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Le Ménestrel

Le Ménestrel (The Minstrel) was an influential French music journal published weekly from 1833 until 1940. It was founded by Joseph-Hippolyte l'Henry and originally published by Poussièlgue. In 1840 it was acquired by the music publishers Heugel and remained with the company until the journal's demise at the beginning of World War II. With the closure of its chief rival, La Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris in 1880, Le Ménestrel became France's most prestigious and longest-running music journal.

History

In 1827 François-Joseph Fétis had founded La Revue Musicale, France's first periodical devoted entirely to classical music. By 1834 it had two serious competitors, Le Ménestrel established in 1833 and Maurice Schlesinger's Gazette Musicale established in 1834. Le Ménestrel was founded by Joseph-Hippolyte l'Henry with the first edition (published by Poussièlgue) appearing on 1 December 1833. In 1835, Schlesinger bought La Revue Musicale from Fétis and merged the publications into La Revue et gazette musicale de Paris. Until the Revue et Gazette ceased publication in 1880, Le Ménestrel was to be its main rival in terms of influence and breadth of coverage.

In July 1835 E. D'Arlhac took over the directorship of Le Ménestrel, but relinquished it the following March to the journalist and critic Jules Lovy, who had been a writer for the journal since its foundation. The partnership of Jacques-Léopold Heugel and Jean-Antoine Meissonnier acquired Le Ménestrel in 1840. Heugel became the Director and Jules Lovy stayed on as Editor-in-chief until his death in 1863. When Jacques-Léopold died in 1883, his son Henri-Georges Heugel took over as Director of the journal. He was in turn succeeded by his son Jacques-Paul who remained the Director for the remainder of its existence. Lovy had been succeeded as Editor-in-chief by Joseph d'Ortigue. However, after d'Ortigue's death in 1866, only the Heugel name appeared on the masthead.

Le Ménestrel was published weekly for a period spanning 107 years, initially coming out on Sunday (later changed to Saturday and then Friday). The Franco-Prussian War caused publication to be suspended from late December 1870 through November 1871, and publication was suspended again for the duration of World War I, with the first post-war issue appearing on 17 October 1919. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the journal carried on until the invasion of France. The 24 May 1940 issue carried an announcement that the closure of theatres and concert halls in Europe and France as well as the Paris Conservatory had forced them to suspend publication until the following autumn. In the end, it proved to be the last issue of Le Ménestrel. The Heugel company continued to operate as an independent music publisher until 1980 when it was sold to Éditions Alphonse Leduc.

Sources

• Ellis, Katharine (2007).Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521035899
• Feurzeig, Lisa (1994). "The Business Affairs of Gabriel Fauré" in Hans Lenneberg (ed.) The Dissemination of Music: Studies in the History of Music Publishing. Routledge. ISBN 2884491171
• Gautier, Théophile (1995). Correspondance générale 1865–1867 (edited and annotated by Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre). Librairie Droz. ISBN 2600000755 (in French)
• Le Ménestrel (1 December 1833). Année 1, No. 0 (in French)
• Le Ménestrel (3 February 1933). "Cent ans d'histoire de la musique et du théâtre", Année 95, No. 5 (in French)
• Le Ménestrel (24 May 1940). Année 102, Nos. 19–21 (in French)
• Nichols, Robert S. and Drake, Jeremy (2001). "Heugel" in Stanley Sadie (ed.) The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Volume 11. Grove's Dctionaries. ISBN 0195170679

External links

• All issues of Le Ménestrel from 1833 to 1940 scanned by the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Notes

Fanély Revoil [1], [2], [3], [4]

Claudia Eder [5]

Jean-Christophe Benoit [6]

Andreas Schmidt [7], [8]

Forteguerri, Niccolò

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=G7IWAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false image

• Turri, Vittorio, "Forteguerri, Niccolò", Dizionario storico manuale della letteratura italiana 1000-1900 4th edition, G.B. Paravia e Comp., 1854, pp. 115-116

Fortegoerrl Niccolo: n. nel 1674 a Pistola, ebbe gli ordini sacri, dopo aver studiato a Pistola, a Siena, a Pisa. Accompagnò monsignor Zondadari, ambasciatore nella Spagna presso Filippo V. Tornato nel 1703 a Roma, fu canonico di S. Maria Maggiore e di S. Pietro, e nel 1733 ebbe il posto di segretario di Propaganda Fide. Appartenne all'Arcadia, e scrivendo usava spesso del suo cognome grecizzato in Carlerómaco. Mori nel 1735.

