La Ville morte

Composed in close collaboration with Raoul Pugno, La Ville morte is an opera that, regrettably, was never performed in Nadia Boulanger’s lifetime. All that survives is the version for voice and piano and fragments of the orchestral score held at the BnF. The action of this four-act opera takes place in Mycenae, at an archaeological dig. The four main characters (Léonard, an archaeologist, tenor; Hébé, his sister, soprano; Alexandre, a friend of Léonard’s, baritone; and Anne, Alexandre’s wife, mezzo-soprano) are the protagonists of a drama haunted by the shadows of Eros and Death. Gabriele d’Annunzio’s characteristic Symbolist writing is marked by a latent tension; his characters seem possessed by dark forces. An archaic vocabulary, dazzling metaphors, and a certain grandiloquence conducive to lyricism were all qualities likely to appeal to Nadia Boulanger and Raoul Pugno as they contemplated a large-scale opera in which the full resources of their emotional palette could flourish.

A study of the voice and piano score reveals the extreme care given to prosody and to the portrayal of the characters and their emotions. The vocal writing is fluid, at times close to speech, yet never renounces lyrical effusion. The harmonic language constantly renews itself, favoring modal hues and an ever-shifting tonality, attentive to the meaning of the words and to all they suggest, whether tenderness or anguish, but also to the images, almost always charged with a mysterious significance.

© Heugel 1914

On July 15, 2005, a new orchestration by Mauricio Bonifacio was premiered by Michelle Canniccioni (Hébé), Letitia Singleton (Anne), Lorenzo Carola (Léonard), Randal Turner (Alexandre), and the Camerata Strumentale Città di Prato under the direction of Luca Pfaff in Siena.
There is an unpublished transcription for two pianos of the Prélude, completed by Nadia Boulanger in 1913.

© Anthony Girard