Jacques Ibert
Compositeur
With his brilliantly light and melodic style, Jacques Ibert – far beyond any avant-garde trends – became one of France’s most respected composers. His popularity was established with his impressionistic orchestral work Escales, which premiered in Paris in 1924. He then moved on to a Neoclassical musical language. The Flute Concerto composed for Marcel Moyse in 1934 is one of his most popular works: music that combines late Romantic harmonies with French “clarté”.
Jacques Ibert, born in Paris in 1890, received violin and piano lessons as a child. At the home of his uncle Adolphe Albert, an Impressionist painter, the teenager encountered artists such as Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Camille Pissarro. After dropping out of drama school, he began studying composition at the Conservatoire de Paris under Gabriel Fauré, on the recommendation of Manuel de Falla, a friend of the family. During this time, Ibert worked as a silent film pianist in Montmartre before continuing his training in Paul Vidal’s composition class after the First World War. In the same year, the composer won the coveted Prix de Rome with his cantata Le Poète et la fée, which enabled him to spend three years at the Villa Medici in Rome. During this time, Ibert wrote his first orchestral work: the Ballade de la geôle de Reading, based on Oscar Wilde, which caused a sensation when it premiered at the Concerts Colonne in Paris at the end of October 1922. After his stay in Rome, Ibert lived as a freelance composer in Paris until 1937, when he was appointed to the board of directors of the Académie de France, based at the Villa Medici in Rome – a position he held until 1960, with an interruption during the Second World War (when the Vichy government declared his music undesirable). After the liberation of France, Ibert was personally summoned back to Paris by Charles de Gaulle in 1944, where he took on high-ranking government positions in the cultural sector. In 1955, he was appointed Administrateur Général de la Réunion des Théâtres Lyriques Nationaux, putting him in charge of the administrative management of both Paris opera houses.
