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Halévy was born in Paris, the son of a cantor, Elie Halfon Halévy, who was the secretary of the Jewish community of Paris, also writer and a teacher of Hebrew, and a French Jewish mother.
He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of nine or ten (accounts differ), in 1809, becoming a pupil and later protegé of Cherubini. After two second-place attempts, he won the Prix de Rome in 1819: his cantata subject was Herminie.
As he had to delay his departure to Rome because of the death of his mother, he was able to accept the first commission that brought him to public attention - a ``Marche Funebre et De Profundis en Hebreu'' for three part choir, tenor and orchestra, which was commissioned by the Consistoire Israélite du Département de la Seine, for a public service in memory of the assassinated duc de Berry, performed on March 24, 1820. Later, his brother Léon recalled that the De Profundis, ``infused with religious fervor, created a sensation, and attracted interest to the young laureate of the institute.''
Halévy was chorus master at the Théâtre Italien, while he struggled to get an opera performed. Despite the mediocre reception of L'artisan, at the Opéra-Comique in 1827, Halévy moved on to be chorus master at the Opéra.
The same year he became professor of harmony and accompaniment at the Conservatoire, where he was professor of counterpoint and fugue in 1833 and of composition in 1840. He was elected to the Institut de France in 1836.
With his opera La Juive, in 1835, Halévy attained not only his first major triumph, but gave the world a work that was to be one of the cornerstones of the French repertory for a century, with the role of Eléazar one of the great favorites of tenors such as Enrico Caruso.
The opera's most famous aria is Eléazar's ``Rachel, quand du Seigneur'' . Its orchestral ritornello is the one quotation from Halévy that Berlioz included in his Treatise on Orchestration, for its unusual duet for two cor anglais.
Another specialty from the orchestration of La Juive is this passage scored for four french horns, two ``natural'' horns (named ``cors ordinaires'') and two with pistons (``cors a pistons'').
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La Juive is one of the grandest of grand operas, with major choruses, a spectacular procession in Act I, and impressive celebrations in Act III. It culminates with the heroine plunging into a vat of boiling water in Act V. Mahler admired it greatly, stating: ``I am absolutely overwhelmed by this wonderful, majestic work. I regard it as one of the greatest operas ever created''. Other admirers included Richard Wagner who wrote an enthusiastic review of its premiere for the German press. Interestingly Wagner never showed towards Halévy the anti-Jewish animus that was so notorious a feature of his writings on Meyerbeer.
The libretto was the work of Eugène Scribe, one of the most prolific dramatic authors of the time. Scribe was writing to the tastes of the Opéra de Paris, where the work was first performed - a work in five acts presenting spectacular situations (here the Council of Constance of 1414), which would allow a remarkable staging, a setting which brought out a dramatic situation which was also underlined by a powerful historical subject. In addition to this, there was also the possibility of choral interludes, ballet and scenic effects which took advantage of the entire range of possibilities available at the Paris Opera.
Through the story of an impossible love between a Christian man and a Jewish woman, the work may be seen as a plea for religious tolerance, in much the same spirit as Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots which premiered in 1835, a year before La Juive, as well as the 1819 novel Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott which deals with the same theme.
At the time of composition, the July monarchy4.4 had liberalized religious practices in France.
Meyerbeer and Halévy were both Jewish and storylines dealing with topics of tolerance were common in their operas. The reviews of the initial performances show that journalists of the period responded to the liberalism and to the perceived anti-clericalism of Scribe's text, rather than to any specifically Jewish theme.