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Updated: May 26, 2025
He had dreams of directing the Opéra-Comique and installing Le Timbre d'Argent there. Fate willed otherwise. We have seen how the young French school was encouraged under the Empire. The situation has improved and the old state of affairs has never returned.
What he wanted was to secure a postponement of Limnander's opera Les Blancs et les Bleus. The action of this work and of Dinorah, as well, took place in Brittany. In the hope of being Meyerbeer's choice, both theatres turned poor Limnander away. Finally, Dinorah fell to the Opéra-Comique.
And so the Opéra-Comique theatre has become the home of the boldest experiments in musical drama. The most daring or the most violent ventures into musical realism, after the manner of Charpentier or Bruneau, and the subtle fantasies of a delicate art of dreams, like that of Debussy, have found a welcome there.
Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, drame lyrique en 5 actes et 12 tableaux, was performed for the first time on any stage at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, April 30, 1902. Its first performance outside of Paris was at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, January 9, 1907; its second was at Frankfort, April 19, 1907. Its third will be the coming production at the Manhattan Opera House, New York.
He would take them all four to dine at Philippe's, his favorite restaurant, where he knew all the patrons, the waiters and the steward, would spend a lot of money, and then take them to a reserved box at the Opera-Comique or the Palais-Royal.
Pons therefore introduced Schmucke to the company as copier of music, a humble calling which requires no small musical knowledge; and Schmucke, acting on Pons' advice, came to an understanding with the chef-de-service at the Opera-Comique, so saving himself the clerical drudgery. The partnership between Pons and Schmucke produced one brilliant result.
We were quite ignorant in those days, it is needless to remark, of the fact that this cool, proper-looking Bailli was a great musician, a first-class performer of the STABAT MATER, whose inspiration however depended on his having the shoulders, very DECOLLETEE ones too, of a charming nightingale, over whom the Opera and Opera-Comique fought for many a day, as the desk he laid his music on.
Offenbach's works which were given at the Opéra-Comique Robinson Crusoé, Vert-Vert, and Fantasio are much inferior to La Chanson de Fortunio, La Belle Hélène and many other justly famous operettas. There have been several unprofitable revivals of La Belle Hélène. This is due to the fact that the rôle of Hélène was designed for Mlle. Schneider.
"Monsieur l'abbé," I replied, "when I hear from the pulpit the language of opéra-comique, I will play music appropriate to it, and not before!" Joseph Haydn, that great musician, the father of the symphony and of all modern music, has been neglected. We are too prone to forget that concerts are, in a sense, museums in which the older schools of music should be represented.
Maeterlinck is alleged to have become incensed on account of certain excisions made by Debussy in fitting the text of the play to music; then, it appears, there was a quarrel over the choice of a singer for the performance, and Maeterlinck published a letter of protest in which he declared that "the Pelléas of the Opéra-Comique" was "a piece which had become entirely foreign" to him, and that, as he was "deprived of all control over it," he could only hope "that its fall would be prompt and noisy."
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