Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay (French:[al.fʁɛddəmy.sɛ]; 11 December 1810 – 2 May 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.[1][2] Along with his poetry, he is known for writing the autobiographical novelLa Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century).[2]
Musset was born in Paris. His family was upper-class but poor; his father worked in various key government positions, but never gave his son any money. Musset's mother came from similar circumstances, and her role as a society hostess – for example her drawing-room parties, luncheons and dinners held in the Musset residence – left a lasting impression on young Alfred.[2]
An early indication of his boyhood talents was his fondness for acting impromptu mini-plays based upon episodes from old romance stories he had read.[2] Years later, elder brother Paul de Musset would preserve these and many other details, for posterity, in a biography of his famous younger brother.[2]
Alfred de Musset entered the lycée Henri-IV at the age of nine, where in 1827 he won the Latin essay prize in the Concours général at age 17. With the help of Paul Foucher, Victor Hugo's brother-in-law, he began to attend, at the age of 17, the Cénacle, the literary salon of Charles Nodier at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. After attempts at careers in medicine (which he gave up owing to a distaste for dissections), law,[1] drawing, English and piano, he became one of the first Romantic writers, with his first collection of poems, Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie (1829, Tales of Spain and Italy).[1] By the time he reached the age of 20, his rising literary fame was already accompanied by a sulphurous reputation fed by his dandy side.
He was the librarian of the French Ministry of the Interior under the July Monarchy. His politics were of a liberal stamp, and he was on good terms with the family of King Louis Philippe.[3] During this time he also involved himself in polemics during the Rhine crisis of 1840, caused by the French prime minister Adolphe Thiers, who as Minister of the Interior had been Musset's superior. Thiers had demanded that France should own the left bank of the Rhine (described as France's "natural boundary"), as it had under Napoleon, despite the territory's German population. These demands were rejected by German songs and poems, including Nikolaus Becker's Rheinlied, which contained the verse: "Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den freien, deutschen Rhein ..." (They shall not have it, the free, German Rhine). Musset answered to this with a poem of his own: "Nous l'avons eu, votre Rhin allemand" (We've had it, your German Rhine).
The tale of his celebrated love affair with George Sand in 1833–1835[1] is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century) (1836),[1] which was made into a 1999 film, Children of the Century, and a 2012 film, Confession of a Child of the Century, and is told from her point of view in her Elle et lui (1859). Musset's Nuits (Nights) (1835–1837) traces the emotional upheaval of his love for Sand from early despair to final resignation.[1] He is also believed to be the anonymous author of Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess (1833), a lesbian erotic novel also believed to be modeled on Sand.[4]
Outside of his relationship with Sand he was a well-known figure in brothels, and is widely accepted to be the anonymous author-client who beat and humiliated the author and courtesan Céleste de Chabrillan, also known as La Mogador.
Musset was dismissed from his post as librarian by the new minister Ledru-Rollin after the revolution of 1848. He was, however, appointed librarian of the Ministry of Public Instruction in 1853.
On 24 April 1845, Musset received the Légion d'honneur at the same time as Balzac, and was elected to the Académie Française in 1852 after two failed attempts in 1848 and 1850.
Alfred de Musset died in his sleep in Paris in 1857. The cause was heart failure, the combination of alcoholism and a longstanding aortic insufficiency. One symptom that had been noticed by his brother was a bobbing of the head as a result of the amplification of the pulse; this was later called de Musset's sign.[5] He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
The French poet Arthur Rimbaud was highly critical of Musset's work. Rimbaud wrote in his Letters of a Seer (Lettres du Voyant) that Musset did not accomplish anything because he "closed his eyes" before the visions (letter to Paul Demeny, May 1871).
Henri Gervex's 1878 painting Rolla was based on a poem by De Musset. It was rejected by the jury of the Salon de Paris for immorality, since it features suggestive metaphors in a scene from the poem, with a naked prostitute shown after having sex with her client, but the controversy helped Gervex's career.
