Hervé
Hervé
(real name, Florimond Ronger). Born June 30, 1825, in Houdain, near Arras; died Nov. 4, 1892, in Paris. French composer and conductor.
Hervé was one of the creators of the opéra-bouffe; his bestknown work is Mamz’elle Nitouche (1883). In 1854 he opened the Folies-Concertantes, a theater in which he presented, for example, operettas, pantomimes, and saynètes. He wrote more than 80 operettas. Hervé parodied operatic clichés and traditional operatic forms in many of his works, such as L’Oeil crevé (1867), a parody of Rossini’s William Tell, and Le Petit Faust (1869; in Russian, Faust Inside Out), a parody of Gounod’s and Goethe’s Faust.