Gaston Serpette
Encyclopedia
Henri Charles Antoine Gaston Serpette (4 November 1846 – 3 November 1904) was a French composer, best known for his operetta
s. After winning the prestigious Prix de Rome
as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, he was expected to pursue a career in serious music. Instead, he turned to operetta, writing more than twenty full-length pieces between 1874 and 1900. He accepted some conducting work and also served as a critic and journalist on a number of French newspapers and magazines.
, in western France. He qualified as a lawyer before deciding to devote himself to music. In 1868 he entered the composition class of Ambroise Thomas
at the Paris Conservatoire, and in 1871 won France's top musical prize, the Prix de Rome
, previously won by Berlioz
, Thomas, Gounod
, Bizet
and Massenet
, among others. Serpette's winning entry was Jeanne d'Arc, a cantata
to a libretto by M. J. Barbier, which was performed at the Paris Opéra
in November of the same year. However, to the distress of the conservative element at the Conservatoire, Serpette also submitted an operetta
. When it was played on the piano to Gounod, Thomas and the members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts
, the academy's secretary, Viscount Delaborde, declared that Serpette "had gone to the bad".
Finding himself unwelcome in serious musical circles, Serpette continued to compose operettas. In 1873 he wrote the three-act La branche cassée, to a libretto by Adolphe Jaime and Jules Noriac. The piece was well received at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, in January 1874, and at the Opera Comique
, London in an English version presented by Richard D'Oyly Carte
in October of the same year. The critic of London's The Morning Post, noted that in the London version there were so many interpolations into Serpette's original score that "barely half the solos are from his pen". He added that the music "though not remarkable for originality, is above mediocrity, and … far surpasses the usual run of opéra-bouffe music." Serpette followed this with more works in the same genre: Le manoir du Pic-Tordu (1875), Le moulin du vert-galant (1876) and La petite muette (1877), which, after its Paris première, became the first of Serpette's shows to be played in New York, where it opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre
but ran for only five performances. Serpette continued with a succession of shows that were successful in Paris, but not considered suitable for the public of London or New York. Of La petite muette, the London paper The Era
reported most favourably on the music, but made it clear that the plot was too risqué for English tastes: "not even the most elaborate circumlocution would enable me to steer clear of offending the modesty of your fair readers were I to recite the incident on which the plot turns." A Serpette piece, Le carnet du diable, was reviewed in The Era in 1895 under the headline, "Indecency in Paris".
Serpette's works were continually in demand in Paris. Between 1874 and 1900, with librettists including such writers as Henri Meilhac
and Georges Feydeau
, he wrote more than twenty full-length operettas, and seven shorter ones. Nevertheless, in the view of the English critic Andrew Lamb
, "Serpette was destined to continue, along with Varney
, Vasseur
, Roger
and Lacome
, in the shadow of such French operetta composers as Planquette
, Audran
and, later, Messager
."
. The latter protested about what he called the "botching" of French operetta scores when adapted for the English stage. Serpette took the pragmatic view that the French and English publics were so different that Parisian operettas had to be drastically rewritten to succeed in London, and he offered his fellow French composers three choices: "they must either refuse to permit their works to be adapted" (in which case no London producer would touch them), or "master the English language, and do it themselves which they never will", or settle for being adapted by those who knew what the West End
public required.
This was not Serpette's only incursion into print. He was music critic for a number of Paris newspapers and journals. He reviewed music for Gil Blas magazine (his review of Debussy
's Pelléas et Mélisande
appeared simultaneously with reviews by Paul Dukas
and Vincent D'Indy
for the Gazette de Beaux-Arts and L'Occident, respectively) and wrote the musical column of the Paris newspaper, in which his disagreement with Solomon was published. Serpette also worked as a conductor. One of his appointments was in London, conducting the ballets at the re-opening of Carte's former Royal English Opera House when it was relaunched as the Palace Theatre of Varieties
in 1892, and throughout the ensuing season.
