Déjanire

First edition of the vocal and piano score of the opera Déjanire by Camille Saint-Saëns.

A few pencil annotations in the margins of certain staves.

Our copy is presented in a 3/4 shagreen clamshell box, spine with five raised bands framed by gilt garlands and decorated with gilt fleurons, gilt lettering at foot of spine: "Inscribed by composer". Boards, endpapers and pastedowns in marbled paper. Spine of the box slightly faded.

Inscribed, dated and signed by Camille Saint-Saëns to music critic Edouard Beaudu.

Saint-Saëns presented this copy to Edouard Beaudu, a journalist writing for the Intransigeant, who would later publish a glowing review of <Déjanire: 

“Tragedy, in both lyric and dramatic art, is the highest and most noble form that theater can offer.

It can only arise from a robust, healthy, luminous mind, drawn to an ideal that allows no compromise, no weakness; it is not within everyone's reach. I do not believe that many contemporary musicians can approach this genre without risking heaviness of style, or incoherence.

Camille Saint-Saëns, who combines abundant lyricism with the richness of symphony, had no reason to fear making a mistake in choosing the story of Dejanira for his new opera - the character jealous of her husband Hercules, who gave him the fatal tunic of Nessus.

We know that, on the same subject, Saint-Saëns had written an important piece of music a few years earlier. He felt the desire to take up the poem left by Louis Gallet and develop the score in a more complete form, more worthy of the glorious mark that characterises his other works.

In its dramatic and musical homogeneity, the story of the valiant son of Alcmene and the rival of Iole appears more wonderful, more terrible, more impressive.

The violent heart of Hercules and the distressed love of Deianeira are rendered with a grandeur and pathos that admirably match what our exalted senses expected. Music, when it attaches itself to fiction and harmonizes splendidly with it—as is the case here—has the gift of placing heroic action in its proper atmosphere instead of shifting the focus away from it.

Saint-Saëns, who knows how to measure himself against poets, has followed the parallel between love and fate traced by legend with superb ease, self-assurance and a familiarity with triumph. He has harmonized the classical line of the narrative with the melodic and symphonic explorations for which our contemporaries are insatiable; he has reinforced the character of his tragedy by observing the tradition of ancient choruses for the crowds surrounding his heroes.

What is the point of pointing out passages that are all marked by perfection – Iole's lament in the second act, the duet between Hercules and Dejanira that follows, the final ensemble – this second act, incidentally, is superior, then the prelude to the “quatre” in which Saint-Saëns' beloved Orientalism reappears in the dances, the renewed pages of his symphonic poem La Jeunesse d'Hercule, not to mention such pieces as Hercules' aria in the fourth act, which will delight Opera audiences next year? What purpose would it serve, really, to scrutinize the details of this work, which, in its entirety, appears to us as a magnificent bas-relief carved in the finest marble? I thought about this as I admired the large fresco drawn at the end of the third act by the choral masses. [...]"