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The prose libretto

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Hugh Macdonald
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Extract

Before returning to Paris in 1874 after his eventful four-year stay in England, Gounod embarked on a comic opera based on Molière's George Dandin. Recuperating in St Leonard's-on-Sea from a ‘cerebral attack’ he wrote a lengthy Preface, dated 10–11 April 1874, from which the following is drawn:

The infinite variety of stress, in prose, offers the musician quite new horizons which will save him from monotony and uniformity. Independence and freedom of pace will then come to terms with observance of the higher laws that govern periodic pulse and the thousand nuances of prosody. Every syllable will then have its own quantity, its own precise weight in truth of expression and accuracy of language. Longs and shorts will not have to make those cruel concessions, those barbarous sacrifices of which composers and singers, it must be admitted, take so little notice. What inexhaustible mines of variety there will be in sung or declaimed phrases, in the duration and intensity of stress, in the proportion and extension of musical periods, extensions which will no longer depend on continual reiteration and repetition but on logical progression and the growth of the germinal idea on which the piece is based […]

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , July 1989 , pp. 155 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1 The Preface was published by Weldon, Georgina in Autobiographie de Charles Gounod (London, 1875), 88–93.Google Scholar The manuscript of George Dandin was among those held by Mrs Weldon and not recovered by Gounod until 1875 (see Le Ménestrel, 26 September 1875). It was put up for auction at the Gare d'Orsay, Paris, on 20 June 1977, and has not been available since. When it again becomes accessible it will perhaps be possible to resolve the following discrepant information: (1) In a letter of 26 February 1874 Gounod reported completion of two scenes identifiable as Act II scenes 5 and 7 (Prod'homme, J. G. and Dandelot, A., Gounod (1818–1893) [Paris, 1911] II, 150–1Google Scholar). (2) According to the Ménestrel report in 1875 the manuscript comprised ‘huit morceaux […[ entièrement terminés’. (3) The 1977 sale catalogue lists an overture and the following scenes: in Act I: 2 and 8; in Act II: 4, 7 and 9 (two versions of 7); in Act III: 8, 14 and 15 (last). (4) Molière's George Dandin has only seven, eight and eight scenes respectively in its three acts. Although the opera is normally listed as unfinished, it is at least conceivable that this 217-page manuscript in full score (as the catalogue facsimiles show) is a complete work, especially since it has an overture in full score and since the Preface was written and published. Eighteen pages of pencil sketches were sold at the Hôtel Drouot on 27 November 1963.

2 Journal des débats, 22 January 1858, reprinted in Les Grotesques de la musique (Paris, 1859), 217–28Google Scholar, under the title ‘Préjugés grotesques’.

3 For example Combarieu (see below, p. 160).

4 ‘Treat the absurd rules of rhyme with the disdain they deserve. Omit rhyme altogether when it serves no purpose, which is frequently.’ ‘What I said about rhyme was just to put you at ease. I hate to see you waste your time and your talent solving pointless problems. You know as well as I do there are a thousand occasions when verse set to music is distended in such a way that rhyme, and even the hemistich, disappears completely. So what's the point of versification?’ Berlioz to Ferrand, 8 January 1832 and 26 March 1832, Correspondance générale (Paris, 1972), I, 521, 543.Google Scholar

5 Quoted by Weaver, William in his Seven Puccini Librettos (New York, 1981), [viii].Google Scholar

6 Castil-Blaze's title is dated 1858, but it was probably excerpted in advance in the musical press. An Essai sur le drame lyrique et les vers rythmiques had been attached to the second edition of his L'Opéra en France (1826).Google Scholar

7 Mozart, , Briefe and Aufzeichnungen, ed. Bauer, Wilhelm and Deutsch, Otto Erich (Kassel, 1963), III, 167.Google Scholar

8 Reichardt, J. F., Über die deutsche comische Oper (Hamburg, 1774), 115.Google Scholar

9 In the late eighteenth century, French librettos were described on their title page as ‘en prose’ or ‘en vers’, referring to the spoken dialogue. Examples of librettos ‘en prose’ are: Dalayrac's, La Dot (1785)Google Scholar and Camille ou le Souterrain (1791)Google Scholar, Devienne's, Les Visitandines (1792)Google Scholar, Bochsa's, La Lettre de change (1815).Google Scholar Marmontel's libretto for Grétry's, Zémire et Azor (1771)Google Scholar is ‘en vers libres’. Of de Rosoi's libretto for Les Mariages samnites (1776) Grétry wrote: Il était d'abord en prose, et c'est ainsi qu'il a été gravé’ ( Mémoires ou essais sur la musique, nouvelle édition [Paris, 1829] 231Google Scholar). The ‘drame lyrique’ was refashioned as a ‘comédie héroïque en vers’ in 1782.

10 Speyer, Edward, Wilhelm Speyer der Liederkomponist (Munich, 1925), 78–9.Google Scholar

11 Oper und Drama, trans. Ellis, Ashton (London, 1893), II, 230.Google Scholar

12 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Rés. Vmb 42.

13 Reprinted in Musiques d'hier et de demain (Paris, 1900), 103–10.Google Scholar At the end of his career, strange to say, Bruneau reverted to setting verse texts.

14 By Taruskin, Richard, for example, in his Opera and Drama in Russia (Ann Arbor, 1981)Google Scholar and by Emerson, Caryl in Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (Bloomington, 1986).Google Scholar

15 Taruskin, 308.

16 Taruskin, 323.

17 See Maehder, Jürgen, ‘The Origins of Italian Literaturoper: Guglielmo Ratcliff, La figlia di Iorio, Parisina, and Francesca da Rimini’, in Reading Opera, ed. Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger (Princeton, 1988), 92–128.Google Scholar

18 Budden, Julian, The Operas of Verdi (London, 1978), II, 247.Google Scholar

19 See Abraham, Gerald, ‘Realism in Janáček's Operas’, in Slavonic and Romantic Music (London, 1968), 83–98Google Scholar, and Tyrrell, John, ‘Janáček's three types of prose-opera’, Colloquium Leoś Janáček et Musica Europaea, Brno 1968, ed. Pečman, Rudolf (Brno, 1970), 141–4.Google Scholar

20 Smith, Patrick, The Tenth Muse (London, 1971), 317–19Google Scholar; Rolandi, Ulderico, Il libretto per musica attraverso i tempi (Rome, 1951), 182–3Google Scholar; Bragaglia, Leonardo, Storia del libretto (Rome, 1970–1977).Google Scholar