Jean Anouilh's Eurydice (1941) employs an intertextually salient quote of Musset's play On ne badine pas avec l'amour II.5 (1834), "The Tirade of Perdican" — Vincent and Eurydice's Mother rekindle the glorious days of their earlier acting careers and their own amours, when once his on-stage performance of Perdican's tirade instigated their first dressing-room love scene.
Bizet set Musset's poems『À une fleur』and『Adieux à Suzon』for voice and piano in 1866; the latter had previously been set by Chabrier in 1862. Pauline Viardot set Musset's poem "Madrid" for voice and piano as part of her 6 Mélodies (1884). The Welsh composer Morfydd Llwyn Owen wrote song settings for Musset's "La Tristesse" and "Chanson de Fortunio". Lili Boulanger's Pour les funérailles d'un soldat for baritone, mixed chorus and orchestra is a setting of several lines from Act IV of Musset's play La Coupe et les lèvres.
Instrumental music
Ruggero Leoncavallo's symphonic poem La Nuit de Mai (1886) was based on Musset's poetry. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Cielo di settembre, op. 1 for solo piano (1910) takes its name from a line of Musset's poem "A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles". The score, in the original publication, is preceded by that line,『Mais vois donc quel beau ciel de septembre…』Rebecca Clarke's Viola Sonata (1919) is prefaced by two lines from Musset's La Nuit de Mai.[10]
Other
Shane Briant played Alfred de Musset in one episode of a 1974 TV drama series, Notorious Woman.
In 2007, Céline Dion recorded a song called『Lettre de George Sand à Alfred de Musset』for her album D'elles.
Musset is one of the five characters in the painting George Sand dans l'atelier de Delacroix avec Musset, Balzac et Chopin[14] [George Sand in Delacroix's studio with Musset, Balzac and Chopin] made by Peruvian painter Herman Braun-Vega at the request of the Museums of Châteauroux, France, in 2004, for the bicentenary of George Sand's birth. In his commentary on the painting, Braun-Vega evokes the relationship between Musset and George Sand.[15] The painting was exhibited for the first time in 2004-2005 at the Couvent des Cordeliers in Châteauroux, France.
^ abcdefHis names are often reversed "Louis Charles Alfred de Musset": see "(Louis Charles) Alfred de Musset" (bio), Biography.com, 2007, webpage: Bio9413Archived 8 August 2007 at the Wayback Machine.
^"Twelve eponymous signs of aortic regurgitation, one of which was named after a patient instead of a physician", in: The American Journal of Cardiology, vol. 93, issue 10, 15 May 2004, pp. 1332–3; by Tsung O. Cheng MD.
^George Sand : Interprétations 2004 (in French). éditions joca seria. 2004. p. 75. ISBN978-2-848-09036-8. Let's imagine: A visit to Delacroix studio... We are in 1847. The master is making a portrait. George Sand is posing, surrounded by Chopin, Balzac and Musset. [...] Musset, in the shade of sunflowers, makes a strange gesture with the right hand. Does he remember Venice?
Denommé, Robert Thomas (1969). Nineteenth-century French Romantic Poets. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Gamble, D.R. (1989–1990). "Alfred de Musset and the Uses of Experience," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. XVIII, No. 1/2, pp. 78–84.
Gooder, Jean (1986). "Alive or Dead? Alfred de Musset's Supper with Rachel," The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. XV, No. 2, pp. 173–187.
Grayson Jane (1995). "The French Connection: Nabokov and Alfred de Musset. Ideas and Practices of Translation," The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. LXXIII, No. 4, pp. 613–658.
Greet, Anne Hyde (1967). "Humor in the Poetry of Alfred de Musset," Studies in Romanticism, Vol. VI, No. 3, pp. 175–192.
Stothert, James (1878). "Alfred de Musset,"The Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. CCXLIII, pp. 215–234.
Thomas, Merlin (1985). "Alfred de Musset: Don Juan on the Boulevard de Gand." In: Myths and its Making in the French Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 158–165.
Trent, William P. (1899). "Tennyson and Musset Once More." In: The Authority of Criticism. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 269–291.
Wright, Rachel L. (1992). "Male Reflectors in the Drama of Alfred de Musset," The French Review, Vol. LXV, No. 3, pp. 393–401.
