Ambroise Thomas
Ambroise Thomas (1811–1896)
Born	(1811-08-05)August 5, 1811 Metz, France
Died	February 12, 1896(1896-02-12) Paris

Thomas circa 1880, taken by Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon.

Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas (5 August 1811, Metz – 12 February 1896, Paris) was a French composer, best known for his operas Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868, after Shakespeare) and as Director of the Conservatoire de Paris from 1871 till his death.

Biography[link]

"There is good music, there is bad music, and then there is Ambroise Thomas." - Emmanuel Chabrier

Early life and studies[link]

Thomas's parents were music teachers. By the age of 10, he was already an experienced pianist and violinist. In 1828, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Jean-François Le Sueur (who also taught Berlioz) while at the same time taking piano lessons privately from the famous virtuoso Frédéric Kalkbrenner. In 1832, his cantata Hermann et Ketty won the Conservatory's prestigious composition prize, the Grand Prix de Rome, which allowed him to travel to and study in that city for three years. He took with him a love for Mozart and Beethoven; but once in Rome, he became an ardent admirer of the Italian cantilena and melodic tradition. It was during his Italian sojourn that he wrote all of his chamber music: namely, a piano trio, a string quintet and a string quartet.

Career[link]

The first opera Thomas composed, La double échelle (1837), was produced at the Opéra Comique and subsequently received 247 performances. Le caïd (1849), did still better, and achieved over 400 performances. For the next quarter of a century Thomas's productivity was incessant, and several of his operas (he wrote 24 altogether) enjoyed a considerable, if ephemeral, popularity. The questionable quality of their libretti hampers them, but a few have been revived now and then as historic curiosities or recorded as vehicles for bel canto singers, such as Le songe d'une nuit d'été (1850; loosely adapted from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream) or Psyché (1857). The overture to Raymond (1851) has also been given the occasional modern performance.

To his theatrical successes, Thomas added administrative achievements. In 1856 he acquired a professorship at the Conservatoire, where he taught, among others, Jules Massenet, one of the few French composers of the younger generation whose music interested him. He succeeded Auber as director of the Conservatoire in 1871. Baffled by the musical unconventionality of César Franck, Gabriel Fauré, and certain other Conservatoire colleagues, he nevertheless was rather well liked as a man, even by those who found his output old-fashioned.

Success[link]

Ambroise Thomas wearing his medals from the Légion d'honneur

With Mignon (premiered at the Opéra Comique in 1866), Thomas achieved his first great acclaim outside, as well as within, France. Goethe's celebrated Wilhelm Meister had provided inspiration for a highly sentimentalized libretto; Marie Galli-Marié (1840–1905), it was said [1], "had modelled her conception of the part upon the well-known picture by Ary Scheffer". Mignon was a success all over Europe, to audiences who had embraced Charles Gounod's indirectly Goethe-inspired 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. [2] It is still heard sometimes today, more often in the form of extracts for concert use, or in recordings, than in complete stagings. 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. This opera has a strong, dramatic libretto, although it closes with a traditional (and, surprising for Hamlet) happy ending. It enjoyed a long vogue, and like Mignon it continues to have a certain following; during 2010 it was heard at New York's Metropolitan Opera.

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, this time The Tempest), was produced at the Opéra, again with little effect. He died in 1896. Massenet had hopes of succeeding him in the job of Conservatoire director, abandoning this plan only when told by the government that the post would no longer carry lifelong tenure. The man who got the job was not Massenet but, rather, organist-composer Théodore Dubois.

Works[link]

Ambroise Thomas, about 1865

Operas[link]

See List of operas by Ambroise Thomas

Ballets[link]

• La gipsy, second act ballet at the Opéra de Paris, 1839
• La tempête, ballet, ("The Tempest", based on Shakespeare), 1889

Other works[link]

• String Quartet in e major, Op.1

References[link]

Cited sources

• Composers: (Charles Louis) Ambroise Thomas
•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Thomas, Charles Louis Ambroise". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• Some of the material in the above article appears on the website of Edition Silvertrust but permission to copy, distribute and alter has been given to Wikipedia under the terms of the GNU License in accordance with the GDFL.

Other sources

• Georges Masson, 1996. Ambroise Thomas (Metz: Editions Serpentoise)

External links[link]

Biography portal

• Ambroise Thomas String Quartet in e minor Soundbites & short biography.
• Free scores by Ambroise Thomas at the International Music Score Library Project
• Free scores by Ambroise Thomas in the loumy.org
•  "Charles L.A. Thomas". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. 
• "Ambroise Thomas". Find a Grave. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8082799. Retrieved August 9, 2010. 

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company. 

Sir Thomas Raymond or Rayment (1626/7 — 14 July 1683) was a British judge. Born to Robert Raymond, he was educated at a school in Bishop's Stortford before matriculating to Christ's College, Cambridge on 5 April 1643.^[1] On 6 February 1645 he joined Gray's Inn, being called to the Bar there on 11 February 1651. In October 1677 he became a Serjeant-at-Law,^[2] before being appointed a Baron of the Exchequer on 1 May 1679 and knighted on 26 June.^[3] On 7 February 1680 he became a Justice of the Common Pleas,^[4] and on 24 April 1680 transferred to the Court of King's Bench.^[5] He died on 14 July 1683, leaving behind a set of law reports titled Reports of divers special cases adjudged in the courts of king's bench, common pleas, and exchequer in the reign of King Charles II, which were published in 1696, 1743, 1793 and 1803. His son, Robert Raymond, also later became a judge.^[2] Commentators of the time identified him as having "extraordinary servility" and being an "unprincipled judge", with his failure in a witchcraft trial to point out the "irrationality" of the defendants' confessions leading to their death.^[6]

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Foss, Edward (1870). A Biographical Dictionary of the Justices of England (1066 - 1870). Spottiswoode and Company. OCLC 181068114. 
• Sainty, John (1993). The Judges of England 1272 -1990: a list of judges of the superior courts. Oxford: Selden Society. OCLC 29670782.