Louis Varney

Biography

Louis Varney was the son of Alphonse Varney, a French conductor at the Bouffes-Parisiens and at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, he was also invited to conduct the "French Opera Season" abroad, notably in New Orleans, Louisiana, and this is how Louis came to be born there in 1844.

He studied music with his father, and became first a conductor like him. He was conducting in a small theatre L'Athénée-Comique, while he began composing, he succeeded in having one of his work, Il signor Pulcinella presented there in 1876 with considerable success. He was then proposed by the director of the Bouffes-Parisiens, Louis Cantin, to write an operetta on a libretto by Paul Ferrier and Jules Prével, based on a comédie en vaudeville by St-Hilaire and Dupont from 1835, entitled L'habit ne fait pas le moine. Louis accepted and under a new title Les mousquetaires au couvent, it premiered at the Bouffes-Parisiens on March 16, 1880, and the success was absolute.

Varney went on writing some forty operettas, all of them noted for their musical elegance and good taste, sometimes closer in style to opéra-comique, amongst the most notable are; Fanfan la tulipe (1882), Babolin (1884), Les petits mousquetaires (1885), L'âge d'or (1905), all very popular in their time, some were even presented abroad, but nowadays all but forgotten.

Les mousquetaires au couvent is the only one to have survived total oblivion, and is still occasionally presented in France.