Adolphe Adam (1803 – 1856): Giselle
Creating music came so naturally to the young Adolphe Adam that he had little inclination for studying technique or theory, or even for bothering how to read musical notation. “I loved music”, he recalled, “but I didn’t want to learn it. I would sit quietly for hours, listening to my father play the piano, and as soon as I was alone I tapped on the instrument without knowing my notes. I knew without realising it how to find the harmonies. I didn’t want to do scales or read music; I always improvised.” Although Adolphe eventually did learn how to decipher music, he never allowed his creative instincts to become too bogged down in theory. A charming and pragmatic man, he would enjoy great success during his lifetime as a composer of ballets and comic operas for the Parisian stage.
Adolphe’s lifelong distaste for the more didactic elements of music may have been part rebellion against his father, Louis Adam, a well-regarded professor at the Paris Conservatoire. Louis would at one point even discourage his son’s aspirations to make a career from music. In the meantime, Adolphe’s mother Élisa, the daughter of a distinguished Parisian physician, attempted to install a little discipline into her gifted but wayward son. According to Adolphe, Élisa came to despair of her son’s academic “ineptitude” and had him enrolled at the Hix Institute, a slightly draconian boarding school situated in the Champs-Élysées. Adolphe was far from impressed by the place which he described as “barbaric”, not least when the teachers had him conjugating complicated Latin tenses in front of the rest of the class.
He must have been relieved to finally enrol at the Paris Conservatoire in 1821, where he studied under two illustrious teachers – counterpoint with the innovative modernist, Anton Reicha, and composition from the popular French opera composer, François-Adrien Boieldieu. Of the two, it was Boieldieu who would have more influence on the young Adam. His pupil would later credit him for teaching him how to create a sustained and beautiful melody, without reverting to artifice or showy modulation.
Boieldieu would also have an important hand in kick-starting his pupil’s career, as he engaged Adam’s help with preparing and orchestrating his new opera, La Dame Blanche in 1825. After the opera had become a major success in Paris (it is now regarded as Boieldieu’s masterpiece), Adam was allowed to publish a piano transcription of the opera’s most popular melodies. The fee he earned from this allowed him to take an extended holiday around Europe.
But as much as Adam’s involvement with an operatic hit had done his reputation no harm, he was quite prepared to get his hands dirty at the other end of the musical scale. At around the same time, he began to earn money by writing songs and incidental pieces for the Théâtre du Vaudeville (which advertised itself as putting on farcical or satirical entertainments mixing “small pieces with verses on well-known tunes”) – works that he later dismissed as “trashy… bad romances and even worse piano pieces”. He supplemented his meagre income, albeit even more reluctantly, with a little casual teaching.
Adam always joked that his big break came from the time he was offered the unpaid position as triangle-player for the orchestra of the Théâtre du Gymnase. Although the orchestra was only of middling standards, Adam immediately knew he had landed himself in the right place: the Gymnase had opened five years earlier specifically as a training theatre for conservatoire students, namely for aspiring playwrights as well as opera composers.
Getting his foot in the door of the Gymnase allowed Adam to make “acquaintances and friendships with actors and writers; that was, in a word, my starting point. Duchaume [the orchestra’s director] died, and I succeeded him as timpanist and chorus master, at a salary of six hundred francs a year. It was a fortune. I no longer gave thirty-sous lessons, and I wrote a little less trashy music.”
He was soon busy composing or arranging music for the Gymnase. In late 1827, he had his first one-act comic opera, Le Mal Du Pays, produced there. It did sufficiently well that by the time he had completed his second comic opera, Pierre et Catherine, it was to enjoy a double bill at the Paris Opéra-Comique, running to no less than eighty performances alongside a work by (the better established) Daniel Auber. Not yet twenty-five years old, Adolphe Adam was on his way.
Always down-to-earth, businesslike and blessed with a natural gift for writing tuneful melodies (as well as possessing a shrewd intuition for what Parisian audiences wanted), there was hardly any stopping Adam over the following two decades. “My only ambition”, he once said, “is to write music that is transparent, easy to understand and amusing to the public, and I shall not stop writing until the public tires of my work.” But it wasn’t just the public, but also choreographers, scenarists, singers and dancers who appreciated Adam for his flexibility and calm efficiency, not least when adapting his music to last-minute changes.
Having spent three years in London in the wake of the 1830 revolution in Paris, Adam triumphantly returned to his home city with his comic-opera, Le Chalet (1834), drawing on his old vaudeville experience to produce what many consider to be the first true French operetta. Frivolous and witty in tone and buoyantly piloted by a lively score, the work would chalk up a thousand performances at the Opéra-Comique alone over the next forty years.
Two years later came Adam’s operatic masterpiece, Le Postillon de Longjumeau. Essentially a satire on the opera business, the work also casts a critical eye over aristocratic privilege – politically risky, perhaps, in a country that had recently restored its monarchy and regressed into stodgy, conservative values. Thankfully, Le Postillon avoided any official censure and has since become one of Adam’s most popular and widely performed works.
