Victorien Sardou

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Victorien Sardou
Sardou in 1880
Sardou in 1880
BornVictorien Léandre Sardou
(1831-09-05)5 September 1831
Paris, France
Died8 November 1908(1908-11-08) (aged 77)
Paris, France
OccupationPlaywright
Period19th-century
GenreWell-made play
Signature

Victorien Sardou (

Eugène Scribe, of the well-made play.[2] He also wrote several plays that were made into popular 19th-century operas such as La Tosca (1887) on which Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca (1900) is based, and Fédora (1882) and Madame Sans-Gêne (1893) that provided the subjects for the lyrical dramas Fedora (1898) and Madame Sans-Gêne (1915) by Umberto Giordano
. His play Gismonda, from 1894, was also adapted into an opera of the same name by Henry Février.

Early years

Commemorative plaque at the house in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, where Sardou was born

Victorien Sardou was born at 16 rue Beautreillis (pronounced [ʁy bo.tʁɛ.ji]), Paris on 5 September 1831. The Sardous were settled at Le Cannet, a village near Cannes, where they owned an estate, planted with olive trees. A night's frost killed all the trees and the family was ruined. Victorien's father, Antoine Léandre Sardou, came to Paris in search of employment. He was in succession a book-keeper at a commercial establishment, a professor of book-keeping, the head of a provincial school, then a private tutor and a schoolmaster in Paris, besides editing grammars, dictionaries and treatises on various subjects. With all these occupations, he hardly succeeded in making a livelihood, and when he retired to his native country, Victorien was left on his own resources. He had begun studying medicine, but had to desist for want of funds. He taught French to foreign pupils: he also gave lessons in Latin, history and mathematics to students, and wrote articles for cheap encyclopaedias.[3]

Career

At the same time, he was trying to make headway in the literary world. His talents had been encouraged by an old

Eugène Scribe, who was revolted by the scene in question.[3]

In 1857, Sardou felt the pangs of actual want, and his misfortunes culminated in an attack of

Déjazet. She nursed him, cured him, and, when he was well again, introduced him to her friend. Déjazet had just established the theatre named after her, and every show after La Taverne was put on at this theatre. Fortune began to smile on the author.[3]

It is true that Candide, the first play he wrote for Mlle Déjazet, was stopped by the censor, but Les Premières Armes de Figaro, Monsieur Garat, and Les Prés Saint Gervais, produced almost in succession, had a splendid run. Garat and Gervais were done at Theatre des Varlétés and in English at Criterion Theatre in London. Les Pattes de mouche (1860, afterwards anglicized as A Scrap of Paper) obtained a similar success at the Gymnase.[3]

Théodora
 in 1884
A sketch of Sardou from 1899

Sir Henry Irving, and produced at the Lyceum theatre in London, as was Dante (1903). The Napoleonic era was revived in La Tosca (1887).[3]

Sardou's grave in Marly-le-Roi

Louis XIV of France.[6] Toward the end of his life, Sardou made several recordings of himself reading passages from his works, including a scene from Patrie![7]

Vanity Fair
 (1891)

Personal life and death

Sardou married his benefactress, Mlle de Brécourt, but eight years later he became a widower, and soon after the

Académie française in the room of the poet Joseph Autran (1813–1877), and took his seat on 22 May 1878.[3] He lived at Château de Marly
for some time.

He was a fervent book collector who assembled an immense collection of 80,000 books. [8] The rooms at his home in Marly were devoted to housing his book and print collections. After his death his books were sold as described in the Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu M. Victorien Sardou [9]

He obtained the

pulmonary congestion.[6]

Sardou in 1901

Writing style

Sardou modelled his work after Eugène Scribe. It was reported in Stephen Sadler Stanton's intro to Camille and Other Plays that Sardou would read the first act of one of Scribe's plays, rewrite the rest, and then compare the two. One of his first goals when writing was to devise a central conflict followed by a powerful climax. From there, he would work backwards to establish the action leading up to it. He believed conflict was the key to drama.[10]

He was ranked with the two undisputed leaders of dramatic art at that time,

Dumas. He adhered to Scribe's constructive methods, which combined the three old kinds of comedy —the comedy of character, of manners and of intrigue— with the drame bourgeois, and blended the heterogeneous elements into a compact body. He opened a wider field to social satire: He ridiculed the vulgar and selfish middle-class person in Nos Intimes (1861: anglicized as Peril), the gay old bachelors in Les Vieux Garçons (1865), the modern Tartufes in Seraphine (1868), the rural element in Nos Bons Villageois (1866), old-fashioned customs and antiquated political beliefs in Les Ganaches (1862), the revolutionary spirit and those who thrive on it in Rabagas (1872) and Le Roi Carotte (1872), the then threatened divorce laws in Divorçons (1880).[3]

