October 15, 1864, pp. 996-1006.
When an ingenious and learned writer once published here his remarkable studies on chivalry (see the Revue of February1 and 15, 1838), little did he realize that, among so many literary treasures, these fertile pages also contained a whole grand opera. Twenty-six years to complete a score is almost as long as it takes God to make an oak tree. It so happened that Mr. Mermet was looking for a subject: what musician, from the greatest to the smallest, is not at this point, quærens quem devoret...For a moment, his epic mind focused on the Niebelungen, which were later to become the work of Richard Wagner; but soon the subject, by its horror, frightened him. He wanted a woman's role, passion and tenderness, and all he found in this grandeur was barbarism. So he read, perused the library's manuscripts, took notes, but made no progress. Even though he knew what he wanted, he couldn't find it. What could he do? Contact the masters of the genre, ask them for a poem to his taste? Mr. Mermet wouldn't have dared; against the excess of such a step, the awareness of his profound obscurity defended him. Moreover, modest as he was, this musician felt he had the strength, if need be, to carve out his own work. Mr. Mermet has a good literary background, a kind of intellectual sturdiness that is to be found in almost all men who follow in the direct tradition of Gluck. Ampère's study, appearing in the meantime, was the turning point. For this imagination possessed by memories of Armide, what a sudden evocation! What delirium! Roncesvalles, Roland, the beautiful Aude, Durandal the living sword and Olifant the ivory horn! First the poem, then the music: an inescapable dream,
A dream of the Round Table and chivalry,
from which it was necessary to wake up one fine morning and go off to run the show! Here the situation was complicated by the fact that, in the eyes of the unpleasant world of theaters, Mr. Mermet didn't even have the ordinary advantage of being a simple stranger. Sad to say, the candidate had begun badly. Nobody today remembers Le Roi David, an ephemeral score whose destiny was made and unmade by a whim ofMme Stoltz. It is no less true that the bad fortune of this work was to weigh heavily on the author for a long time. In the theater, first impressions can hardly be erased, especially when they are unfortunate, for then malice does not neglect to exploit them. In King David, Mr. Mermet showed some dramatic flair, but his instrumental inexperience was evident. This was enough for him to be forever denied the right to assemble an orchestra. His relentless studies, efforts and progress were ignored, and Roland, who died at Roncesvalles, lived in Paris beating the stage.
The story of this score would make a poem. To get to where we see it today, what tribulations! What an odyssey! Waiting, moping, banging on all the doors, seeing them open for a moment and then inexorably close again, that's the experience of almost everyone who starts out; but I doubt if any man, poet or musician, has stood up more bravely to the incredible vicissitudes of an artist's existence than Mr. Mermet. On that account, he should already be praised for his courage and imperturbable stubbornness; let's also say that the undertaking was singular, and that it's not every day that one easily tackles a major operatic stage with a four-act score for which one has written the poem oneself.In the days when masters reigned, when illustrious works followed one another at the Opéra year after year, the event we have just witnessed would not have been possible, and it is at least a consolation that the public would be ill-pleased not to indulge in. Even the most unfortunate situations can give rise to certain advantages, and if we have to look for one of the causes of the staging of Roland à Roncevaux in the absolute distress of a repertoire that for three years - an unheard-of thing! had not been renewed, let's congratulate ourselves on this occasion, but on the condition that it is not abused, for true merit may well not be there every day at the right moment to help the short-sighted and the unqualified out of trouble. - I've already spoken of Mr. Mermet's intrepid persistence. For fifteen years, this attitude has never wavered: honest, calm, resolute; implacable in its moderation. I've known fiercer, more reticent men to rush into a fortress at the risk of breaking their necks; Mr. Mermet's approach was different: he coldly laid out his circumvallations, reconnoitred the place, surrounded it with advanced works, then, when least expected, abandoned it and went off to lay siege elsewhere. There was no anger or ranting in his temperament, nothing disheveled, nothing that betrayed the apostolate. Mr. Mermet was never the man of an idea or a system; he was the man of a score. He had played Roland at Roncesvalles, and had sworn to himself not to die without having seen his work performed. Hence his efforts, which no ill-will could thwart, his steps, which no obstacle could disconcert from their methodical regularity. Broken off on one side, the negotiation was soon renewed on the other, to no better effect, it's true, but without this tenacious yet debonair nature allowing itself to be inflicted with anger or discouragement. Towards the end, however, a certain irony began to emerge; the author, so many times disappointed in his most cherished hopes, so many times molested, became defiant, and when a theater director met him and talked to him about mounting Roland, M. Mermet shrugged his shoulders and even pushed the irreverence to the point of laughing in the character's face; but these were only jokes and flashes in the pan. With reflection, conviction would soon return; with conviction, courage and strength; then the relentless fighter would once again roll the Sisyphean boulder of this score towards some inaccessible summit, which, always lifted, always fell back on his shoulders. Others have loves, passions, family interests and fortunes; he knew only Roland in the world: he was the past, the present and the future. He suffered for it, he wept for it, but he lived for it. There's no telling how much intoxication such a man can get out of the Danaides' barrel we call a score. You throw in your tears, your miseries, your daily despairs, and it all comes back to your mind, to your ears, in dazzling harmonies. How many misfortunes forgotten, how many pains, even physical ones, overcome with an aria added to Roland, an ensemble piece orchestrated! A never-ending task, whose irresistible appeal is that it never ends! You come back to it as if it were a chimera, you redo what you've already done, and in the meantime, life passes you by, pains wear out, wounds close, because the good thing about work is that, even in a vacuum, you still have to do it. Even if it produces nothing, it makes you forget.