Oltre a versioni dal teatro di Terenzio e di Euripide; a Capitoli giocosi; a Liriche varie, scrisse un poema burlesco in trenta canti d'ottava rima, parodia delle leggende romanzesche, intitolato Ricciardetto. Occasione a scriverlo fula promessa fatta ad alcuni giovani amici, coi quali il Forteguerri soleva leggere il Mor- gante, l'Innamorato, il Furioso, di comporre, in un giorno, un canto intero, nel quale lo stile e le maniere di que' tre poemi fossero fusi insieme. Nacque così il Kicciardetto, che il poeta elaborò e corresse sino agli ultimi giorni della vita. Il motivo del poema è, come ognun vede, romanzesco e attinto a un episodio del Furioso: semplice la trama: il re dei Cafri, Scricca, istigato dalla figlia Despina, a cui Ricciardetto ha ucciso un fratello, chiama a raccolta gli Etiopi e i Lapponi, passa il mare e, risoluto ad aver tra le mani l'uccisore del figlio, che è nel campo di Carlo Magno, assedia Parigi. Carlo Magno raccoglie i gloriosi paladini, tra' quali il pazzo Orlando, che viene risanato a furia d'acqua fredda e di bastonate Nel furore della battaglia, che volge in rotta l'esercito del re africano, Despina, che aveva seguito il padre, vede Ricciardetto e se ne invaghisce perdutamente. Dopo lunghe, varie e romanzesche vicende, dopo che Gano di Maganza, il traditore, ha fatto, con una mina posta a Roncisvalle, saltar in aria Carlo Magno, Orlando e Rinaldo, i due giovani innamorati, lungamente divisi, si ricongiungono e ottengono la corona di Francia.

Questa la trama del poema, sulla quale sono intcssuto le invenzioni le più fan- tastiche e le più strane. La parodia si rivela nella comica esagerazione delia materia romanzesca : rospi che inghiottiscono cavalli e cavalieri, balene che trangugiano case, campagne, campanili, conventi; giganti che pigliano gli uomini con le reti: Ferraù fatto frate e ferito mortalmente, con un temperino, da Rinaldo: l'eroismo deriso, la cavalleria beffata, e insieme una mordace ironia che ferisce la curia corrotta, le goffaggini dell'Arcadia, i poeti mestieranti e perdigiorno. Facile lo stile, fresca, vivace, loscanamente propria la liugua: il poema potrebbe essere anche più letto e ammirato, se in alcune parti non fosse detarpato da inutili oscenità. Y. Epopea.

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http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=p3m-l_gGNqwC&dq=Forteguerri,++Niccol%C3%B2&source=gbs_navlinks_s Between the real and the ideal: the Accademia degli Arcadi and its garden in eighteenth-century Rome Author Susan M. Dixon Editor Susan M. Dixon Edition illustrated Publisher University of Delaware Press, 2006 ISBN 0874139376,

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http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=U2ktAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Forteguerri,++Niccol%C3%B2&lr=&as_brr=3#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Title The first canto of Ricciardetto Authors Niccolò Forteguerri, Baron Sylvester Douglas Glenbervie Publisher J. Murray, 1822

NIOCOLO CARTEROMACO

I now therefore proceed to give some account of the author of Ricciardetto, and of hiswork, in which last respect he himself will be my principal authority ; and also of the circumstances which led me to attempt a translation of his first canto, and my reasons for proceeding no farther.

