GOUNOD Charles.

Lot 261
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Estimation :
1500 - 2000 EUR
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Result : 1 100EUR
GOUNOD Charles.
2 autograph musical manuscripts, the first signed "Ch. Gounod", Pensée des morts, 1841; oblong notebook in-4 (22.5 x 29.5 cm) of 7 pages plus title, and a folio notebook. of 16 pages. Orchestral score of this melody on a poem by Lamartine. "Voilà les feuilles sans sève qui tombent sur le gazon"... For this melody in C minor [CG 438], composed in Naples in 1840 and later entitled Seul?, Gounod borrowed three stanzas from the poem Pensée des morts in Lamartine's Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, "having to do with the premature wear and tear of things and beings that go fatally towards the grave. Gounod treats them in a severe contrapuntal style: on a bass in regular quarter notes, the song unfolds an equally austere line, essentially diatonic, without concern for direct expressivity. In the orchestral version, the wind colours discreetly underline certain words. The brass and timpani suggest a distant bell, the soft light of the flutes illuminates the child gleaning in the heather" (Condé p. 719). The orchestration is dated on the title page "Rome 1841". The orchestra includes: flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, timpani, and strings. The manuscript, in brown ink on oblong paper in the Italian style with 16 lines, presents erasures and corrections, deleting in particular the chords of the horns in the introduction. Gounod wrote the music and the words of the three stanzas. The second manuscript, entitled La Pensée des Morts, on paper with 24 lines, is the beginning of a clean-up of the score on the first two pages, corresponding to the orchestral introduction; afterwards, only the vocal line has been noted, with the words, except for 5 bars of the strings in the second verse, and 4 bars of the orchestral conclusion (the last 3 bars are missing).
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