Background
André Messager was born on December 30, 1853, at Montluçon, France, the son of Paul-Philippe-Émile Messager, a prosperous local tax collector, and Sophie-Cornélie Lhôte de Selancy.
André Messager was born on December 30, 1853, at Montluçon, France, the son of Paul-Philippe-Émile Messager, a prosperous local tax collector, and Sophie-Cornélie Lhôte de Selancy.
The young Messager was given piano lessons, and at the age of seven he was sent as a boarder to a Marist school where he continued his interest in the piano. After a bank crash brought ruin to the family, which could no longer afford to keep Messager at the Marist school, he was awarded a bursary to study at the École de Musique classique et religieuse in Paris, run by Louis Niedermeyer. This was at the time of the Paris Commune, 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.
In 1874 Messager was appointed to succeed Fauré as organiste de choeur (choirmaster) at Saint-Sulpice, Paris, under the principal organist, Charles-Marie Widor.
Messager established his reputation with his operetta La Béarnaise (performed Paris, 1885; London, 1886). Between 1890 and 1926 he produced 14 operettas, including Madame Chrysanthème (1893; on a plot similar to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly), Mirette (1894), and Monsieur Beaucaire (1919). Of his three ballets Les Deux Pigeons (1886) was especially well known. He wrote in a light, elegant style that was characteristically Parisian. He became director of the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1898, then artistic director of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden (1901–1906), and later associate director of the Paris Opéra. He conducted the first performance (1902) of Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.
André Charles Prosper Messager died on February 24, 1929, after a short illness and was interred in the Passy Cemetery.
(Australian pressing features a total of 17 tracks. Decca....)
In 1883, André Messager married to Edith Clouette. Messager's second wife became Hope Temple in 1895, Edith having divorced him.