Towards the end of his career, Serpette had more of his works performed in England. Augustus Harris
and F. C. Burnand adapted La demoiselle du téléphone as The Telephone Girl in 1896; it toured the country for three years. Serpette, in line with his earlier comments on adaptations, agreed to the addition of new musical items by J. M. Glover. His last show, written in 1903, originally entitled Cuvée reservée 1810, was specially composed for England, and, under the title Amorelle, toured the provinces in 1903–04 before opening at the Comedy Theatre in London in February 1904.
Serpette was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1898. For some time he left Paris to live in Algeria, where he had purchased vineyards. During one of his sea trips between Algiers and Marseille
, he was knocked down by a freak wave, breaking his leg; he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
He died in 1904, on the eve of his 58th birthday, and his funeral at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité was attended by "le Tout-Paris".
Operetta
Operetta is a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter. It is also closely related, in English-language works, to forms of musical theatre.-Origins:...
s. After winning the prestigious Prix de Rome
Prix de Rome
The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...
as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, he was expected to pursue a career in serious music. Instead, he turned to operetta, writing more than twenty full-length pieces between 1874 and 1900. He accepted some conducting work and also served as a critic and journalist on a number of French newspapers and magazines.
Early life and work
Serpette, the son of a rich industrialist, was born in NantesNantes
Nantes is a city in western France, located on the Loire River, from the Atlantic coast. The city is the 6th largest in France, while its metropolitan area ranks 8th with over 800,000 inhabitants....
, in western France. He qualified as a lawyer before deciding to devote himself to music. In 1868 he entered the composition class of Ambroise Thomas
Ambroise Thomas
Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas was a French composer, best known for his operas Mignon and Hamlet and as Director of the Conservatoire de Paris from 1871 till his death.-Biography:"There is good music, there is bad music, and then there is Ambroise Thomas."- Emmanuel Chabrier-Early life...
at the Paris Conservatoire, and in 1871 won France's top musical prize, the Prix de Rome
Prix de Rome
The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...
, previously won by Berlioz
Hector Berlioz
Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande messe des morts . Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works; as a...
, Thomas, Gounod
Charles Gounod
Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.-Biography:...
, Bizet
Georges Bizet
Georges Bizet formally Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, was a French composer, mainly of operas. In a career cut short by his early death, he achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, became one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertory.During a...
and Massenet
Jules Massenet
Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he ranks as one of the greatest melodists of his era. Soon after his death, Massenet's style went out of fashion, and many of his operas...
, among others. Serpette's winning entry was Jeanne d'Arc, a cantata
Cantata
A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir....
to a libretto by M. J. Barbier, which was performed at the Paris Opéra
Paris Opera
The Paris Opera is the primary opera company of Paris, France. It was founded in 1669 by Louis XIV as the Académie d'Opéra and shortly thereafter was placed under the leadership of Jean-Baptiste Lully and renamed the Académie Royale de Musique...
in November of the same year. However, to the distress of the conservative element at the Conservatoire, Serpette also submitted an operetta
Operetta
Operetta is a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter. It is also closely related, in English-language works, to forms of musical theatre.-Origins:...
. When it was played on the piano to Gounod, Thomas and the members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts
Académie des beaux-arts
The Académie des Beaux-Arts is a French learned society. It is one of the five academies of the Institut de France.It was created in 1795 as the merger of the:* Académie de peinture et de sculpture...
, the academy's secretary, Viscount Delaborde, declared that Serpette "had gone to the bad".
Finding himself unwelcome in serious musical circles, Serpette continued to compose operettas. In 1873 he wrote the three-act La branche cassée, to a libretto by Adolphe Jaime and Jules Noriac. The piece was well received at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, in January 1874, and at the Opera Comique
Opera Comique
The Opera Comique was a 19th-century theatre constructed in Westminster, London, between Wych Street and Holywell Street with entrances on the East Strand. It opened in 1870 and was demolished in 1902, to make way for the construction of the Aldwych and Kingsway...
