{"id":511,"date":"2010-10-14T16:03:25","date_gmt":"2010-10-14T20:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/?p=511"},"modified":"2011-01-03T16:06:31","modified_gmt":"2011-01-03T21:06:31","slug":"la-belle-la-perfectly-swell-romance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/2010\/10\/14\/la-belle-la-perfectly-swell-romance\/","title":{"rendered":"La Belle, La Perfectly Swell Romance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The generosity of the Women\u2019s Task Force Fund has enabled the Loeb Music Library to acquire a wide variety of rare works by women composers: some, like Carrie Jacobs Bond or Liza Lehmann, top of the charts in their lifetimes but less known today, some, like Miss Mellish, composer of My Phillida, adieu love<\/a>, hauntingly obscure: we don\u2019t even know her first name. None of them pique this writer\u2019s curiosity more than the one-woman hit machine known as Lo\u00efsa Puget.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n
\"\"<\/a><\/em>

Cover engraving from "\u00c0 la gr\u00e2ce de Dieu" (1836) Even then, the old "let's make her look as if she's smoking" routine was irresistible, apparently.<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Puget (1810-1889) was one of the most popular and playable French songwriters of the 1830\u2019s.\u00a0 Her romances<\/em>, or simple, pretty, easy-to-sing ballads of peasant and bourgeois life, were as much a part of life as the poke bonnet.\u00a0 Her mother had been an singer, and made music a large part of her daughter\u2019s education, which included some time at the same boarding school as the young George Sand (then known as Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin.)\u00a0 Quick to spot the one other pupil interested in the arts, Sand remarked on the younger girl\u2019s talent, vivacity, roguery and beauty.\u00a0 These served Puget well as she began to make a name for herself as a songwriter, singing and accompanying her own ballads in the salons of the well-to-do. Her facility and charm won over such diverse people as Hector Berlioz, who ruefully remarked that to the people of Paris all the symphonies in the world are not worth a romance by Lo\u00efsa Puget sung by their favorite prima donna, and the dialect poet Jacques Jasmin, who wrote a poem praising her melodies, at which \u201cla terro tout s\u2019amayzo, tout se tayzo.\u201d\u00a0 Together, Puget and Gustave Lemoine, her lyricist, dominated family music racks, school songbooks, popular concerts and after-dinner piano singalongs from 1830 to 1845, when composer and lyricist married, fashions in song began to change, and Puget\u2019s prolific production rate slowed down.<\/p>\n

Puget enjoyed herself thoroughly giving her public exactly what they wanted, even, in 1836, an opera, Le mauvais \u0153il<\/em>, but her greatest hit was \u201c\u00c0 la gr\u00e2ce de Dieu.\u201d \u00a0If cell phones had been available in 1836, Puget\u2019s ballad would have been the most popular ringtone in France. \u00a0A mother\u2019s song of farewell as she watches her daughter leave her village to seek her fortune in Paris, this romance<\/em> was the \u201cSingle Ladies\u201d of its day: church organs played it, dance bands played it, accomplished young women beguiled the long evenings with it.\u00a0 It was so successful that in 1841 Lemoine and Adolphe Philippe D\u2019Ennery elaborated the basic idea into a melodrama, La Gr\u00e2ce de Dieu<\/em>, which in turn became the basis for Donizetti\u2019s Linda di Chamounix<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Loeb Music Library owns seventy-two pamphlet scores of Puget\u2019s romances<\/a>.\u00a0The earliest dates to 1830.\u00a0 In addition, a score of Le mauvais \u0153il<\/a> is available for study in the Merritt Room.<\/p>\n

– Sarah Barton<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The generosity of the Women\u2019s Task Force Fund has enabled the Loeb Music Library to acquire a wide variety of rare works by women composers: some, like Carrie Jacobs Bond or Liza Lehmann, top of the charts in their lifetimes but less known today, some, like Miss Mellish, composer of My Phillida, adieu love, hauntingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2370,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15748],"tags":[19720,19721,19722,14789,19719,19726],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-isham-memorial-library","tag-french-composers","tag-loisa-puget","tag-romance","tag-scores","tag-women-composers","tag-womens-task-force-fund","post-preview"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6lSEF-8f","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2370"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":800,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions\/800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/loebmusic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}