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Louis-Auguste Joseph Florimond Ronger (30 June 1825 – 4 November 1892, who used the pseudonym Hervé (French pronunciation: [ɛʁve]), was a French composer, singer, actor and conductor, credited with inventing the genre of operetta in Paris.

Life

Hervé was born in Houdain near Arras, in the Pas de Calais on 30 June 1825, the son of a brigadier in the French gendarmerie and his Spanish wife. His father died when Hervé was ten and his mother moved to Paris, where he became a choirboy at the Église Saint-Roch. He studied for a time at the Conservatoire de Paris, with Antoine Elwart (harmony) and Daniel Auber (composition), and by the age of fifteen was serving as organist at the chapel of the Bicêtre Hospital. His playing made such an impression that he was engaged to provide music and some instruction for the inmates of the adjacent mental hospital. Besides playing and teaching, Hervé established an orchestra, and organised some of the patients to present his setting of a vaudeville by Scribe and Saintine, L'Ours et le Pacha (The Bear and the Pasha, 1842). There was favourable press comment on the "musicothérapie" at Bicétre.

In 1845 Hervé won a competition for the prestigious post of organist at the Église Saint-Eustache, Paris, which he held while continuing a parallel career in musical theatre, a situation that he turned to advantage years later, in his most famous work, Mam'zelle Nitouche. He made some professional appearances on stage as a comedian and singer in theatres in the Paris suburbs. In 1848 he composed and appeared in a one-act piece entitled Don Quichotte et Sancho Pança for the composer Adolphe Adam's short-lived Opéra-National. This burlesque of classic literature, written for the singer and comic actor Désiré, was a precursor of opéra-bouffe and contrasted the short and rotund Désiré as Sancho Panza with the Don Quixote of the tall and lanky Hervé. Later, the composer Reynaldo Hahn wrote, "It had as a subtitle: "Tableau grotesque". It was really not an opéra-comique. What was it then? It was a thing for which no name had previously existed: it was an operetta; it was simply the first French operetta."

While continuing to double as church organist and theatrical writer and performer, Hervé worked as a conductor at the Odéon and the Théâtre du Palais-Royal. For them he wrote short musical playlets – variously labelled "vaudeville-opérette", parodie-opérette or opérette-bouffe – and composed the music for wordless pantomimes. But his first major success was a burlesque ("fantaisie bouffe") Les Folies dramatiques, described by Kurt Gänzl in The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre as "an extravagant five-act parody of all things theatrical". It had elements of a topical revue and aroused the interest of the powerful Duc de Morny – stage-struck, and later rumoured to be the father of the farceur Georges Feydeau. In consequence Hervé was allowed to take on the management of the Folies-Concertantes – which he renamed the Folies-Nouvelles – in 1854.

Thus, Hervé was the founder of a new era of French operettas. Through his , a small theater stage he took over in 1854 and for which he wrote many works, he became the forerunner of the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens of Jacques Offenbach, whose early efforts he produced at his theatre, renovated as the Folies-Nouvelles. Many of Hervé's early one act pieces are topical skits satirizing current events and were never revived. The restrictive license of the Folies-Concertantes permitted only spectacles-concerts, with no more than two characters, in a single act, stringencies imposed on Offenbach as well, but which encouraged Hervé to experiment with genres, before more flexible rules were established in the following decade. A jealous rivalry soon developed between Hervé and Offenbach, which was only patched up in 1878, when Hervé sang in a revival of Offenbach's Orphée aux enfers.

He died in Paris at the age of 67.

Since 2015, a number of his works have been revived by Palazzetto Bru Zane in tours of France and Italy.

Hervé

Works

Hervé wrote more than a hundred and twenty operettas, among which were:

• Les folies dramatiques (1853), with two other librettists, which parodied all the forms of entertainment in Paris, comedy, tragedy, vaudeville, ballet and opera.
• Les chevaliers de la Table Ronde (Bouffes Parisiens, 17 November 1866)
• L'œil crevé (Folies-Dramatiques, 12 October 1867)
• Chilpéric (1868)
• Le petit Faust (1869)
• Les Turcs (1869)
• Le trône d'Écosse (1871)
• La veuve du Malabar (1873)
• La belle poule (1875)
• La roussotte (with Charles Lecocq and Marius Boullard, Théâtre des Variétés, 1881)
• Lili (1882)
• Mam'zelle Nitouche (1883)