, London in an English version presented by Richard D'Oyly Carte
Richard D'Oyly Carte
Richard D'Oyly Carte was an English talent agent, theatrical impresario, composer and hotelier during the latter half of the Victorian era...
in October of the same year. The critic of London's The Morning Post, noted that in the London version there were so many interpolations into Serpette's original score that "barely half the solos are from his pen". He added that the music "though not remarkable for originality, is above mediocrity, and … far surpasses the usual run of opéra-bouffe music." Serpette followed this with more works in the same genre: Le manoir du Pic-Tordu (1875), Le moulin du vert-galant (1876) and La petite muette (1877), which, after its Paris première, became the first of Serpette's shows to be played in New York, where it opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre
Fifth Avenue Theatre
Fifth Avenue Theatre was a Broadway theatre in New York City in the United States located at 31 West 28th Street and Broadway. It was demolished in 1939....
but ran for only five performances. Serpette continued with a succession of shows that were successful in Paris, but not considered suitable for the public of London or New York. Of La petite muette, the London paper The Era
The Era (newspaper)
The Era was a British weekly paper, published from 1838 to 1939. Originally a general newspaper, it became noted for its sports coverage, and later for its theatrical content.-History:...
reported most favourably on the music, but made it clear that the plot was too risqué for English tastes: "not even the most elaborate circumlocution would enable me to steer clear of offending the modesty of your fair readers were I to recite the incident on which the plot turns." A Serpette piece, Le carnet du diable, was reviewed in The Era in 1895 under the headline, "Indecency in Paris".
Serpette's works were continually in demand in Paris. Between 1874 and 1900, with librettists including such writers as Henri Meilhac
Henri Meilhac
Henri Meilhac , was a French dramatist and opera librettist.-Biography:Meilhac was born in Paris in 1831. As a young man, he began writing fanciful articles for Parisian newspapers and vaudevilles, in a vivacious boulevardier spirit which brought him to the forefront...
and Georges Feydeau
Georges Feydeau
Georges Feydeau was a French playwright of the era known as the Belle Époque. He is remembered for his many lively farces.-Biography:Georges Feydeau was born in Paris, the son of novelist Ernest-Aimé Feydeau and Léocadie Bogaslawa Zalewska. At the age of twenty, Feydeau wrote his first comic...
, he wrote more than twenty full-length operettas, and seven shorter ones. Nevertheless, in the view of the English critic Andrew Lamb
Andrew Lamb
Andrew Lamb , bishop of Brechin and bishop of Galloway, was probably son or relative of Andrew Lamb of Leith, a lay member of the general assembly of 1560...
, "Serpette was destined to continue, along with Varney
Louis Varney
Louis Varney was a French composer.-Biography:Louis Varney was the son of Alphonse Varney, a French conductor at the Bouffes-Parisiens and at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, he was also invited to conduct the "French Opera Season" abroad, notably in New Orleans, Louisiana, and this is how Louis came...
, Vasseur
Léon Vasseur
Félix Augustin Joseph Vasseur, known as Léon Vasseur , was a French composer, organist and conductor. While working as a cathedral organist, he turned to composing operettas and soon had a hit with La timbale d'argent . He wrote another thirty operettas but never repeated that early success...
, Roger
Victor Roger
Victor Roger was a French composer. He is best known for his operettas, particularly the lighter kind known as the "vaudeville-opérette". His thirty theatre works, composed between 1880 and 1902, also include pantomimes and ballets...
and Lacome
Paul Lacome
Paul-Jean-Jacques Lacome d'Estalenx was a French composer. Between 1870 and the turn of the century he produced a series of operettas and operas-bouffes that were popular both in France and abroad...
, in the shadow of such French operetta composers as Planquette
Robert Planquette
Jean Robert Planquette was a French composer of songs and operettas.Several of Planquette's operettas were extraordinarily successful in Britain, including Les cloches de Corneville , the length of whose initial London run broke all records for any piece of musical theatre up to that time, and Rip...
