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Reynaldo Hahn. L’Île du rêve

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L'Île du rêve couvertureCD-Book. Bru Zane Label. French Opera Collection n. 26.

‘To have written that, you must be a poet’, Massenet told Reynaldo Hahn when he read through the score of L’Île du rêve. Composed when the young man was not yet eighteen years old, this ‘curtain-raiser’ already had the qualities of the great works of the period. It reveals the colouristic talents of Bizet, the passionate outbursts of Massenet and even the prosodic originality of the young Debussy. The plot recounts a French naval officer’s love affair with a young Polynesian girl he has to abandon. This subject – also treated musically by Puccini (Madama Butterfly) and Delibes (Lakmé) – is approached in an almost Symbolist style: the Romanticism of the music contrasts with a contemplative, introspective treatment of the narration. This is where the youthful Hahn particularly shines: in the very first bars (the hymn to Bora-Bora), in the various love scenes for Loti and Mahénu (notably the duet ‘Restons encore les paupières mi-closes’) and even in the neo-Handelian prelude to Act Two.

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Content

Vincent Giroud – A Polynesian idyll in the time of Gauguin

Léon Parsons – An interview with Reynaldo Hahn

Arthur Pougin – The evening of the premiere

In the composer’s workshop: correspondence between Hahn and his friend Édouard Risler

Libretto

Scientific publications

Related works

L'Île du rêve

Reynaldo HAHN

/

Georges HARTMANN André ALEXANDRE

1898

Related persons

Conductor, Composer

Reynaldo HAHN

(1874 - 1947)

Librettist, Editor

Georges HARTMANN

(1843 - 1900)

Librettist, Poet

André ALEXANDRE

(1860 - 1927)

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