L’Île du rêve

L’Île du rêve condenses into an hour of music all the charms of French Romantic opera. The youthful Reynaldo Hahn – just seventeen at the time – reveals colouristic talents inherited from Bizet, a prosodic originality anticipating Debussy, and above all the passionate outpourings he learnt from his teacher Jules Massenet. On reading through the score of L’Île du rêve, Massenet told Hahn: ‘To have written that, you must be a poet.’ The plot recounts a French naval officer’s love affair with a young Polynesian girl he is forced to abandon. This subject – also treated musically by Puccini (Madama Butterfly) and Delibes (Lakmé) – is approached in an almost Symbolist style: the Romanticism of the music contrasts with a contemplative, introspective treatment of the narration.

Recorded at the Prinzregententheater, Munich (Germany), on 24 and 26 January 2020
Alphonse Leduc musical editions in collaboration with the Palazzetto Bru Zane

Contents of the book
A deserted island
Vincent Giroud, A Polynesian idyll in the time of Gauguin
Léon Parsons, An interview with Reynaldo Hahn
Arthur Pougin, The evening of the premiere
In the composer’s workshop: correspondence between Hahn and his friend Édouard Risler
Synopsis
Libretto