The whole thing started as a half-joke, ”says Sébastien Troester, amused on the phone.
The person responsible for publishing the Palazzetto Bru Zane, the center for French Romantic music based in Venice, had been teased by a colleague, he just always deals with obscure composers and works - but why not, for example, with Jacques Offenbach and a crowd-puller like “La vie parisienne ”?
"I took him at his word," continues Troester, "and went on a two-year treasure hunt."
The dive into hardly mapped archives - namely into the abyssal regions of France's national library - uncovered treasures sunken in the mud of history: the handwritten individual voices of the premiere of “Paris Life” on October 31, 1866, which bear traces of the earliest version of the work like a palimpsest; for the first four acts, the score of the concertmaster (who was in charge of the performances at the time), which contains all the vocal lines including the text as well as a synthesis of the orchestral parts; plus manuscripts of individual numbers and passages from the probationary period.
Together with the orchestral score preserved in New York from the composer's hand, these finds allow a reconstruction of the work, as Offenbach and his librettists had imagined and largely worked out, but never heard or seen. Because even during rehearsals at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris - then and now a spoken theater, no music stage - drastic interventions had probably taken place in September and October 1866 due to the vocal overstrain of certain participants. In 1867 the composer reduced the work from five acts to four, and in 1873 he revised it again.
What was presented on November 7th at the Théâtre des Arts in Rouen is the original version, which the team at Palazzetto Bru Zane tries to call the “ideal version”.
"What if these two nudes that were never played [elevators four and five] were the best in this series of constantly revised pages?" Asked Troester and three of his colleagues in the preface to their new edition.
What if this version was ideal not only in terms of the creation process of the work, but also in terms of stage effectiveness - simply the artistic quality?
"Sauerkraut with ham and sausage / Always gives me, always thirst"
The losses compared to the 1873 version played across the country are bearable. Here and there an added instrumental detail is lost, a cornet chime for example; Also missing is an introductory choir and a post-composed, seventy-five-second aria. On the other hand, you win: extended versions of well-known pieces (even as famous as the moto-perpetuo-rondeau “Je suis Brésilien, j'ai de l'or”, a sparkling, long-chattering aria); complete alternative versions (such as the triolet “Ce que c'est pourtant que la vie”, the new setting of which Offenbach turned out to be more varied); completely unknown numbers (including the aria "C'est ainsi, moi, que je voudrais mourir", which musicologists like the Blaue Mauritius had been looking for since a separate edition was announced by Offenbach's publisher,but had never been published); Substantially new finals (of the second and third act) and even an almost entirely new act: the fourth, which was completely revised shortly before the world premiere!