Gustave Chouquet

Gustave Chouquet (16 April 1819 – 30 January 1886) was a French music historian, music critic, and teacher of French.

Born Adolphe-Gustave Chouquet in Le Havre, he spent six years in Paris studying at the Massin Institute, but devoted almost all his spare time to studying voice and piano and attending concerts at the Paris Conservatory. In 1836, after receiving his degree (bachelier ès lettres), he returned to Le Havre, where his father was a banker. The latter lost his fortune in creating a railroad company (from Paris to the sea), and in 1840 the family moved to the United States. Gustave produced his first essays of music criticism in New York. He was also a professor of French literature and history and published several textbooks of French language instruction. After sixteen years devoted to education, a respiratory ailment caused him to move back to France, where he spent several winters in the warm climate of Le Midi. By 1860 he was permanently in Paris.

In Paris Chouquet became a music journalist, writing articles for La France musicale and L'Art musicale, and occasionally contributed to Le Ménestrel. He also became well known as the author of a great number of texts for songs (romances), cantatas, choral scenes and pieces for amateur performance, including the words for the cantata David Rizzio (the examination piece for the 1863 Prix de Rome in Music with the Grand Prize awarded to Jules Massenet), "1867," with music by Laurent de Rillé (performed at the Opéra-Comique in 1867, and the words for the Hymne à la Paix ("Hymn to Peace") which won the poetry prize at that year's Exposition Universelle but which was never set to music.

Chouquet participated in a contest held by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, winning the Bordin prize in 1864 for his Histoire de la musique depuis le XIVe siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle ("History of Music from the 14th Century to the end of the 18th Century"), which was never published (according to Arthur Pougin in 1878). Chouquet was awarded the prize a second time in 1868 for his history of French opera, which was published in 1873 as Histoire de la musique dramatique en France depuis ses origines jusqu’à nos jours ("History of Dramatic Music in France from its Origins to the Present Day"), which was recognized as one of the first important French works in the genre of music history and criticism.

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