Ambroise thomas biography sampler

French composer and music educator

Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas (French:[ɑ̃bʁwaztɔmɑ]; 5 August – 12 February ) was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas Mignon () and Hamlet ().

Claude debussy date of death

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 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 , and in 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