Le devin du village
| Opera dates | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The village fortune teller |
| Original title: | Le devin du village |
Libretto for the performance on March 1, 1753 in Paris |
|
| Shape: | Intermède in one act |
| Original language: | French |
| Music: | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
| Libretto : | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
| Premiere: | October 18, 1752 |
| Place of premiere: | Fontainebleau Castle |
| Place and time of the action: | A French village, 18th century |
| people | |
Le devin du village ( Eng. "The village fortune teller") is the title of a one-act opera by Jean-Jacques Rousseau called Intermède . The premiere took place on October 18, 1752 in Fontainebleau Palace.
prehistory
When an Italian opera company made a guest appearance in Paris in August 1752 , the old dispute over the supremacy of Italian or French opera, which was essentially a political one between the royalists and their opponents , flared up again . On this occasion, the philosopher Rousseau , who was previously unsuccessful as an opera composer, but already famous for his award-winning treatise on the sciences and the arts (1749/50), wrote text and music for a small opera that promised to save the fame of the French language.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote Le devin du village largely during a stay in the former Paris community of Passy . First a few verses and the associated melodies were written. Rousseau showed his host in Passy and his housekeeper the verses, which had the background idea of bringing the style of the Italian opera buffa closer to the French audience. Due to their applause, in the rest of his time in Passy an opera was completed except for a few recitatives and the supporting roles. He completed the missing recitatives and supporting roles in Paris. The first rehearsal took place in Paris, without naming the author. Due to general applause, the then director of court amusements, Herr von Curie, asked for the work to be performed at court. Against the will of Rousseau's friend Dueclot (who was in charge of rehearsing the opera in Paris), the court insisted on its right to a world premiere in the exclusive setting of the Palace Theater in Fontainebleau . In the second part of his work, Confessions, Rousseau explains the history of its origins.
action
The shepherdess Colette was abandoned by her lover Colin, who turned to a noble lady in the city. The village fortune teller asked by Colette for advice prophesies that Colin will return to her, but gives her the advice to turn him down first because that will rekindle his love for her. When Colin returns because he prefers the shepherd's dress to courtly pomp, Colette does what she was advised to do and is successful. Everyone is happy.
Music and lyrics
With this work Rousseau seized the opportunity to demonstrate what he meant by the good and peaceful natural state of man, which he had opposed to the innovations of civilization in his famous treatise . Religious powers or sorcery are excluded from the subject. The fortune teller only gives Colette friendly advice.
The musical style still has a very baroque effect and has not incorporated many Italian innovations (for example from Rousseau's declared role model Giovanni Battista Pergolesi ). Some of the melodies, however, became famous as "timbres" in the vaudevilles of the time, a kind of hit song. The direct model was probably the plays of the Parisian fair theater .
Other stylistic features speak for the fact that Rousseau had not (yet) turned to the role model of the opera buffa : The comedy is greatly withdrawn from the touching moments, and he avoids the reprehensible motives of the intrigue . On the other hand, the “pretense out of love” that Colette is advised to do (a common motif up to Beethoven's opera Fidelio , 1805/06) is to a certain extent a sincere deception. Only the coloratura of the fortune teller seem comical and thereby relativize his authority.
Interesting are the recitatives in which Rousseau tries to combine the French language with the flow of the Italian recitative and possibly to accompany pantomime actions with “gestural” motifs of the figured bass . These recitatives were not or only partially performed at the court, as Rousseau suggests in the preface to the printed score . Of the divertissements that decided on the piece according to the custom of the time, a small narrative ballet deserves special attention in which a nobleman and a citizen argue over a woman, but in the end unite in a common dance.
effect
Both the court premiere and the subsequent public performances were a great success. The programmatic simplicity shows a change in the image of the French court: In contrast to Louis XIV , who was considered the best dancer in his empire, King Louis XV. the melodies of the Devin du village are sung in the wrong voice of his empire, as the tenor Pierre Jélyotte, the first interpreter of Colin, informed the philosopher in a letter of October 1752. The Marquise de Pompadour also played the role of Colin in her court theater.
Rousseau did not want to be considered a royalist. So he did not appear at an audience that had been offered to him by the king, and in the Buffonist dispute that sparked the following year, he took a very violent stand for Italian and against French opera, which he "saved" with his own piece. would have.
Le devin du village gave the French opéra-comique social prestige, although the subject matter and style only had a limited influence on this genre. Arrangements and translations followed throughout Europe: in 1755 and 1763 the piece was played under the title Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne in the arrangement of Marie-Justine Favart, for example in Vienna and Prague. In 1764 a German arrangement by Friedrich Wilhelm Weiskern appeared in Vienna and in 1766 the English composer and music scholar Charles Burney performed an arrangement under the title The Cunning Man at the Drury Lane Theater in London.
The Paris Opera kept the work in its repertoire until 1829. Famous, but not proven, is the anecdote that Hector Berlioz threw a wig onto the stage at a performance of Devin and thus exposed this opera as out of date.
parody
Marie-Justine Favart's malicious parody of Rousseau's piece entitled Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne , in which she herself appeared as Bastienne (a novelty :) in peasant clogs, without a wig, with free arms and sang in dialect, was after his First performance in Paris in 1753 by the Comédiens Italiens for a long time as successful as the Devin by Rousseau and was repeated in Vienna as early as 1755. Finally, the parody Marie-Justine Favart was set to music in a German translation by Friedrich Wilhelm Weiskern (inter alia) in 1767/68 by Mozart as Bastien and Bastienne . Weiskern's German text replaced the parodic with a naive seriousness, which nevertheless does not ignore the psychological sophistication of its previous authors.
literature
- Peter Gülke: Rousseau and the music or from the competence of the dilettante. Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel 1984. ISBN 3-7959-0423-4
- Carl Dahlhaus (ed.): Piper's Enzyklopädie des Musiktheater, Vol. 5, Piper, Munich 1994, pp. 461-465. ISBN 3-492-02415-7
- David Charlton: Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism, Cambridge Univ. Press 2012. ISBN 978-0521887601
score
- Score autograph
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Le devin du Village . King Louis XV library, as well as the first printed libretto for the opera, now part of the French national library.
- Modern score edition
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Le devin du Village , edited by Charlotte Kaufman, together with libretto, foreword and critical break (French / German) at AR Editions, Inc. USA. (Recent researches in the music of the classical era, 50, (RRMCE)) 1998, ISBN 0-89579-399-7 , ISSN 0147-0086. Instruments: 2 oboes, 2 flutes, bassoon (bassoon), 2 violins, viola, figured bass
Web links
- Sound sample from Le devin du Village
Individual evidence
- ^ Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Confessions . tape 2 . dtv Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 1765, ISBN 978-3-86231-871-1 , p. Tracks: 136; 137 .
- ↑ Cf. Ruth Müller-Lindenberg: Weeping and Laughing. Dramaturgy and musical idiom of Opera-comique compared to Opera buffa (1750-1790), Lit, Münster 2006, p. 51. ISBN 978-3825899837
- ^ Albert Jansen: Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a musician, Berlin 1884, reprint: Slatkine, Geneva 1971, p. 463.
- ^ Hugo Blank: Rousseau - Favart - Mozart. Six variations on a libretto . In: Hans-Joachim Lope (Ed.): Studies and documents on the history of Romanic literatures , vol. 38. Peter Lang, European publishing house, the science of Frankfurt, etc. 1999, ISBN 3-631-35308-1 , p. 113 ff , P. 143 ff.
- ^ Hugo Blank: Rousseau - Favart - Mozart. Six variations on a libretto , p. 231 ff.