Lot n° 51
Estimation :
5000 - 6000
EUR
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Result
: 5 000EUR
Henri DUPARC. MANUSCRIT MUSICAL autograph signed, Lamento; 3 - Lot 51
Henri DUPARC. MANUSCRIT MUSICAL autograph signed, Lamento; 3 pages in-fol. (slight freckles).
Exceptional working manuscript of this very beautiful melody, dedicated to Gabriel Fauré.
Melody for song and piano on a poem by Théophile GAUTIER, taken from La Comédie de la Mort (1838) : " Connaissez-vous la blanche tombe " .
Duparc has carefully neatly neatened the first version of this melody, signed at the end "H.", in brown ink on a Lard-Esnault paper slip with 5 systems of 3 staves. Duparc ", with the dedication at the head: " To my dear master & friend G. Fauré HD. ", to which Gabriel Fauré added the word " élève " above the word " maître ". He then overloaded this manuscript with black pencil corrections, in the 5-bar singing part, but mainly in the piano part, deeply modified throughout, modifying chords and alterations, and rewriting no less than 8 bars.
Composed in 1883, Lamento was given its first performance at the Société Nationale de Musique on April 4, 1885 by Mrs Storm; it was published in the collection of eight Mélodies (no. 7) by Baudoux in 1894 (the manuscript used for the engraving was sold on October 16-17, 1991, no. 136).
From Théophile Gautier's poem, already set to music by Berlioz in his Nuits d'été, Duparc deletes three stanzas. Marked "Très-lent", in D minor at 4/4, this melody has 43 bars. The composer had a predilection for it: "I believe that I will never do better" (letter to his brother, January 1, 1886).
Let us quote Rémy Stricker's beautiful commentary: "The first bars of the piano already make us hear what will be all the four-foot verses which, in Gautier's text, sound like a knell, echoing the previous rhyme. It is not surprising that Duparc heard this immediately and invariably brought the motif back each time. The theme he imagined (melodic as well as harmonic) is indeed as relentless as a death bell. Its continuous returns and the construction in two almost identi
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