GOUNOD Charles (1818 - 1893) 2 L.A.S., London,... - Lot 77 - Aguttes

Lot 77
Go to lot
Estimation :
500 - 700 EUR
Result with fees
Result : 390EUR
GOUNOD Charles (1818 - 1893) 2 L.A.S., London,... - Lot 77 - Aguttes
GOUNOD Charles (1818 - 1893) 2 L.A.S., London, Tavistock House November 15 and December 12, 1872, to Ernest LEGOUVÉ; 6 and 4 pages in-8. Long intimate letters about his exile in London and his family situation, and their collaboration for Les Deux Reines. [Gounod wrote the incidental music for Legouvé's play, to be premiered on November 27, 1872]. November 15. He appeals to the memories of his friend, "to the knowledge that you have of my life, of my nature, of the struggles sustained against myself, in spite of the falls which have humiliated my weakness and sometimes obscured my path. [...] You cannot believe that I flee from France, and even less, that I deny it! [...] What am I running away from? It is an environment from which I feel and know that trust has disappeared. [...] I cannot live without it: the home, in my eyes, must not have a shadow in this respect: to be separated by a perpetual cloud, it is not to live, it is to suffocate"... He refuses Legouvé's hospitality: "I would not do it for anything in the world: it would be to declare openly that I am separated from my wife, and to do to your hospitality, so worthy and so dear, the insult of a sort of complicity and sanction. Now, I am not separated from my wife, and I do not want to be. I respect my wife, and I will not do to the name she received from her family nor to the one she got from me the sorrow and the scandal of escaping in this way from the sorrows which can cross my life and make it very painful. No: when I return to Paris, it will be to come back home, to my wife and children, in such conditions that I can breathe freely the air in which I will live, and not have, at every moment, without respite or truce, the heart oppressed, crushed, fl étri by the ostracism of the beings that I love and that love me, and by the humiliation of being reduced to this alternative of seeing them either dismissed or welcomed otherwise than they deserve to be welcomed [...] My career, my works, my reason, my health, are at the price of peace and concord"... Then he talks about his music for Les Deux Reines, and in particular about the chorus of the Danes and the chorus of the Pilgrims... December 12. After having evoked his deplorable state of health, he rejoices in the success of Les Deux Reines: "As for my personal part, you know that I never have much confidence in the musical execution of my works; I feel them too keenly, and, it seems to me, too ardently, not to be in a perpetual anxiety about the insufficiency of the implementation; and I add that my presence and my personal efforts have never done anything. [...] After all, I am sure that everything possible was done in Italy for my music, and I am even convinced that my absence simplified things that my presence would have initiated. My only regret is not to have heard your work: mine I heard in this small corner of the brain where the auditions are incomparable"...
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue