André Messager

thumb|alt=head and shoulder shot of an elderly bald man with a large moustache|Messager in 1921

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

left|alt=four head and shoulder photos of middle-aged nineteenth-century men in semi-profile. All are wearing suits and have facial hair.|thumb|upright|Four of Messager's musical influences: clockwise from top left, [[Camille Saint-Saëns|Saint-Saëns; Fauré; Gigout; Chabrier]]

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. 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". At the age of seven he was sent as a boarder to a Marist school where he continued his interest in the piano.

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. 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. 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. Messager studied piano with Adam Lausset, organ with Clément Loret, and composition with Eugène Gigout, Gabriel Fauré and (after leaving Niedermeyer's school) Camille Saint-Saëns. The musicologist Jean-Michel Nectoux comments that after his studies Messager developed into one of the finest orchestrators of the period.

Fauré and Messager quickly moved from being master and pupil to being firm friends and occasional collaborators. In 1874 Messager succeeded Fauré as organiste du chœur (choir organist) at Saint-Sulpice, Paris, under the principal organist, Charles-Marie Widor. 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. They frequently performed as a party piece their joint composition, the irreverent Souvenirs de Bayreuth (c. 1888). presented a Russian season starring Félia Litvinne and Feodor Chaliapin, At the invitation of the Emperor Wilhelm II, Messager and Broussan took the Opéra company to Berlin in 1908. Relations between the two co-directors were not always harmonious; after the French government refused Messager's resignation on at least one occasion, he finally announced it in November 1913, a year before his term of office was due to expire. He consented to return in January 1914 to conduct Parsifal – its first performance in Europe outside Bayreuth. His conducting of the work won critical praise.

On the strength of his experience as a Wagnerian, Messager was appointed conductor of the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in 1908. It was at the time, and for many years, the most prestigious symphony orchestra in France, Alongside the main orchestral repertoire of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and French classics, Messager conducted major choral works by J. S. Bach, Handel, Schumann and Berlioz, as well as introducing early French music such as that of Janequin. In the 1913–14 season, he conducted a chronological cycle of Beethoven's symphonies and his Missa solemnis, as well as Verdi's Requiem, for the Italian composer's centenary. Messager took the orchestra outside Paris to Lille, Lyon and Antwerp during these years. During the First World War he took the orchestra on tour to Argentina (1916), Switzerland (1917), and the US and Canada (1918–19), giving concerts in more than 50 cities. After their concert at the Metropolitan Opera House in October 1918, the orchestra and Messager received a prolonged ovation that was typical of their reception as the tour progressed. At the end of that tour Messager retired from his post.

Messager was criticised for performing the music of Wagner during the war, but he maintained that German music represented the noble side of the enemy nation's nature. Like Fauré, Messager refused to have anything to do with the National League for the Defence of French Music (La Ligue Nationale pour la Defense de la Musique Française), led by Saint-Saëns, which sought to boycott German music.

In 1914 Messager composed Béatrice, described as a "légende lyrique", The premiere was in Monte Carlo. The work was performed in Paris in 1917 but was not successful.

thumb|upright|alt=theatre poster advertising Messager's Monsieur Beaucaire and other pieces playing at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh|Playbill from a 1920 production

In 1919 Messager's operetta Monsieur Beaucaire was premiered in Birmingham prior to a long run in the West End. The composer, who generally conducted British premieres of his works, was suffering from sciatica and could not even be in the audience for the first nights in either city. Later in 1919 Messager resumed the musical directorship of the Opéra-Comique for the 1919–20 season, conducting among other works the first complete performance in France of Così fan tutte.

Last years

In the 1920s, Messager kept pace with the change in fashion in musical theatre, consciously absorbing the styles of musical comedy, lightening his orchestration, but maintaining a Gallic flavour, mostly avoiding American dance-rhythm influences. The former was a considerable success in Paris, but in London the official censor, the Lord Chamberlain, declared it "unfit for the English public", and banned C. B. Cochran's planned production starring Printemps and Guitry. In Messager's late stage works his lighter touch was balanced by echoes of the nineteenth century, with hints of Fauré and, particularly, Chabrier's L'Étoile.

