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Updated: May 13, 2025
Let them go to the orchestra and hear Le Nozze di Figaro, Obéron, Freischutz and Orphée ... we are doing something for them by placing such models before them. The young composers who were thus politely invited to be seated included, among others, Bizet, Delibes, Massenet, and the writer of these lines. Massenet and I would have been satisfied with writing a ballet for the Opéra.
The first, as we have seen, under the guidance of such men as Bizet, Delibes, and Massenet, has approached so near to the confines of grand opera, that it is often difficult to draw the line between the two genres The second, under the influence of Offenbach, Hervé, and Lecocq, has shrunk into opéra bouffe, a peculiarly Parisian product, which, though now for some reason under a cloud, has added sensibly to the gaiety of nations during the past thirty years.
'Kassya, which the composer left unfinished, was orchestrated by Massenet, and produced in 1893. In this work Delibes attempted a tragic story to which his delicate talent was ill suited, and the opera achieved little success. Delibes is a typically French musician. Slight as his works often are, the exquisite skill of the workmanship saves them from triviality.
Gounod had conducted the Funeral March of a Marionnette; Reyer, his beautiful overture to Siguar; Saint Saens, the Danse Macabre and a Reverie Orientale; Massenet, an unpublished Hungarian march; Guiraud, his Carnaval; Delibes, the Valse Lente from Sylvia and the Pizzicati from Coppelia. Mlle. Krauss had sung the bolero in the Vespri Siciliani; and Mlle.
As the experiment succeeded, they allowed Delibes to write, without assistance, his marvellous Coppélia. But Delibes had the legitimate ambition of writing a grand opera. He never reached so far. Bizet and I were great friends and we told each other all our troubles. "You're less unfortunate than I am," he used to tell me. "You can do something besides things for the stage. I can't.
He proposed the Rat Catcher from an old German tale, while I proposed Une nuit de Cléopâtra on the text of Théophile Gautier. They refused us the honor, and, when they consented to order a ballet from Delibes, they did not dare to trust him with the whole work. They let him do only one act and the other was given to a Hungarian composer.
He studied piano with L. Zelenski at Cracow and with Diémer at the Paris Conservatoire. At the same institution he studied composition with Léo Delibes.
The policy imposed on Bizet and Delibes certainly deprived us of several works which would now be among the glories of the repertoire at the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique. That is an irreparable misfortune; one which we cannot sufficiently deplore.
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