1803–1856 · France · Classical
Adolphe Adam (1803–1856) was a French Romantic-era composer who wrote around fifty operas and several ballets, including the famous Giselle. Players know him above all for the Christmas carol "O Holy Night": the site offers arrangements of the Giselle duet and of the carol for voice and piano.
Adolphe Adam was born in Paris in 1803 to Jean-Louis Adam, a pianist and teacher from Alsace who taught piano at the Paris Conservatoire. The future composer's mother, Élisabeth-Charlotte-Jeanne Coste, came from a physician's family. As a boy he showed little interest in music and was being prepared for quite a different path, that of a scholar.
Among Adam's teachers at the Paris Conservatoire of Music and Declamation were François Boieldieu and François Benoist. Such progress earned Adam the Prix de Rome in 1825, though not on his first try: a year earlier the jury had only given him an honourable mention, and the following year he was awarded the second prize.
Louis Adam had hoped his son might follow a commercial or academic career rather than become a composer, and though the young man had food and lodging at home, no money was set aside for his musical pursuits. By the age of twenty Adam was already writing songs for the Paris vaudeville theatres and giving music lessons.
Adam began his professional career as his teacher's assistant: he wrote the overture to Boieldieu's opera La Dame blanche and composed music for vaudevilles. In 1829 came his first one-act opera, Pierre et Catherine, on a Russian subject. Among his regular collaborators in these years were the choreographer Taglioni and the playwright and librettist Arthur de Beauplan, and in 1833 his ballet Faust was premiered.
After the July Revolution and a cholera outbreak had disrupted theatrical life in Paris, Adam, on the advice of his relative Pierre François Laporte, manager of London's King's Theatre, moved to London. There, in 1832, his music for a stage piece about a military commander was warmly received at Covent Garden, while his next production there, a historical melodrama, failed to repeat that success. He returned to Paris by the end of 1832, but briefly went back to London in early 1833 for the premiere of his ballet Faust at the King's Theatre.
In the late 1830s Adam spent long spells in St Petersburg: he worked on the staging of his ballet La fille du Danube (1838) in the Russian capital, and later composed L'Écumeur de mer (1840) specially for its Russian premiere. On his way home to France he passed through Berlin, where he wrote, on commission, the opera-ballet Die Hamadryaden, performed at the Berlin Court Opera.
On his return to Paris he created the ballet Giselle to a libretto by Théophile Gautier — it premiered on 28 June 1841, with choreography by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot. The ballet established the Romantic direction in French ballet and became the peak of Adam's work for the choreographic stage: Giselle is still successfully performed on stages around the world.
In 1844 his first grand opera, Richard en Palestine, was staged at the Paris Opéra but aroused little interest among the public. That same year Adam was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
Adam wrote around fifty operas; the most popular of them were Le postillon de Lonjumeau (1836), Le Roi d'Yvetot (1842), Cagliostro (1844), Giralda ou La nouvelle Psyché (1850) and Si j'étais roi (1852).
In 1846, after a falling-out with the management of the Paris Opéra-Comique, Adam decided to open his own lyric theatre and leased for it the building of the Cirque Olympique, putting into the venture his own money along with large loans. The new stage, named the Opéra-National, opened at the end of 1847 and was meant as a home for the newest French repertoire, but after the Revolution of 1848 the theatre closed — nine operas had been staged there in four months — leaving the composer in debt for years.
Adam did not give up after this collapse: in 1850 his Giralda was staged at the Opéra-Comique, and for the revived theatre, now renamed the Théâtre-Lyrique, he wrote Si j'étais roi, first performed in September 1852. That same year, 1852, he brought out several more new works and finally cleared all his debts. In these same years Adam remarried — his second wife was the singer Chérie-Louise Couraud, and the two stayed together for the remainder of his life.
From 1 October 1848 the former student began teaching within the walls of his own alma mater — as professor of composition and counterpoint; his pupils there included Jean-Alexandre-Ferdinand Poise and Léo Delibes. A year earlier, in 1847, to words by Placide Cappeau he composed the Christmas carol "Minuit, chrétiens" — the future "O Holy Night". Its first performance took place in Roquemaure at a midnight mass, sung by the opera singer Emily Laurey, and the carol was soon adopted by the Catholic church, entering its Christmas services.
In 1853 Adam wove into his opera Le Sourd an old French tune from the fifteenth century, "Sur le Pont d'Avignon", giving it a new life on stage. He also had a literary gift: his feuilletons and articles appeared in print, including in Le Constitutionnel and the Assemblée nationale, and in 1859 fragments of his memoirs were published in St Petersburg in the Theatrical and Musical Herald.
One of Adam's last major ballets was Le Corsaire, which premiered in January 1856 after a year of preparation. His final stage work, the one-act operetta Les Pantins de Violette, opened at the Bouffes-Parisiens theatre in Paris on 29 April 1856. Only a few days afterwards, on 3 May 1856, the composer passed away in his sleep, aged 52, and was laid to rest at the Montmartre Cemetery.
Adam owes his most lasting fame to the ballet theatre. Giselle (1841) established the Romantic direction in French ballet and remains in the repertoire of theatres in many countries to this day. Among his other ballets, staged at the Royal Academy of Music's Théâtre Le Peletier, are La jolie fille de Gand (1842, choreographed by Albert), Le diable à quatre (1845, choreographed by Joseph Mazilier) and La beauté du diable (1845, choreographed by Albert); one of Adam's last major ballets was Le Corsaire (1856).
Adam's operatic legacy is even larger than his ballet output — around fifty works; besides composing, he worked as a music critic, taught at the Conservatoire and was himself a pianist. Among the operas, the best known are Le postillon de Lonjumeau (1836), Giralda ou La nouvelle Psyché (1850), Si j'étais roi (1852) and La poupée de Nuremberg (1852). For students who are just discovering nineteenth-century French opera and ballet, Adam's music is a convenient entry point: the tunes are easy to remember, and the plots are simple and vivid. In other countries, the opera most often named as Adam's favourite was Le postillon de Lonjumeau.
Another example of his light-hearted style is the opera Le chalet (1834): over the following few decades it was given more than a thousand times in Paris, and in France it remained Adam's most popular work for a long time.
The opera Le toréador (1849) deserves a special mention: its bravura aria "Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman?" is still current among coloratura sopranos.
On the site Adam's sheet music is represented by the duet from the first act of Giselle for solo piano (level "intermediate") and by an arrangement for voice and piano of his famous carol "Minuit Chrétiens" (level "intermediate+"). The ballet duet is worth taking on first — it gives a feel for the lightness and dance quality of Adam's music — while the vocal piece makes a good next step, for whoever wants to sing or accompany one of the composer's most recognisable tunes.