L'Orphelin de la Chine
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| Title: | L'Orphelin de la Chine |
| Genus: | tragedy |
| Original language: | French |
| Author: | Voltaire |
| Publishing year: | 1755 |
| Premiere: | August 20, 1755 |
| Place of premiere: | Paris |
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L'Orphelin de la Chine is a tragedy in five acts by Voltaire . The play was redesigned in 1755, completed in five acts, and premiered in Paris on August 20 of the same year . A first private performance, which was disapproved by the city council on July 31, took place in June 1755 in Geneva .
action
The plot, taken from the Chinese play Zhaoshi gu'er from the Yuan period , translated into French , takes place in Beijing in 1215 in the house of the mandarin Zamti at the time the city was conquered by the Mongols. Zamti, married to Idamé, hid the last imperial descendants as orphans in his house. Gengis Khan demands the surrender of the child along with Idamé, whom he fell in love with during an earlier incognito visit as a teenager. Zamti wants to impersonate his own son on Gengis and then commit suicide with his wife. Gengis saves the couple and gives birth to the imperial orphan.
Additions
Voltaire put a ten-page dedication to his childhood friend, Marshal von Richelieu , in front of his orpheline , in which he refers to the forty-year friendship with Richelieu and the Chinese source. This was followed by the first print of the first edition of the open letter to Jean Jacques Rousseau , the Lettre à J (ean). J (aques). R (ousseau). C (itoyen). d (e). G (énève). Slightly shortened by the censorship, the lettre was added to the text in the subsequent editions. The vicious and brilliantly phrased lettre begins the open feud with Rousseau, who answered in two open letters.
History of origin
After Voltaire's break with Friedrich II. And Voltaire's one month imprisonment in Frankfurt , Voltaire was welcomed in August 1753 by Elector Karl IV.-Theodor von der Pfalz in Schwetzingen Palace . Voltaire wrote to his friend Charles-Augustin de Ferriol d'Argental : "The Elector has shown me the politeness to play four of my pieces (in the Schwetzingen Castle Theater ). That rekindled my old fire and I was, close to death, how I feel (still!), set about devising a new piece that will be full of love. I'm almost ashamed of these old fool's daydreams. " This note is the first reference to orpheline. The initially planned five-act, then three-act version for lack of material was created in July 1754 during Voltair's visit to D'Argental in Plombières . In September 1754 the first copies were ready, as evidenced by a letter from the Elector of September 17, who had asked to have read the play three times. A performance of the work that D'Argental and Voltaire regarded as imperfect in its three-act form was not performed. The only copy that has survived in Munich was published in 1913 by Leo Jordan. The revision to five acts, begun on the advice of the friend, was completed on February 7, 1755. Corrections and slight changes were made while the first edition was printed by Cramer in July 1755.
Contemporary reception
The Paris premiere in the Comédie-Française with Henri Louis Lekain in the role of Gengis and Claire Clairon in the role of Idamé was successful and saw twelve performances in a row. Voltaire then transferred the rights to the actors. The play was resumed in Fontainebleau in the autumn . The one-act play Les Magots, premiered on March 19, 1756 by the Comédiens italiens ordinaires du Roi by Claude-Henri de Fusée de Voisenon, deserves a special mention among several parodies and arrangements as an indicator of success . Vincenzo Galeotti processed the material into a one-act ballet piece in 1780. Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier painted a first reading of the piece in Madame Geoffrin's drawing room in 1812 .
Performances
After initial rehearsals in Geneva, the first private performance of the original version took place in June 1755 in Voltaire's Les Délices , which had just been acquired in March .
Going to press
Voltaire moved to Geneva in March 1755 at the invitation of the publisher Gabriel Cramer (1723–1793), where he acquired the Les Délices estate . The first print of the Orphelin with a private character without a title page was the first more extensive joint publication by Voltaire with Cramer. The last changes to the text and the sequence of the accompanying texts were made during the printing process. In August of the same year the first official French edition was published by Michel Lambert in Paris. The errata of the Geneva edition are incorporated into it. In the open letter to Rousseau, the last half-sentence was suppressed by the censors. The author of the catalog raisonné, Bengesco, mistakenly declared the Lambert edition to be the first edition.
First editions
- L'Orphelin de la Chine , only half title, (Cramer, Geneva, 1755), XV, (I), 80 pp. Variant A of the first edition
- L'Orphelin de la Chine , only half title, (Cramer, Geneva, 1755), X, (II), 85 (II) S. Variant B of the first edition, with the Lettre à Rousseau and a sheet of Errata digitized at the end on Gallica
- L'Orphelin de la Chine , only half title, (Cramer, Geneva, 1755), X, (II), 86 pp. Variant C of the first edition, with the Lettre à Rousseau at the end and the errata
- L'Orphelin de la Chine , Lambert, Paris, 1755, XII, 72 p., Title page with several variants of the typographical element
- The orphan in China, a tragedy of 5 acts from the French of Herr von Voltaire, translated into German verse ... by Ludwig Korn , Vienna, in the Kraussischer Buchladen, 1763, II, 80 pp.
- Voltaire's Orphelin de la Chine, in 3 acts, based on the only Munich manuscript , with an introduction, the variants of the Munich manuscript and the prints of the five-act Orphelin, with annotations, first published by Leo Jordan, Dresden, Gesellschaft für Romanische Literatur, 1913 , VII, 231 S. Digital copy on Archive.com
literature
- Basil J. Guy: Orphelin de la Chine, in: Dictionnaire Voltaire, Hachette Livre, 1994, pp. 149 ff.
- Siegfried Detemple: Voltaire: Die Werke, catalog for his 300th birthday, Berlin, 1994, p. 112.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Voltaire: Die Werke, catalog for the 300th birthday, Berlin, 1994, p. 113.
- ↑ See Voltaire: Die Werke, catalog for the 300th birthday, Berlin, 1994, p. 113.
- ^ Leo Jordan: Voltaire's Orphelin de la Chine in three acts based on the only Munich manuscript, pp. 5–23
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