However, Mr. Mermet's friends held the field, and Roland gradually gained ground. An honest man, when he has merit, always ends up finding people who help him. Mr. Mermet never lacked this resource, and it is no mean honor for the author of Roland à Roncevaux to have been able, through the esteem and sympathy he personally inspires in you, to attach to his musical fortune a whole legion of fine minds whose support has never wavered. It was not a sect proclaiming its leader, but quite simply a group of enlightened men on a mission to draw the public's attention to the work of a musician they felt should not be left on the sidelines indefinitely. - For a time, the Théâtre-Lyrique seemed to want to accommodate the matter: the play was suitable, and so was the music. So many vicissitudes were finally about to come to an end. Everyone was telling themselves this, when suddenly the tide turned; Les Troyens by M. Berlioz had just appeared on the horizon, and the theater director's undulating enthusiasm, without cooling, changed object. Instead of the bird's wings of Roland's feudal helmet, which he had been seen wearing for two weeks, he now preferred the horse's mane of Aeneas' helmet: helmets and colors are not up for debate. Who received the blow in the chest? It was Mr. Mermet; he went home without complaint, stuffed his score in a trunk, and told his friends: "Let's not talk about it anymore! One evening, around this time, I met him in the vicinity of the Opéra. I exclaimed. - Roland," he replied in dismay, "he's dead! Then suddenly, as if in a fit of painful hallucination, "but not so dead that he won't come back. I swore I'd never think of him again, and to keep my word I'd buried him in an old trunk under some hard clothes; but, bah! the deceased has been acting up! Last night, as I went home to bed, I found my apartment lit up a giorno and standing in front of the fireplace, guess who? Roland! Yes, Roland in his great armor, waiting to sing my score. Then in line came the other characters: Aide and Saïda, Archbishop Turpin, the Emir of Saragossa, the traitor Ganelon, the whole phantasmagoria, and the dance began! Proud music, come on! A performance to take everything away; it was splendid!" Some men are seers, and such nocturnal ramblings, the product of discouragement and suffering, often contain the first word of an enigma whose secret they will not know until later. When we attended the first performance of Roland à Roncevaux at the Opéra the other evening, we were reminded of this scene of irony and bitterness, and the success charmed us all the more because we had for years been following the author more closely through his inexorable tribulations. We had been told that this famous dream of glory, glimpsed in a night of anguish and despair, would one day be realized in all its glory.
It's true that man never assumes everything. Beneath this score, whose music we were content to recommend, lurked an element of fortune which it seems the most interested had not for a moment considered.
A work filled with the name of Charlemagne could not, in a time like ours, remain on the road, and sooner or later the great breath that animates it and serves as its vehicle would, willingly or unwillingly, have pushed it to the fulfillment of its destiny.
The poem and music of Roland à Roncevaux are by the same hand. I don't believe that such an attempt, if successful, should be the law. Dramatic music takes and transforms.
It's an essentially objective art form, to use the German term, a very complex one, and one that, apart from the great passions that bring it to life, requires all kinds of varied accidents, picturesque effects and motifs that are the province of stage direction.
