Le timbre d'argent

Description

Composed in 1864, Saint-Saëns' first opera – Le Timbre d’argent – has nothing to envy from the most famous works of 19th-century French opera. It depicts the nightmare of a man whose hallucinations anticipate by twenty years the fantastical apparitions of Offenbach's Contes d’Hoffmann. A manipulative devil gives the hero a silver bell that he must ring to obtain gold in order to win the love of the beautiful Circe; in return, a supposedly random victim must die. But it is successively Conrad's father-in-law and best friend who succumb. The flashback resolution of this drama already foreshadows the cinematic techniques of the following century. Led by a dynamic conductor like François-Xavier Roth and performed with all the precision and fervor of the orchestra on historical instruments Les Siècles, this Timbre d’argent is presented here in its latest version, that of 1914, after having been revised ten times over nearly fifty years. Saint-Saëns was undoubtedly right to insist on considering the work as one of his masterpieces.