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.

Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, España and Joyeuse marche, Chabrier left a corpus of operas (including L'étoile), songs, and piano music, but no symphonies, concertos, quartets, sonatas, or religious or liturgical music. His lack of academic training left him free to create his own musical language, unaffected by established rules, and he was regarded by many later composers as an important innovator and a catalyst who paved the way for French modernism. He was admired by, and influenced, composers as diverse as Debussy, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Satie, Poulenc, Stravinsky, and others of the group of composers known as Les Six. Writing at a time when French musicians were generally proponents or opponents of the music of Wagner, Chabrier steered a middle course, sometimes incorporating Wagnerian traits into his music and at other times avoiding them.

Chabrier was associated with some of the leading writers and painters of his time. Among his closest friends was the painter Édouard Manet, and Chabrier collected Impressionist paintings long before they became fashionable. A number of such paintings from his personal collection by artists known to him are now housed in some of the world's leading art museums. He penned a large number of letters to friends and colleagues which offer an insight into his musical opinions and character.

Chabrier died in Paris at the age of fifty-three from a neurological disease, probably caused by syphilis.

Chabrier was born in Ambert, (Puy-de-Dôme), a town in the Auvergne region of central France. He was the only son of a lawyer, Jean Chabrier, and his wife, Marie-Anne-Evelina, née Durosay or Durozay. The Chabriers were of old Auvergne stock, originally of peasant origin (the surname comes from "chevrier" – goat-herd), but in recent generations merchants and lawyers had predominated in the family. A key member of the household was the boy's nanny Anne Delayre (whom he called "Nanine" and "Nanon"), who remained close to him throughout her life.

Chabrier began taking music lessons at the age of six; his early teachers were from cosmopolitan backgrounds: at Ambert he studied with a Carlist Spanish refugee called Saporta, and after the family moved to Clermont-Ferrand in 1852 he studied at the Lycée imperial with a Polish musician, Alexander Tarnovsky . The earliest of Chabrier's compositions to survive in manuscript are piano works from 1849. A piano piece, Le Scalp!!! (1856) was later modified into the Marche des Cipayes (1863). The first piece to which the composer gave an opus number was a waltz for piano, Julia, op. 1, 1857.

Tarnovsky advised Chabrier's parents that their son was talented enough to pursue a musical career, but Jean Chabrier was determined that his son should follow him into the legal profession. He moved the family to Paris in 1856, so that Chabrier could enrol at the Lycée Saint-Louis. From there Chabrier went on to law school, but did not neglect music, continuing his studies in composition, violin and piano. After graduating from the law school in 1861 he joined the French civil service at the Ministry of the Interior, where he worked for nineteen years.

Chabrier was well regarded at the ministry, but his passion was music, to which he devoted his free time. He continued his studies, with teachers including Edouard Wolff (de) (piano), Richard Hammer (violin), Théophile Semet (fr) and Aristide Hignard (both composition). In a study of the composer published in 1935 Jacques-Gabriel Prod'homme commented that it would be wrong to class Chabrier as merely an amateur in this period: "For, while in quest of the technique of his art, he displayed a curiosity in the painting and literature of the 'modernists' of his day that, among musicians, had few parallels."