Roman(ce) en scène - Paris 8 Study Day

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, romance was omnipresent in operas and comic operas, in collections and periodicals of vocal music and in novels: the worlds of the stage and the musical and literary salon rubbed shoulders and sometimes interchanged through a romance or the adaptation of a novel into an opera, melodrama or pantomime.

To the mixture of spoken dialogues and song in the comic opera answers that of poetry and prose in the novel, "mixture which pleases, rests, and can become a fertile source of beauties" according to the novelist and librettist Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (Essai sur la pastorale, p. 21).

Commissioned by the author or of their own accord, composers take over the texts of the romances to set them to music, making the literary work a novel to be read and sung, a "novel in romances" according to the designation of musicologist Manuel Couvreur.

Le 2 décembre 1819 paraît dans Le Camp- volant l’annonce d’une nouvelle collection complète des romances d’Estelle de Florian mises en musique par Joseph-Bernard Woets : suggestion est faite à cette occasion d’alterner lecture du roman et interprétation des romances pour « entrer ainsi dans la véritable intention de l’auteur ». Le roman devient alors l’équivalent de la représentation scénique dans le cadre plus restreint et intimiste d’un salon. Les modalités d’une telle restitution demandent cependant à être définies et constituent l’enjeu de ces journées d’étude.

La réflexion proposée repose sur les questions suivantes :

• What place does romance have in the stage works of the second half of the eighteenth century?
• What place is reserved for the texts of the original romances in the stage adaptations of the novels? Are the romances retained or are they rewritten like the rest of the libretto?
• What elements of musical interpretation and stage gestures can be extracted from the literary work, on the one hand, and from the complete musical settings on the other?
• Reflections and musicological debates will be based on two workshops that will explore the sound possibilities of the pianoforte and the transmission of the characters' emotions through stage performance - an aspect that is all the more crucial since a complete reading of the novels is often outside an acceptable time frame according to current standards of artistic performance.

Program 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm MERCREDI 30 NOVEMBRE 2022 :

• 11h30 SanDrine DiVanaC’h (Sorbonne Université, IReMus) La Romance chez Hervé : Estelle et Némorin, une étude comparative. Estelle et NémorinThis work, with music by Hervé and libretto by Jallais, was intended as a caricature of the novel by Claris de Florian. This work seems to be the only one in which Hervé, adept at parody, has preserved substantial textual passages in an identical manner. In the first part of his career as a composer, the creator of the Favori de la favorite - Hervé, who was also a librettist, tried to preserve the music of his homologues and not the text; on the contrary, he wrote an entirely new one. The score of this comic opera by Hervé is, moreover, the one that contains the most Romances, probably in order to pastiche the style of M. de Florian. The dichotomy of Hervé's musical writing in Estelle et Némorin - facetious as in his habits as much as wise here - seems to have disturbed the public, as the press of the time attests, generating its failure. The comparative study of Hervé's Romances within this composition with others - extracted from operettas or songs like the Temps des roses - will make it possible to formulate several hypotheses, to determine if Hervé composes differently according to the author of the text; if the writing of this artist proves to be different from the other Romances composed previously; if there are common points or dis- semblances with those of the xixth century, because the genre knew evolutions since the time of Florian; if the choices of Hervé ensue from a logic of preserving such or such text of this author or if that proceeds of a form of chance.
• 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm luCa MontebuGnoli (pianiste et pianofortiste) Présentation et atelier pratique : L’univers sonore du salon et de la romance. Discovery of the sound possibilities of the Érard square piano (1806) of the association La Nouvelle Athènes in the form of a workshop on the interpretation of romances, open to students (with prior registration) and led by Luca Montebugnoli, professor of fortepiano and chamber music at the CRR of Paris and the CRD of Bobigny
• 6 PM Closing musical moment par rebeCa lopez barrera (soprano) Présentation et interprétation de plusieurs romances. Quentin Delépine (comédien & metteur en scène) Présentation et atelier pratique : Mettre en scène la romance dans le roman. During this workshop we will discuss the different means available for staging a work while respecting the constraint of being both intelli- gible and sensitive. In this short time, we will quickly identify the means available (human and material), distribute the roles and imagine several ideas for staging. The next step will be to produce several short forms in stage writing, to perform them, and then to collectively measure their effectiveness, their relevance and the areas for improvement.
• 6 PM Reading-concert of an extract from the novel byEstelle de Florian Daphne Corregan (soprano) and Clotilde Verwaerde (pianoforte)

• 10 AM THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2022 Julien GarDe (Université Jean-Jaurès de Toulouse, LLA CREATIS) La romance cachée dans l’œuvre lyrique d’Edelmann Edelmann's lyrical work is intriguing because of the diversity of the genres represented. From the tender pastoral to the serious lyric scene, via the academic ballet, Edelmann crosses genres and attempts, after the resounding successes of Grétry and Gluck, to propose a hybrid model, capable of bringing together the dramatic energy of Gluckist drama and the sensitive grace of comic opera. The work on the romance is part of this artistic reflection. Never named as such, the romance nevertheless integrates Edelmann's drama in a search for a tender and touching psychological painting. In the light of the separate romances that the composer published in periodicals, but also in comparison with the cantabile who just refuse the romance, we propose to observe those arias that emphasize the virtuous qualities of female heroines through reference to the musical language of romance.
• 10h45 ClotilDe VerwaerDe (Université Paris 8, Musidanse) L’interprétation musicale dans le roman en romances Répertoire emblématique de la musique vocale française autour de 1800, la romance a la particularité d’unir les univers littéraire, scénique et musical : de nombreux romans publiés entre 1780 et 1820 présentent un mélange de prose et de vers. Ces poèmes sont au centre de scènes musicales pour lesquelles leurs auteurs fournissent souvent une description détaillée de la prestation et du ressenti des person- nages. Si certains compositeurs puisent de façon sélective des textes à mettre en musique dans ce corpus, d’autres abordent l’œuvre littéraire de façon plus complète en lui consacrant un recueil entier, traitant parfois l’intégralité des pièces en vers. Intégrée à une restitution orale du récit, l’intervention du chant devient un mode de scénarisation. L’analyse de différentes mises en musique de cette période révèle la façon dont le compositeur prend en compte la trame narrative et les choix interpré- tatifs qui peuvent en découler.