Massenet : Catalogue Général des Oeuvres

The bi-lingual Massenet: General Catalogue of Works, produced in collaboration with the Internaional Massenet Association and written in French and English, is a complete inventory of the known works of Jules Massenet. It has been produced with the sponsorship of the International Massenet Association. The purpose of this document, written French and translated into English, is to facilitate research, performance, and general knowledge of Massenet’s music. For each work it gives the vocal and/or instrumental nomenclatures (with operatic roles listed by tessitura), the author(s) of associates texts, the location of manuscripts, and other pertinent details. The authors, specialists in nineteenth-century French repertoire, have established listings of works organized by musical genre: opera, sacred music, cantatas and vocal scenes, choruses, incidental music, symphonic music, piano music, and concert songs. The songs, which represent a large part of Massenet’s oeuvre (some 280 titles), have been organized by title as well as by author, along with a summary of songs appearing in cycles, songs for more than one voice, and those found in editions or collections. The Catalogue includes explanatory paragraphs and annotations for each section, a select bibliography, a general index of works and an index of proper names. Appendices contain a biographical chronology; information on such works as Manon (the completely sung version) and L’Histoire de Manon, the composite ballet arranged and orchestrated by Leighton Lucas; the cantatas Louise de Mézières and David Rizzio; as well as the Hymne that remained unpublished until discovered by Hervé Oléon during the research for this Catalogue. Finally, the catalogue’s authors have created a system of DO numbers (Dibbern-Oléon) that in order to establish, for the first time, an exact quantification of Massenet’s works and which will be useful as definitive reference numbers for this oeuvre.