The pantheon of musical gods is usually reserved for composers and the occasional stellar performer: rarely if ever do we think of an arranger of someone else’s music as a major musical personage. But the task is not to be underestimated: even Mozart complained to his father, on 20 July 1782: “you have no idea of
the difficulty of arranging a work of this kind for a band to adapt it to the wind instruments, yet without detracting from the effect.” Emile Hypolite Joseph Tavan (1849-1929), originally from Aix-en-Provence, was a master at arranging operas for large and small ensembles and for piano, such as those performed on this
recording by Monaldo Braconi. Although editions were published of operatic scores for piano solo, these were exclusively for use by the conductor or rehearsal pianist. Instead, Tavan’s operatic “fantasies” are free-form collections of the memorable moments of operas, and they made him quite famous at the time. But he was much more than a simple arranger of opera’s best- loved melodies. According to WorldCat, Tavan created 1,395 works in 1,875 publications in five languages, in his capacities as author, composer, arranger, adapter, editor, and transcriber. He may even have written more compositions under the pseudonym James P. Colwery. Tavan also wrote an orchestration text, Méthode pratique d’orchestration symphonique, which was widely used in France. As a conductor, He performed with the Eiffel Tower symphony (1890), and led the orchestra at one of the masked balls at the Opéra; in 1900, he also conducted as part of the Universal Exposition of Paris. One little-known fact about Tavan is that, in 1894, he was elected mayor of Mantes la Jolie and re-elected many times.
In our modern era - when any music is available to anyone at any time - it may be difficult to understand the need for popularizing operas through piano and band transcriptions. But in a time before youtube, many 19th-century piano virtuosi wrote operatic fantasies to both familiarize audience with the repertoire
(sometimes their own compositions) and to display their virtuosic pianistic skills. Among the most famous of these pianists was Sigismond Thalberg (known for his fantasy on Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots) and Franz Liszt (for his fantasy Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra). Bizet’s Carmen also inspired many fantasies! He was very prolific: the Italian publishing house Ricordi lists Tavan’s arrangements of works by Alfano, Boito, