Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier (French: [ɛmanɥɛl ʃabʁie]; 18 January 1841 – 13 September 1894) was a French Romantic composer and pianist. His bourgeois family did not approve of a musical career for him, and he studied law in Paris and then worked as a civil servant until the age of thirty-nine while immersing himself in the modernist artistic life of the French capital and composing in his spare time. From 1880 until his final illness he was a full-time composer. Chabrier died in Paris at the age of fifty-three from a neurological disease, probably caused by syphilis.