Legacy

Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw said of La Tosca: "Such an empty-headed ghost of a shocker... Oh, if it had but been an opera!"[10] He also came up with the dismissive term "Sardoodledom" in a review of Sardou plays (The Saturday Review, 1 June 1895). Shaw believed that Sardou's contrived dramatic machinery was creaky and that his plays were empty of ideas.[citation needed]

After producer

Sir Squire Bancroft saw the dress rehearsal for Fedora, he said in his memoirs "In five minutes the audience was under a spell which did not once abate throughout the whole four acts. Never was treatment of a strange and dangerous subject more masterly, never was acting more superb than Sarah showed that day."[10] William Winter said of Fedora that "the distinguishing characteristic of this drama is carnality."[citation needed
]

Sardou is mentioned in part two, chapter two of

Proust's The Guermantes Way, the third volume of In Search of Lost Time.[11]

In New Orleans, during the period when much of its upper class still spoke French, Antoine Alciatore, founder of the famous old restaurant Antoine's, invented a dish called Eggs Sardou in honor of the playwright's visit to the city.

The Rue Victorien Sardou and Square Victorien Sardou near the Parc Sainte-Périne in Paris are named after him. There are also streets named rue Victorien Sardou in Lyon and Saint-Omer.

Works

Stage works

Poster for an 1897 production of A Divorce Cure, adapted from Sardou's play Divorçons!
Poster for the 1918 film Let's Get a Divorce, based on Sardou's Divorçons

Books

  • Rabàgas (1872)
  • Daniel Rochet (1880)[16]

Adapted works

Translations of plays

  • Nos Intimes! (1862), translated by Horace Wigan into Friends or Foes?
  • La Papillonne (1864), translated by Augustin Daly into Taming of a Butterfly
  • Le Degel (1864), translated by Vincent Amcotts into Adonis Vanquished
  • Les Ganaches (1869) translated and adapted by
    Thomas William Robertson
    into Progress
  • Nos Intimes! (1872), translated by George March into Our Friends
  • Les Pres Saint-Gervais (1875), translated and adapted by Robert Reece
  • Dora (1877), translated and adapted into Diplomacy
  • Divorçons! (1882), translated into Cyprienne
  • Robespierre, translated by
    Laurence Irving

Operas and musicals

Poster for Henry Février's Gismonda

Film adaptations

References

  1. ^ "Sardou, Victorien". Who's Who. Vol. 59. 1907. p. 1556. Retrieved 23 February 2024 – via Google Books.
  2. ^ McCormick (1998, 964).
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Sardou, Victorien". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 24 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 218–219.
  4. ^ Encarta Dictionary, Microsoft Encarta Premium Suite 2004.
  5. ^ "Terry as Madame Sans-Gene". The Philadelphia Inquirer. 22 November 1901. p. 2. Retrieved 23 February 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
  6. ^ a b c "Victorien Sardou, Dramatist, Dead; Dean of French Playwrights and Creator of Bernhardt's Famous Roles Leaves No Memoirs. First Play was Hissed; His Last, 'L'Affaire des Poisons,' He Saw Produced at 75 -- Still Running to Crowded Houses" (PDF). The New York Times. 9 November 1908. Retrieved 23 February 2024.
  7. ^ Fonotipia – A Centenary Celebration 1904-2004 SYMPOSIUM 1261 [JW]: Classical CD Reviews- May 2005 MusicWeb-International
  8. ^ Dailey, Victoria. "The Marvellous Monsieur Sardou: Part 1." The Book Collector 72 (spring 2023): 21-40.
  9. ^ Dailey, Victoria. "The Marvellous Monsieur Sardou: Part 2." The Book Collector 72 (autumn, 2023):426-449.
  10. ^ a b c "EBSCO Connect".
  11. ^ The Guermantes Way, Part Two, p. 162.
  12. ^ Piccolino, comédie en trois actes, 1861 at Google Books
  13. Bloomsbury Academic
    . p. 326.
  14. ^ Piccolino, opéra-comique en trois actes, 1876 at Internet Archive.
  15. ^ "The latest 'Cleopatra'". In: The New York Times, 24 October 1890.
  16. ^
    ISBN 978-0-7876-1847-6
    .

Further reading

External links

Look up sardoodledom in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Victorien Sardou.
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