In 1924 Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Messager to conduct the Paris premieres of Auric's ballet Les Fâcheux and Poulenc's Les Biches. In 1928 Messager played a key role in establishing important updates to copyright law, though he was on the losing side of the case. He sued the BBC for breach of copyright for broadcasting his works without his consent. He lost because he had assigned his British performing rights to George Edwardes, whose estate had given the BBC permission for the broadcast. The case established that as the broadcasting rights had not been specifically reserved, the Edwardes estate's rights included them.

thumb|right|upright|Messager's grave in [[Passy Cemetery]]

After a short illness Messager died in Paris on 24 February 1929 aged 75. He was interred in the Passy Cemetery near the graves of Debussy and Fauré. His last completed work, the opérette Coups de roulis, was running in Paris when he died. A contemporary critic commented, "Its tuneful melodies show that the veteran composer had lost nothing of the qualities that made Véronique such a success. Throughout his life Messager remained without a peer as a composer of light music."

Honours and awards

Messager was elected President of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques in 1926, the first composer to hold this office. In the same year he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1927 he was appointed Commander of the Légion d'honneur. In 2003, to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, Messager was the subject of a large exhibition at the Musée des musiques populaires de Montluçon, recounting his biography and illustrating his works in the various genres. Among the comité d'honneur of the exhibition were the composer's three grandchildren, and the singers Susan Graham, Dame Felicity Lott and Mady Mesplé, the conductors Sir John Eliot Gardiner, John Nelson and Michel Plasson, and the director Jérôme Savary.

Music

thumb|left|upright=1.25|alt=A group of 18 men in 19th century dress|Staff and students of the École Niedermeyer, 1871. Messager is in the middle row, second from right; his teachers [[Gabriel Fauré|Fauré and Gigout are in the front row, second from left and furthest right, respectively.]]

In his 1991 study of Messager, John Wagstaff writes that the composer's music is notable for its fine orchestration, easy-flowing melody, and skilfully written music, dance-like in character. Unlike his teacher Fauré, Messager enjoyed orchestrating. He said that musical ideas came to him "already clothed in the appropriate instrumental shades", and after the concentrated effort of composing his scores he found it relaxing to work on "the handling of instruments, the balancing of different sonorities, the grouping of colours and the structuring of effects". He remarked that composers who had their music orchestrated by assistants presumably did not care if their helpers lacked "that indefinable sixth sense which would indicate the right combination of sonorities to carry out the original intentions of the composer". To Messager, passages often depended for their significance or flavour on the orchestral writing alone.

Gervase Hughes, in a study of French opérette, comments that Messager's only technical defect was "one all too common to many composers of operetta – too close an adherence to repetitive rhythmic figures and four-bar rigidity", although such was Messager's "innate artistry that criticism on that score would be academic pedantry". this appealed to a younger generation of composers. His "Eh que ne parliez-vous?", from La Basoche, was quoted note-for-note by Poulenc in Les Mamelles de Tirésias.

Unlike some older contemporaries such as Saint-Saëns and Massenet, Messager remained open to new ideas and idioms throughout his life, and his style evolved to match the spirit of the times. His biographer and former pupil Henry Février commented that from classic opéras comiques, such as La Basoche, Messager's later works, such as Les P'tites Michu and Véronique, show a difference in style, "bringing an altogether fresher approach to the genre." Towards the end of his career Messager successfully moved to "comédie musicale", the French form of musical comedy. Others disagree that opérette is "essentially" frivolous.|group= n The composer remarked late in his career:

Early stage works

alt=photograph of a large ballet troupe posed on a large stage with an elaborate woodland set|thumb|upright=1.75|Les Deux Pigeons – final tableau

Although Messager called some of his early stage works opéras comiques they have, Gervase Hughes suggests, more in common with opérette than their composer acknowledged. Nevertheless, Messager introduced adventurous modern harmonic details in his early pieces, and strove to raise the artistic standards of opérette to that of opéra comique while retaining the essential panache of the genre. Hughes finds the first stage works uneven in quality but La Fauvette du temple (1884) to contain two fine expressive duets as well as waltzes and polkas with "an Offenbach lilt". Hughes judges the next two scores, La Béarnaise and La Fauvette (both 1885), less satisfying but nonetheless at least as good as anything by Messager's older contemporaries Planquette, Serpette and Lecocq.

