GOUNOD Charles (1818-1893)

Lot 64
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400 - 500 EUR
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Result : 395EUR
GOUNOD Charles (1818-1893)
L.A.S. "Ch. Gounod", [late 1867 ?, to his friend Ernest LEGOUVÉ]; 4 pages in-8 on blue paper. Interesting letter in which he gives up the project of an opera on The Queen of Navarre to devote himself, after Romeo and Juliet, to Francesca of Rimini (which he will also give up). He reports "the conversation I had with one of the Superiors of St. Sulpice on the day I decided with myself that I had to give up my ecclesiastical career? - This is exactly the counterpart of the situation in which I find myself vis-à-vis the Queen of Navarre. - When I communicated my resolution to my Superior, he told me and even demonstrated with irrefutable arguments that I was mistaken: he demonstrated it to me to such an extent that I could answer nothing and that after a few moments of the silence to which his rhetoric had reduced me, I found myself telling him that this is what I was doing: "Whenever there is a question, the question is judged." - And the next day he said to me: "It's true: - Come on!" Well, dear friend, like you I think that in love (and art is one of the most elusive manifestations of it in their fantasies) I think, I say, that one does not decide by reasons no more for doing a thing than for not doing it. ...] We obey, in this, causes which escape analysis in our reasoning, and whose influence on our organization I am deeply convinced is at the price of and because of this very mystery - it is the Deus absconditus - (ask the Pater Extaticus!) - As for finding in my passion for Juliet the cause of my cooling down for her rival, [...] I do not believe it to be true. Once free, and as soon as my rehearsals began, if I had been taken back, I would have been and would be right now. ...] I do not see, as you do, that Francesca continues Juliet; and the more I meditate on this new subject, the more I find it different from the neighbour. As I have often told you, the Duo of Love, which is the basis of a drama, only gives its variety t
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