Ludovic Halévy

Biography

Ludovic Halévy entered the administration in 1852. He was in particular writer with the legislative Body, then head clerk to the ministry for the Colonies. He collaborated with the duke of Morny in the legislative Body, and also for the booklet of its operetta Mr Choufleuri at his place will remain, put in music by Jacques Offenbach (1861). Its literary career took a sufficiently favorable turn quickly to enable him to leave the administration in 1865.

He collaborated for many booklets of operettas with Leon Battu, Hector Crémieux, and especially Henri Meilhac (1831-1897), with which he gave the booklets of the most famous operettas of Jacques Offenbach of which the Beautiful Helene (1864), Parisian life (1866), the Large-Duchess of Gérolstein (1867) and Périchole (1869) and also of Carmen of Georges Bizet (1875).

The duet also composed of the light comedies and the comedies ( the Ewes of Panurge , 1863; Fanny Lear , 1868; Froufrou , 1869; Tricoche and Cacolet , 1872; the Prince , 1876; the Cicada , 1877; the Husband of the beginner , 1879).

In this twenty years collaboration, it is difficult to determine what returns in Meilhac and what one owes in Halévy. If one judges of it by works that this last only signed, it had, with as many spirit and alacrity that its fellow-member, more taste, of refinement, depth and humanity, and also less daftness and of imagination.

Only, Halévy created the characters of the Cardinal family, symbol of the pompeuse Parisian lower middle class, pedant and malicious. He is also the author of two novels, the Abbot Constantin (1882) and Criquette (1883), which was very great best-sellers at the end of the XIXe century. In rupture with the blackness of the novels naturalists, they depicted a world certainly realistic but where all the characters are good and virtuous.

This success opened to him the doors of the French Academy, where he was elected the December 4th 1884, with the armchair 22, succeeding Joseph Othenin d' Haussonville. Its official reception took place the February 4th 1886. It supported there, in vain, the many candidatures of his friend Emile Zola and almost ceased writing.

Towards 1878, Ludovic Halévy, flanked his/her cousin Genevieve Bizet, future Mrs Strauss and hostess of a famous literary living room, received the Paris whole artistic and literary, at the time of “Thursday of Ludovic” in its apartment 22 Rue of Douai where côtoyaient Edgar Degas, Gustave Moreau, Louis Edouard Dubufe, Edouard Manet, John Lemoine, Georges Ohnet, Charles Gounod, Henri Meilhac, Charles Haas, the Viscount Eugene-Nickel silver of Vogue, Guy of Maupassant, Alexandre Guiraud , Georges of Oporto-Rich person, Emile Straus or Robert de Montesquiou.

Family ties

Ludovic Halévy was the son of the polygraph Leon Halévy (1802-1883) and the nephew of the type-setter Jacques Fromental Halévy (1799-1862).

By its marriage in 1868 with Louise Breguet, he was the son-in-law of Louis Breguet (1804-1883), clock and watch maker and physicist. Of this union are resulting the historian from England Élie Halévy (1870-1937) and Daniel Halévy (1872-1962), essay writer and historian, itself father-in-law and grandfather of the politicians Louis Joxe (1901-1991) and Pierre Joxe (° 1934). He was also the uncle by alliance of the future airframe manufacturer Louis Charles Breguet. (See Descent of Louis Breguet.)

His/her cousin, Genevieve Halévy, girl of Jacques Fromental Halévy married Georges Bizet in 1862 then Emile Straus.

Works

One counts 90 works of Ludovic Halévy, among which collaborations with Henri Meilhac with which he writes operettas for Offenbach, inter alia:

External bonds

Biographical note of the French Academy (a bibliography includes/understands supplements)

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