Adolphe Adam

Adolphe Adam was born in Paris to Jean-Louis Adam (1758–1848), a prominent Alsatian composer and professor at the Paris Conservatoire; his mother was a physician’s daughter. As a child he preferred improvising to formal study, and he sometimes truanted with the writer Eugène Sue. His father, a pianist and teacher, opposed a musical career for him. Adam studied and composed in secret with his older friend Ferdinand Hérold until, at seventeen, his father relented—on condition that music remain only an amusement. He entered the Conservatoire in 1821, studying organ and harmonium with François-Adrien Boieldieu and playing timpani in the orchestra. He did not win the Prix de Rome, taking second prize, and still received little encouragement at home.

By twenty he was writing songs for Paris vaudeville houses and playing in the orchestra at the Gymnase Dramatique, where he later became chorus master. Like many French composers he also earned a living at the organ. In 1825 he helped Boieldieu prepare La dame blanche and made a piano reduction of the score; the proceeds funded travel in Europe, and in Geneva he met Eugène Scribe, a future collaborator. By 1830 he had completed twenty-eight theatrical works.

He is best remembered for the ballet Giselle (1841). He wrote several other ballets and thirty-nine operas, among them Le postillon de Lonjumeau (1836) and Si j'étais roi (1852).

After a quarrel with the director of the Opéra he invested heavily, and borrowed more, to open a fourth Paris opera house, the Théâtre National (Opéra-National). It opened in 1847 and closed in the Revolution of 1848, leaving him with massive debts (the house later reappeared as the Théâtre Lyrique). He turned briefly to journalism and, from 1849 until his death in Paris, taught composition at the Conservatoire.

His Christmas carol Cantique de Noël, known in English as O Holy Night, remains an international favourite and is often cited as the first music broadcast on radio. He is buried in Montmartre Cemetery.