Pygmalion : scène lyrique
Auteur(s)
- Jacqueline Waeber
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Horace Coignet
Jean-Jacques ROUSSEAU, Horace COIGNET, Pygmalion : scène lyrique, ed. crit. by Jacqueline WAEBER, 1997.
ISBN : 2-88433-010-0Résumé
The lyrical scene of Pygmalion, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is the first attempt at a stage genre bringing together music and spoken text, Rousseau’s initial intention being to provide an alternative to the much-decried French singing. Both in France and in other European countries, Pygmalion achieved impressive success until the first decade of the 19th century.
Wrongly presented during Rousseau’s lifetime as a work written entirely by him, Pygmalion was in fact the result of a collaboration between Rousseau, who authored the text, and Horace Coignet, who composed the music.
Until today, researchers had unanimously believed the original edition of the music (around 1770-1771) to have been lost forever. In 1995, the musicologist Jacqueline Waeber discovered a copy of this score at the Bibliothèque Municipale Livrée Ceccano d'Avignon. This new source, combined with the manuscripts that were already known about (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, collection of the Marquis de Girardin, Comédie-française) enabled the first critical edition of the music to be published. Rousseau’s text also formed the subject of a critical edition based on the numerous sources printed between 1770 and 1775, and on Rousseau’s handwritten copy, the special features of which (for instance, the crosses signalling the positions of the musical parts) were painstakingly copied out.
This new edition seeks to recreate Rousseau’s idea: the text and the music are represented in such a way as to make their organic relationship immediately apparent.
