Giuseppe Verdi: 'Don Carlos'. Dossier de presse parisienne (1867).(Review)

Ed. by Herve Ganioux. pp. 270. (Lucie Galland, Heilbronn, 1997, DM59. ISBN 3-925934-31-6.)

This collection of press responses to the premiere of Verdi's Don Carlos at the Paris Opera in 1867 is a recent addition to what has become a sizeable and well-established series, Lucie Galland's 'Critiques de l'opera francais du XIXeme siecle'. Volumes now range from Halevy's La juive (1835) to Oftenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann (1881); the basic format consists of an introduction followed by a body of review material - an emphasis on sources rather than comment that ought to make the series a valuable research tool (we shall cover six other volumes in our next issue (Eds.)). But individual volumes vary: Herve Lacombe's on Les pecheurs de perles is less a source-book than a small monograph on the work's reception (a subject developed in his later Les voies de l'opera francais au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1997)), while the volume on Gounod's Mireille, edited by Marthe …