Niccolo Forteguerri, otherwise Fortiguerra, was born in the year 1674, of respectable parents at Pistoia, in Tuscany, and after the example of one, or perhaps more, of the same family in that city, he often assumed, both in his Latin and Italian compositions, the name of Carteromachus, or Car- teromaco, according to the pedantic custom of adopting the Greek translation of modern names, which was so prevalent with the learned at the revival of letters, and for many years afterwards.18 Scipio Carteromachus, a Pistoian, and no doubt of our author's family, a learned man who lived during the reign, and some time in the service, of Leo the Tenth, seems to have been known by no other name, either by his contemporary Erasmus, who had been familiarly acquainted with him while in Italy, or by Bayle. The former gives to this Forteguerri an encomium for recondite and finished erudition, joined to the most complete absence of all display, so happily expressed, that Bayle exclaims, after citing it, " que c'est un bel eloge! et qu'il y a peu de savans qui le meritent!" The words of Erasmus are, " Bononiae primum videre contigit Scipionem Carteromachum, reconditae et absolutae eruditionis hominem, sed usque adeo alienum ab ostentatione, ut, ni provocasses, ju- rasses esse literarum ignarum."

Our Forteguerri also frequently followed another more modern, but not less affected mode among Italian authors, of assuming in their title pages their academic appellation, as Shepherds of Arcadia; his name, by his diploma from that academy, being Nidalmo Tiseo. He was by his parents designed for the profession of the law, but like many other poets of renown, both among us, and in France and Italy, he soon abandoned that severe study for the more seductive cultivation of the muses. Desertions to the bar have been much less common, and when they have happened, there have been still fewer that could have justified an exclamation similar to the elegant flattery by Pope of the future Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, in the early part of that great lawyer's professional life,

" How sweet an Ovid was in Murray lost!"

Forteguerri's legal studies, however, were probably of service to him when, in his youth, after going through the ordinary course of education at the university of Pisa, he established himself at Rome, under the patronage of his mother's near relation, Carlo Augustino Fabroni, afterwards Cardinal Fabroni.19

In that town, which its present inhabitants still love to hear called the Head of the world, and the Eternal City, he passed the greater part of his days, under successive pontiffs, experiencing various vicissitudes of fortune. After the death of his relation, Cardinal Fabroni, in whose authoritative dignity,—says the writer of his life, Monsig- nor Fabroni, a relation of both,—he had long reposed all his hopes of advancement, he appears to have lived for a considerable time in a state of neglect, if not disgrace ; but on the succession of Clement XII. to the throne of St. Peter, that venerable head of the Catholic church appointed

him secretary to the congregation of cardinals called Della Propaganda, and with well founded prospects, which however were never realised, of being soon after raised to a situation of higher dignity. Clement is said to have taken great delight in our author's company, finding relief from the cares and fatigues of his various weighty and laborious occupations in the cheerful playfulness of his conversation, and particularly to have been much amused by his recitals of the entertaining adventures of Ricciardetto. These we may suppose he delivered with peculiar grace, as we are told he had a very happy facility in repeating poetry, with a most uncommon suavity of voice and gesture; being also of a tall and dignified presence, with limbs finely proportioned, a manly freshness of complexion, and a most engaging and exhilarating expression of countenance. He died at Rome in the possession of his office of Secretary to the Propaganda on the 17th of February, 1735, in the 61st year of his age.

