Georges Adolphe Hüe was a French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

 composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

 of classical music.

Biography

Hüe was born in Versailles

Versailles

Versailles , a city renowned for its château, the Palace of Versailles, was the de facto capital of the kingdom of France for over a century, from 1682 to 1789. It is now a wealthy suburb of Paris and remains an important administrative and judicial centre...

 (Yvelines

Yvelines

Yvelines is a French department in the region of Île-de-France.-History:Yvelines was created from the western part of the defunct department of Seine-et-Oise on 1 January 1968 in accordance with a law passed on 10 January 1964 and a décret d'application from 26 February 1965.It gained the...

) into a noted family of architects. His musical education included studies with Charles Gounod

Charles Gounod

Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.-Biography:...

 and César Franck

César Franck

César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life....

. In 1879, he won the Prix de Rome

Prix de Rome

The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...

 with his cantata

Cantata

A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir....

 Médée. Upon his return to Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, the Opéra Comique produced his first stage work, Les Pantins ("The Jumping Jacks"). This plotless, two-act set-piece for four singers doubling roles completely ignored fashionable realist trends of the day, and won high acclaim. For the next twenty years, his musical career went in other directions.

Hüe returned to the stage with his first full-length opera, Le Roi de Paris, a historical drama with a subplot about unrequited love. His follow-up opera was Titania. Stimulated by fantasy and Shakespeare, this work is noteworthy for its impressionisitic

Impressionist music

Impressionism in music was a tendency in European classical music, mainly in France, which appeared in the late nineteenth century and continued into the middle of the twentieth century. Similarly to its precursor in the visual arts, musical impressionism focuses on a suggestion and an atmosphere...

 woodland scenes for chorus and orchestra. In 1910, the Opéra produced Le Miracle, a grand five-act work combining the mythological

Mythology

The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

 story of Pygmalion

Pygmalion (mythology)

Pygmalion is a legendary figure of Cyprus. Though Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton, he is most familiar from Ovid's Metamorphoses, X, in which Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.-In Ovid:In Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a...

 with a religious miracle.

Hüe's most successful work with the public was Dans l'ombre de la cathédrale, whose topical plot was driven by the conflicting ideals of socialism

Socialism

Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...

 and Catholicism

Catholicism

Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....

. The opera was revived several times in the 1920s. Following his own travels to the Far East, he wrote Siang-Sin, a ballet-pantomime created for a Chinese spring festival in 1924. His final stage work was based on a fairy tale

Fairy tale

A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...

 by Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault was a French author who laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from pre-existing folk tales. The best known include Le Petit Chaperon rouge , Cendrillon , Le Chat Botté and La Barbe bleue...

.

During his lifetime, Hüe wrote a broad range of other compositions, of which his choral works are most noteworthy. Some pieces for flute

Flute

The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...

 are occasionally performed, including Fantaisie for flute and orchestra, written for Paul Taffanel, legendary professor of the Paris Conservatory.

Hüe's music met with limited success mainly because his style did not change with the times. However, he was a competent and sometimes inspired composer whose works garnered the admiration of several famous colleagues, including Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

 and Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Urbain Fauré was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th century composers...

. Hüe died in Paris in 1948.

Operas

• Les Pantins, opéra comique (2 acts, E. Montagne), f.p. 28 December 1881, Opéra Comique (Favart), Paris.
• Le Roi de Paris, opéra (3 acts, H. Bouchut), f.p. 26 April 1901, Opéra, Paris.
• Titania, opéra (3 acts, L. Gallet & A. Corneau), f.p. 20 January 1903, Opéra Comique (Favart), Paris.
• Le Miracle, opéra (5 acts, P.B. Gheusi & A. Mérane), f.p. 14 December 1910, Opéra, Paris.
• Dans l'ombre de la cathédrale, opéra (3 acts, M. Léna & H. Ferrare, after Blasco Ibanez), f.p. 7 December 1921, Opéra, Paris.
• Siang-Sin, ballet-pantomime (2 acts, P. Jobbé-Duval), f.p. 12 March 1924, Opéra, Paris.
• Riquet à la houppe ("Prince Riquet with the Tuft") comédie-musicale (3 acts, R. Gastambide, after Perrault), f.p. 17 December 1928, Opéra Comique (Favart), Paris.