Jacques-Francois-Fromental-Elie Halevy , usually known as Fromental Halevy ( French: [f??m??tal alevi] ; 27 May 1799 – 17 March 1862), was a French composer. He is known today largely for his opera La Juive .

Early career [ edit ]

Halevy was born in Paris, son of the cantor Elie Halfon Halevy , who was the secretary of the Jewish community of Paris and a writer and teacher of Hebrew, and a French Jewish mother. The name Fromental (meaning 'oat grass'), by which he was generally known, reflects his birth on the day dedicated to that plant: 7 Prairial in the French Revolutionary calendar , ^[1] which was still operative at that time. He entered the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of nine or ten (accounts differ), in 1809, becoming a pupil and later protege of Cherubini . After two second-place attempts, he won the Prix de Rome in 1819: his cantata subject was Herminie .

As he had to delay his departure to Rome because of the death of his mother, he was able to accept the first commission that brought him to public attention: a Marche Funebre et De Profundis en Hebreu for three part choir, tenor and orchestra, which was commissioned by the Consistoire Israelite du Departement de la Seine , for a public service in memory of the assassinated duc de Berry , performed on 24 March 1820. ^[2] Later, his brother Leon recalled that the De Profundis , "infused with religious fervor, created a sensation, and attracted interest to the young laureate of the institute".

Halevy was chorus master at the Theatre Italien , while he struggled to get an opera performed. Despite the mediocre reception of L'artisan , at the Opera-Comique in 1827, Halevy moved on to be chorus master at the Opera . The same year he became professor of harmony and accompaniment at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he was professor of counterpoint and fugue in 1833 and of composition in 1840. He had many notable students. See: List of music students by teacher: G to J#Fromental Halevy .

La Juive [ edit ]

With his opera La Juive , in 1835, Halevy attained not only his first major triumph, but gave the world a work that was to be one of the cornerstones of the French repertory for a century, with the role of Eleazar one of the great favorites of tenors such as Enrico Caruso . The opera's most famous aria is Eleazar's "Rachel, quand du Seigneur". Its orchestral ritornello is the one quotation from Halevy that Berlioz included in his Treatise on Instrumentation , for its unusual duet for two cors anglais . It is probable, however, that this aria was inserted only at the request of the great tenor Adolphe Nourrit , who premiered the role and may have suggested the aria's text. La Juive is one of the grandest of grand operas , with major choruses, a spectacular procession in Act I and impressive celebrations in Act III. It culminates with the heroine plunging into a vat of boiling water in Act V. Mahler admired it greatly, stating: "I am absolutely overwhelmed by this wonderful, majestic work. I regard it as one of the greatest operas ever created". Other admirers included Wagner , who wrote an enthusiastic review of Halevy's grand operas for the German press in 1841 (Wagner never showed towards Halevy the anti-Jewish animus that was so notorious a feature of his writings on Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn ).

Later career [ edit ]

Halevy was elected to the Institut de France in 1836, but after La Juive , his real successes were relatively few, although at least three operas, L'Eclair , La reine de Chypre and Charles VI received some critical and popular acclaim. Heine commented that Halevy was an artist, but "without the slightest spark of genius". He became, however, a leading bureaucrat of the arts, becoming Secretary of the Academie des Beaux-Arts and presiding over committees to determine the standard pitch of orchestral A , to award prizes for operettas, etc. The artist Eugene Delacroix described Halevy's decline in his diaries (5 February 1855):

I went on to Halevy's house, where the heat from his stove was suffocating. His wretched wife has crammed his house with bric-a-brac and old furniture, and this new craze will end by driving him to a lunatic asylum. He has changed and looks much older, like a man who is being dragged on against his will. How can he possibly do serious work in this confusion? His new position at the Academy must take up a great deal of his time and make it more and more difficult for him to find the peace and quiet he needs for his work. Left that inferno as quickly as possible. The breath of the streets seemed positively delicious. ^[3]

Halevy's cantata Promethee enchaine was premiered in 1849 at the Paris Conservatoire and is generally considered the first mainstream western orchestral composition to use quarter tones .

Halevy died in retirement at Nice in 1862, aged 62, leaving his last opera Noe unfinished. It was completed by his former student Georges Bizet , but was not performed until ten years after Bizet's own death.

Works [ edit ]

Halevy wrote some forty operas in all, including:

Halevy also wrote for the ballet , provided incidental music for a French version of Aeschylus 's Prometheus Bound , and wrote cantatas.

Halevy's family [ edit ]

Halevy's wife, Leonie (sister of Eugenie Foa ) who had experienced serious mental problems during their marriage, underwent a remarkable recovery after his death and became a talented sculptor (she was 20 years younger than he.) In 1869, their daughter Genevieve married the composer Georges Bizet , who had been one of Halevy's pupils at the Conservatoire. After Bizet's death and an alliance with Elie-Miriam Delaborde , the son of Charles-Valentin Alkan , Genevieve married a banker with Rothschild connections and became a leading Parisian salonniere . Amongst the guests at her soirees was the young Marcel Proust , who used her as one of the models for the Duchesse de Guermantes in his epic In Search of Lost Time .

Halevy's brother was the writer and historian Leon Halevy , who wrote an early biography of his brother and was the father of Ludovic Halevy , librettist of many French operas, including Bizet's Carmen and Jacques Offenbach 's Orpheus in the Underworld . Leon was also the father, by his mistress Lucinde Paradol, of the politician Lucien-Anatole Prevost-Paradol .

References [ edit ]

Sources [ edit ]

• Bureau des Longitudes (ed.): Le Calendrier republicain (Paris: Bureau des Longitudes, 1989).
• Conway, David : Jewry in Music: Entry to the Profession from the Enlightenment to Richard Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) ; ISBN   978-1-107-01538-8 .
• Delacroix, Eugene (trans. Lucy Norton): The Journal of Eugene Delacroix: A Selection , ed. and introd. Hubert Wellington (3rd edn., London: Phaidon, 1995).

Further reading [ edit ]

• Halevy, Leon: F. Halevy, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1863).
• Jordan, Ruth: Fromental Halevy ? His Life and Music, 1799?1862 (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996; and London: Kahn & Averill, 2006); ISBN   1-871-08251-X .
• Macdonald, Hugh : "Halevy, Fromental", in: Grove Music Online (subscription access); Oxford Music Online , (accessed 15 February 2010).

External links [ edit ]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jacques Fromental Halevy .

• Hector Berlioz: relations with Halevy
• John Ericson, "The First Orchestral Use of the Valved Horn: La Juive "
• Halevy's background and family
•   Singer, Isidore ; et al., eds. (1901?1906). "Halevy, Jacques Francois Fromental Elie" . The Jewish Encyclopedia . New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
• Chisholm, Hugh , ed. (1911). "Halevy, Jacques Francois Fromental Elie"  . Encyclopædia Britannica . Vol. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 835.
• Free scores by Fromental Halevy at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)