La Damoiselle élue

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti , The Blessed Damozel (1878)

La Damoiselle élue ( The Blessed Damozel ), L. 62, is a secular cantata by Claude Debussy . From 1887 to 1888 he set the French translation of a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti , "The Blessed Damozel", to music and set the music for two soloists, a female choir and an orchestra. The premiere took place in Paris in 1893 and was the first public performance of an orchestral work by Debussy.

history

Claude Debussy was interested in symbolism and was later inspired by a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé for his Prelude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894). He read an anthology of English poems translated by Gabriel Sarrazin, Poètes moderne d'Angleterre (1883), and decided to set the poem "The Blessed Damozel" by the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti , who worked as both a poet and a painter, to music . Debussy had probably not yet seen Rossetti's paintings on the same subject at this point, but had seen other Pre-Raphaelite illustrations that showed a new ideal of female beauty. Debussy completed the cantata in 1889. In a letter to André Poniatowski dated September 9, 1892, he wrote that he wanted to compose “a little oratorio with a mystical, slightly pagan note” (“un petit oratorio dans une note mystique un peu païenne”) . Debussy dedicated the work to the composer Paul Dukas . He sent his score to the Académie des beaux-arts as an application for the Prix ​​de Rome .

La Damoiselle élue belongs to the same creative phase as the Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire , in which Debussy was influenced by Richard Wagner's music. He later distanced himself from this influence, but remained loyal to symbolist literature when he wrote his opera Pelléas et Mélisande .

La Damoiselle élue was premiered in Paris by the société Nationale de Musique on April 8, 1893, sung by Julia and Thérèse Robert, and conducted by Jean Gabriel-Marie . It was Debussy's first work with orchestra that was performed in public. The premiere was a success, and the music critic Pierre Lalo wrote in Le Temps that the beauty and delicacy are so great that all daring makes you happy (“telles sont la grâce et la délicatesse de son goût que toutes ses audaces sont heureuses”). Another reviewer criticized the work as "very sensual and decadent" ("très sensuelle et décadente").

A version for voice and piano was published in 1892. Debussy revised the instrumentation in 1902. A performance lasts about twenty minutes.

literature

  • Richard Langham: La Genèse de "La Damoiselle élue" . In: Cahiers Debussy , 1980–1981, No. 4–5, ZDB -ID 432879-6 .

Discography

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Caroline Rae, La Damoiselle élue, Claude Debussy (English), London Philharmonic Orchestra , June 13, 2016.
  2. ↑ a b Anne Penesco, Itinéraires de la musique française: théorie, pédagogie et création (French), Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1996, p 192nd
  3. ↑ a b c La Damoiselle élue. FL 69 (French), Bibliothèque nationale de France
  4. ↑ La Damoiselle élue : Sheet music and audio files in the International Music Score Library Project
  5. ↑ Ariane Charton, Debussy , Editions Gallimard folio biographies, 2012.
  6. ↑ Eric Frederick Jensen, Debussy , Oxford University Press , 2014, (p. 158).
  7. ↑ Bidu Sayao - La Damoiselle Elue, Opera Arias ArkivMusic
  8. ↑ OCLC 671658965
  9. ↑ 9408841 discogs
  10. ↑ 9408841 Claude Debussy, La damoiselle élue, L 62, Suzanne Danco, Jeanne Deroubaix, women of the Kölner Rundfunkchor, Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, Marcel Couraud, July 3-6, 1957 renegagnaux.ch
  11. ↑ OCLC 916463378
  12. ↑ OCLC 50085203
  13. ↑ OCLC 785894329
  14. ↑ OCLC 690137799
  15. ↑ 1014953 discogs
  16. ↑ Interview with Mireille Delunsch / discography (French) odb-opera.com