The Bald Soprano | Author Biography

Eugene Ionesco (Ionescu) was born in Slatina, Romania, on November 26, 1909, the son of a municipal official and a French mother working as a civil engineer for a Romanian railway company, lonesco's early childhood was spent in Paris, where in 1912 his father took the family when he began studying law. A quarrelsome, choleric man, lonesco's father treated his wife badly, leading to her attempted suicide and to lonesco's life-long distaste for brutal authority figures.

Eugene Ionesco
Eugene Ionesco

In 1916, when Germany declared war on Romania, lonesco's father left to return to Bucharest. He lost contact with the family. Without support, lonesco's mother had to take a factory job, leaving her son to spend lonely months in a cheerless children's home near Paris. However, in 1922 at age thirteen, Ionesco had to return to Romania. His father had secretly divorced his mother, remarried, and gained legal custody of Eugene and Marilina, lonesco's younger sister. The uprooting was traumatic, for it required that Ionesco learn a new language and once more live with his tyrannical father, whom he despised, both for his familial violence and his devious political fence straddling.

At the age of seventeen, Ionesco fled his father's house, finding work as a French tutor; in 1928 he entered the University of Bucharest to study French literature. During his studies, Ionesco made connections in Romanian literary circles and established a reputation as a poet and a critic. His work focused on novelists, poets, and philosophers rather than playwrights. He claimed, in fact, that the great French classical dramatists held little interest for him, though Shakespeare did. He would later come to writing plays almost by accident.

In 1938, Ionesco and his wife went to France so that he could complete a doctoral thesis on French poetry, and though World War II forced him to return to Romania, in 1942, having obtained an exit visa, he returned to France, living near poverty in Marseilles. At the war's end, he moved back to Paris, where he found work as a proofreader. Three years later, in 1948, the year his father died, Ionesco wrote The Bald Soprano, the first of his "anti-plays." The work was inspired by a language primer that Ionesco had used to learn English. At first writing in Romanian, Ionesco set out to parody the inane phrasing of the book's dialogue, but he recast it in French, giving it the title La Cantatrice chauve. In 1950, the year he acquired French citizenship, Ionesco was able to have the play produced at the Theatre des Noctambules in Paris before a small, largely unenthusiastic audience.

The work marked the debut of Ionesco as one of the new playwrights of the avant-garde theater centered in Paris and quietly launched a dramatic career that by the 1960s, his most prolific period, brought him world-wide acclaim. In 1970, he was elected to the Academie Francaise. Along with Samuel Beckett Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov, Ionesco is now honored as a major seminal figure in the absurdist movement in France. He died on March 28,1994.