Wagstaff writes that the composer's most enduring work is the ballet score Les Deux Pigeons (1886). Messager revived the ballet in 1906 in London and in 1912 in Paris in a shortened, two-act version. In 1961 John Lanchbery revised this for Frederick Ashton's new version of the ballet, with a closing reconciliation scene from earlier music and a passage transcribed from Véronique. This was first given at Covent Garden, is revived regularly by the Royal Ballet and has been staged by such other companies as CAPAB and Australian Ballet.

Isoline (1888), a musical fairy story ("conte des fées"), is neither an opérette nor an opéra comique. Writing in 1908, Fauré called it "one of the most poetic, most expressive works that have been written in France in the last twenty years", but it made little impact. The score remained in obscurity until 1930 when Reynaldo Hahn staged the ballet section of the work at Cannes.

1890s stage works

thumb|left|alt=black and white drawing of a stage scene showing a plaza with a man addressing a woman, both in aristocratic mediaeval costume|Scene from [[La Basoche]]

The decade began well for Messager with the artistic and commercial success of La Basoche (1890). Février in his André Messager: Mon Maître, Mon Ami calls it "the last of the great nineteenth-century French comic operas" ("le dernier des grands opéras-comique français du XIX siècle") and considers it of the greatest importance not only in Messager's career but in the history of French musical theatre.

With Madame Chrysanthème (1893), a four-act "lyric comedy" with no spoken dialogue, Messager reached a turning point in his development. The crux of the plot was the same as that later used by Puccini for Madama Butterfly (1904): a young Japanese geisha wooed and then abandoned by a foreign sailor. – but he was a self-critical artist, and he felt he had strayed too far in the direction of opera and away from his chosen genre. Both Hughes and Harding comment that Messager's score is subtler than Puccini's, but add that the almost total eclipse of Madame Chrysanthème by Madama Butterfly may be partly due to the relative effectiveness of their libretti. Traubner describes the piece as "one of those unusual works that begin well enough and gets better and better". The score contains two of the composer's best known numbers, the "Swing duet" ("Poussez, poussez l'escarpolette") and the "Donkey duet" ("De ci, de la"). When the work was revived at the Proms in London in the 1960s, the music critic of The Times commented, "Charming as it can prove in the theatre, the music alone is a little thin, with none of the piquancy that – thanks perhaps to Gilbert – redeems Messager's famous English contemporary Sullivan ... but Véronique has plenty of pretty things". It became and has remained the composer's most performed musical theatre piece.

20th century

thumb|alt=Photo of a scene in upper-class 18th century costume, a young man kneeling and grasping the hand of a young woman, who is standing and leaning towards him|Marion Green and [[Maggie Teyte in Monsieur Beaucaire, 1919]]

Messager's work running opera houses in Paris and London limited his composing between Véronique and the period after the First World War. Fortunio (1907) was a rare example in his oeuvre of a sung-through opera. Eight decades later the critic Edward Greenfield described it as "a long-buried jewel of a piece ... an improbable cross between musical comedy and Tristan und Isolde". From 1919 onwards Messager composed no more opéras comiques. Among his post-war stage works, Monsieur Beaucaire, a "romantic operetta" (1919), was his second work to an English libretto. French critics were inclined to look down on "Messager's English operetta" as over-sweet and sentimental to suit Anglo-Saxon tastes. Harding comments that the composer was successful in his attempt to produce an English flavour: one number is "pure Edward German" and there is much pastiche throughout the score. Despite the critics the piece ran well not only in Britain and the US, but also in France, with more than 300 performances in Paris and a long life in French provincial theatres.

Non-stage works and role in French music

thumb|upright=0.7|alt=Head and shoulders photo of a youngish man with receding dark hair and large moustache, wearing striped suit|left|Messager in 1890

Messager wrote songs for solo voice with piano throughout his career. Like Fauré, he was fond of the poetry of Armand Sylvestre, and from "La Chanson des cerises" in 1882 to the cycle Amour d'hiver in 1911 he set thirteen of Sylvestre's poems. Others whose verse he set ranged widely, from Victor Hugo to Frederic Weatherly (author of among other things "Danny Boy"). In notes to a 1992 recording of the piece, Xavier Deletang comments that although the influence of Mendelssohn and possibly Schumann may be discernible, the work reveals a mastery of instrumentation and a quintessentially French flavour, particularly in the wind parts. The two main subjects of the Allegro con moto first movement are strongly contrasted, with the opening string theme followed by a chorale-like theme for the winds.