It appears that Forteguerri was endowed with a most powerful memory, and an eager ambition of distinction in almost every branch of composition both in prose and verse; and, as was more the custom in those days, in Latin as well as in the Vulgar or Tuscan, as the purists of that district of Italy love to call the general language of the country. His Latin orations or discourses upon public occasions, both inaugural and on speculative topics of taste or morality, were applauded in their day; but I believe few were ever printed, I have never met with any of them, and it seems to be generally admitted now, even by his most unqualified admirers, that he had no particular claim to extraordinary merit in writings of that description. The great and early bent of his genius was certainly poetry. He was a proficient not only in the knowledge of the Latin, but also of the Greek classics, and had endeavoured to form his taste upon a profound and judicious consideration of their excellencies; and in his attempts to approach the highest station in poetry, if he failed, as will be mentioned by and by, it may be said of him—" magnis tamen excidit ausis."—As a mem» ber of the Academia degli Arcadi he composed odes, canzoni, sonnets, stanzas, and a collection of capitoli in the terza rima of Dante, and in a style something between the manner of Berni ^ in his capitoli, and that of Ariosto in his satires. In whatever he undertook his aim was perfection, being used to say that one ought never to despair of arriving at the best.

While Forteguerri was actually employed in writing his Ricciardetto he finished a translation into blank verse of the Comedies of Terence, which has been published in various editions, and is spoken of in terms of high commendation by many Italian critics of great authority. He was much too good a scholar not to have done justice in this translation to the sense of the original, and too much a master of Italian versification not to have done it with elegance, and some approach to the extreme delicacy and beauty of Terence's iambics. But modern accented hendecasyllables can ill furnish a just and happy resemblance of the inimitable dialogue of Terence.

The gaiety of Forteguerri's character was one of its most conspicuous features, insomuch that it had obtained for him, among his friends and acquaintances, the name of " il Lepido" derived from the Latin " lepor," or " lepos," a word to which it would be difficult to find one exactly synonymous in our language. It must be rendered by a circumlocution. Does it not, in its most appropriate sense, express a light and graceful jucundity united with good breeding; that chastised liveliness, which still knows to confine itself

" Within the limit of becoming mirth ?" 21 Lepidus is more than "jucundus:" one may have " jucunditas" without" lepos."—Cicero sometimes makes the distinction: " Multa erat in hominejw- cunditas, et magnus in jocando lepos." In other parts of his writings, indeed, that great, though not always successful, joker, uses lepos in a more indeterminate sense; in a sense in which the Italian epithet may have been sometimes offensively applied to our author; thus he speaks of " facetiarum et urbanitatis non scurrilis lepos." And it is confessed, that the good Niccol6, in certain and perhaps not unfrequent moments of social relaxation and unrestrained open-heartedness, transgressed Shakespeare's limit of becoming mirth. Of this being conscious himself, he was not well pleased with those who gave him the appellation of Lepido, whom he suspected of meaning to convey by it that he was a person who habitually sacrificed the civility and proprieties of conversation to an indulgence in coarse and indecent pleasantry. Yet it certainly cannot be denied, that, in his most celebrated work itself, he has given way too much to the irresistible force of a laughter-loving disposition, such as is so apt to transport the boon companion beyond the checks prescribed by a just sense of modesty and decorum. To the great purity of Forteguerri's manners, and his abstinence from every thing that could have justified the imputation of dissoluteness, intemperance, or immorality, we have abundant testimony: so that if censured because he does not always write with a due regard to delicacy, which God forbid that I should attempt to justify,—though he is not more faulty in that way than the admired Ariosto, or (proh dolor!) our Spenser himself in a certain canto of his Fairy Queen,—it may be said with truth of him,

" Licentious though his song, his life was chaste !"

I have hinted that our author was ambitious of eminence in the higher sorts of poetry, as well as in that which has rendered his name of such celebrity with all who have a taste for genuine humour. His Ricciardetto probably cost him a r ' thousand times less pains than his translation of Terence; and his historian and relation informs us, that as it appears that he wrote Ricciardetto in a sort of rivality with Ariosto, Berni, &c. he had conceived a work in imitation of the immortal Gerusalemme, on the subject of Bajazet, but when he was proceeding to describe the barbarian conqueror boxed up in his iron cage, he was so carried away by a sudden train of ludicrous images, that all at once he determined to relinquish a project so little suited to the natural turn of his mind.

The circumstances which gave rise to his writing Ricciardetto are told with so much simplicity and good humour by the author himself, in a letter prefixed to the first acknowledged edition, that I cannot better perform a part of what I had proposed to myself in this discourse than by translating it.

