Le Testament de Villon

Le Testament de Villon is an opera composed in 1923 by the American poet Ezra Pound, with assistance from George Antheil.[1] It is based on Le Testament, a collection of poems written by François Villon in 1461.

For the poetry collection by François Villon, see Le Testament.
Le Testament de Villon
by
Languagemiddle French
Based onLe Testament by François Villon
Premiere
1926

Pound was an amateur composer. He was interested in early music in general, perhaps partly through his contact with Arnold Dolmetsch; he was particularly fond of the repertoire of the Provençal troubadours.[1] He had written chapters on mediaeval song in his Spirit of Romance in 1910.[2]:55 In 1913 he had, with Walter Morse Rummel, published nine troubadour songs arranged for solo voice and piano;[1][3] in 1920 he had collaborated with Agnes Bedford on Five Troubadour Songs, also for voice and piano.[2]:56 For his setting of Le Testament of Villon in 1923, he enlisted the help of George Antheil. The result has little in the way of instrumentation, harmony or dialogue, but is characterised by detailed and complex rhythmic notation designed to reproduce the rhythms of the text.[1]

The first performance was given in 1926.[1] In July 1965 it was performed as a ballet under the direction Gian-Carlo Menotti at the Teatro Caio Melisso of Spoleto, in Umbria in central Italy, as part of the Festival dei Due Mondi;[4] the first performance in the United States was conducted by Robert Hughes at the Zellerbach Auditorium of the University of California at Berkeley in 1971;[5] and the first British public performance took place in Cambridge in 1985.[6] The work was recorded by Hughes and the Western Opera Theatre of the San Francisco Opera in 1972.[1][7]

References
  1. Stephen J. Adams (2001). Pound, Ezra (Loomis). Grove Music Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.22205. (subscription required).
  2. Charles Mundye (March 2008). 'Motz el Son': Pound's Musical Modernism and the Interpretation of Medieval Song. Cambridge Opera Journal 20 (1): 53–78. doi:10.1017/S0954586708002401. (subscription required).
  3. Walter Morse Rummel, Ezra Pound, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi (1913). Hesternae Rosae, Serta II, Neuf Chansons de Troubadours des XIIième et XIIIième Siècles. London: Augener.
  4. [s.n.] ([1965]). L'ottavo Festival Dei Due Mondi presenta Rarità musicali: opere di Benjamin Britten, Claude Debussy, Ezra Pound: Teatro Caio Melisso Mercoledì 14, venerdì 16, sabato 17 luglio, 1965 (concert programme, in Italian). [[Spoleto, Italy]: [Festival dei Due Mondi].
  5. Peter Dale Scott (1971). Zellerbach Auditorium, University of California at Berkeley, Saturday, November 13, 1971: the Committee for Arts and Lectures and Western Opera Theater and the ASUC Vocal Music Department present premiere performance Le testament de Villon, an opera by Ezra Pound: music by Ezra Pound, text from Le testament, by Francois Villon (concert programme). [Berkeley, California]: [Committee for Arts and Lectures and Western Opera Theater, and ASUC Vocal Music Department].
  6. [s.n.] ([1985]). The English live première of the opera Le testament de Villon (concert programme). [Cambridge]: [publisher not identified].
  7. Tobert Hughes, Western Opera Theatre of the San Francisco Opera (1972). Le Testament de Villon (long-playing record). Berkeley, California: Fantasy Records 12001.

Further reading
  • Ezra Pound (1952). The Spirit of Romance. London; Dublin: Peter Owen.
  • Virgil Thomson (1966). Antheil, Joyce and Pound, Virgil Thomson. New York: 73–83
  • N. Rorem (1968). Ezra Pound as Musician, Music and People New York: 167–84
  • Noel Stock (1970). The Life of Ezra Pound. New York: Pantheon Books.
  • Paideuma: a Journal devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship, 2 (1) (1973), special music issue
  • Stephen J. Adams (1980). Musical Neofism: Pound's Theory of Harmony in Context, Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 13 (2) (1980): 49–70
  • John Stevens (1986). Words and Music in the Middle Ages. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ISBN 0521339049.
  • Humphrey Carpenter (1988). [https://archive.org/details/seriouscharacter0000carp A Serious Character: the life of Ezra Pound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395416787.
  • Stephen J. Adams (1996). Pound in the Theatre: the Background of Pound's Operas. In: L. Surette, D. Tryphonopoulos (1996). Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition. Orono, ME.
  • Michael Ingman (1999). "Pound and Music" in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound Ed. Ira Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Margaret Fisher (2002). Ezra Pound's Radio Operas. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, page 19. ISBN 0262062267.
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