Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 28, 2025
Allowing for the growth of M. Meilhac's intellect during the eight or ten years which intervened between the work alone and the work with his associate, and allowing for the improvement in the mechanism of play-making, I see no reason why M. Meilhac might not have written Fanny Lear and Froufrou substantially as they are had he never met M. Halévy.
Just as the egg of the jelly-fish is girt by circles which tighten slowly until the ovoid form is cut into disks of independent life, so if the four intermissions of some of Meilhac and Halévy's full-sized plays were but a little longer and wider and deeper they would divide the piece into five separate plays, any one of which could fairly hope for success by itself.
Even then even in 1869 Meilhac and Halévy, in their ever-memorable Froufrou, showed what disasters often result from it; but it retained its prestige with the average playwright and with some who were above the average for many a day after that.
And then, as she belonged to that witty 'Guermantes set' in which there survived something of the alert mentality, stripped of all commonplace phrases and conventional sentiments, which dated from Merimee, and found its final expression in the plays of Meilhac and Halevy she adapted its formula so as to suit even her social engagements, transposed it into the courtesy which was always struggling to be positive and precise, to approximate itself to the plain truth.
In these comedies the influence of the new school of Alexandre Dumas fils is plainly visible. And the inclination toward the strong, not to say violent, emotions which Dumas and Angier had imported into comedy is still more evident in Fanny Lear, the first five-act comedy which Meilhac and Halévy wrote together, and which was brought out in 1868.
The frequenters of the Palais Royal Theatre are not babes; young people of either sex are not taken there; only the emancipated gain admittance; and to the seasoned sinners who haunt theatres of this type these plays by MM. Meilhac and Halévy are harmless. Indeed, I do not recall any play of theirs which could hurt any one capable of understanding it.
Carmen, which, like Périchole, owes the suggestion of its plot and characters to Prosper Mérimée, is little more than the task-work of the two well-trained play-makers: it was sufficient for its purpose, no more and no less. Of all the opera-books of MM. Meilhac and Halévy, that one is easily first and foremost which has for its heroine the Helen of Troy whom Marlowe's Faustus declared
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.
Young ladies in Paris do not go to hear Madame Chaumont, for whom Toto was written, nor is the Variétés, where it was played, a place where a girl can take her mother. It was at the Variétés in December, 1864, that the Belle Hélène was produced: this was the first of half a score of plays written by MM. Meilhac and Halévy for which M. Jacques Offenbach composed the music.
M. Meilhac's new partner was the nephew of the Halévy who is best known out of France as the composer of the Jewess, and he was the son of M. Léon Halévy, poet, philosopher and playwright. Two years younger than M. Henri Meilhac, M. Ludovic Halévy held a place in the French civil service until 1858, when he resigned to devote his whole time, instead of his spare time, to the theatre.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking