The prose libretto

Abstract

Before returning to Paris in 1874 after his eventful four-year stay in England, Gounod embarked on a comic opera based on Molière's George Dandin. Recuperating in St Leonard's-on-Sea from a ‘cerebral attack’ he wrote a lengthy Preface, dated 10–11 April 1874, from which the following is drawn: The infinite variety of stress, in prose, offers the musician quite new horizons which will save him from monotony and uniformity. Independence and freedom of pace will then come to terms with observance of the higher laws that govern periodic pulse and the thousand nuances of prosody. Every syllable will then have its own quantity, its own precise weight in truth of expression and accuracy of language. Longs and shorts will not have to make those cruel concessions, those barbarous sacrifices of which composers and singers, it must be admitted, take so little notice. What inexhaustible mines of variety there will be in sung or declaimed phrases, in the duration and intensity of stress, in the proportion and extension of musical periods, extensions which will no longer depend on continual reiteration and repetition but on logical progression and the growth of the germinal idea on which the piece is based […]

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