Abstract
AbstractDuring the 1780s a cellist in the orchestra of the Opéra, known only as Monsieur Hivart, served the Russian Count Nicholas Sheremetev as an operatic agent, sending scores, librettos, costume designs, stage designs and other materials related to opera in Paris, and advising the count on the production of French operas in Russia. Hivart was in contact with such composers as Grétry, Sacchini and Piccinni, and the stage machinist and ballet master of the Opéra, and from his place in the orchestra he could watch their work take shape on stage. This gives his letters to Sheremetev (published in Russian translation in 1944 but largely unknown in the West) significant value for historians of opera in eighteenth-century Paris. Especially extensive are Hivart’s reports on the first production of Salieri’s Les Danaïdes, which contain much information about the first production available nowhere else.
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