In that letter he states, that at a country-house of his, near his native Pistoia, in a society of friends assembled there in the autumn of the year 1716, there were several young men of great erudition, with whom, in the evenings, while others of his company diverted themselves with play in another room, he used to read sometimes Berni, sometimes the Morgante of Pulci, sometimes Ari- osto, which readings, he says, were a source of very particular delight; that one evening, during some intervening pause, after they had read for a considerable time, one of his young friends said, " God knows what a labour it must have cost the authors of those poems to compose, not to say an entire Canto, but even a dozen of their stanzas, and the greater the facility of the measure and of the rhyme appears to be, so much greater must their exertions have been." That his other friends present all concurred in this remark: " Upon this," continues he, " I, less considerate, or at least more confident, observed with a smile, in good faith those poets have, peradventure, laboured much less than you imagine, for in poetry, if not the whole, at least more than one half, is due to nature, and he who has not been benignly seconded by nature, will do well not to meddle with so noble and delectable an occupation, but rather betake himself to some other employment of his time, where art, not nature, may be his guide. And not to waste more words, but to prove in fact what I have asserted, I engage to produce to you a Canto to-morrow evening, containing in it the style of the different bards we have been reading; for to speak freely, nature has been rather liberal to me than scanty, in her gifts of that sort. The engagement was received with applause by all, and having retired after supper, I executed it punctually, and produced and read the new Canto the next evening, to the no ordinary satisfaction of the society." —The whole thirty cantos are said to have been finished in thirty days.

When I was first in Italy, now more than half a century ago, the Ricciardetto was the most popular of all their burlesque poems with the young and gay society into which I happened to be introduced at that time, and its novelty to me, and its broad but sly humour, naturally recommended it to a very young reader; and now, in my later years (such is the force of early habit), a few cantos, or even stanzas of this jocular poem, have been a frequent temporary source of relief to my spirits when afflicted with poignant grief (of which I have had my share), or visited by occasional returns of depression and melancholy.

I had often been surprised, considering the great love of Italian poetry, both of the serious and amusing kind, so prevalent in England, that no translation of Ricciardetto into our language had, as far as I knew, ever been attempted. The different versions of Tasso and Ariosto, as well as of the Portuguese epic, Camoens, by Fairfax, Harrington, Fanshawe, Hoole, and Mickle, are in most considerable libraries; and it seemed unaccountable, that in the country which had produced Hudibras and the Rape of the Lock, the two extremes as it were of the burlesque and mock- heroic, there had been found no translator of Ricciardetto. A few years ago I had presumed to suggest to a gentleman possessing great poetical talents, and a remarkable vein of humour and pleasantry, that if he would undertake to translate that work it would be a source of amusement to himself, and at the same time be a great service rendered to the public in this department of the very extensive and diversified domain of the British

Crusade opera Notes

Title page of Arie dell' Opera di Rinaldo by Handel 1711

Orlando Furioso Operas

Alcina pic http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uhpMD79jx80C&printsec=frontcover&vq=alcina&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=alcina&f=false Title Orlando furioso Author Ludovico Ariosto Publisher Gaspar y Roig, 1851 p. 32

(Jerusalem Delivered), which in turn borrowed both plot elements and character types from Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Ariosto's epic poem likewise recounted a conflict between Christians and Muslims but was set in the earlier wars between Charlemagne and the Saracen army which had invaded both Spain and Southern Italy.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=apBBRsin3JQC&pg=PA86&dq=%22Francesco+Cavalli%22+Tasso#v=onepage&q=%22Francesco%20Cavalli%22%20Tasso&f=false Dido

Ariodant is an opera in three acts by the French composer Étienne Méhul first performed at the Théâtre Favart in Paris on 11 October 1799. The libretto, by François Benoît Hoffmann is based on the same episode in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso that inspired Handel's opera Ariodante

Voltaire operas

Voltaire

• Casaglia, Gherardo, "Voltaire" , Almanacco Amadeus (in Italian). Accessed 16 May 2009. → 2

Notes etc.

