About
Alexandre Charles Lecocq was a French composer, known for his opérettes and opéras comiques.
He became the most prominent successor to Jacques Offenbach in this sphere and enjoyed considerable success in the 1870s and early 1880s before the changing musical fashions of the late 19th century made his style of composition less popular. His few serious works include the opera Plutus (1886), which was not a success, and the ballet Le Cygne (1899). His only piece to survive in the regular modern operatic repertory is his 1872 opéra comique La fille de Madame Angot (Mme Angot's Daughter). Others of his more than forty stage works receive occasional revivals.
After study at the Paris Conservatoire, Lecocq shared the first prize with Georges Bizet in an operetta-writing contest organized in 1856 by Offenbach. Lecocq's next successful composition was an opéra-bouffe, Fleur-de-Thé (Tea-flower), twelve years later. His comic operas Les cent vierges (The Hundred Virgins, 1872), La fille de Madame Angot (1872), and Giroflé-Girofla (1874) were all successes and established his international reputation. Critics remarked on the elegance of the music in Lecocq's best works. His other popular pieces in the 1870s included La petite mariée (The Little Bride, 1875) and Le petit Duc (The Little Duke, 1878). Although a few of his works in the early 1880s were well-received, and he continued composing for more than two decades afterward, his later works never achieved the same admiration.
In a 2017 study, Laurence Senelick comments that whereas Offenbach's operas are frequently revived, Lecocq's are "the stuff of occasional antiquarian revivals" ... "sporadic productions of curiosity value". For the eight seasons from 2012 to 2020, the international Operabase archive records ten staged or planned productions of four pieces by Lecocq: six productions of La fille de Madame Angot, two of the 1887 three-act opéra comique Ali-Baba and one each of Le docteur Miracle and Le petit duc. For the same period, Operabase records more than five hundred productions of nearly forty different operas by Offenbach.
Several writers have discussed why Lecocq's music is neglected. In 1911 an anonymous critic in The Observer wrote, "Lecocq succeeded in being a formidable rival to Offenbach. As a composer, he was one of the happiest of melodists, but never attained the heights of fascinating vulgarity and bustling originality of his more famous contemporary." Lamb writes that much of Lecocq's music is characterized by a light touch, although "he could also adopt a more lyrical and elevated style than Offenbach". Trubner comments that Lecocq consciously sought to elevate comic opera from the satirical and zany opéra-bouffe of his predecessors to the supposedly loftier genre of opéra-comique. Florian Bruyas in his Histoire de l'opérette en France makes a similar point. When Giroflé-Girofla opened at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in 1874, the reviewer in the Chronique Musicale wrote that the music seemed to him superior to that of Offenbach – or even of earlier pieces by Lecocq, including La fille de Madame Angot – but that it was composed in a style that was possibly too refined to appeal to operetta audiences. This style came into its own in the 1870s and 1880s but went out of fashion before the turn of the century.
In a 2015 study, Robert Letellier divides the genre of opérette by chronology and type, with the "imperial" operetta of Offenbach followed by the "bourgeois" operetta of Lecocq, which was superseded by the "Belle Epoque" of Messager. Like the Observer reviewer, he remarks on the elegance of Lecocq's best music. He also criticizes Lecocq for abusing his compositional talent, particularly in his early works, by setting libretti of little merit. This, in Letellier's view, led to the oblivion of much excellent music, lost when works with bad libretti failed. Trubner observes that many critics rate Lecocq higher than Offenbach as an orchestrator and harmonist, although melodically he did not rival the "startling immediacy" of Offenbach's tunes. Lecocq disliked being compared to Offenbach and went out of his way to avoid rhythmic devices familiar from the older composer's works.