La colombe
| La Colombe | |
|---|---|
| Opera by Charles Gounod | |
The composer in 1859, at the premiere of Faust
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| Description | opéra comique |
| Translation | The Dove |
| Librettist | |
| Based on |
Le Faucon by Jean de la Fontaine |
| Premiere | 3 August 1860 (one-act version) Baden-Baden |
La Colombe (The Dove) is an opéra comique in two acts by Charles Gounod with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré based on the poem Le Faucon by Jean de la Fontaine. It premiered in a one-act version at the Theater der Stadt in Baden-Baden on 3 August 1860, where it was well received and performed four times. It was revived on 7 June 1866 by the Opéra-Comique at the Salle Favart in Paris in an expanded two-act version with additional music by Gounod.
Gounod's previous opera, Philémon et Baucis, also with a text by Barbier and Carré based on a story by La Fontaine, had originally been commissioned for the summer season of 1859 by Édouard Bénazet, the director of the theatre and casino at Baden-Baden. When the political situation between France and Germany deteriorated in June, Gounod's opera was preemptively withdrawn to avoid potential negative reaction from German audiences, and it ended up being premiered in an expanded form in February by Léon Carvalho at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris. To compensate Bénazet for his loss, Gounod quickly composed La colombe during a two-week period for the following summer. (The score is dedicated to Bénazet.) Although it received an ovation in Baden-Baden, it did not do particularly well in its expanded version in the 1866 revival at the Opéra-Comique, receiving a total of only 29 performances. It was presented in Brussels on 5 December 1867, in in Swedish on 11 February 1868, at the Crystal Palace in London on 20 September 1870 (as The Pet Dove in an English translation by H. B. Farnie), in Copenhagen in Danish on 27 April 1873 and Prague in Czech on 22 September 1873. It was presented in Bologna in Italian and again in Paris in French in 1912. Diaghilev presented it on 1 January 1923 in Monte Carlo, with recitatives composed by the 24-year-old Francis Poulenc replacing the spoken dialogue.
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