It has long been said that a musician is inspired by his subject.
But to be fruitful, to yield all it contains, this subject needs to undergo more than one trial.
It's all very well to choose it, to commission it, but to try to write it yourself is a clumsy pretension.
Besides, you're never a poet and a musician in equal measure, and if you were, you'd always have to challenge yourself.
You know yourself better than anyone else, you say, it's possible; you tailor your work accordingly, I readily admit; but by dint of agreeing with your qualities, you turn those qualities into defects. Instead of drawing strength and originality from new sources, your inspiration is consumed by its own resources.
Who knows what Scribe's collaboration brought to the musician in the way of fruitful, unforeseen ideas, what his experience of the theater created for the master in the way of varied incidents and resources?
Scribe would never have allowed his composer to overlook his own qualities. As soon as he saw danger, he ran to it, warding it off.
Let's not forget that in an opera, everything is special, starting with the verses. Here, rhythm is everything.
M. Mermet doesn't seem to have paid enough attention to this essential condition of the poetics of musical drama. His verse, hammered as it is, lacks suppleness.
He has spurs, but I sometimes wish he had wings.
It's such a happy coincidence for music to come across such an ingeniously rhythmic stanza.
Ask the masters, and they'll tell you that the style of the lyrics is of little importance to them, and that the cut of the piece, much more than the style in which it is written, will determine their inspiration.
I agree that this is a mediocre literary theory, and one that cultivated minds reject with disdain; but in the theater, certain servitudes must inevitably be accepted. "Hugo ne puis, Scribe ne daigne!" any musician good enough to want to create a play for himself will begin, you can be sure, by applying this variant of the Rohan motto to himself.
We would never resign ourselves to the platitudes of current style, and as there are marvellous secrets in this art of arranging rhymes that only vocation and study can reveal, and as we ourselves are poets only up to the alexandrine, we are sometimes obliged to renounce all the good fortune of prosody for the music.
I have heard Mr. Mermet's score criticized for its lack of uniformity, which only stems from his poem and the admiring cut of his pieces.
The musical phrase is not like the poetic phrase: the greater the scope of the latter, the shorter it will necessarily be, and the more it will have to resort to intermittent modulations in order to render the text. More or less disguised recitative is all too common.
You're in the throes of passion when all of a sudden the momentum stops, and the melody intervenes in the most indiscreet way, all this, I persist in maintaining, through the fault of the verse, whose context resists, rather than lends itself to, the development of musical phraseology. Take, for example, the trio in the third act, an excellent piece, well poised, well conducted, and reminiscent in its distribution of parts of the trio in Robert le Diable.
From the very first bars, the tone is assertive and soaring: the archbishop's objurgations, the young woman's tearful cry of love, Roland's tears, are followed by Durandal's song, grave, profound, solemn ; Then suddenly, the drama, thus musically engaged, turns to recitative, and this interval of declamation unexpectedly cuts short the interest of the scene, which only regains its dramatic authority with the motif of the peroration, a broad, pathetic idea, but whose momentum is obviously hampered by a stanza too full of words.
This third act was eagerly awaited.
As early as the dress rehearsals, it had been singled out as the dominant part of the work, so that the interest it aroused in advance must have detracted somewhat from the effect of the first two, which nevertheless contain some real beauties.
In the first, I'd like to mention the beginning of a woman's aria, very pleasantly sung byMme Gueymard [Guéymard-Lauters], the entrance of the archbishop and, above all, the invocation to the Pyrenees, an ample and vigorous melody, first proposed in full voice by the tenor and taken up with great brilliance by the ensemble.
- The second act takes us to the Emir of Saragossa. The beautiful Aide, whom Roland is fighting over with the traitor Ganelon, ends up there without much explanation as to how or why.
The libretto tells us that it is to escape the barbaric treatment of the treacherous knight, whom she does not want for her husband.
I confess that this reason does not satisfy me.
A Christian princess mingling freely with a whole theory of sultanas, and coping as best she could with the life of a harem, I feel that in the time of Emperor Charlemagne, this was hardly a common occurrence, and you'll understand with me why Roland, meeting his noble lady in such a place, is astonished at first, then immediately asks for reassurance.
It's true that the emir's harem is a lot like Bajazet 's seraglio : everyone enters, even the horses.
