José Melchor Gomis
José Melchor Gomis y Colomer (6 January 1791 – 4 August 1836) was a Spanish Romantic composer.
Career
He was born in Ontinyent, Vall d'Albaida, Valencia Province.[1]
He was a director of music for an artillery regiment during the
melodrame which was voiced by Gomis was performed at Valencia in 1817.[2]
He wrote the music of the Himno de Riego,[3] named after the rebellious General Riego (1784-1823) and since used as the national anthem by various republican governments of Spain.
Gomis's political views caused him to live in exile after the accession of
Gioacchino Rossini and François-Adrien Boieldieu, and in London his choral work L'inverno was performed in 1827. In 1830, his opera Aben-Humeya was performed in Paris.[4] Gomis's Paris operas Diable à Seville (1831) (staged with the support of Rossini) and Le revenant (1836) gained respectful reviews from Hector Berlioz.[5] Le portefaix, the most successful of his operas,[2] had a libretto by Eugène Scribe (originally offered to the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer).[6]
Gomis was made a Chevalier of the
Légion d'honneur by King Louis-Philippe. Gomis died in Paris in 1836 of tuberculosis, leaving a number of works unfinished, including the opera Le comte Julien, also to a libretto by Scribe (and eventually set in 1851 by Sigismond Thalberg as Florinda).[2]
Bibliography
- Berlioz, Hector (ed. Katherine Kolb): Berlioz on Music: Selected Criticism, 1824–1837 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); ISBN 9780199391950
- Dowling, John: "Gomis (y Colomer), José Melchor [Melchior]", in Grove Music Online(subscription required), accessed 23 August 2015.
- Johnson, Janet: "Rossini in Bologna and Paris during the Early 1830s: New Letters", in Revue de Musicologie, vol. 79 (1993) no. 1, pp. 67–83.
- Letellier, Robert: Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots: An Evangel of Religion and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014); ISBN 9781443860840
References
- ^ "José Melchor Gomis, un compositor romántico olvidado". El País. 12 August 1978. Retrieved 23 August 2015.
- ^ a b c Dowling (n.d.)
- ^ "El Himno de Riego, la música de la República". El Mundo. 28 November 2003. Retrieved 23 August 2015.
- ^ Johnson (1993), 67-71
- ^ Berlioz (2015), 57.
- ^ Letellier (2014), 1