Biography
A French creator of works for chamber ensembles, orchestras, the lyric stage, and dance, Lalo achieved his widest renown with the Symphonie espagnole of 1875. That luminous, vividly hued score served as the first clear model for the French Impressionist manner, an approach later echoed when Chabrier evoked Spain in España and when Debussy did the same in Iberia. Yet Lalo’s deeper originality resides in an orchestration of striking individuality that foreshadowed some of the Impressionists’ richest sonorities; the young Debussy, for one, attended the premiere of the ballet Namouna and was removed from the theater after vigorously championing the piece before a divided crowd. Equal distinction appears in his fusion of Wagnerian chromaticism with Gallic melodic elegance, nowhere more tellingly than in the opera Le Roi d’Ys—drawn from an old Breton legend—and again throughout Namouna.