When Messager was elected to membership of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1926 the influential musical journal Le Ménestrel remarked that this conferred on his chosen genre – opérette – official status and recognition; but his fame as a composer of light music has tended to obscure his considerable standing in contemporary serious musical circles. It was said of him that he had "seen all, heard all, and remembered all". The leading composers of the time valued his friendship and advice. Fauré called him "familiar with everything, knowing it all, fascinated by anything new". Like Fauré, Messager wrote musical criticism for Le Figaro and other publications in the first decades of the 20th century. Unlike Fauré, who was known for his kindly reviews, Messager was frequently severe. His views carried weight: some of his criticisms were reported in the international press.

In 1908 Fauré wrote of Messager, "There are not many examples in the history of music of an artist with such a complete education, of such profound knowledge, who consents to apply his gifts to forms regarded, nobody knows why, as secondary". He observes that Messager spanned an entire era: "Auber, Rossini and Meyerbeer were still alive when he began his studies, yet he survived the First World War and witnessed the rise and decline of "les Six". ... For forty years he carried aloft the torch kindled by Adolphe Adam in 1834; after his death it soon flickered out".

Conductor

thumb|left|upright|alt=caricature of elderly man in evening dress conducting an orchestra|Messager conducting at the Opéra, 1908

The wide range of Messager's musical sympathies was noted by Le Menéstral, which said that he "has served Wagner, Debussy, Fauré, Ravel and Stravinsky when their works were still struggling for recognition". The music critic Pierre Lalo wrote that under Messager's direction, Parsifal, without losing any of its grandeur, "assumed a French clarity, and a sobriety, nobility and order ... even the most famous Bayreuth conductors have not always been able to do this." Not everyone shared Lalo's view; some audience members equated undemonstrativeness with dullness: Reynaldo Hahn commented, "[Messager] is not a master of the theatre ["chef du théâtre"], being too exclusively musical; he sets too much store by detail without feeling the spirit of the public behind him, and does not understand the variable musical flow that makes one hold one's breath, sigh and wait." Nevertheless, Hahn admired Messager as an orchestral conductor:

<blockquote> André Messager is the most French of conductors; I mean that in this art he embodies sharpness. Grace and clarity are not uniquely French qualities: they are frequently found among the Italians and even some Germans. But sharpness is a French virtue, and nothing but French. M. André Messager has it to an exceptional degree, and it shows in how he writes, orchestrates, dresses, talks, and plays the piano. But it is when he conducts the orchestra that what one might call his organic sharpness shows itself most forcefully.</blockquote>

Recordings

In 1918 Messager conducted recordings in New York, with the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, of Les Chasseresses and Cortège de Bacchus from Sylvia by Delibes, Sérénade and Mules from Impressions d'Italie by Charpentier, the Bacchanale from Samson et Dalila and the Prelude to Le Déluge, both by Saint-Saëns, and 4½-minute extracts from Capriccio espagnol by Rimsky-Korsakov and Le Rouet d'Omphale by Saint-Saëns. In Wagstaff's 1991 study of Messager, the list of recordings of the composer's music runs to 40 pages; 24 of his works are represented in the list of recordings up to that date.

right|thumb|alt=brightly coloured theatre poster showing a festive grouping of characters from Veronique, with the title of the piece in large letters|1898 Paris theatre poster

Complete operas

Complete recordings exist of several of Messager's stage works. There are three complete sets of Véronique – a 1953 mono recording for the Société française du son conducted by Pierre Dervaux, a 1969 stereo EMI recording conducted by Jean-Claude Hartemann, and a 1998 recording sung in English, conducted by J. Lynn Thompson. Other complete sets include L'Amour masqué (1970; conductor, Raymond Legrand), La Basoche (1960; Tony Aubin), Coups de roulis (1963; Marcel Cariven), Fortunio (1987; John Eliot Gardiner), Isoline (1947; Louis Beydts), Monsieur Beaucaire (1958; Jules Gressier), Passionnément (1964; Jean-Paul Kreder; and 2021; Armando Noguera); and Les p'tites Michu (2019; Pierre Dumoussaud).

Individual numbers

Singers who have recorded individual numbers by Messager include role creators such as Jean Périer (Véronique), Lucien Fugère (La Basoche), Pierre Darmant and Yvonne Printemps (L'Amour masqué), Koval (Passionnément), Marcelle Denya (Coups de roulis), and Maggie Teyte (Monsieur Beaucaire), as well as other contemporaries – Aino Ackté, Emma Eames, and John McCormack – whose recordings have been reissued on compact disc. Singers of the next generation who recorded Messager numbers included Georges Thill and Ninon Vallin. More recent examples include Mady Mesplé, Susan Graham, and Felicity Lott.

