Jean Nouguès

Who was Jean Nouguès?

Jean-Charles Nouguès was a French composer of operas.

Born in Bordeaux, Nouguès was from a wealthy family, and in his youth he received little formal musical training. His first opera, Le Roi de Papagey, was written when he was only sixteen; after further study in Paris, he composed a second, Yannha, which was premiered in Bordeaux in 1905. Neither this nor 1904's Thamyris had much success. In 1905, Nouguès gained some notice with his incidental music for a production of Maurice Maeterlinck's play La Mort de Tintagiles at the Théâtre des Mathurins in Paris.

1909 was the year of Nouguès' greatest success, the opera Quo Vadis, with a libretto by Henri Caïn based on the novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz. Quo Vadis premiered in Nice and was soon taken to Paris; from there it went on to London and Milan. The work was given its American premiere in 1911 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, by the Philadelphia-Chicago Company under the direction of Cleofonte Campanini; Maggie Teyte sang the female lead, and the work was also seen in Chicago and Philadelphia. Quo Vadis found great favor with the critics; Reynaldo Hahn and Francis Casadesus were among those to praise the music, while others felt that much of the work's success may have been due to the strength of the cast.