thumb|Thomas by [[Wilhelm Benque, c. 1895]]
Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas (; 5 August 1811 – 12 February 1896) was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868).
Born into a musical family, Thomas was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris, winning France's top music prize, the Prix de Rome. He pursued a career as a composer of operas, completing his first opera, La double échelle, in 1837. He wrote twenty further operas over the next decades, mostly comic, but he also treated more serious subjects, finding considerable success with audiences in France and abroad.
Thomas was appointed as a professor at the Conservatoire in 1856, and in 1871 he succeeded Daniel Auber as director. Between then and his death at his home in Paris twenty-five years later, he modernised the Conservatoire's organisation while imposing a rigidly conservative curriculum, hostile to modern music, and attempting to prevent composers such as César Franck and Gabriel Fauré from influencing the students of the Conservatoire.
Thomas' operas were generally neglected during most of the 20th century, but in more recent decades they have experienced something of a revival both in Europe and the US.
Life and career
Early years
thumb|upright|left|Thomas in 1834 by [[Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin]]
Thomas was born in Metz, the youngest of four children of Martin Thomas (1770–1823) and his wife, Jeanne, née Willaume (1780–1866), both music teachers. By the age of ten he was already an experienced pianist and violinist. When he was twelve his father died, and Ambroise's elder brother Charles moved to Paris, where he played the cello in the Opéra orchestra. The prize brought him three years' study at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome. During his time there he became friendly with the painter Ingres, the head of the academy, with whom he shared an admiration for both Mozart and Beethoven; he also met Berlioz, who encouraged him and wrote about him favourably. and in the next few years was given in Brussels, New Orleans, Berlin, Vienna and London. The work, described by The Musical Times as "a little masterpiece",|group= n Later in 1850 Thomas' next opera, Raymond, was premiered. It has not survived in the operatic repertoire, but the overture became a popular orchestral showpiece.|group= n
Professor
In 1856 Thomas was appointed professor of composition at the Conservatoire, under the directorship of Daniel Auber. He remained on the staff, as professor and subsequently director, until his death forty years later. Over these years his students included the composers Jules Massenet, Gaston Serpette, and, late in Thomas' career, George Enescu; future academics included Théodore Dubois and Charles Lenepveu; and conductors who were Thomas' students included Edouard Colonne and Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht.
thumb|left|upright|[[Jean-Baptiste Faure as Hamlet, painted by Manet]]
During the 1850s Thomas continued to compose, writing five operas, none of which made much impression. After a fallow spell in the early 1860s he wrote Mignon, the work by which his name became most widely known. Despite disparaging reviews of the libretto from English-speaking critics at the time and subsequently, the work has remained an occasional part of the operatic repertoire; later singers of Ophelia included Emma Calvé, Emma Albani, Nellie Melba and Mary Garden, and among the Hamlets have been Victor Maurel, Titta Ruffo, Mattia Battistini and more recently Sherrill Milnes, Thomas Allen and Thomas Hampson. Although Thomas had by now a reputation for musical conservatism, the score of Hamlet was innovative in one respect: its incorporation of saxophones into the instrumentation.|group=n He was so widely seen as Auber's heir apparent that the minister of education, Jules Simon, said in his letter offering Thomas the post, "You are so obviously fitted for the office that if I did not nominate you I should seem to be signing your dismissal from a post already yours." As director Thomas ran an intransigently conservative regime. The music of Auber, Halévy and especially Meyerbeer was regarded as the correct model for students, and early French music such as that of Rameau and modern music, including that of Wagner were kept rigorously out of the curriculum. Thomas strove to keep progressive musicians from being appointed to the faculty of the Conservatoire – unsuccessfully in the case of César Franck, who was appointed against Thomas' wishes in 1872, but successfully as regards Gabriel Fauré whose appointment to the Conservatoire was delayed until after Thomas' death.
Thomas was, on the other hand, innovative in the running of the Conservatoire: he increased the number of classes, improved the conditions of the faculty, and expanded the curriculum to include solfège, sight-reading and compulsory orchestral practice. The faculty under Thomas included, at various times the composers Franck, Théodore Dubois, Jules Massenet and Ernest Guiraud, and the singers Pauline Viardot and Romain Bussine.
In 1889 the Opéra staged Thomas' ballet La tempête (another treatment of a Shakespeare play – The Tempest), but it made little impression.
Thomas died in his flat in the Conservatoire in 1896, aged 84, of congestion of the lungs. He was survived by his widow, Elvire, née Remaury (1827–1910), whom he married in 1878.
Music
thumb|upright|Thomas, about 1865
Emmanuel Chabrier's jibe, "There is good music, there is bad music, and then there is Ambroise Thomas" is often quoted, but, as the musicologist Richard Langham Smith observes, it is not clear whether Chabrier meant that Thomas' music was worse than bad, somewhere between good and bad, or something else. A contemporary assessment was given in the first edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1889), where Gustave Chouquet wrote of Thomas:
In the 2001 edition of Grove, Langham Smith writes, "In the context of French opera of the late 19th century Thomas was a figure of considerable importance, an imaginative innovator and a master of musical characterization."