page_title: Le dernier sorcier
section_title: Later performance history
hierarchical_section_title: Le dernier sorcier / Later performance history
caption_attribution_description: Hoftheater Weimar, vor 1907
context_page_description: Le dernier sorcier is a chamber opera in two acts with music composed by Pauline Viardot to a French libretto by Ivan Turgenev. It was first performed privately on 20 September 1867 at the Villa Turgenev in Baden-Baden and received its first public performance at the Court Theatre in Weimar on 8 April 1869. The story revolves around Krakamiche, an old and once-powerful sorcerer whose presence in the woods has upset the elves living there, and a romance between the sorcerer's daughter Stella and Prince Lelio, whose marriage comes about through the intervention of a Queen of the Elves.
context_section_description: Following a second season of Viardot and Turgenev's privately performed operettas, which included the first performance of L'ogre, their reputation began to spread which led to the first public performance of Le dernier sorcier. With help of Franz Liszt, its first professional public performance was arranged for the Weimar Court Theatre, where it premiered on April 8, 1869, and was repeated on April 11. For those performances, the libretto was translated into German by Richard Pohl and the score was arranged for a full orchestra by Eduard Lassen. The reviews of Der letzte Zauberer (the opera's German title) were mixed. According to Žekulin, this may have been due to the "ponderous" German translation and the arrangement for a full symphony orchestra which overwhelmed what was originally composed as a chamber piece. Nevertheless, there were subsequent performances of the German version in Karlsruhe (January 28 and February 1, 1870) and in Riga later that year as part of a benefit performance for Louise Mayer, who had been a pupil of Viardot's in Baden-Baden.
  Viardot's villa in Baden-Baden had an adjacent salon and art gallery. She later added a small theatre there known locally as the Théâtre du Thiergarten, which could seat about 30 people, making it appropriate for small stage productions. The theatre was inaugurated on August 13, 1869, with a gala performance of Le dernier sorcier. Brahms was in the audience that night and returned to conduct the August 23 performance himself. although on that occasion, it was given in a chamber orchestration—piano, string quartet, harp and percussion. After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870, the Viardot family left Baden-Baden for London where they stayed until 1871, with Turgenev, once again living nearby. While Viardot was in London, Le dernier sorcier received a private performance there.
  The work was largely forgotten until January 2005 when the University of Calgary staged its North American premiere using an English translation of the French libretto by Žekulin and the version of the score for chamber orchestra that had been used at the 1869 gala performance in the Théâtre du Thiergarten, which Žekulin reconstructed from Viardot's papers at Harvard University. As part of the commemorations for the centenary of Viardot's death, the opera was given another staging in July 2010 (using Žekulin's 2005 version of the score) at the convent of the Minims in Pourrières.
caption: Interior of the Weimar Court Theatre, where Le dernier sorcier had its first public performance on April 8, 1869
exif: {}