“Annette et Lubin”
Justine Favart and Adolphe Blaise's “Annette et Lubin” was premièred on 15 February 1762 at the Paris Opéra-Comique – the first new production at that theater following its merger with the Comédie-Italien. It was a resounding success: by the time the season came to an end, on 3 April, it had been almost continuously on the program with no decline in interest from the public, and it remained in the repertoire for more than thirty years. Countless new editions, translations, and parodies of the play bear witness to its impact far beyond the borders of Paris. Like all of Favart's works, it deals with the subject of natural love, unencumbered by considerations of money or social status endangering it from the outside through powerful aristocratic or wealthy rivals. The plot is based on a literary model, the like-named tale by Jean-François Marmontel, which is in turn based on a contemporary occurrence.
Annette and her cousin Lubin are sharply reprimanded for their love by an estate administrator (Le Bailli) who himself has designs on Annette. He takes advantage of Annette's illegitimate pregnancy to extort her: only by marrying him can she escape condemnation by society and the church. But Annette and her lover are able to gain the protection of the local squire (Le Seigneur), and the story ends happily with a conciliatory gesture from the lord of the manor.
The second volume in our series OPERA, Annette et Lubin, consists of a cloth-bound book and an Edirom file stored on a USB card in credit-card format. The number of simultaneous users of the edition's digital component is unlimited.
Further information on the work and the OPERA series can be found at http://www.opera-edition.com/en/annetteetlubin_en.htm.
OPERA: Spectrum of European Music Theatre in Separate Editions is dedicated to critical editions of outstanding works of European music theatre from the 17th to the 20th centuries.
Compositions of French, Italian, German, English, Scandinavian and Slavic origin are being edited. These include specific genres which have seldom been given attention in editorial undertakings until now and which present their own editorial problems, such as ballet, theatre music, melodrama or operetta.
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This special editorial access being implemented by OPERA’s editions uses the software Edirom, which was developed in a project of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) based at the University of Paderborn. All components of the electronic part are encoded according to the modern standard of XML. The text components follow the standard of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).