1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hérold, Louis Joseph Ferdinand

HÉROLD, LOUIS JOSEPH FERDINAND (1791–1833), French musician, the son of François Joseph Hérold, an accomplished pianist, was born in Paris, on the 28th of January 1791. It was not till after his father’s death that Hérold in 1806 entered the Paris conservatoire, where he studied under Catal and Méhul. In 1812 he gained the grand prix de Rome with the cantata La Duchesse de la Vallière, and started for Italy, where he remained till 1815 and composed a symphony, a cantata and several pieces of chamber music. During his stay in Italy also Hérold for the first time ventured on the stage with the opera La Gioventù di Enrico V., first performed at Naples in 1815 with moderate success. During a short stay in Vienna he was much in the society of Salieri. Returning to Paris he was invited by Boieldieu to collaborate with him on an opera called Charles de France, performed in 1816, and soon followed by Hérold’s first French opera, Les Rosières (1817), which was received very favourably. Hérold produced numerous dramatic works for the next fifteen years in rapid succession. Only the names of some of the more important need here be mentioned:—La Clochette (1817), L’Auteur mort et vivant (1820), Marie (1826), and the ballets La Fille mal gardée (1828) and La Belle au bois dormant (1829). Hérold also wrote a vast quantity of pianoforte music, in spite of his time being much occupied by his duties as accompanist at the Italian opera in Paris. In 1831 he produced the romantic opera Zampa, and in the following year Le Pré aux clercs (first performance December 15, 1832), in which French esprit and French chivalry find their most perfect embodiment. These two operas secured immortality for the name of the composer, who died on the 18th of January 1833, of the lung disease from which he had suffered for many years, and the effects of which he had accelerated by incessant work. Hérold’s incomplete opera Ludovic was afterwards printed by J. F. F. Halévy.