Autograph musical quotation signed ("M. Massenet") from Thaïs
3 measures of a single melodic line marked "Lento" at head and identified in the composer's autograph as "Thais" (acte 2) Méditation." Inscribed "In respecteuse hommage M. Massenet" and dated "Paris Juin 1903." Notated in black ink on a postal card with printed attribution "L. Sandron - Palermo N. 155" to left margin of recto, with a reproduction bust-length photograph of Massenet and printed identification "Massenet (1942)" below portrait.
Thaïs, a comédie lyrique in three acts and seven scenes set to a libretto by Louis Gallet after the novel of the same title by Anatole France (1890), was first performed at the Paris Opera on 16 March 1894 with Sibyl Sanderson in the title role.
[The opera] "was an important departure from normal practice in using a prose libretto, with rhyme and metre replaced by what Gallet, the librettist, termed ‘poésie mélique’, relying on assonance and evocative language to give the text poetic resonance." Annegret Fauser, Patrick Gillis, and Hugh Macdonald in Grove Music Online
"Massenet’s musical painting reaches full maturity in Thaïs ... By the time the finale is reached, there is a web of interconnected motifs, chaste and erotic, that starts to match through the music the irony at the heart of France’s novel, albeit in gentler, more compassionate form." Rodney Milnes in Grove Music Online.
Item #39449
Price: $600.00 other currencies