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Beautiful book - the 1958 printing of the 1925 first edition. Half red cloth spine over gray & red marbled paper on boards. Book is tight, square and totally free of all markings and flaws, other than a faint gift inscription on the FFEP. Endpapers are gray. "Nowhere is Maurice Ravel s ability to conjure up the world of a child more vividly revealed than in the web of fairytale and reality, imagination and intense sensation that is woven through his opera L Enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Enchantments). The opera s libretto, by the French novelist Colette, was drafted following a commission from Jacques Rouché, the visionary director of the Opéra de Paris. In mid-March 1916 Colette sent her sketch to Rouché, who offered it first to Paul Dukas and then to Stravinsky; barely a fortnight earlier, Ravel had left for the Western Front as an army driver. That September Ravel, serving somewhere near Verdun, was offered the third refusal, but although a copy of Colette s text was mailed, it never reached him. Ravel finally received and accepted the commission only in the spring of 1917, and it was not until well after the end of World War One that he began work. Oh! Cher ami, when, oh when, the Divertissement pour ma.petite-fille? wrote Colette to Ravel in the summer of 1923. If he didn t get a move on, this work that she had first conceived as a Divertissement for my daughter , was going to turn into one for her granddaughter (petite-fille) instead. In the spring of 1924, with a première for the new opera confirmed at the Théâtre de Monte Carlo (rather than in Paris, as originally foreseen), Ravel seriously set to work on completing L Enfant. 1st/later - now protected in archival quality mylar. Seller Inventory # blb01685
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