Now comes the perfidious Ganelon, who, in his golden chainmail and accompanied by a swagger-bearer, announces the arrival of the emperor's nephew, while Roland in turn announces the approach of the emperor himself.
The ballet is set between these two trumpet warnings.
In any well-ordered opera, ballet is expected to play its part. Inventing new steps, arranging groups, finding reasons for all this choreography, for the pleasure of the eyes, for interesting staging motifs - this charming art
once had its masters too, who, judging by what we see today, seem to have taken their secret with them. Without going back to the nuns in Robert le Diable or the skaters in Le Prophète, who doesn't remember the very recent pas de Diane in Pierre de Médicis, a graceful interlude in which Ferraris excelled?
As for the ballet of Roland à Roncevaux, I advise lovers of the genre to leave their memories and pretensions at the door.
It's so ordinary and naive as to baffle the choreographers at the Place du Châtelet.
Charlemagne's valiant men come to inform the emir of Saragossa that, if he does not consent to be baptized, his city will be razed to the ground, and the honest emir takes the opportunity to give them some games. Immediately, a canopy is erected in a corner of the theater; the Bedouin, surrounded by his court, steps forward with pomp, sits down between his daughter Saïda and that traitor Ganelon, and immediately the dances begin.
As you can see, the idea is primitive; we're back in the heyday of the Cairo Caravan:
Take part in the party
that I've had prepared!
Shall I say that here the execution is as good as the idea? What's the point in upsetting modest young talents who should be encouraged if they were performing in their rightful place?Mlle Fonta is an amiable second-rate dancer, and neitherMlle Fioretti,Mlle Montaubry norMlle Baratte will ever spoil a good ensemble; We don't think that the Opéra public would allow the front stage of a theater where, for twenty years, it has seen the Taglionis, the Elsslers, the Carlotta Grisis, the Rosatiis and the Ferraris, to be abandoned to mere coryphaeos.
Let no one tell us that the stars are lacking, for the dancers are no different from the tenors.
I'm not talking about our French school, which is, alas, so sterile today; but Italy still has excellent subjects, and Saint Petersburg has produced some admirable ones.
We had Mouravief, we no longer have her; we hadMme Zina Mérante, who alone, in the midst of the general disarray, seemed to have kept the secret of great style: we let her go.
Everyone knows the combination, the system: subjects are expensive, let's do without them; no more troupe, but only occasional shooting stars:Mme Petitpas for a season, Mouravief for a fee!
It's obvious that such arrangements are good for the economy.
It remains to be seen whether economy has any rights to assert in such a matter, and whether a theater called the Imperial Academy, a theater to which we ascribe the importance of a national institution, can be administered like an ordinary stage.
We don't think so, and if need be, we'd like to quote Emperor Napoleon I 's words about the Opéra: "Throw money out the window, if you want it to come in through the door.
But let's get back to the music, which is well worth the effort. The women's chorus with which the second act opens, Saïda's voluptuously melancholy verse in this introduction, the duet between Roland and Aide, are inspirations of exquisite charm, and I'll gloss over them quickly to get to the capital piece that ends this part of the work.
I refer to the Saracen chorus: Roncevaux, vallon triste et sombre! Ganelon has sworn to Roland's death; the traitor, sold out to the emir and plotting with him the extermination of his brothers-in-arms, points out to all these miscreants the funeral spot where the victims must fall: it's Roncesvalles, the dark valley, and the chorus repeats the felon's verse with an accent whose terror involuntarily reminds you of certain liturgical psalmodies.
It's frightening, chilling, energetic, fateful.
We sense that the Franks are doomed, and that this song of Roncesvalles is their song of death.
At that moment, Roland, on his palefroi, passes to the back of the stage, taking with him the beautiful Aide, who rides at his side, and followed by the rich tributes he has just raised on this race of pagans whose submission is but a trap.
Suddenly the chorus falls silent, then resumes, and as the proud victor rides away in his glory and love, this sinister phrase continues to rumble dully in your ears like a false drone.
The music, the drama, the staging, all move you; this is truly a grand operatic tableau.
This foreboding finale is echoed in the few bars before the curtain rises on the third act. It's impossible to be quicker or better introduced to the depths of the tragic valley.
We're in Roncesvalles, and even before we've seen the gigantic peaks rise, we recognize it just by recalling this phrase, which, I repeat, carries within it all the foreboding of the catastrophe.
