Bizet in Italy: Letters and Journals, 1857–1860 Hugh Macdonald
2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ml/gcac021
ISSN1477-4631
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoNumerous specialists have written about Bizet and/or Carmen in the past decade, and the tempo of such publications will most likely remain brisk as the 150th anniversary of his death approaches in 2025. Among these scholars, Hugh Macdonald has paid the most broad-ranging attention to this French master, with several articles, a biography for Oxford’s Master Musicians series, a new edition of Les Pêcheurs de perles for Bärenreiter, the online Bizet thematic catalogue, and editions of Djamileh and Don Procopio. Now, with Bizet in Italy, he has also provided the first English translation of Bizet’s travel journals and letters from 1857 to 1860. Macdonald’s idea for the volume goes back to 2014, for while preparing his Bizet biography, he noticed that earlier writers had done little with Bizet’s journals. Moreover, the early twentieth-century edition of Bizet’s correspondence to his family suppressed brief passages, certain names, and overt criticism of contemporaries (see Lettres de Georges Bizet: Impressions de Rome, 1857–1860; La Commune, 1871, préface Louis Ganderax (Paris, 1908)). Although some of the missing information was filled in by biographers as early as the mid-1950s, the present volume is the first to include all the omitted material and correct the dating. Macdonald also supplements these texts with another fifteen or so letters from the same period. Noteworthy are five Bizet addressed to his piano teacher, Antoine Marmontel (translated from Marmontel’s Symphonistes et virtuoses, 1881), and another six sent to Bizet by his mentor Charles Gounod (translated from the Revue de Paris, 1899). In yet another, Rossini wrote to Pietro Romani, brother of the celebrated librettist Felice Romani, and introduced Bizet as a fine student, good pianist, and excellent fellow. No correspondence appears to survive between Bizet and his composition teacher Fromental Halévy, who was burdened by his duties as secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie des Beaux-Arts from 1854 on. Writing to his mother on 5 February 1859, Bizet does quote from a brief note delivered by Samuel David, Prix de Rome winner of 1858, where he takes umbrage at Halévy’s words (‘I am always interested in you and your work. Send us something good this year! Your affectionate, F.H.’) and exclaims (‘O what a rascal I’ll show him!!!!’).
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