Already practiced in the salons of the second half of the 18th century, the romance genre experienced an unprecedented vogue under the Empire and then the Restoration. Defined in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique in 1768 as an "air to which a little poem of the same name is sung, divided into couplets, the subject of which is usually some love story and often tragic", the romance is a simple song usually accompanied by the piano. Accessible to many amateur musicians, romance also brought success to famous singers like Pierre Garat (1762-1823) and renowned composers like Alexis de Garaudé (1779-1852). In a booming music publishing market, sales of romances, in separate sheets, as supplements to journals such as Le Ménestrel, in specialized periodicals such as the Journal d'Euterpe or anthologies such as the Chansonnier des graces , are experiencing considerable growth.
Jean-François Didier Attel de Luttange devoted himself to writing about twenty romances, probably during the 1820s and 1830s. Now kept in the Verdun library, the pieces are all present in manuscript in the ms. 372, tome 6. This bound volume also includes a large number of manuscript copies of romances for which Attel wrote only the literary text or the musical accompaniment, and a few romances of which he was not the author at all. Among the romances for which Attel wrote the words and the music, three are related to his activity as a writer and his published novels. These are precisely the only three to be published during his lifetime: Le Chant du Damoisel (of which a complete printed version is preserved in Attel's papers in Verdun), La Dame de Rosange (whose text and melody are published in the Chansonnier des graces in 1821), and Le Diable au manoir (the version of which, however, published in 1824 in the Journal d'Euterpe offers a setting by Alexis de Garaudé, and not the version by Attel). The other romances presented here only existed until now, to our knowledge, in manuscript.
Reflecting a fairly developed amateur practice, the composition of these romances, musically as well as poetically, experienced quite diverse fortunes. In the ten pieces selected for this collection, the interpreter will sometimes be confronted with prosody difficulties, in particular in the verses following the first because Attel has not always ensured the consistency of his entire text with the melody. Certain stylistic traits in the writing of the accompaniment may also be surprising.
- ISBN: 9782364852310 (2364852315)