Google book search → 2

Voltaire later observed that attending it was good for the digestion. Otherwise, the great philosopher had no use for opera. "Anything that is too stupid to be spoken," he said, "is sung." [9]

Xavier Leroux has written music to a new comic opera "L'Ingenu," the boob by Charles Mere and Regis Gignoux, after Voltaire. It has been produced at the ... ACTIVITIES OF MUSICIANS IN TOWN AND AFIELD; NYT March 8, 1931, Sunday Section: Arts & Leisure, Page 115, [10]

RANDOM READINGS: VOLTAIRE'S BITE. [11] One night Voltaire was enjoying a performance at the opera, when the Due de Lauzun, a favourite of Louis XV., noisily entered the foyer with a crowd of friends, and demanded a box. "Alas, monsieur," said the atten- dant, "the boxes are all gone!" "That may be," said the duke; but I see the scribbler Voltaire over there in a very good box. Turn him out!" - Anxious to please the Court favour- ite, the attendants ejected Voltaire from the box for which he had paid, and the Due de Lauzun took his place. Voltaire, enraged at the injustice of the affair, brought a suit against the duke to recover the price that he had paid for the box. At the opening sess- ion of the court the duke's lawyer rose and, in a scornful voice, said : "What! Is it Monsieur Voltaire, a petty ink-splasher, who dares to plead against the Due de Lauzun, whose great-grandfather was the first to scale the walls of La Rochelle, whose grand- father took twelve cannon from the Dutch at Utrecht,* whose father cap- tured two standards from the English at Fontenoy, whose-" "Excuse me," Voltaire interrupted, I am not pleading against the Due de Lauzun who was first on the walls of La Rochelle, nor against the duke who took twelve cannon from the Dutch at Utrecfit, nor against him who captured two standards from the English at Fon- tenoy . I am pleading against the Due de Lauzun who never captured any- thing in his life except my box at the opera !"

"VOLTAIRE (1694-1118) VOLTAIRE, the towering figure in eighteenth-century French literature and thought, had a divided attitude toward opera. ..." The essence of opera‎ - Page 74 by Ulrich Weisstein - Music - 1964 + [12], Gretry: [13], [14]

From Garrick to Gluck: essays on opera in the age of Enlightenment

Tamerlane etc

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Candide

• 23 Agosto 1784, Burgtheater Vienna Il re Teodoro in Venezia ("Il re Teodoro"), Giovanni Paisiello, libretto di Giovan Battista Casti (da Voltaire: "Candide")
• 11 December 1956 New York City. Candide by Leonard Bernstein, based on the novella of the same name by Voltaire. The original libretto was written by Lillian Hellman, but since 1974, has been generally performed with a book by Hugh Wheeler

Zaïre

• Zaira (1797, Venice) composed by Sebastiano Nasolini; libretto by Mattia Butturini
• La Zaira (1802, Lisbon) composed by Marcos Antônio Portugal; libretto by Mattia Butturini
• Zaira ossia Il trionfo della religione composed by Vincenzo Federici; libretto by Mattia Butturini
• Zaira (1805) composed by Peter Winter; libretto by Filippo Pananti
• Zaira (1829, Parma) composed by Vincenzo Bellini; libretto by Felice Romani
• Zaira (1829) composed by Alessandro Gandini; libretto by Felice Romani
• Zaira (1831, Naples) composed by Saverio Mercadante; libretto by Felice Romani
• Zaira (1845, Modena) composed by Antonio Mami; libretto by Felice Romani
• Zaïre (1887, Lille) composed by Charles Edouard Lefebvre; libretto by Paul Collin

Sémiramis

• 27 Marzo 1754, Königliches Opernhaus (Linden) Berlin Semiramide, Carl Heinrich Graun, libretto by Giampietro Tagliazucchi
• 25 Gennaio 1786, Mercoledì Teatro di via della Pergola di Firenze di "La vendetta di Nino o sia Semiramide", Alessio Prati, libretto di Pietro Giovanni
• February 3, 1823 Venice Semiramide Gioachino Rossini. The libretto by Gaetano Rossi

