Édouard LALO

1823 - 1892

Composer

Breaking with the family military tradition after a struggle, Lalo showed his inclinations for music at a fairly early age. After enrolling at the conservatory in Lille in 1832, taking classes with Müller (violin) and Baumann (composition), he left for Paris seven years later to complete his education with Habeneck (violin), then Schulhoff and Crèvecœur (composition). From then on, this strong-minded musician relentlessly pursued a difficult career, often outside official channels. At the end of the 1840s, he was scraping a living by giving a few lessons or playing as a member of the orchestra at the Opéra-Comique. In 1850, he met Berlioz as a result of his involvement in the Grande Société Philharmonique. A founder member of the Quatuor Armingaud around 1856 (for which he wrote, in 1859, his Opus 19), he was mainly interested in art songs and chamber music at that time, developing a style deeply influenced by German music. However, despite the support of key figures like Gounod, he did not achieve recognition until the 1870s, a period during which he helped to found the Société Nationale de Musique (1871) and during which he wrote most of his major output, imbued with a symphonic quality that was to have a profound effect on the generations to come. Works such as the Violin Concerto and the Symphonie Espagnole, written for the virtuoso Sarasate, the Cello Concerto, the Rapsodie Norvégienne, the ballet Namouna and his grand opera Le Roi d’Ys, were all therefore written one after the other until the mid-1880s.