PORTRAIT LITHOGRAPHY   32 x 25 CENTIMETERS MARGINS INCLUDED

1869 PANTOTYPIC PORTRAIT

  GOOD CONDITION(some burnishes) VISIBLE IN PHOTO

ABSOLUTELY AUTHENTIC ENGRAVING, THIS IS NOT A COPY!

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Victor Massé, nor the 7 March 1822 to Lorient (Morbihan) and died on 5 July 1884 to Paris, is an composer and teacher French.

It fits the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of twelve and studied piano with Zimmermann and composition with Halévy. Although it got the price of Rome in 1844, that he was head of the choir of theParis Opera and teacher of composition to Conservatoire de Paris and a street always bears his name in the 9^and arrondissement of Paris, it has now fallen into almost complete oblivion.

It composed nearly twenty operas, comic operas and operettas. However, three of his works are still known (at least by name): Galathea (1852), the Jeannette Wedding (1853), which was a triumph for its time and whose title role was created by Caroline Miolan-Carvalho. Finally, Paul and Virginia (1876) which became world famous.

In 1872 he was elected to theAcademy of Fine Arts, where it succeeds Daniel-François-Esprit Auber.

He had two daughters one of whom married Philippe Gille, journalist and opera librettist hence the pianist Victor Gille.

It is buried in the Montmartre cemetery in Paris (section 26, avenue Hector-Berlioz). Charles Garnier was the architect of his tomb.

If Victor Massé's music is hardly held in esteem today, it must be believed that this sentiment was already shared by some of his contemporaries. This is evidenced by this excerpt from From the Swann side of Proust ; the character of Swann (highly cultured big bourgeois) gets irritated by what his mistress Odette de Crécy (half-worldly absolutely devoid of taste in artistic matters) wishes to go see an opera by Victor Massé entitled A Night of Cleopatra, an opera he finds appalling:

It is not anger, yet,"" he told himself, ""that I feel when I see her urge to go itching in this dung music. It is sorrow, certainly not for me, but for her; sorrow to see that after living more than six months in daily contact with me, she has not been able to become another enough to spontaneously eliminate Victor Massé! »

This does not prevent the same Marcel Proust from getting very enthusiastic about ""The Lord of Vergy"" by Claude Terrasse, yet less inspired score than Les Noces de Jeannette. About the Lord of Vergy, Proust claims to have applauded so loudly at a performance that he slapped his neighbor without doing so on purpose.

As for Richard Wagner, he does not hide his admiration for the music of the Wedding of Jeannette, while stating that he has little admiration for that of So fans all of Mozart.

A letter from Jules Verne to Massé in which he asked her to send him two seats for The Devil's Bride, 1854 comic opera.

Saint-Saëns devotes developments on Victor Massé in his book Portraits et Souvenirs in which he explains that the first chords of the opening of the Wedding of Jeannette correspond to the notes ginned by the bell tower of the church of Seals, town crossed by Victor Massé to go to his librettist Jules Barbier, which spent the summer at Aulnay near the Valley of the Wolves at Châtenay-Malabry .