| Dezède study grant |
10/2006 |
Opéra-comique
in Paris at the end of the XVIIIth Century
Monvel & the opéra-comique
Rémy-Michel Trotier
The two carriers in France of Jacques-Marie Boutet de
Monvel (1745-1812) - before he left to Sweden in 1781 and after
he came back in 1788 - seem to coincide with a strong evolution
of the taste propitious to the development of new performance
forms. Monvel's later works have mainly been composed with the musician Nicolas Dalayrac
(1753-1809) for the Théâtre Italien, and belong to the hardly known - and
rarely performed - genre of Opéra-Comique. Were the first dramas,
written starting in 1772 as Monvel is sociétaire at Comédie-Française,
more connected to spoken theatre? Already a composer,
the mysterious Dezède (? - 1792),
was involved in these first realisations definitely belonging to
musical genres.
Even in Monvel's plays, the presence of musical numbers -
ariettes, vaudevilles, etc. - tends to abolish the frontier between spoken theatre and
music and to question the reciprocal influence of different
theatrical genres.
Who was Dezède ?
The name of Nicolas [Alexandre?] Dezède (b. 1740-45?,
d. Paris, 1792), given to this study grant, is as mysterious as
the composer's origins themselves. He thought to be born in Turin
or maybe Lyons, until being told to be the illegitimate son of a
German prince. He only know his name
contained the letters "D" and "Z"
and so did he sign his scores : D.Z., Dezèdes,
Desaides or De Zaides. After a strong musical training, he began
his career in 1772 with the actor Jacques-Marie Boutet de
Monvel. In 1783, they produced together Blaise et Babet ;
this pastorale, representative of the musician's style, became his most
famous work and was performed in his lifetime as far as in Russia and in the
United States. Unfortunately, Dezède's music was not anymore in
fashion in the XIXth century and today only a few songs
from him are well known. Among those, two of them - Lison dormait dans un
boccage and the most famous Ah! vous dirais-je Maman
- were used for variations by Mozart, who might have
personally known Dezède.
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