Mérope

• Carl Heinrich Graun Merope (Giampietro Tagliazucchi/Friedrich II. nach Voltaire Mérope), tragedia per musica 3 Akte (27. März 1756 Berlin)

Tancrède

• 26 Dicembre 1766, Nuovo Teatro Regio di Torino di Tancredi Ferdinando Bertoni, libretto di Silvio Saverio Balbi [Balbis]
• 6 February 1813 Teatro La Fenice Venice Tancredi Gioachino Rossini, librettto by Gaetano Rossi

Bélisaire

• 20 Agosto 1768 Théâtre de la Comédie-Italienne Paris Le huron, André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, libretto di Jean-François Marmontel "Bélisaire" Voltaire and "L'ingénu, histoire véritable tirée des manuscrits du père Quesnel")

Others

• 26 Ottobre 1765 première nel Théâtre Royal de la Cour di Fontainebleau di La fée Urgèle ou Ce qui plaît aux dames Egidio Duni, libretto by Charles-Simon Favart e Claude-Henri-François de Fusée de Voisenon after Voltaire Ce qui plaît aux dames and Geoffrey Chaucer: The Wife of Bath's Tale The Canterbury Tales

• 6 Novembre 1773, Théâtre Royal de la Cour di Fontainebleau di "La belle Arsène" ("Arsène", "Arsenne") by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, libretto di Charles-Simon Favart (da Voltaire: La bégueule)

• 22 Novembre 1774, Martedì Académie Royale de Musique et de Danse Parigi di "Azolan ou Le serment indiscret", opera-balletto eroico in Étienne-Joseph Floquet, libretto di Pierre-René Lemonnier (Le Monnier) "François Antoine Devaux" (da Voltaire)

• 2 Luglio 1782, Académie Royale de Musique et de Danse Paris "Électre", Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, libretto di Pierre-Nicolas-François Guillard (da Voltaire: "Oreste")

• 26 Novembre 1782, Académie Royale de Musique et de Danse Paris "L'embarras des richesses", André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, libretto di Jean-François Marmontel (da Voltaire: "L'ingénu, histoire véritable tirée des manuscrits du père Quesnel")

• 26 Agosto 1784, Comédie-Italienne Paris "Memnon", opera comica Louis-Charles Ragué, libretto di Jean-François Guichard e Roger-Timothée Régnard de Pleinchesne (da Voltaire: "Memnon ou La sagesse humaine")

• 3 Maggio 1785, Académie Royale de Musique et de Danse Paris "Pizarre ou La conquête de Pérou", Pierre Joseph Candeille, libretto di Pierre Duplessis (da Voltaire)

• 30 Gennaio 1787, Teatro (Gallo) San Benedetto di Venezia di "L'orfano cinese" ("L'orfano della China"), Francesco Bianchi, libretto da Voltaire [15]

• 13 Novembre 1789,Drury Lane Theatre London "The Island of St.Marguerite", Thomas Shaw, libretto di John St.John (da Voltaire: "L'anedocte sur l'homme au masque de fer"

• 13 Gennaio 1790, Théâtre-Italien) paris "Pierre le Grand", André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, libretto di Jean Nicolas Bouilly (da Voltaire: "Histoire de l'empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand")

• Teatro San Carlo, Naples, on August 12, 1845 Alzira Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Salvadore Cammarano, based on the play Alzire, ou les Américains by Voltaire.

Samson et Dalila (English: Samson and Delilah), Op. 47, is a grand opera in three acts and four tableaux by Camille Saint-Saëns to a French libretto by Ferdinand Lemaire. It was first performed at the Grossherzogliches (Grand Ducal) Theater (now the Staatskapelle Weimar) in Weimar on 2 December 1877 in a German translation. ???? [16] Rameau [17]