Basoche, produced with much success at the Opéra-Comique. The critic who had pronounced so unfavourably on Le Bourgeois de Calais wrote of the new piece, "an exceptionally pleasing work ... a dainty piece which cannot fail to obtain widespread popularity.""The Drama in Paris", The Era, 7 June 1890, p. 9 An English-language version was produced in London in 1891 by Richard D'Oyly Carte. The theatrical newspaper The Era said, "The Basoche is more than a success; it is a triumph","The Basoche", The Era, 7 November 1891, p. 11 but the piece had only a modest London run of three months. A New York production was given in 1893 but was not a success."The Basoche Goes" . The New York Times, 11 March 1893, p. 8
Messager was a dandy and a philanderer. The musical historian D. Kern Holoman describes him as "given to immaculately tailored suits emphasizing his thin frame, careful grooming with particular attention to his mustaches, fine jewelry, and spats ... a witty conversationalist with an inexhaustible store of anecdotes and bons mots" and a womaniser.Holoman, pp. 229–230 In the early 1890s Edith Messager, tired of her husband's infidelities, divorced him. Shortly afterwards she became ill; her condition deteriorated, and Messager visited her daily. By the time of her death in 1892 the two had become close again, and Messager felt her loss deeply.Augé-Laribé, pp. 79–80