Non-operatic recordings

Of Messager's non-operatic works, his Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville, written jointly with Fauré, has been recorded by, among others, Harmonia Mundi, conducted by Philippe Herreweghe (1989). Messager's other collaboration with Fauré, the Wagner send-up Souvenirs de Bayreuth, has been recorded by piano duettists including Kathryn Stott and Martin Roscoe (1995, Hyperion), and, in an orchestral arrangement, by the orchestra of the Bayreuth Festival. A suite from Les Deux Pigeons has been recorded several times, for example by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Hugo Rignold (1948) and by Charles Mackerras (1958); in 1993 Decca recorded the complete score with the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera conducted by Richard Bonynge. His ballet-pantomime Scaramouche was recorded by the Toulon Opera orchestra under Guillaume Tourniaire (2018). The Symphony in A has been recorded by the Orchestre Symphonique du Mans, conducted by José-André Gendille (2001). His Solo de concours – a test piece for clarinet and piano written at Fauré's request for the 1899 clarinet contest at the Paris Conservatoire, demonstrating the clarinettist's skill in both cantabile and virtuoso passages – has been recorded numerous times.

List of works

Stage works (except ballets)

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align: left; margin-right: 0;"

! scope="col" |Title

! scope="col" |Genre

! scope="col" |Year

! scope="col" |Acts

! scope="col" |Librettists

! scope="col" |Notes

| Les Païens The Pagans

| opérette

| 1876

| ?

| Henri Meilhac

| François les bas-bleus François the Bluestocking

| opéra comique

| 1883

| 3

| Ernest Dubreuil, Eugène Humbert and Paul Burani

| Gisèle

| opérette

| c. 1884–5

| 3

| F. Oswald and Maxime Boucheron

| La Fauvette du temple The Temple Songbird

| opéra comique

| 1885

| 3

| Eugène Humbert and Paul Burani

| La Béarnaise The Woman from Béarn

| opéra comique

| 1885

| 3

| Eugène Leterrier and Albert Vanloo

| Le Petit Poucet Tom Thumb

| féerie

| 1885

| 4

| Eugène Leterrier, Albert Vanloo and Arnold Mortier

| Le Bourgeois de Calais The Burgher of Calais

| opéra comique

| 1887

| 3

| Ernest Dubreuil and Paul Burani

| Les premières armes de Louis XV The First Conquest of Louis XV

| opéra comique

| 1888

| 3

| Albert Carré

| Isoline

| conte des fées

| 1888

| 3

| Catulle Mendès

| Le Mari de la reine The Queen's Husband

| opérette

| 1889

| 3

| Ernest Grenet-Dancourt and Octave Pradels

| La Basoche The Guild

| opéra comique

| 1890

| 3

| Albert Carré

| Hélène

| drame lyrique

| 1891

| 4

| Paul Delair

| Madame Chrysanthème Madam Chrysanthemum

| comédie-lyrique

| 1893

| 4

| Georges Hartmann and Alexandre André

| Miss Dollar

| opérette

| 1893

| 3

| Charles Clairville and Albert Vallin

| Mirette

| comic opera

| 1894

| 3

| Michel Carré, Frederic Weatherly, Percy Greenbank and Adrian Ross

| Le Chevalier d'Harmental The Knight of Harmental

| opéra comique

| 1896

| 5

| Paul Ferrier

| La Fiancée en loterie The Raffled Bride

| opérette

| 1896

| 3

| Camille de Roddaz and Alfred Douane

| La Montagne enchantée The Enchanted Mountain

| pièce fantastique

| 1897

| 5

| Albert Carré and Émile Moreau

| Véronique

| opéra comique

| 1898

| 3

| Georges Duval and Albert Vanloo

| Les Dragons de l'impératrice The Empress's Dragoons

| opéra comique

| 1905

| 3

| Georges Duval and Albert Vanloo

| Fortunio

| comédie lyrique

| 1907

| 5

| Gaston Arman de Caillavet and Robert de Flers

| Béatrice

| légende lyrique

| 1914

| 4

| Gaston Arman de Caillavet and Robert de Flers

| Cyprien, ôte ta main de là! Hands off, Cyprien!

