Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas (French:[ɑ̃bʁwaztɔmɑ]; 5 August 1811 – 12 February 1896) was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868).
Born into a musical family, Thomas was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris, winning France's top music prize, the Prix de Rome. He pursued a career as a composer of operas, completing his first opera, La double échelle, in 1837. He wrote twenty further operas over the next decades, mostly comic, but he also treated more serious subjects, finding considerable success with audiences in France and abroad.
Thomas was appointed as a professor at the Conservatoire in 1856, and in 1871 he succeeded Daniel Auber as director. Between then and his death at his home in Paris twenty-five years later, he modernised the Conservatoire's organisation while imposing a rigidly conservative curriculum, hostile to modern music, and attempting to prevent composers such as César Franck and Gabriel Fauré from influencing the students of the Conservatoire.
Thomas' operas were generally neglected during most of the 20th century, but in more recent decades they have experienced something of a revival both in Europe and the US.
Charles Louis AmbroiseThomas (French: [ɑ̃bʁwaz tɔmɑ]; 5 August 1811 – 12 February 1896) was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas...
(Offenbach) Ophélie, Hamlet (AmbroiseThomas) Oscar, Un ballo in maschera (Verdi) – trouser role Philine, Mignon (AmbroiseThomas) Philomele, The Love of the...
composer AmbroiseThomas (1811–1896). All premieres took place in Paris unless otherwise noted. Forbes, Elizabeth (1992), 'Thomas, Ambroise' in The New...
1866 opéra comique (or opera in its second version) in three acts by AmbroiseThomas. The original French libretto was by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré...
principal music college, the Paris Conservatoire. There he studied under AmbroiseThomas, whom he greatly admired. After winning the country's top musical prize...
high D (D6). Final cadenza from the Valse in Ophélie's Mad Scene (Act IV) from the opera Hamlet (1868) by AmbroiseThomas (piano-vocal score, p. 292)....
repeated this gesture twice – on the deaths of Charles Gounod in 1894 and AmbroiseThomas in 1896. Professors from the Conservatoire were elected on both occasions...
Merry Wives of Windsor. Le songe d'une nuit d'été (1850), an opera by AmbroiseThomas in which Shakespeare and Falstaff meet. Falstaff (1893), Giuseppe Verdi's...
Ambrose Thomas may refer to: Ambrose Thomas (artist) (1880–1959), English artist AmbroiseThomas (1811–1896), French composer This disambiguation page...
and was not published until 1932. The director of the Conservatoire, AmbroiseThomas, was a deeply conservative musician, as were most of his faculty. It...
square of the Théâtre-Français; Gounod, also by Antonin Mercié (1902); AmbroiseThomas by Alexandre Falguière (1900); and Chopin by Froment-Meurice (1906)...
tragedy (1901; written for D'Annunzio's mistress, Eleonora Duse) AmbroiseThomas, Françoise de Rimini, opera (Paris 1882) Antonio Scontrino, Francesca...
permanently by AmbroiseThomas, who held the post from 1871 to 1896. Auber's health deteriorated and in May 1871 he took to his bed. Two friends – Thomas and his...
Delibes, Duparc, Grétry, Lalo, Lully, Offenbach, Saint-Saëns and AmbroiseThomas. Many of Beecham's later recordings of French music were made in Paris...
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