But even as Adam made his mark with French comic opera, his creativity would prove to be even more instinctive with ballet. Indeed, he once described writing the latter as fun rather than work.
Ballet was at that time undergoing something of a revolution across Europe. It was a time when female ballerinas were increasingly cast in starring roles (even if such roles often highlighted narrow stereotypical views of feminine innocence or sensuality). It was a time when the respective roles of creator and choreographer were becoming ever more separate. It was also a time when commissioning original music for a new work was now becoming the norm, in place of the old custom of using a ready-made arrangement or pastiche.
August Bournonville’s 1832 production of La Syphilde (with music by Jean Schneitzhoeffer) had already taken Paris by storm and in 1841, Adam was commissioned to write the music for a ballet with a not entirely dissimilar plot (involving supernatural women) created by the French poet and novelist, Théophile Gautier. Gaultier’s inspiration had come from a Heinrich Heine story, retelling an old Slavic legend of the Wilis, the vengeful spirits of girls jilted by their lovers. Gautier wanted to create a version in which a country girl, Giselle, dies of a broken heart after being deceived by her beloved (Albrecht), before later returning as a spirit to forgive him and save him from the vengeful Wilis.
Although given a tight deadline for the performance, Adam rose to the challenge in his usual effortless way, turning out around an hour and a half’s music in less than two months. Giselle was duly premiered on June 28th at the Salle Le Peletier in Paris, with audiences immediately spellbound by its dazzling spectacle, as well as its heart-rending storyline. The ballet’s huge popularity quickly led to performances far and wide across Europe, before eventually reaching Russia and even the United States.
Adam’s sumptuous musical score was doubtless a major factor in its great success, with the composer now somewhere near his creative peak. Classical grace and romantic invention (especially in Act II, when Giselle and Albrecht battle the Wilis) are perfectly balanced throughout, with Adam just as adept at turning out tuneful, bucolic melodies as he is with creating tense, atmospheric moods. At two of the ballet’s darkest moments, he produces two unforgettably poignant themes, firstly on a solo viola and later on an oboe (when Albrecht comes to lay flowers on Giselle’s grave). He also shows a mastery for orchestral colour throughout, often using his instrumental forces in unusual and novel ways, while always retaining a vibrant lightness.
In all, Giselle probably represented the high point of Adam’s career. Attempting to surpass even this success, he then tried his hand at a grand opera, Richard en Palestine, a much more dramatic form unsuited to his subtle compositional style. The work was unmitigated failure and thereafter Adam stuck to what he did best. Perhaps it helped that his work was also his one and only pastime, as he admitted in his memoirs. “I love neither the country, nor gaming, nor any kind of distraction. Musical labour is my only passion, and my only delight. The day when the public shall reject my works, mortification will kill me.”
It was during the mid-1840s that he wrote the other work for which he is best remembered today, his Christmas carol, Minuit, Chrétiens, better known across the English-speaking world as “O Holy Night”*.
*The English words being subsequently added by a Boston minister, John Sullivan Dwight, in 1855.
Despite his career success, Adam’s personal life was not without its heartaches and tragedy. His marriage to Sara Lescot, a singer he had met during his Vaudeville days, was a failure almost from the word go, and they would separate in 1835. More tragically, their only son would commit suicide in 1851, at the age of just 19.
When Adam then fell out with new management at the Opéra-Comique in 1845, he unwisely ploughed his fortune into the creation of a new Parisian opera house, Opéra-National, which then completely flopped (something not helped by the 1848 revolution in Paris forcing the closure of all the theatres). Adam was declared bankrupt, and although he eventually managed to settle his debts, he was never again wealthy.
Ever resourceful, he followed in his father’s old footsteps, taking up a position as professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire from 1849 (where his pupils included future ballet composer Léo Delibes). He also eked out extra income from journalism for various music magazines even if, in sharp contrast to some of his more vituperative contemporaries such as Hector Berlioz, his critiques were generally benign and even bland in tone.
“I have paid my debts”, he wrote near the end of his life:
But my brother has just died, leaving to me his embarrassed affairs, after having squandered all of my mother’s estate that could have any value. I have therefore no hope of finding even a competence, much less, fortune. I shall lay something by for my wife and daughter, but it will be very little.
I thank God, in whom I firmly believe, for the favours, perhaps unmerited, which he has bestowed upon me; since, in spite of my ill-luck in business matters, he has left me ideas enough to write a few more works, which I shall try to make as respectable as I can.
The various stresses of Adam’s later career may have contributed to his sudden and premature death at the age of just 52. But he had carried on writing prolifically to the very end, having lived to see the premiers of his final ballet Le Corsaire (which many consider an even finer work than Giselle) as well as his comic-opera, Les Pantins de Violette.
Perhaps growing old and retiring would never have suited his temperament anyway. As he had admitted shortly before his death, “it is the fever of work and of composition which prolongs my youth and keeps me up.”