La chartreuse de Parme (opera)

La Chartreuse de Parme is a four-act opera in eleven tableaux by Henri Sauguet with a French libretto by Armand Lunel after the 1839 novel of the same name by Stendhal. The composer's third opera, and his first on a serious subject, it was first performed at the Paris Opera in 1939 but has not entered the repertoire.

Armand Lunel was a teacher of philosophy in a lycée in Monaco who also carved out a career as a writer. As well as novels, he also wrote operatic libretti. In 1923 he had written the libretto of Les Malheurs d'Orphée for his friend Darius Milhaud, followed by Esther de Carpentras. Sauguet was introduced to Lunel by Milhaud at the time of the premiere of Les Malheurs d'Orphée in Paris and met him again in 1927 during the preparations for Sauguet's ballet La Chatte for the Ballets Russes.

The composition of La Chartreuse de Parme took place during a long and extensive exchange of letters between composer and librettist. The score was composed during the period 1927 to 1937 during which time Sauguet was developing both as a person and musician.

Lunel was keen to focus on all aspects of Stendhal's novel: historical, political, sentimental, but the final text concentrates on the latter, for which Sauguet's music effected a progressive ascension towards a more pure and rarefied love. The libretto starts when Fabrice, refusing military heroics, has made a clandestine return to his mother and aunt Gina near the Swiss-Italian frontier, thus first seeing Clélia. All chapters of Book I: the arrival of Napoleon and his followers in Lombardy, Fabrice's military exploits and Waterloo; are left out.

The opera is divided into eleven :

Once the vocal score was complete in the autumn of 1937, Hélène de Wendel invited the composer to play through some extracts after a dinner where the guests included Julien Cain of the Bibliothèque nationale and the Institut and Jacques Rouché, general administrator of the Paris Opera. Impressed, Rouché asked Sauguet to present the score to him, which he did singing all parts; before he had finished Rouché accepted to produce the work at the Opéra. Rehearsals were scheduled to start at the very beginning of 1939.

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