A shepherd, leaning on his iron stick, sighs a rather monotonous eglogue that's no match for the goatherd's song in Sapho, then wanders off, announcing the return of the Franks, and immediately Charlemagne's valiant men descend from the surrounding heights.
Needless to say, the orchestra welcomes them. Sound, bugles; roar, ophicleides and trombones: these men of iron need brass. A farandole follows this proud chorus, with its well-felt movement.
"Young girls carry provisions on their heads to offer the soldiers.
Let's take a breath.
We sing, we dance, we disappear into the mountains, and the melodious trail leaves behind it a refreshing atmosphere that the room enjoys for a moment between two storms.
In truth, the illusion is hardly complete. We were dreaming of Tempé, but now we're in Roncesvalles.
Here is Roland, obsessed by a gloomy foreboding, coming to confess to Archbishop Turpin a love that heaven forbids.
This scene needs to be emphasized, for it is a beautiful one.
In response to the priest's solemn exhortation, the hero recounts a dream in which an angel appeared to him.
It is to this miracle that Roland owes his possession of Durandal, the invincible sword that can only retain its virtue if it can defend a heart capable of defying love to the end.
But Roland has betrayed his promise, for he loves Aide and is loved by her. The story has grandeur and pathos, and I'm impressed by the instrumentation: the opposition of harps and trombones, for example, at the moment when the angel disappears, and towards the last bars, a reprise of the orchestra bursting into minor on Roland's phrase:
Love is the strongest, it keeps me in chains.
I've said what I think of the trio, in which melody obviously plays too large a role. On the face of it, it's not a trio at all; it's a recitative scene interspersed with Durandal's song, taken up in D by the archbishop, and ending with a lyrical stanza in a painful, passionate accent.
- However, the Saracens arrive in their thousands, and the Franks are crushed by their numbers.
In vain Olivier, in vain Gui de Gascogne and the three Renauds beg Roland to call Charlemagne to the aid of this handful of men; Roland refuses, and rather than sound Olifant for this horde of pagans, he draws Durandal from his scabbard and utters a war cry which, repeated by the mass of choirs, supported by all the orchestra's drums, fills the hall with an irresistible explosion.
It is this vive l'empereur! that will make the fortune of the work.
Strangely enough, here is a score which, despite its real merit, would perhaps have remained on the ground, and which the wing of a flamboyant verse carries to the stars! The best pieces go unnoticed.
The good intentions behind this music are barely noticed by a few curious minds!
But wait until the pas redoublé is announced, and immediately the boxes are moved and the audience is thrilled.
Never has the famous Charles VI chorus aroused more delirium.
The motif is repeated three times, but that's not enough.
The curtain rises, and M. Gueymard [Guéymard], with a voice that no effort can break, launches it in front of the cheering bravos!
Hasn't anyone ever compared this finale to the blessing of the daggers in Les Huguenots? It makes you smile, but let's be fair and try not to exaggerate.
People will say: "This is Janissary music! Take away the Opéra's chorus and orchestra, remove the situation, the costumes, the movement of the staging, what's left?
An orpheon chorus, a military band pas redoublé.
That's possible; but should we reason like that, and isn't it unfair to try to judge music of this kind outside its theatrical context? You might as well say to a decorator: "Here's a wonderful backdrop; but try to take away the banister, try to show us this painting in the light of the Louvre, between a Raphaël and a Léonard, and you'll see what a beautiful rag it will become!
Verdi wouldn't last a minute against such a system of criticism. Let's take things as they come, and when Roland and his paladins go to war, let's not reproach the music that sounds the charge for being armored.
M. Gueymard [Guéymard] is a splendid coryphée, a true tenor of combat and of the field of honor, who, as long as the action continues, fights without surrendering and without dying.
Above the terrible melee of chorus and orchestra, his voice rises and soars heroically.
You always hear it, you follow it like a sword, like a plume! Legend has it that Roland blew his ivory horn so hard that he ruptured the veins in his neck. Mr. Gueymard [Guéymard] performs many other feats.
In this act, he sings the recitative of the dream, the trio, and the entire finale, which we still have him repeat, and no accident, thank God, is to be deplored, and his robust organization is sufficient for this Herculean task. M. Gueymard [Guéymard] is not only the voice of this role, he is the man.
His tall stature, his physiognomy, lent themselves to the costume.
I regret, however, that the expression on his face is so little in keeping with our idea of the character.
