Ferdinand Hérold

Louis Joseph Ferdinand Herold (28 January 1791 – 19 January 1833), better known as Ferdinand Hérold, was a French composer. He was celebrated in his lifetime for his operas, of which he composed more than twenty, but he also wrote ballet music, works for piano and choral pieces. He is best known today for the ballet La Fille mal gardée and the overture to the opera Zampa. Born in Paris to a musical family, Hérold trained at the Paris Conservatoire and won France's premier musical prize, the Prix de Rome in 1812. After a time in Italy he returned to Paris and worked first at the Théâtre Italien and then at the Opéra. He wrote several ballets for the latter, but was best known as a composer of opéra comique. Some of them, particularly in his early days, were hampered by poor librettos, but later he had more successes than failures, and his last two operas, Zampa (1831) and Le Pré aux clercs (The Clerk's Meadow, 1832) were immensely popular, and remained in the repertory in France and elsewhere for decades after his early death from tuberculosis in 1833. As a ballet composer Hérold was a pioneer, raising the standard of ballet scores from being simple arrangements of popular tunes to well-orchestrated music illustrating the action of the ballets. His operas influenced later composers from Bizet and Offenbach to Wagner and Smetana. Life and career Background and early years The Herold family was of Alsatian origin (the surname was written without an acute accent). The composer's father, François-Joseph Herold (1755–1802) was the son of an organist in Seltz. François-Joseph studied music with C. P. E. Bach in Hamburg and moved to Paris in about 1780, where he worked as a composer, pianist and teacher. In 1790 he married Jeanne-Gabrielle Pascal. Their only child, Louis Joseph Ferdinand Herold, later widely known as Ferdinand Hérold, was born in what is now the rue Herold in the 1st arrondissement on 28 January 1791.