- On the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 Thomas, though aged nearly sixty, volunteered to serve in the Garde Nationale.
- Thomas died in his flat in the Conservatoire in 1896, aged 84, of congestion of the lungs. He was survived by his widow, Elvire, née Remaury (1827-1910), whom he married in 1878.
- Thomas' operas were generally neglected during most of the 20th century, but in more recent decades they have experienced something of a revival both in Europe and the US.
- By the age of ten he was already an experienced pianist and violinist. When he was twelve his father died, and Ambroise's elder brother Charles moved to Paris, where he played the cello in the Opéra orchestra. In 1828, aged 17, Ambroise joined him in Paris, where he was admitted as a student by the Conservatoire de Paris.
- He was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868).
- Thomas was appointed as a professor at the Conservatoire in 1856, and in 1871 he succeeded Daniel Auber as director. Between then and his death at his home in Paris twenty-five years later, he modernised the Conservatoire's organisation while imposing a rigidly conservative curriculum, hostile to modern music, and attempting to prevent composers such as César Franck and Gabriel Fauré from influencing the students of the Conservatoire.
- During the 1850s Thomas continued to compose, writing five operas, none of which made much impression. After a fallow spell in the early 1860s he wrote Mignon, the work by which his name became most widely known. The libretto was by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, based on Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.
- Later in Thomas' life his academic career largely overtook his activities as a composer, and after Hamlet, he composed only one more opera: Françoise de Rimini (1882), which was well received but did not enter the regular operatic repertoire.
- He wrote twenty further operas over the next decades, mostly comic, but he also treated more serious subjects, finding considerable success with audiences in France and abroad.
- Born into a musical family, Thomas was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris, winning France's top music prize, the Prix de Rome. He pursued a career as a composer of operas, completing his first opera, La double échelle, in 1837.
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