Louis-Claude-Armand Chardiny

Louis-Claude-Armand Chardiny (Fécamp, 1755 – Paris, 1 October 1793) was a French composer and singer whose career illustrates the difficulties faced by opera writers in late eighteenth-century Paris. To improve his chances of success, he Italianised his surname, which also appears in sources as Chardin or Chardini.

In 1780 he joined the Académie Royale de Musique as a bass-baritone (basse-taille), although the role for which he is best remembered, Theseus in Sacchini's Œdipe à Colone, suggests that his voice was more properly that of a tenor. An ardent admirer of Gluck, he had a leaning towards opera seria, but his only contribution to the Opéra's repertoire was writing the recitatives and some cavatinas for a French adaptation of Paisiello's Il re Teodoro in Venezia, premièred in 1787 as Le roi Théodore à Venise. His works for the Théâtre des Beaujolais, such as La ruse d'amour, aimed to compete with the comic operas of the Comédie-Italienne, and the first of them gave the small theatre its first great success, ten months after it opened.

From January 1792 he worked as an arranger at the Théâtre du Vaudeville. According to Beffroy de Reigny, Chardiny detested the revolutionaries, although at the time of his death he was captain of a section of the National Guard.

His legacy is modest but well documented: his operas Le pouvoir de la nature and La ruse d'amour are the only works from his output that survive in score, which allows us to assess his attempt to rival the Parisian comic genre.