Sidonie

La jeune Claudine, 15 ans, relate son quotidien et les relations qu’elle noue au sein de son école. En pleine préparation du brevet, elle préfère se mêler des affaires des adultes plutôt qu'étudier. Puis Claudine emménage à Paris, et doit s'adapter à sa nouvelle vie. …

À bien des égards, Renée, l'impétueuse narratrice de "La Vagabonde", se pose comme le double de Colette qui signe ici son roman le plus personnel. Comme elle, sa jumelle littéraire est divorcée, actrice de music-hall, écrivaine et surtout farouchement indépendante. Elle se laisse pourtant toucher par Max, un homme beau, brillant et riche …

‘Perhaps the best of all my works’, said Gluck of his Armide. But this, the fifth of his seven ‘reform operas’, has never quite captured the public interest as have Orfeo, Alceste, the two Iphigenies and even Paride ed Elena. Unlike those works it is based not on classical mythology but on Tasso’s crusade epic, Gerusalemme liberata. No doubt Gluck turned to this libretto, originally written by Quinault, to challenge Parisian taste by inviting comparison with the much-loved Lully setting. Its plot is thinnish, concerned only with the love of the pagan sorceress Armide, princess of Damascus, for the Christian knight and hero Renaud, and his enchantment and finally his disenchantment and his abandonment of her; the secondary characters have no real life.

Niccolò Jommelli was one of the most sought after composers of his time, but finally accepted to become musical director at the court of Stuttgart in 1753. Three years later he composed his Requiem to commemorates the recent death of the Duchess von Württemberg, mother of his patron, the Duke Carl Eugen.. Despite the fact that Jommelli owed his fame almost exclusively to his operas during his lifetime, the Requiem became his most famous work after his death; the almost one hundred handwritten and printed copies of the entire work or fragments of it that have survived in some seventy libraries throughout Europe, some also in the USA, bear witness to this. Whilst the score and parts of the first performance have been lost, we can still form a reasonably good idea of the original instrumentation thanks to a surviving list of payments made to the musicians. We know that there were eight singers (one female and seven male) in addition to Jommelli.

'Armide' is in the form of a tragédie en musique, a genre invented by Lully and Quinault, and was their last collaboration. It was a new form of opera that combined elements of classical French drama with ballet, French song and a new form of recitative. Critics in the 18th century regarded 'Armide' as Lully's masterpiece and it continues to be well-regarded, featuring some of the best-known music in French baroque opera and being arguably ahead of its time in its psychological interest. The subject, chosen for Lully by King Louis XIV, is the enchantress Armide’s unhappy love for the knight Renaud, drawn from Tasso’s 'Gerusalemme liberata'.