0
Daniel François Esprit Auber
Daniel François Esprit Auber
French composer
1
Jules Massenet
Jules Massenet
French composer (1842-1912)
2
Camille Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns
French composer, organist, conductor and pianist
3
Gabriel Fauré
Gabriel Fauré
French composer, organist, pianist and teacher
4
Charles Gounod
Charles Gounod
French composer
5
André Messager
André Messager
French opera composer and conductor
6
Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
French composer
7
Paul Dukas
Paul Dukas
French composer
8
Ernest Chausson
Ernest Chausson
French composer
9
Charles-Édouard Lefebvre
Charles-Édouard Lefebvre
French composer
10
Louis Diémer
Louis Diémer
French composer
11
André Bloch
André Bloch
French composer
12
Jacques Ibert
Jacques Ibert
French composer
13
Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
French composer
14
Hector Berlioz
Hector Berlioz
French Romantic composer
15
Marie Emmanuel Augustin Savard
Marie Emmanuel Augustin Savard
French composer
Ambroise Thomas
French composer

Ambroise Thomas

Intro
French composer
Genres
Awards Received
Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour
Prix de Rome
resident at the Villa Medici
Member of, past and present
Académie des beaux-arts

Académie des beaux-arts

Académie de Stanislas

Académie de Stanislas

Thomas by Wilhelm Benque [fr], c. 1895

Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas (French: [ɑ̃bʁwaz tɔma]; 5 August 1811 – 12 February 1896) was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868).

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 1837. 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 1856, and in 1871 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 Franck and Gabriel Fauré from influencing the students of the Conservatoire.

Thomas' operas were generally neglected during most of the 20th century, but in more recent decades they have experienced something of a revival both in Europe and the US.