Le tribut de Zamora
| Charles Gounod |
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Operas
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Le tribut de Zamora is an opera in four acts by Charles Gounod, his last work for the stage. The libretto by Adolphe d'Ennery was offered to Gounod after negotiations with Giuseppe Verdi stalled, and involves a young couple on their wedding day, a forced tribute of twenty virgins, a slave auction at which the would-be groom is outbid, a madwoman who turns out to be the heroine's mother and regains her reason on murdering a tyrant, and a magnanamous second-in-command.
The premiere at the Opéra's Palais Garnier on 1 April 1881 was a success, Hermosa's patriotic "Debout! enfants de l'Ibérie!" (sung by Gabrielle Krauss) being enthusiastically encored, and praise being showered on the magnificent costumes by Eugène Lacoste and the four settings designed by Auguste-Alfred Rubé and Philippe Chaperon (Acts I and IV), Jean-Baptiste Lavastre (Act II), and Antoine Lavastre and Eugène Louis Carpezat (Act III).
Recent criticism is less kind, calling it "musty...too reminiscent of his earlier work"[1] or dismissing it as an exercise in spagnuolismo.[2]
Roles
| Role | Voice type | Creators |
|---|---|---|
| Xaïma | soprano | Daram |
| Hermosa, her mother | soprano | Gabrielle Krauss |
| Iglésia, her friend | soprano | Janvier |
| Manoël, her fiancé | ténor | Sellier |
| Ben-Saïd, envoy of the caliph of Cordoba | baryton | Lassalle |
| Hadjar, his brother | basse | Léon Melchissédec |
| Le roi, king of tenth-century Asturias | basse | Giraudet |
References
- Notes
- Sources
- James Harding, Gounod (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973)
- Steven Huebner, The Operas of Charles Gounod (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).
External links
- Le Tribut de Zamora: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project (enormous single file of piano solo reduction- no vocal score yet)
- Le Tribut de Zamora: Visual documentation of the premiere on Gallica