Gambara (short story)
Image from Gambara
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| Author | Honoré de Balzac |
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| Illustrator | Pierre Vidal |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Series | La Comédie humaine |
| Publisher | Hippolyte Souverain |
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Publication date
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1837 |
| Preceded by | Massimilla Doni |
| Followed by | Les Proscrits |
Gambara is a short story by Honoré de Balzac, first published in 1837 in the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris at the request of its editor Maurice Schlesinger.
Schlesinger commissioned the novella to promote Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera, Les Huguenots, which he was also publishing. At the time of its publication, Balzac was going every week to the Théâtre des Italiens, watching the shows from the box of the Guidoboni-Visconti, Italian friends of his who had first met him in the Scala in Milan and at the shows in Venice. The text was edited into a single volume with le Cabinet des Antiques, published by éditions Souverain in 1839, before being published by édition Furne in 1846 in the Études philosophiques, following Massimilla Doni, a short story also written by Balzac shortly after returning from Italy, highly impressed by what he called the "mother of the arts".
This work shows the formidable artistic intuition Balzac had already developed in le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, la Bourse, his habit of taking on the guise of a painter and of searching the soul and meandering thoughts of a sculptor in Sarrasine. With Gambara, Balzac addressed the musical world with the character of an instrument-maker who becomes a composer of mad music, as a substitute for himself as an author composing a work - he has Gambara say:
Misunderstood on its first publication, this short story has since been re-evaluated. Musicologists have demonstrated few errors in Balzac's research, which he passionately documented. He impressed George Sand with his ideas about opera during a conversation on music, and she advised him to write down what they had been discussing.
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