Thomas Corneille

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Thomas Corneille

Thomas Corneille (born August 20, 1625 in Rouen , † December 8, 1709 ) was a French man of letters who made a name for himself mainly as a playwright. He was the 19 years younger brother of Pierre Corneille and is practically only known in this capacity today, although he himself was quite successful and very respected during his lifetime.

Thomas Corneille, like his father and brother, studied law and was admitted to the Parlement of Rouen in 1649 . A year later he married a sister of his brother's wife and otherwise remained very closely connected to him, who had also been his guardian after his father's death (1639). For a long time under the care of his brother, he wrote around 40 largely successful comedies, tragedies and opera librettos.

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Inspired by Calderón and Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla , he first wrote comedies: Les Engagements du hasard (1647), Le Feint astrologue (1648), Don Bertrand de Cigarral (1650). The latter was regularly on the program of the Molières troupe from 1659 to 1661 and was still applauded by the public in 1685.

From 1653, after his brother had withdrawn from the theater because of the complete failure of his tragedy Pertharite and did not write any plays for a few years, Thomas turned more to tragedy. First he wrote the tragic comedy Les illustres ennemis (1654), which was well received. A “relapse” into comedy in 1655, Le Geôlier de soi-même, was well received and was still played in the 18th century under the title Jodelet Prince .

Corneille's first tragedy, Timocrate ( 1656 ), became one of the greatest successes of the time. It was premiered in the presence of the king, to whom the author was introduced on the occasion, and played 80 times in a row within six months.

In the next few years Corneille brought out other tragedies: 1657 Bérénice , 1658 La Mort de l'empereur Commode , 1659 Darius .

In the meantime he had made contact with the finance minister and great patron Nicolas Fouquet , with whom he got his brother Pierre to try a return as a playwright in 1659. Of the three subjects that Fouquet suggested to him for editing, Pierre chose the Oedipus subject and wrote the tragedy Oedipe . From the other two, Thomas made the tragedies Camma and Stilicon (1660 and 1661). He then wrote Pyrrhus, Roi d'Épire (late 1661), Maximian (1662), Persée et Démétrius (1662).

In 1662, after the Corneilles had found the Duke of Guise to be a patron instead of Fouquet, who had been convicted of alleged abuse of office in 1661, they moved their residence together from Rouen to Paris, where they and their families often even, as before in their hometown , lived under one roof.

In the following years Thomas wrote Antiochus (1666), Laodice (1668) and Le Baron d'Albikrac (1668); In 1669 he wrote the comedy Le Galant doublé and at the end of the year the tragedy La Mort d'Hannibal, then La Comtesse d'Orgueil. The diarrhea of ​​the latter two pieces signaled a change in the audience's taste: the style of the Corneilles (Pierre had begun to imitate the more successful Thomas in style) was no longer in demand.

Thomas was now inspired by Jean Racine , who had set the tone in Paris since his great success with Andromaque (1667). So he wrote in 1672 in the mythological tragedy Ariane, which Voltaire later judged to be his best. The tragedies Théodat (also 1672) and La Mort d'Achille (1673) then staged the stage with little success .

Molière's death in 1673 also meant that his acting company needed a new writer. In this context, at the request of Armande Béjart , Molière's widow , Thomas rewrote his prose piece Dom Juan ( Don Juan ) , which had been banned in 1665, in a version in verse that was at the same time less offensive. He then wrote the comedy Dom César d'Avalos (1674).

In 1675, in collaboration with his friend Jean Donneau de Visé , Circé , a tragedy with music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier was created , which exhausted all the possibilities of the stage machinery of the time : mountains grow, statues come to life, gardens become cliffs against which the sea crashes and similar. Circé was a great success, which Corneille was able to follow up with L'Inconnu in the autumn of the same year . Le Triomphe des Dames, however, failed the following year.

When Racine turned his back on the theater in 1677 after his play Phèdre had been badly received because of an intrigue, Thomas Corneille tried again with tragedies. Le Comte d'Essex was well received in 1678. In collaboration with his nephew Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle as a librettist and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully , Psyché was written in 1678 and the opera Bellérophon in 1679 (which was set to music again by Pierre Montan Berton and Grenier in 1773 ; already in 1671 Lully had with Molière, Pierre Corneille and Philippe Quinault used the same material in a ballet tragedy of the same title.)

From 1677 Thomas Corneille earned an additional income as editor and co-owner of the monthly salon newspaper Mercure Galant , which his friend Visé had founded in 1672. In 1679 he succeeded, again together with Visé, the successful piece La Devineresse.

After that, the stage success left him. Although he continued to write, but La Pierre philosophale (1681) was found to be "too mysterious"; L'Usurier (1685), Le Baron des Fondrières (1686), Médée (1693, with the music of Charpentier ), the tragedy Bradamante and the comedy Les Dames vengées (both 1695) remained without reverberation .

Corneille translated Ovid's Metamorphoses between 1669 and 1697 , and his translation and adaptation of Aesop's fables appeared around 1702 .

In 1685 he was unanimously elected to the Académie française in place of his brother, who had died the previous year , which entrusted him with a supplement to the Dictionnaire de l'Académie after the exclusion of Antoine Furetière . This, a Dictionnaire des termes des arts et des sciences , came out on September 11, 1694 in Paris. Before that, the Notes de M. Corneille sur les Remarques de M. de Vaugelas had appeared (2 vols., Paris 1687). In 1694 he had started work on an encyclopedic work, the Dictionnaire universel géographique et historique , which was to occupy him almost to the end of his life and which appeared in three volumes in Paris in 1708.

Since he was gradually going blind, Corneille had gallantly stopped working at the Mercure around 1700 and thus robbed himself of an important source of income. In 1701 he was elected a member of the Academy of Inscriptions . In 1705 the Académie française made him a veteran and released him from all obligations. Because of the expensive marriage of his daughter to Fontenelle and the low income for his Dictionnaire universel , Corneille ended up in poor circumstances. To escape his creditors, he retired to Les Andelys , where his wife had inherited a house. He died here on December 8, 1709.

Voltaire judged the playwright more positively than Meyer's Konversationslexikon : Le cadet n'avait pas la force et la profondeur du génie de l'aîné; mais il parlait sa langue avec plus de pureté, quoique avec plus de faiblesse. C'était un homme d'un très grand mérite, et d'une vaste littérature; et si vous exceptez Racine, auquel il ne faut comparer personne, il était le seul de son temps qui fût digne d'être le premier au-dessous de son frère. Translation: The younger did not have the strength and depth of the genius of his older brother; but his language, even if it was weaker, was more pure. He was a very meritorious man and possessed extensive literary knowledge; and apart from Racine, with whom no one can be compared, in his day he was the only one who was worthy of first place among his brother.


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