Le Roi malgré lui — quotations

Maurice Ravel:

The first night of Le Roi malgré lui changed the face of French harmony for ever

Gabriel Pierné (to Chabrier on 24 May 1887):

I had the pleasure of being at the second performance of your new piece and I spent such a delicious evening that I cannot resist telling you what admiration I have for you. I applauded with all my strength and roared my head off! A thousand bravos! Here is real French art served up with a sauce that will enrage your contemporaries. So much the worse for them - just let them do as much!

Cosima Wagner (to Felix Mottl after seeing Le Roi malgré lui in Dresden):

Ye Gods! What vulgarity and what a lack of ideas! Offenbach, Meyerbeer and Gounod with a few tricks à la Berlioz in the orchestration. Why Chabrier ever came to Dresden will always remain a mystery. When we came out, the Countess Wolkenstein and I, we said that what would be really good would be never to hear a note of Chabrier ever again. If Gwendoline is bad, this is abominable. He doesn’t even know how to write a decent dance. In the first act I was horrified, in the second I was furious, in the third I was so fed-up that I asked myself yet again what on earth I was doing there. The execution was good…but no performance in the world could disguise, even for a moment, these café-concert trivialities, this lowest of the low.

Vincent d’Indy (to Chabrier just after the dress rehearsal of Le Malgré lui):

There are some absolutely exquisite things in it and (which I like even better) some quite new things that no one has done before you. All the second act is absolutely ravishing from the waltz - which really gets going “alla Chabrier vecchio” - to the finale, which will have an enormous effect. As for the third act, there’s inspiration there as beautiful as anything there is in music…But I cannot understand the plot…There are two many doors, too many oratories for going in and out of, too many people arriving when they should be leaving or going away when they should be staying. I don’t understand…You are sure to have a great success and your friends (the real ones) will be as pleased as the public, because there is music in there.

Reynaldo Hahn

Le Roi malgré lui is the most perfectly, the most exclusively French work of the musical 19th century and perhaps the only one where the French spirit is reveal in all its charm, all its courage, all its nimbleness, all its strength without any of the trivialities or vulgarities which too often besmirch it.

Maurice Ravel:

I would rather have written Le Roi malgré lui than the whole of the Ring !