Lot n° 328
Estimation :
1000 - 1500
EUR
Result without fees
Result
: 1 600EUR
[GOUNOD Charles]. SAND George (1804-1876). - Lot 328
[GOUNOD Charles]. SAND George (1804-1876).
2 L.A.S. "George Sand" and "G. S.", Nohant 1851-1852, to Charles
GOUNOD; 2,3, and 4 pages in-8 in blue ink.
Interesting correspondence about a stage music for Sand's play,
La Baronnie de Muhldorf¸ and a project for a Berrichon comic opera.
[On this music, see Condé, p. 482. Sand's play was afterwards renamed Nello, and then Maître Favilla, under which title it was first performed at the Odéon on 15 September 1855]. [Nohant, 30 October 1851]. "My dear child, it is superb, nothing but an F sharp, a D flat placed at the right moment, and one feels the touch of a master, and, with almost nothing, one feels the delirium of my character coming. And it is beautiful, it is sad, it is great. It's simple as anything, and yet it looks like nothing. And yet it could still be
Haendel. Thank you, thank you a thousand times, I am enchanted, enthusiastic, and I have it in my head, in my ears, as if I were hearing it with the instruments. [...] You must really have had some difficulty in imagining this scene on paper, and you have done a miracle, and so quickly! I thank you again and again. [I will go to Paris from the 15th to the 20th, I think, and I will tell you my comic opera script, or more or less, and I think I will be able to do it as soon as you want. We will talk about this great affair soon...
Nohant, 10 January [1852]. "Thank you, dear master, for your kind words in the New Year. I need my friends to save me, for I am so sick in body and soul that I feel I am hanging on by a thread. I am still working, night and day, like a machine that cannot stop until it finishes existing. When will we do an opera? This summer, I hope. At present, I am still in a new play. I'm doing more plays than they want me to do. They say it is too difficult and that the public prefers something else, Bouchardy's dramas and obscene vaudevilles. So I have Nello and another great play that has been done for six months on my hands. Marielle, another play that we didn't want to perform, was lost in the
Revue de Paris. I thought I had earned enough to live on for a year, but I didn't earn enough for three months. So I'm doing another one of a different kind to see if I can earn my summer.
If not, I'll be in a lot of trouble, because I've always lived from day to day, and I've got loads that eat me up. I will die without having worked a day for myself. What is this in the midst of so many other things that happen to so many other better Christians than me? It's not worth talking about it, but it's to tell you that I thought I was ready to give myself entirely to our project, and that I am not. But it can't take more than three months (for I have to write a volume of my memoirs [History of my life], and that's a lot of work). In three months it will be spring. If I'm not out of commission by then, I'll get to work. I don't want to get you started before I'm done. Unless you want me to do a lot more. But I want the background to come out clean. If it takes me six weeks to do that, it will be the end of the world. So let's hope you can come this summer and get your musical fix. Perhaps, thanks to you, the music I have been deprived of for so many years will keep me going for some time to come. She mocks Théophile Gautier's judgement on
Gounod: " Decidedly this great man does not like us. He is like Janin who only pays you compliments in order to have the right to make you suffer. [...]
I would have liked to hear Lulli dressed up by you [arrangement of an aria by Lulli for
Pauline Viardot]. Ah! I would love to have an hour of your time at my disposal to play me a guitar-Watteau aria in that style. And she quotes a duet by
Lulli: " Vivre sans amour, C'est mourir de tristesse ", adding: " It is a delicious memory of childhood ". Finally, she evokes Pauline Viardot's stay in Scotland...
G. Sand, Correspondence, t. X, nos. 5105 and 5193 and t. XV, n° S656.
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