Les Horaces
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| Original title: | Les Horace |
| Shape: | Tragédie lyrique |
| Original language: | French |
| Music: | Antonio Salieri |
| Libretto : | Nicolas-François Guillard |
| Literary source: | Pierre Corneille |
| Premiere: | November 2 or December 2, 1786 |
| Place of premiere: | Fontainebleau or Court Theater of Versailles |
| Playing time: | about 2 hours |
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Les Horaces is a tragédie lyrique in three acts and two intermèdes by Antonio Salieri based on a text by Nicolas-François Guillard based on Horace by Pierre Corneille . The first performance took place on November 2nd in Fontainebleau or on December 2nd, 1786 in the court theater of Versailles . The public premiere took place on December 7, 1786 in the Paris Opera .
The premiere of the opera turned out to be a fiasco, and according to Salieri's first biographer Ignaz Franz von Mosel , the performance closed “not only without applause, but with unambiguous signs of disapproval.” In addition to a few mishaps during the performance, the subject and the text book in particular have to be a failure be held responsible. Salieri's composition could not compensate for the inadequacies of the libretto despite many successful passages. The work revolves too much around the conflict between love and state duty, the characters are drawn too one-dimensional.
The high expectations placed on the composer after the overwhelming success of Salieri's first French opera Les Danaïdes (1784) were not met by contemporary critics.
Beaumarchais said about the work to Salieri: "A really beautiful work, but a little too dark for Paris."
The French conductor Christophe Rousset and the Ensemble Talens Lyriques held the first (concert) revival of Les Horaces in Paris and Vienna in 2016 . Excerpts from the work were already heard in 2010 at the "Walldorfer Musiktage" festival with soprano Caroline Melzer, tenor Thomas Ströckens and the Karlsruhe Barockorchester under the direction of Timo Jouko Herrmann .
Web links
- Libretto (French), Fontainebleau 1786. Digitized in the Internet Archive
Individual evidence
- ↑ Program Walldorfer Musiktage 2010, City of Walldorf, September 2010.