DThe whole thing was just a half joke at the beginning,” said Sébastien Troester, having a great time on the phone. The person responsible for publishing the Palazzotto Bru Zane, the French romantic music center in Venice, was once caught A colleague teased that he always dealt with obscure composers and works-but why not, for example, deal with Jacques Offenbach and a group of people-handles like “La vie parisienne”? “I believe his words,” Tross Te continued, “and went on a two-year treasure hunt. “
Dive into the archives with almost no maps-the abyssal area of the French National Library-found a treasure sunken in the mud of history: the handwritten personal voice of the premiere of “Life in Paris” on October 31, 1866, which left the earliest The version of the work is like a reprint; for the first four acts, the score of the orchestra (which was in charge of the performance at the time), which contains all the vocal lines including the text and the synthesis of the orchestral part; plus the manuscript with the personal number and paragraphs during the trial period .
Together with the orchestral scores preserved in New York from the composer, these discoveries can reconstruct the work, as Offenbach and his screenwriters imagined, and to a large extent completed, but never heard of or seen . Because during the rehearsal at the Theatre Royal in Paris—it was a spoken theater at the time and there was no music stage—the voices of some participants were overly tense, and there may have been fierce interventions in September and October 1866. In 1867, the composer reduced his work from five acts to four, and revised it again in 1873.
The original version was exhibited at the Rouen Art Theater on November 7th, and the team of Palazzetto Bru Zane tried to call it the “ideal version.” “What if those two acts had never been played [die Aufzüge vier und fünf] Will it be the best in this series of constantly revised pages? “Trost and his three colleagues asked in the preface of the new version. What if this version is ideal not only in terms of the creative process of the work, but also in terms of stage effects—just in terms of artistic quality. ?
“Sauerkraut with ham and sausage/Always give it to me, always thirsty”
Compared with the 1873 version, the loss of broadcasting across the country is affordable. Here and there, an additional instrument detail is missing, such as the cornet; the introductory choir and the post-composing 75-second aria are also missing. On the other hand, you won: an expanded version of the famous work (even as famous as moto-perpetuo-rondeau “Je suis Brésilien, j’ai de l’or”, which is a sparkling, chattering aria); complete Alternative versions of the trio (such as the trio “Ce que c’est Pourtant que la vie”, Offenbach’s new setting becomes more diverse); completely unknown numbers (including the aria “C’est ainsi, moi, que je voudrais mourir” “Since the publisher of Offenbach announced a separate version, musicologists like Mauritius have been looking for it, but have never published it); brand new finals (acts 2 and 3), even almost brand new Behind the scenes: the fourth act, which was completely revised shortly before the world premiere!
