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Saint-Saëns and Sophocles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2020

Steven Huebner Open the ORCID record for Steven Huebner [Opens in a new window]
Steven Huebner*
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McGill University
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steven.huebner@mcgill.ca
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Abstract

Saint-Saëns's incidental music for Sophocles’ Antigone (Comédie-Française, 1893, trans. Meurice and Vacquerie) gives witness both to his engagement with culture classique and an experimental orientation in the context of fin-de-siècle music theatre. This essay situates Saint-Saëns's highly idiosyncratic score within the frame of late nineteenth-century research into ancient Greek music by François-Auguste Gevaert and Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray. It documents how Saint-Saëns aimed to participate in the creation of an authentic experience of ancient Greek theatre, one enhanced by the initiative of the Comédie-Française to stage its production at the open air Théâtre d'Orange in southern France. The article also shows the limitations of authenticity resulting from the nature of the translation as well as from Saint-Saëns's own compositional instincts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , December 2021 , pp. 499 - 519
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 For biographical context see Studd, Stephen, Saint-Saëns: A Critical Biography (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999): 192–7Google Scholar, and Macdonald, Hugh, Saint-Saëns and the Stage: Operas, Plays, Pageants, a Ballet and a Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019): 243–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 These and other productions of Greek drama at the end of the nineteenth century are discussed in Humbert-Mougin, Sylvie, Dionysos revisité: les tragiques grecs en France de Leconte de Lisle à Claudel (Paris: Belin, 2003): 176–88Google Scholar.

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19 Gevaert, Histoire et théorie, I, 31.

20 Gevaert, Histoire et théorie, I, 140.

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29 Humbert-Mougin, Dionysos revisité, 130.

30 Humbert-Mougin, Dionysos revisité, 117–46.

31 Jacques Normand, ‘Les Fêtes Félibréennes: au théâtre d'Orange’, Le Gaulois, 15 August 1894.

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33 Emile Berr, ‘La Revanche de Sophocle’, Le Figaro, 14 August 1894.