Why the short-cut hair, the moustache and the non-commissioned officer's goatee?
This spoils my hero: he's no longer Roland, he's a zouave of Emperor Charlemagne.
I won't leave this score without saying a word about a very new and original effect found at the entrance to the fourth act.
It concerns the Olifant horn.
The musician had to make this fabulous instrument sound.
Roland, as he is about to expire, lifts the ivory horn to his lips, and the mournful voice that emanates from it has accents from another world.
M. Mermet understood that a simple orchestral instrument was not enough here, and it was to an intelligent combination of bassoons and ophicleides that he called for this sound of truly legendary melancholy and desolation.
Moreover, this curious resource that can be drawn from the high notes of the ophicleide to produce a lamenting effect had already been indicated by M. Berlioz in his treatise on instrumentation.
Whether Mr. Mermet took advantage of the lesson, or whether the idea simply came to him, he is to be congratulated on the result.
Above all, let's congratulate him on his success, which, by clearing up the past, paves the way for the future.
Today more than ever, the author of Roland à Roncevaux must know what he is missing, and the experience he has just gone through will not be lost.
For good spirits, who let themselves be neither discouraged by unjust disdain nor dizzied by the indiscreet ramblings of immoderate enthusiasm, success has its lessons: it helps us to know ourselves, to criticize, and gives us, along with a sense of our own worth, a surge of admiration for those masters to whom we must return all the more because we have now acquired the right to speak to the public.
The illustrious head of the current French school once said to me, as I complimented him on the revival of La Muette [La Muette de Portici]:
"Do you really think it still holds up?"
And he added, with that fine hint of skepticism that seems to give his mind a pleasant edge:
"As for me, I doubt it a little. I had lost sight of this music, which I rediscovered at the rehearsals, nearly forty years later; well! Believe it or not, it's not that!
When the ingenious author of so many charming works speaks like this, who would dare to claim definitively the success of an evening?
Mr. Mermet has just made a name for himself with a coup d'éclat, and now it's time for him to assert himself: in the theater, no more than anywhere else, good intentions are not enough.
Singing is a lot, but it's not everything.
The melodic idea, however new and original, cannot do without the resources of an art that varies it, develops it, guides it with love and curiosity through a thousand transformations, and in the chrysalis seeks out the butterfly to bring it to life, to the light.
Gone are the days of flawless sonnets, which alone are worth long poems.
Sonnets! Nowadays, everyone knows how to make them, in poetry as well as in music, and if there was anything to be astonished about, it would be a sonnet that was not flawless, such is the extent to which this art of contextualization has now divulged its slightest secrets!
I don't want a score to reveal all its beauty and richness right from the start.
In poetry, as in music, there are masterpieces of clarity that are at the same time marvels of science: a sonnet by Petrarch, for example, a simple comic opera by Auber!
We grasp the master's intention, but as we indulge in it, we return to it to feel it better, to taste it better, for this clarity has depths where the eye lingers, this limpidity, like a diamond, has its facets.
This is what, in my opinion, is missing from Mr. Mermet's work.
This Roland à Roncevaux is certainly not the score of the first-comer ; moreover, among the French musicians writing for the Opéra today, I know of none capable of such breath.
To these powerful rhythms that he knows how to find, to this strong intelligence that he possesses of the dramatic situation, M. Mermet must strive to apply the resources of style.
Not incessantly abusing the pedal, searching curiously in the large instrumental ensemble for groups on which to concentrate interest, particularizing instead of always generalizing the orchestra, a profound, sovereign art that must be acquired at all costs when it is ignored, for if inspiration makes for success, it is this art alone that shuns the masters.
REVUE DES DEUX MONDES, October 15 1864, pp. 996-1006.
Journal title: REVUE DES DEUX MONDES
Journal subtitle: None
Day of week: Sunday
Date : OCTOBER 15, 1864
Date d'Impression correcte yes
Volume number TOME LIII - CINQUANTE-TROISIÈME VOLUME
Year : XXXIVYEAR
Series : SECOND PERIOD
Issue : Issue of October 15, 1864 (OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1864)
Pages : 996 à 1006
Article title : REVUE MUSICALE
Article subtitle: Roland à Roncevaux, by M. Mermet
Signature: HENRI BLAZE DE BURY
Pseudonym: HENRI BLAZE DE BURY
Author : Ange-Henri Blaze
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