Biography
Emmanuel Chabrier was born on 18 January 1841 in Ambert in the Auvergne and studied law in Paris from 1858, while teaching himself piano, harmony and counterpoint largely on his own. Until 1880 he worked as a civil servant at the French Ministry of the Interior, composing only in his spare time, among other works the opéra bouffe "L'étoile" (1877); only in his late thirties did he give up his secure position to devote himself entirely to music. His international breakthrough came in 1883 with the orchestral rhapsody "España", written after a trip to Spain. Without academic training, he developed a harmonically daring musical language full of wit and joie de vivre that composers such as Ravel, Debussy and Stravinsky later praised as a forerunner of French musical modernism. In his final years, increasingly weakened by a progressive nervous illness, Chabrier did not live to complete his opera "Briséïs"; he died on 13 September 1894 in Paris.
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