When Rostand was twenty years old, his first play, a one-act comedy,
Le Gant rouge, was performed at the
Cluny Theatre, 24 August 1888, but it was almost unnoticed. He and his fiancée Rosemonde Gérard became friends with
Emmanuel Chabrier in 1889, and the composer quickly set three of his poems (and two of hers) to music; the following year the two collaborated on
À la musique for the house-warming of a mutual friend. In 1890, Rostand published a volume of poems called
Les Musardises. The same year he offered a one-act Pierrot play in verse to the director of the Théâtre François. This gave him the opportunity to write for the state theatre a three-act play, also in verse, as are all Rostand's plays. He considered himself a poet, whether writing plays or poetry. The resulting play,
Les Romanesques, was produced at the Théâtre François on 21 May 1894. It was a great success and was the start of his career as a dramatist. This play would be adapted in 1960 by
Tom Jones and
Harvey Schmidt into the long-running American musical
The Fantasticks. Rostand's next play was written for
Sarah Bernhardt.
La Princesse Lointaine was based on the story of the 12th-century troubadour
Jaufre Rudel and his love for
Hodierna of Jerusalem (who is the archetypal
princesse lointaine character). This idealistic play opened on 5 April 1895, at the
Théâtre de la Renaissance. The part of Melisandre (based on Hodierna's daughter
Melisende of Tripoli) was created by
Sarah Bernhardt He relocated to Cambo-les-bains, in the Basque Pyrenees, in 1903 for health reasons. Here he built himself a villa, Arnaga (now a Rostand museum) and worked on his next play, one for Constant Coquelin this time,
Chantecler. Chantecler is a cockerel and the characters are birds and animals. "Chantecler" is the great play of Rostand's maturity, expressing Rostand's own deepest feelings as a poet and idealist. The Romancers
one act play is one of Edmond Rostand's most famous plays. This play is found to be read for study in the courses of many universities of the world. When he died prematurely at fifty years old, Rostand was still writing plays. "La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan" was performed posthumously in 1922. There were two unfinished and unpublished plays –
Yorick and
Les Petites Manies. ==Personal life==