Lot n° 141
Estimation :
1200 - 1500
EUR
[Guillaume APOLLINAIRE (1880-1918). Autograph manuscript by - Lot 141
[Guillaume APOLLINAIRE (1880-1918). Autograph manuscript by Jacqueline APOLLINAIRE (1891-1967), Casanova; small in-4 schoolbook with pink cover of about 51 pages.
Complete manuscript, copied by his wife, of Apollinaire's Casanova.
The manuscript, written on the front of the notebook pages, contains corrections and additions, sometimes important, on the left side; it presents some passages crossed out and some cuts, with variants and changes compared to the edition, and also some differences (in the order of some passages) with the autograph manuscript preserved at the Bnf.
With Casanova, a "parodic comedy" written in 1917-1918, Apollinaire tackled the genre of opera buffa. The music was to be composed by Henry Defosse, conductor of the Ballets Russes.
In his preface to the original edition of Casanova (Gallimard, 1952), Robert Mallet states that Apollinaire had formed the project of writing a text that "would really be the subject of a musical work. The idea had come to him at Picasso's house, where he met dancers and musicians from the Ballets Russes [...]. He envisioned choreographic entertainments that would be adapted to comically lyrical scenes [...]. He began to write a dialogue of Italian comedy whose title was Casanova. [...]. He did not complete the third act until August 5, 1918 at "Kervoyal", the villa he had rented in Morbihan. His death, a few weeks later, closed on his barely signed work the boxes from which Mme Apollinaire has just extracted it ".
One notices in particular the suppression of the spoken passages, in prose; thus, at the beginning of scene IV, the monologue of the Marquise, of which we will quote the beginning: " To say that until now one always made me the court. I have never given in. That is my policy, to yield nothing but to let myself be taken, and here I am taken myself, a youth, an actor, what shall I say, an Adonis. The beauty in a man makes him king of our hearts"...
A set of proofs (56 p.) is enclosed, of which only the beginning (5 p.) is corrected, dated March 22, 1951; the first edition (Gallimard, 1952), one of the 100 copies out of trade (n° 1691), stapled, with a prayer of insertion.
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