Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 12, 2025
I paid another visit, the last for a long time to come, to the Grand Opera to hear this Reine de Chypre. There was, indeed, much for me to smile at. My eyes were no longer shut to the extreme weakness of this class of work, and the caricature of it that was often produced by the method of rendering it. I was sincerely rejoiced to see the better side of Halevy again.
This seal is of particular interest, for on it were the words 'Yarsahal, the Elder of Shibahm'; and in an inscription published by M. Halévy, we have the two Yarsahals and various members of this family described as vassals of the King of the Gebaniti.
When we remember that, in France alone, Augier and Dumas fils and Hugo, Halévy and Meilhac and Labiche, were all of them alive, the compliment, though a sound, was a vivid one. Sooner or later, everything that was said about Ibsen, though it were whispered in Choctaw behind the altar of a Burmese temple, came round to Ibsen's ears, and this handsome tribute from the rival produced its effect.
It is not that M. Halévy is some two years the junior of M. Meilhac: it lies in the quality of their respective abilities. M. Meilhac has the more masculine style, and so the literary progeny of the couple bear rather his name than his associate's.
Since MM. Meilhac and Halévy have ceased writing for M. Offenbach they have done two books for M. Charles Lecoq the Petit Duc and the Grande Demoiselle. These are rather light comic operas than true opéras-bouffes, but if there is an elevation in the style of the music, there is an emphatic falling off in the quality of the words.
When this collaboration terminated, shortly before M. Halévy wrote The Abbé Constantin, he gave up writing for the stage. The training of the playwright he could not give up, if he would, nor the intimacy with the manners and customs of the people who live, move, and have their being on the far side of the curtain.
Three months after "Carmen's" first equivocal success, Bizet was dead, not of a broken heart, as legend tells, but of heart-disease. Six years before he had married Geneviève, the daughter of his teacher, the composer Halévy. In his letters to Lacombe he frequently mentions her, saying in May, 1872: "J'attends un baby dans deux ou trois semaines."
But M. Halévy started a theory to the effect that Sumerian was not a language at all, in the proper sense of the term, but was a cabalistic method of writing invented by the Semitic Babylonian priests. Drawn up by an Assyrian scribe to assist him in his studies of early texts. Photograph by Messrs. Mansell & Co.
Besides these plays for music, and besides the more important five-act comedies to be considered later, MM. Meilhac and Halévy are the authors of thirty or forty comic dramas as they are called on the English stage or farce-comedies in one, two, three, four, and even five acts, ranging in aim from the gentle satire of sentimentality in La Veuve to the outspoken farce of the Réveillon.
It is universally recognised and is sufficiently evident to anyone who will look at the faces of the chief orchestras of Europe. Besides a crowd of lesser names they have produced among composers Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Halévy, and among contemporary performers Rubinstein, Joachim, Hermann Levy, and Lucca.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking