Paul DUKAS (1865-1935)

Lot 7
Go to lot
Estimation :
1200 - 1500 EUR
Paul DUKAS (1865-1935)
Autograph manuscript signed, Édouard Lalo, [1923]; 9 pages in-fol. Beautiful study on the music of Édouard LALO, for a special issue of La Revue Musicale devoted to the composer (March 1, 1923). The manuscript, in black ink on large sheets of paper filled with small handwriting, has numerous erasures and corrections. Dukas quotes a word by Degas that "could serve as an epigraph to a biography of Édouard Lalo. Like César Franck, and even Saint-Saëns, Lalo knew in his youth all the sweetness of an era that was particularly rebellious to talents free from imitation of recognized models. And these models were then Meyerbeer, Halévy, Donizetti, Auber and Adolphe Adam! They represented the great art and almost all music. Not that real music was absolutely ignored or totally misunderstood. One knew that there were symphonies. One was vaguely aware of the existence of chamber music. And one respected this learned genre. One revered it with confidence. But its worship was left to the specialists, to the hardened amateurs, to the subscribers of the Conservatoire. These formed a group of so-called initiates, too few in number to impose a new renown, and moreover closed on principle to all novelty, and convinced that there was no good music except from the dead who had taken the secret to the grave. Berlioz, however, had from then on, at intervals, upset these ideas and shaken this torpor. But his dazzling manifestations remained an isolated phenomenon. And although he had created warm supporters, although he had aroused violent enthusiasms, his appearances quickly fell into silence, and almost everyone considered him a half-crazed eccentric. Such was more or less the state of the musical world when, around 1840, Édouard Lalo came from Lille to Paris to become a composer. Dukas traces Lalo's obscure beginnings, then his attraction to dramatic music and the composition of Fiesque, which failed the government competition. It is only after the war of 1870 that Lalo will know success, with the Symphonie espagnole and the cello concerto. The ballet of Namouna having made scandal and quickly withdrawn from the poster, Lalo finally succeeds in making play his opera Le Roi d'Ys, with a triumphant success. But he was soon struck by illness. Dukas evokes Lalo's "entirely classical" training, the influence of Berlioz, and underlines "the mastery of the quartet, of which Lalo possessed all the resources, and which he made sound in a very personal way by the use of the particular timbre of this string, the accent of this or that stroke of the bow, which Berlioz nor anyone else had hardly done before him. He is also the first to have imagined, through the use of appropriate nuances, to arrange the orchestra on different planes in certain cases. And in the same way that he individualized the groups, he preserved as much as possible the specific timbre of each instrument, surrounding it with the sounds best suited to highlight it. This is the most varied mode of instrumentation, the most fertile in unexpected combinations, and to which we return today. All the work of Lalo remains an incomparable model"... Etc.
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue