United States or Heard Island and McDonald Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The fortunes of the opera have not been altogether happy. There was much correspondence between composer and dramatist before Maeterlinck finally heard the music of Debussy at a rehearsal at the Opéra-Comique: so, at least, runs the legend. Just when or precisely how the famous and probably inevitable rupture occurred between them, tradition does not make altogether clear.
From time to time, however, the young girls are taken to the Opera-Comique or the Theatre Francais, when the play is recommended by the paper which is read by M. Chantal. At present the young ladies are respectively nineteen and seventeen. They are two pretty girls, tall and fresh, very well brought up, in fact, too well brought up, so much so that they pass by unperceived like two pretty dolls.
About that time du Locle took over the management of the Opéra-Comique. He saw that Perrin, who was his uncle, had decided not to stage Le Timbre d'Argent and asked me for it. This meant another metamorphosis for the work and new and considerable work for the musician. And this work was by no means easy.
The captain gave him a drink of unspeakable gin, and the opera-comique crew, with their hairy throats, red caps, and long knives, greeted him as a brother. Then the trade began. They had tobacco, plenty of it American, that had never paid duty to France. They wanted chocolate and crackers.
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.
The chief mourners were the doctor who assisted at the last moments of Mademoiselle Pell, and M. Villedo, director of the Opéra-Comique. Among the wreaths we may cite those of the Association of Dramatic Artists, of Madame Morenita, of the management of the Opéra-Comique, and of the artists of the Opéra-Comique.
On one side were the partisans of Melody, opéra-comique, the Italians, and, with some effort, of grand opera. Opposed to them were the partisans of music in the grand style Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Sebastian Bach, although he was little known and is less well known now. No one gave a thought to our old French school, to the composers from Lulli to Gluck, who produced so many excellent works.
Frescobaldi and Philipp Emanuel Bach brought fresh life to art, but were scorned by the so-called representatives of fine art; Mozart's opere buffe have more of truth and life in them than his opere serie; and there is as much dramatic power in an opéra-comique like Carmen as in all the repertory of grand Opera to-day.
There are no new themes, and no significant recurrences of familiar ones, though the music is rich in suggestive and imaginative details; as I have previously noted, it is omitted in the performances at the Opéra-Comique.
The beautiful choruses sung by the fresh voices of the pupils made such a success and the whole work was so enthusiastically applauded that it was revived at the Opéra-Comique and won back a success which it has never lost. We also heard there Gluck's Orphée long before that masterpiece was revived at the Théâtre-Lyrique.
Word Of The Day