| fantaisie

| 1916

| 1

| Maurice Hennequin

| Monsieur Beaucaire

| romantic operetta

| 1919

| 3

| Frederick Lonsdale and Adrian Ross

| La Petite Fonctionnaire The Post-Mistress

| comédie musicale

| 1921

| 3

| Alfred Capus and Xavier Roux

| L'Amour masqué Hidden Love

| comédie musicale

| 1923

| 3

| Sacha Guitry

| Passionnément Passionately

| comédie musicale

| 1926

| 3

| Maurice Hennequin and Albert Willemetz

| Deburau

| musique de scène

| 1926

| 4

| Sacha Guitry

|Coups de roulis The Roll of the Ship

| opérette

| 1928

| 3

| Albert Willemetz and Maurice Larrouy

Ballets

Single act, except where shown

Fleur d'oranger 1878
Les Vins de France 1879
Mignons et vilains 1879
Les Deux Pigeons (2 acts) 1886
Scaramouche (2 acts) 1891 (with Georges Street)
Amants éternels 1893
Le Procès des roses 1896
Le Chevalier aux fleurs 1897 (with Raoul Pugno)
Une aventure de la Guimard 1900

Orchestral

Symphony in A major 1875
Loreley, ballade for orchestra, c. 1880

Chamber and instrumental

3 valses, piano 4 hands (1884)
"Souvenirs de Bayreuth", piano 4 hands, with Gabriel Fauré, c. 1888
For solo piano (1889):
Impromptu, Op.10
Habañera, Op.11
Menuet, Op.12
Mazurka, Op.13
Caprice polka, Op.14
Valse, Op.15
"Pavane des fées"
Trois pièces, violin and piano (1897): Barcarolle, Mazurka, Sérénade
Solo de concours, clarinet and piano (1899)

Choral

Don Juan et Haydée (Byron), cantata, c. 1875
Prométhée enchaîné (Georges Clerc), cantata, c. 1877
Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville, with Gabriel Fauré, 1881, for choir with solo violin and harmonium; orchestral accompaniment added 1882.

Songs

For solo voice with orchestral accompaniment

Sérénade (Louis Legendre), written for the play Colibri, 1889

For solo voice with piano accompaniment

"Regret d'avril" (Armand Silvestre) (1882)
"Chanson de ma mie" (Théodore de Banville) (1882)
"Mimosa" (Armand Silvestre) (1882)
"Nouveau printemps" (Heinrich Heine, translated by Georges Clerc), 5 songs (1885), dedicated to Fauré
"Gavotte" – danse chantée (Théodore de Banville) (1887)
"Chanson mélancolique" (Catulle Mendès) (1889)
"La Chanson des cerises" (Armand Silvestre) (1889)
"Neige rose" (Armand Silvestre) (1889)
"Fleurs d'hiver" (Armand Silvestre) (1889)
"O canto do Paris n'America" (unnamed) (1890)
"À une fiancée" (Victor Hugo) (1891)
"Arioso" (Paul Burani) (1891)
"Ritournelle" (Henry Gauthier-Villars) (1894)
"Chanson d'automne" (Paul Delair) (1894)
"Chant d'amour" (Armand Silvestre) (1894)
"Le Bateau rose" (Jean Richepin) (1894)
"Douce chanson" (Émile Blémont) (1894)
"Notre amour" (Armand Silvestre) (1896)
"Aimons nous" (Emile Blémont) (1897)
"Curly Locks" (Frederic Weatherly) (1897)
"Amour d'hiver" (Armand Silvestre), 6 songs (1911)
"Pour la patrie" (Victor Hugo) (1914)
"La Paix de blanc vêtue" (Léon Lahovary) (1922)
"Va chercher quelques fleurs" (Louis Aufauvre) (1922)

Sources: Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; L'académie nationale de l'opérette; and Wagstaff: André Messager.

André Messager

Life and career

Early years

Last years

Honours and awards

Music

Early stage works

1890s stage works

20th century

Non-stage works and role in French music

Conductor

Recordings

Complete operas

Individual numbers

Non-operatic recordings

List of works

Stage works (except ballets)

Ballets

Orchestral

Chamber and instrumental

Choral

Songs

Notes, references and sources

Notes

References

Sources

Further reading

External links