Henri Meilhac (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi mɛjak]; 23 February 1830 – 6 July 1897) was a prolific French playwright and opera librettist, known for his collaborations with Ludovic Halévy on comic operas with music by Jacques Offenbach. He also wrote occasionally for serious works including Georges Bizet's Carmen (with Halévy) and Jules Massenet's Manon.
Born in Paris, Meilhac began writing for a humorous magazine in 1852, and four years later he began a career as a playwright. In 1860 he collaborated for the first time with Halévy, an old schoolfriend, on a one-act comedy, presented at the Théâtre des Variétés. Over the next twenty-one years the two co-wrote fifty more stage works.
After Halévy retired in 1882 Meilhac continued to write, sometimes as sole author and sometimes with collaborators. His tally of stage works is more than a hundred, and includes short and full-length comic plays and the libretti of twenty-five operettas. He and Halévy wrote the libretti for Offenbach's La belle Hélène (1864), La vie parisienne (1866), La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) and La Périchole (1868). In addition Meilhac provided libretti for operettas by Charles Lecocq, Hervé, Gaston Serpette and Robert Planquette.
Meilhac was born in what is now the first arrondissement of Paris, on 23 February 1830, the son of François Meilhac, a painter, and his wife, Antoinette née Chomé.[1] He was educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he did not distinguish himself as a scholar but found a lifelong friend in a fellow student, Ludovic Halévy.[2]
After leaving school he worked as a commercial clerk in bookselling, and then began to write for a living, contributing articles and drawings to the Journal pour rire from 1852 to 1855.[3] He made his theatrical debut in 1856, with a one-act comédie en vaudevilles, La Sarabande du Cardinal, with a cast of five, and music by Sylvain Mangeant, given at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in May.[3] He wrote a further seven comedies between then and 1860, when he began to work with co-authors, as was frequently done in the French theatre of the time. His first collaborator was Germain Delavigne but in 1860 he teamed up with his friend Halévy to write a one-act comedy, Ce qui plait les hommes (What Men Like), presented at the Théâtre des Variétés on 20 April 1861.[4] Between then and 1881 the two collaborated on a further fifty stage works, in between working alone or with other co-authors.[5] A biographer of Meilhac has written:
The critic Henry Fouquier wrote in 1897, "It is agreed that Meilhac was the bold inventor and the audaciously fanciful, while M. Halévy remained the skilful, wise, and level-headed man of the theatre, and the writer of moderation and taste.[7]
Meilhac's first libretto for a comic opera was for Louis Deffès' Les Bourguignonnes, given at the Opéra-Comique in July 1861; with Halévy, he had a huge hit with his next: Offenbach's La belle Hélène (1864). Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians says of Halévy and Meilhac:
The three followed La belle Hélène with two more great successes: La vie parisienne (1866) and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867).[9] Le château à Toto (1868) did less well at the box-office,[10] but La Périchole (1868) was another success. It was based on Le carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, a comedy by Prosper Mérimée, who was to feature again in Meilhac and Halévy's work four years later.[11] Their last two collaborations with Offenbach in the 1860s – La diva (1869) and Les brigands (1869) – were less successful.[11] The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the downfall of the Second Empire caused a strong reaction against Offenbach from the public, who identified him with the fallen regime. He left the country for a time, taking refuge in London and Vienna.[12]
Other composers for whom Meilhac wrote or co-wrote comic opera libretti were Jules Cohen, Auguste Durand, Clémence de Grandval, Hervé, Charles Lecocq, Gaston Serpette and Robert Planquette.[3] He was a posthumous contributor to Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow in 1895: it was based on Meilhac's 1861 comedy Attaché d'ambassade (Embassy Attaché) adapted without permission.[13][14][n 1]
Although the two librettists were known for their comedies, in 1872 they undertook what was, for them, an unusual assignment. Halévy's cousin Geneviève (daughter of Fromental) was married to Bizet, whom the directors of the Opéra-Comique invited to write an opera in collaboration with Halévy and Meilhac. The librettists were enthusiastic about the composer's preference for a plot based on Mérimée's story Carmen;[15] they provided a libretto with the requisite tragic ending. Nonetheless, they regarded the piece as a side venture. Just before the premiere, Halévy wrote:
The management of the Opéra-Comique was uneasy about presenting a piece with a tragic and violent ending, and Meilhac unsuccessfully urged Bizet to resist killing Carmen off at the end of the last act.[17] Their predictions of a failure proved accurate: the piece completed its scheduled run of forty-eight performances, but played to small audiences.[18] Grove comments on the librettists' efforts for Carmen: "perhaps the most famous product of the Halévy-Meilhac collaboration, but not a very typical one ... There is some justice in the complaint that the remarkable style of Mérimée’s original narrative is lost".[8]
This was the pair's only joint venture into tragedy. They wrote seven more libretti together, of which three were for Offenbach and four for Lecocq.[8] When Offenbach returned to Paris from his voluntary exile he collaborated with Halévy and Meilhac on revised versions of La vie parisienne and La Perichole; the three collaborators' final work together was an opéra bouffe, La boulangère a des écus.(1875). Thereafter Halévy and Meilhac provided libretti for four opéras comiques with music by Lecocq: Le petit duc (1878), La petite mademoiselle (1879), Janot (1881) and La rousotte (1881), in the last of which there was also music by Hervé and Marius Boullard.[8][3] They were unwitting contributors to Johann Strauss's 1874 Die Fledermaus, which plagiarised the plot of their 1872 comedy Le Réveillon (New Year's Eve).[13] They refused to allow the operetta to be produced in France.[14][n 2]
After Halévy retired in 1882, Meilhac wrote two serious libretti for operas by Jules Massenet (Manon, 1884, with Philippe Gille) and Leo Delibes (Kassya, 1893, with Gille).[3] He continued to write comedies; his most frequent collaborators were Gille and Albert de Saint-Albin.[3]
In 1888, Meilhac was elected to the Académie française, joining Halévy, who was elected in 1881. He died in Paris on 6 July 1897, aged sixty-seven.[8] After his death a London newspaper reported that at one time he had fourteen of his plays running simultaneously in Paris.[19] In Le Figaro Henry Fouquier wrote, "As it was said of Rossini that he was not a musician, but was 'Music', we can say of Meilhac that he was the Theatre itself ... the very expression of the disrespectful, witty and good-natured scepticism of the happy days of the Empire".[7]
The young Georges Feydeau sought Meilhac out and asked him to critique a play he had written. He recalled Meilhac as saying, "My boy, your play is stupid, but it is theatrical. You will be a man of the theatre".[21] Feydeau modelled himself on Meilhac and two other predecessors: Eugène Labiche for characterisation, Alfred Hennequin for plotting, and Meilhac for polished dialogue, sounding elegant but natural.[22]