Hervé (composer)

Hervé (French pronunciation: ​[ɛʁve]), real name Louis Auguste Florimond Ronger, (30 June 1825 – 4 November 1892) was a French singer, composer, librettist, conductor and scene painter, whom Ernest Newman, following Reynaldo Hahn, credited with inventing the genre of operetta in Paris.

Hervé was born in Houdain near Arras. Part Spanish by birth, he became a choirboy at the Church of Saint-Roch, Paris. His musical promise was noted, and he was enrolled in the Conservatoire and studied with Daniel Auber, and by the age of fifteen was serving as organist at Bicêtre Hospital and a stage vocalist in provincial theatres, where he trained his fine tenor voice. He won a competition in 1845 for the prestigious Paris post of organist at the Church of Saint-Eustache, while he doubled with his theatrical music career, a situation that he turned to advantage years later, in his most famous work, 'Mam'zelle Nitouche.

Before he became musical director of the Théâtre du Palais Royal in 1851, he composed a one-act tableau grotesque, a burlesque on Don Quixote titled Don Quichotte et Sancho Pança. It was conceived as a vehicle for the actor Desiré, who was short and plump, accompanied by the tall and gangling Hervé, as he was now calling himself, in order to distance his two personas. It was staged at Adolphe Adam's Opéra-National, and achieved a great success in 1848, in spite of the distracting revolution: furthermore, according to the composer Reynaldo Hahn, the farcical pot-pourri was "simply the first French operetta". He had also composed musical entertainments to keep the patients entertained at the Bicêtre Hospital, and these gained the notice of producers.

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