Claude Firmin Bernicat (13 January 1842 – 5 March 1883) was a 19th-century French operetta composer.
Biography
editBernicat was born in Lyon. He moved to Paris in the mid-1860s and studied music with Jules Duprato, probably at the Conservatoire de Paris.[citation needed]
He began his career in Parisian café-concerts.[citation needed] Early in his career, he composed some short operas for the Paris theatre L'Eldorado.[citation needed] He also made his living as a music arranger and orchestrator for composers including Robert Planquette and wrote songs for the stars of the era: Le Chemin des noisettes or La Pigeonne.[citation needed]
He wrote about thirty works, most one-act operettas and humorous or sentimental skits, for example Ali Pot-d’rhum (1869), Les Cadets de Gascogne, Le Cornette or Une aventure de la Clairon.[citation needed] He eventually attracted the attention of the Director of the Fantaisies-Parisiennes in Brussels, who produced his first work in three acts, Les Beignets du Roi (1882), with a libretto by Albert Carré and Paul Ferrier. The piece was a success, but Bernicat did not attend because his fragile health did not allow him to leave Paris.[citation needed] He then wrote the libretto and began composition for an opéra comique, François les bas-bleus, before he died of tuberculosis at the age of 41. His publisher, Enoch & Costallat, asked André Messager to complete the score. The opera premiered at the Folies-Dramatiques in Paris in 1884, running for 131 performances. It was then regularly revived in Paris.[citation needed]
