La reine de Saba
| La reine de Saba | |
|---|---|
| Opera by Charles Gounod | |
Act I, scene 2 in the premiere, design by Édouard Desplechin
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| Description | grand opera |
| Translation | The Queen of Sheba |
| Librettist | |
| Based on |
Le voyage en Orient by Gérard de Nerval |
| Premiere | 28 February 1862 Salle Le Peletier, Paris |
La reine de Saba (The Queen of Sheba) is a grand opera in four or five acts by Charles Gounod to a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré inspired by Gérard de Nerval's Le voyage en Orient. It was premiered at the Salle Le Peletier by the Paris Opera on February 28, 1862. The magnificent, first production was directed by Eugène Cormon, with costumes designed by Alfred Albert and Paul Lormier, and scenery by Édouard Desplechin (Act I), Charles-Antoine Cambon and Joseph Thierry (Acts II and IV, scene 2), Hugues Martin (Act III), and Joseph Nolau and Auguste-Alfred Rubé (Act IV, scene 1).
An English reworking of the libretto by Henry Farnie "interwoven [with] certain legends and traditions of freemasonry" was titled Irene. It transposed the action to Istanbul in the time of Suleyman the Magnificent and the building of the Great Mosque and used almost all of Gounod's music.
The big song from La reine de Saba is the tenor aria 'Inspirez-moi, race divine!', in which the hero invokes the example of the sons of Tubal-Cain (son of Lamech and Zillah, the founder of metalworking) as the molten metal flows into its mould. In its English version 'How vain and weak a thing is man... Lend me your aid, O race divine', this became a war-horse of the concert repertoire, surviving into the 20th century in the recordings of Edward Lloyd and Walter Widdop. It was also recorded by Enrico Caruso, in one of whose versions the English text was re-translated back into French with the exceptionable formula: 'Prête-moi ton aide'.
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