, Audran
Edmond Audran
Achille Edmond Audran was a French composer best known for several internationally successful operettas, including Les noces d'Olivette , La mascotte , Gillette de Narbonne , La cigale et la fourmi , Miss Helyett , and La poupée .After Audran's initial success in Paris, his works also became a...
and, later, Messager
André Messager
André Charles Prosper Messager , was a French composer, organist, pianist, conductor and administrator. His stage compositions included ballets and 30 opéra comiques and operettas, among which Véronique, had lasting success, with Les p'tites Michu and Monsieur Beaucaire also enjoying international...
."
Later years
In late 1892, in the press of London and Paris, Serpette engaged in a lively debate with the English composer Edward SolomonEdward Solomon
Edward Solomon was a prolific English composer, as well as a conductor, orchestrator and pianist. Though he died before his fortieth birthday, he wrote dozens of works produced for the stage, including several for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, such as The Nautch Girl, among others.-Early...
. The latter protested about what he called the "botching" of French operetta scores when adapted for the English stage. Serpette took the pragmatic view that the French and English publics were so different that Parisian operettas had to be drastically rewritten to succeed in London, and he offered his fellow French composers three choices: "they must either refuse to permit their works to be adapted" (in which case no London producer would touch them), or "master the English language, and do it themselves which they never will", or settle for being adapted by those who knew what the West End
West End theatre
West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres of London's 'Theatreland', the West End. Along with New York's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English speaking...
public required.
This was not Serpette's only incursion into print. He was music critic for a number of Paris newspapers and journals. He reviewed music for Gil Blas magazine (his review of Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
's Pelléas et Mélisande
Pelléas et Mélisande (opera)
Pelléas et Mélisande is an opera in five acts with music by Claude Debussy. The French libretto was adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck's Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande...
appeared simultaneously with reviews by Paul Dukas
Paul Dukas
Paul Abraham Dukas was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man, of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, and he abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions...
and Vincent D'Indy
Vincent d'Indy
Vincent d'Indy was a French composer and teacher.-Life:Paul Marie Théodore Vincent d'Indy was born in Paris into an aristocratic family of royalist and Catholic persuasion. He had piano lessons from an early age from his paternal grandmother, who passed him on to Antoine François Marmontel and...
for the Gazette de Beaux-Arts and L'Occident, respectively) and wrote the musical column of the Paris newspaper, in which his disagreement with Solomon was published. Serpette also worked as a conductor. One of his appointments was in London, conducting the ballets at the re-opening of Carte's former Royal English Opera House when it was relaunched as the Palace Theatre of Varieties
Palace Theatre, London
The Palace Theatre is a West End theatre in the City of Westminster in London. It is an imposing red-brick building that dominates the west side of Cambridge Circus and is located near the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road...
in 1892, and throughout the ensuing season.
Towards the end of his career, Serpette had more of his works performed in England. Augustus Harris
Augustus Harris
Sir Augustus Henry Glossop Harris , was a British actor, impresario, and dramatist.-Early life:Harris was born in Paris, France, the son of Augustus Glossop Harris , who was also a dramatist, and his wife, née Maria Ann Bone, a theatrical costumier...
and F. C. Burnand adapted La demoiselle du téléphone as The Telephone Girl in 1896; it toured the country for three years. Serpette, in line with his earlier comments on adaptations, agreed to the addition of new musical items by J. M. Glover. His last show, written in 1903, originally entitled Cuvée reservée 1810, was specially composed for England, and, under the title Amorelle, toured the provinces in 1903–04 before opening at the Comedy Theatre in London in February 1904.
Serpette was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1898. For some time he left Paris to live in Algeria, where he had purchased vineyards. During one of his sea trips between Algiers and Marseille
Marseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...
, he was knocked down by a freak wave, breaking his leg; he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
He died in 1904, on the eve of his 58th birthday, and his funeral at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité was attended by "le Tout-Paris".