Charles Gounod | Autograph manuscript full score of the incidental music "Le Songe d'Auguste", 1853, UNPUBLISHED

Charles Gounod.

Autograph manuscript score full score of the incidental music to Alfred de Musset's Le songe d'Auguste, CG 27, NOT LOCATED OR DESCRIBED IN THE 2009 CATALOGUE OF WORKS

comprising two choruses, ("Guerriers! Guerriers!" and "Oui, César! il existe un monde si sublime"), the second also with soloists, notated in dark brown ink on a single system of between 17 and 21 staves per page, autograph title-leaf inscribed and signed on the recto ("Le Songe d'Auguste. / Paroles de M^r A. de Musset. / Musique de Ch. Gounod. / (Partition d'Orchestre.) / Ch. Gounod / Paris; Mars 1853. / (21 feuilles.)"), scored for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, four horns, cornets, trumpets, trombones, kettle-drum, cymbals, bass drum, triangle, strings and SSTTBB, a number of autograph deletions, corrections and erasures, one page containing a revision to its last bar on a strip of manuscript paper affixed to that page

80 pages, folio (35 x 26.5cm), plus title-page, five blank pages and one blank half leaf, 26-stave paper, a few later entries in pencil and red crayon, modern blue half morocco, gilt lettering to spine ("Gounod Le Songe d'Auguste"), Paris, March 1853, pinholes, two small tears to title-leaf, light browning

A GOUNOD DISCOVERY.

Gounod's score, which sets two choruses of Alfred de Musset's poem Le songe d'Auguste, occupied the composer for one hectic week at the end of March/beginning of April 1853, but on account of belated concerns of the instigator of the project, the Minister of Public Instruction Hippolyte Fortoul, regarding the political appropriateness of one of the dialogues between Octavia and Livia, the work was quietly shelved and never performed.

The emergence of the present - hitherto unpublished - autograph allows us for the first time to assess Gounod's musical contribution to this project, known otherwise only from a 15-page fragment of part of the opening number, preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (MS 22700). This latter manuscript, commencing at the entry of the voices, ("Guerriers! Guerriers!"), would appear to be an earlier, rejected fragment, differing in many points of orchestration from the present score. The second number of the complete score, an exquisite, multi-sectional and ravishingly-scored 200-bar piece, in which the muses address the sleeping emperor Augustus, would appear to be wholly unknown.

LITERATURE:

Gérard Condé, Charles Gounod (2009), pp.490 and 976 (CG 27; provenance given as 'Drouot 1966')