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Complete Libretti of Giacomo Meyerbeer, in the Original and in Translation, in Five Volumes, The (Hardcover, Unabridged edition)
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Complete Libretti of Giacomo Meyerbeer, in the Original and in Translation, in Five Volumes, The (Hardcover, Unabridged edition)
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Giacomo Meyerbeer, one of the most important and influential opera
composers of the nineteenth century, enjoyed a fame during his
lifetime hardly rivalled by any of his contemporaries. This ten
volume set provides in one collection all the operatic texts set by
Meyerbeer in his career. The texts offer the most complete versions
available. Each libretto is translated into modern English by
Richard Arsenty; and each work is introduced by Robert Letellier.
In this comprehensive edition of Meyerbeer's libretti, the original
text and its translation are placed on facing pages for ease of
use. The eleventh volume presents the fourth of Meyerbeer's grands
operas, and his final work. By 1860 long-imposed labor had started
to tell upon the composer's health: he knew that he must
concentrate on the "navigator project" which he had started twenty
years earlier if he intended to finish it. Meyerbeer died on 2 May
1864, the day after the completion of the copying of the full score
of this his last opera, Vasco da Gama. Minna Meyerbeer and
Cesar-Victor Perrin, the director of the Opera, entrusted the
editing of a performing edition to the famous Belgian musicologist
Francois-Joseph Fetis, while the libretto was revised by
Melesville. The original title of L'Africaine was restored out of
deference to public expectation. Much of the music and action was
suppressed, in spite of the strain this inflicted on the internal
logic of the story.While L'Africaine is not lacking in the grandeur
of statement and stirring climaxes for which the composer was so
famous, there is a new intimacy, a new intensity of melancholic
lyricism. Like its famous predecessors, it is basically an
historical work, derived from the period of sixteenth-century
Renaissance. The account of Vasco da Gama's voyage of discovery
around the Cape of Good Hope and conquest of Calicut (1497-98) is
subjected to a fictional treatment that raises many interesting
issues. The framework is historical, but most of the characters and
course of action are not; in fact the end of the opera, in the
suicide of the heroine, suddenly leaves the terra firma of reality,
and transports us into the mystical realms of the spirit. It is
this mixture of modes that is central to the dramaturgy of
L'Africaine, a confusion of history and fairytale, ancient
certainties and challenging discoveries, in the creation of a new
mythology. There is also originality in formal developments, with
the great tenor scene in act 4 providing a new malleability in
handling the constraints of shape and genre: recitative, arioso and
cabaletta have a fluent integration in trying to explore the text
more pointedly. L'Africaine was produced on 28 April 1865, a great
posthumous tribute to its famous creators. The Ship Scene, the
exotic Indian act, and the Scene of the Manchineel Tree exerted a
fascination on audiences, and elicited new praise. The work full of
melodic beauty and rapturous lyricism, began a triumphal progress
through the world, beginning with the big stages of London and
Berlin.
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