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Louis Joseph Ferdinand Herold (28 January 1791 – 19 January 1833), better known as Ferdinand Hérold (pronounced [fɛʁdinɑ̃ eʁɔld]), was a French composer. He was celebrated in his lifetime for his operas, of which he composed more than twenty, but he also wrote ballet music, works for piano and choral pieces. He is best known today for the ballet La Fille mal gardée and the overture to the opera Zampa. Born in Paris to a musical family, Hérold trained at the Paris Conservatoire and won France's premier musical prize, the Prix de Rome in 1812. After a time in Italy he returned to Paris and worked first at the Théâtre Italien and then at the Opéra. He wrote several ballets for the latter, but was best known as a composer of opéra comique. Some of them, particularly in his early days, were hampered by poor librettos, but later he had more successes than failures, and his last two operas, Zampa (1831) and Le Pré aux clercs (The Clerk's Meadow, 1832) were immensely popular, and remained in the repertory in France and elsewhere for decades after his early death from tuberculosis in 1833. As a ballet composer Hérold was a pioneer, raising the standard of ballet scores from being simple arrangements of popular tunes to well-orchestrated music illustrating the action of the ballets. His operas influenced later composers from Bizet and Offenbach to Wagner and Smetana. Life and career Background and early years The Herold family was of Alsatian origin (the surname was written without an acute accent). The composer's father, François-Joseph Herold (1755–1802) was the son of an organist in Seltz. François-Joseph studied music with C. P. E. Bach in Hamburg and moved to Paris in about 1780, where he worked as a composer, pianist and teacher. In 1790 he married Jeanne-Gabrielle Pascal. Their only child, Louis Joseph Ferdinand Herold, later widely known as Ferdinand Hérold, was born in what is now the rue Herold in the 1st arrondissement on 28 January 1791. Wanting the boy to have an all-round education, François-Joseph sent him, aged eleven, to one of the best boarding schools in Paris, the Hix institute in the Champs-Élysées. The school included music in the curriculum, and Hérold studied solfège with François-Joseph Fétis. At the same time he continued his piano studies with his godfather, Louis Adam.François-Joseph did not intend his son to follow him into the musical profession, but his death, from tuberculosis, in 1802 left Hérold free to do so. In 1806, when he was nearly 16, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied piano with Adam, harmony with Charles-Simon Catel and violin with Rodolphe Kreutzer. In 1810 he won the conservatoire's first prize for piano, playing one of his own compositions. In 1811 he was admitted to the composition class of Étienne Méhul, who esteemed his talents greatly, saw him as his successor, and became a much-loved father-figure to him. During 1812 works by Hérold were performed publicly for the first time. They included a piano concerto given on 6 April at the Théâtre Italien with the composer as soloist. In October 1812 Hérold was awarded France's premier musical prize, the Prix de Rome, which he won with a cantata, La Duchesse de la Vallière. The prize carried with it liberally subsidised residence and tuition at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, where Hérold went in 1813. There, he composed his first symphony and an anthem. Like his father, Hérold suffered from tuberculosis, and the climate of Rome did not suit him; he moved south to Naples in 1815.In Naples, Hérold won the approval of Joachim Murat, whom Napoleon had installed as King of Naples. Hérold was engaged as court pianist to Murat's wife, Queen Caroline, and music teacher to their daughters. While in Naples, Hérold was commissioned in 1814 to write his first opera, La gioventù di Enrico quinto (The Boyhood of Henry V), to a libretto from Alexandre Pineux-Duval's play La jeunesse de Henry V about Prince Hal of England. It was premiered in January 1815 at the Teatro del Fondo before Murat's court, with Manuel García in the title role. Shortly after this, the Napoleonic empire began to disintegrate, and Hérold left Naples, making a circuitous journey back to Paris. He went via Rome and Venice to Vienna, where he met Antonio Salieri, whom he admired, and heard operas by Mozart. Return to Paris Hérold arrived back in Paris in August 1815, where he took the post of maestro al cembalo (deputy conductor and répétiteur) at the Théâtre Italien. In 1816 the composer François-Adrien Boieldieu invited him to collaborate on a new opera Charles de France, to which Hérold contributed the second act. In the same year he composed the opera Les Rosières, dedicated to Méhul, produced successfully at the Opéra-Comique. He had another success with La Clochette (The Bell, 1817), based on the story of Aladdin and his lamp; it ran well in Paris and was seen in Vienna (with additional numbers by Franz Schubert) After these, he had difficulty finding adequate librettos, and suffered four failures in a row between 1818 and 1821, following which he gave up composing operas for more than two years.In 1821 the director of the Théâtre Italien asked Hérold to go to Italy to find new works and recruit new singers. Across a four-month trip he visited seven major Italian cities and attended performances of Rossini operas including La donna del lago, which made a strong impression on him, La gazza ladra and Ricciardo e Zoraide. He recruited singers including Giuditta Pasta, Filippo Galli for his Parisian employer.During 1823 Hérold had another opera produced, Le Muletier; despite an unimpressive libretto the music was well received. The biographer Thomas Betzwieser writes that in Le Muletier Hérold "found his own language for the first time" so that this work marks the emergence of his personal style. A one-act piece for the Paris Opéra, L'Asthénie, had a moderate run but was not well reviewed, and it was not until 1826 that he had another success, with Marie at the Opéra-Comique.In November 1826 Hérold gave up his post at the Théâtre Italien and became premier chef de chant (senior voice coach) at the Opéra, working on major works in the grand opéra genre such as Le Siège de Corinthe, Guillaume Tell, and Robert le diable. His position as chef de chant meant that he was barred from having his own operas performed at the Opéra, and his principal commissions there over the next three years were for ballet music: Astolphe et Jaconde (1827), La Somnambule (The Sleepwalker) (1827), La Fille mal gardée (1828) Lydie (1828), La Belle au bois dormant (The Sleeping Beauty) (1829) and La Noce de village (Village Wedding) (1830).Hérold married Adèle Elise Rollet in 1827. They had three children: Ferdinand, who became a lawyer and subsequently a senator; Adèle, who married a member of the Paris Conseil municipal; and Eugénie, a gifted musician, who, like her father and grandfather was consumptive, and died ag.... Discover the Thomas Herold popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Thomas Herold books.