Philippe Gille

Philippe Gille
(date unknown)

Philippe Emile François Gille (10 December 1831 – 19 March 1901) was a French dramatist and opera librettist, who was born and died in Paris. He co-wrote wrote more than twenty librettos between 1857 and 1893, the most famous of which are Massenet's Manon and Delibes' Lakmé.

Gille studied law and was a clerk for a time at the Préfecture de la Seine, before becoming secretary of the Théâtre Lyrique and, from 1869, an art and music critic for Le Figaro.

Gille was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1899 and was appointed as an officer of the Legion of Honour.

Life and career

Gille was born in Paris on 18 December 1830, the son of Louis François Gille and his wife, Marie Adelaide Benjamine, née Bidaut. He was educated at the Lycée Charlemagne, after which he studied law for a time and then took up sculpture, before working as a clerk in the office of the Préfecture de la Seine. After next working as secretary of the Théâtre Lyrique he embarked on a parallel career as a playwright and librettist on the one hand and as a journalist on the other.

In 1857 Gille provided the composer Jacques Offenbach with a libretto for a one-act comic opera, Vent du soir, ou L'horrible festin ("Evening Wind, or The Horrible Feast") produced at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens. Over the next twelve years he worked as sole or co-author on fourteen comedies, some of them spoken and some operatic. His literary collaborators included Ludovic Halévy, Eugène Grangé and Hector Crémieux, and he worked with Léo Delibes on four comic operas.

As a journalist, Gille wrote for papers including Le Petit Journal and Le Soleil before joining the staff of Le Figaro in 1869. There, he wrote about the arts. A section of the front page was reserved for his "Echoes" column, in which, a colleague said, "the spirit of Paris smiled every morning". The same colleague recalled:

[Gille] occupied, with unequalled brilliance, the most eminent position, next to our editors, who were his former comrades. He wrote on the fine arts with the most informed taste; he wrote with unquestionable authority "Literary Criticism" and "Bibliography" and he brought together, under the signature of the "Iron Mask", the most amusing anecdotes and the most exquisite words, issued, with their smiling and courteous philosophy, from his ever more witty and fertile imagination.

In August 1871 Gille married Zoé Jeanne Marie Massé, daughter of the composer Victor Massé.. They had one son.

During the 1870s Gille collaborated with, among other dramatists and librettists, Eugène Labiche, Victorien Sardou, Arnold Mortier, Edmond Gondinet and Henri Meilhac. Composers with whom he worked included Offenbach, Charles Lecocq and Olivier Métra. In his last years in the theatre Gille was co-author of two serious operas that entered the international repertoire: for Delibes, Lakmé (1883) with Gondinet and for Jules Massenet, Manon (1884) with Meilhac.

Gille was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and was appointed to the Legion of Honour. He died in Paris on 19 March 1901, aged 69, and was buried in the Cimetière du Nord, Montmartre.

Stage works

Title	Genre	Acts	Co-authors	Composer	Theatre	Date
Vent du soir, ou L'horrible festin ("Evening Wind, or The Horrible Feast")	opérette bouffe	1		Jacques Offenbach	Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens	16 May 1857
M de Bonne Etoile	opéra-comique	1		Léo Delibes	Bouffes	4 Feb 1860
Le carnaval des revues	revue	3	Ludovic Halévy and Eugène Grangé	Offenbach	Bouffes	10 Feb 1860
Valets de Gascogne	opéra comique	1		Alfred Dufresne	Théâtre Lyrique	2 Jun 1860
Maître Palma	opéra comique	1	Eugène Furpille	Mlle Rivay	Lyrique	17 Jun 1860
L'hôtel de la poste ("The Post Office")	opéra comique	1		Dufresne	Bouffes	15 Nov 1860
Le serpent à plumes	opérette bouffe	1	Cham	Delibes	Bouffes	16 Dec 1864
Le boeuf Apis ("The Apis Bull")	opéra bouffe		Furpille	Delibes	Bouffes	15 Apr 1865
Sacripant	opéra comique	2		Jules Duprato	Théâtre des Fantaisies-Parisiennes	26 Sep 1866
Les bergers	opéra comique		Hector Crémieux	Offenbach	Bouffes	11 Dec 1865
Tabarin le duelliste	opérette	1	Furpille	Léon Pillaut	Bouffes	13 Apr 1866
Cent mille francs et ma fille ("One Hundred Thousand Francs and My Daughter")	vaudeville	4	Adolphe Jaime		Théâtre Déjazet	11 Apr 1868
Les horreurs de la guerre	opéra-bouffe	2		Jules Costé	Théâtre de l'Athénée	9 Dec 1868
L' Écossais de Chatou ("The Scotsman of Chatou")	opéra-bouffe	1	Jaime		Bouffes	16 Jan 1869
La cour du roi Pétaud ("King Petaud's Court")	opéra comique	3	Jaime	Delibes	Théâtre des Variétés	24 Apr 1869
J'insulte ma femme	vaudeville				Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques	25 Dec 1871
Le tour du chien vert	opéra-bouffe	3		Duprato	Folies-Dramatiques	25 Dec 1871
Garanti dix ans ("Guaranteed for Ten Years")	vaudeville	1	Eugène Labiche		Variétés	12 Feb 1874
Les près-Saint-Gervais	opéra bouffe	3	Victorien Sardou	Charles Lecocq	Variétés	14 Nov 1874
Les 30 millions de gladiator	vaudeville	4	Labiche		Variétés	22 Jan 1875
Pierrette et Jacquot	opérette	1	Jules Noriac	Offenbach	Bouffes	13 Oct 1876
Le docteur Ox	opéra bouffe	3	Arnold Mortier after Jules Verne	Offenbach	Variétés	26 Jan 1877
Les charbonniers ("The Charcoal Burners")	opéra bouffe	1		Napoléon Coste	Variétés	4 Apr 1877
Yedda	ballet	3	Mortier	Olivier Métra	Opéra	17 Jan 1879
Jean de Nivelle	opera	3	Edmond Gondinet	Delibes	Opéra-Comique	188 Mar 1880
Le mari à Babette	comedy	3	Henri Meilhac		Théâtre du Palais-Royal	31 Dec 1881
La Farandole	ballet	3	Mortier	Théodore Dubois	Opéra	6 Mar 1882
Lakmé	opera	3	Gondinet	Delibes	Opéra-Comique	14 Apr 1883
Ma camarade	comedy	5	Meilhac		Palais-Royal	9 Oct 1883
Manon	opéra comique	5	Meilhac	Jules Massenet	Opéra-Comique	19 Jan 1884
Rip	opéra comique	5	Meilhac after H. B. Farnie	Robert Planquette	Folies-Dramatiques	11 Nov 1884
La bonne ("The Right One")	vaudeville	1	Meilhac		Folies-Dramatiques	21 Nov 1884
La ronde du commissaire	comedy	4	Meilhac		Théâtre du Gymnase	27 Nov 1884
Camille	comedy	1			Comédie-Française	12 Mar 1890
Kassya	drame lyrique	4	Meilhac	Delibes	Opéra-Comique	4 Mar 1893

Source: Nos auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques and Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Sources

• Martin, Jules (1897). Nos auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques (in French). Paris: Flammarion. OCLC 9145330.

External links

• Works by or about Philippe Gille at the Internet Archive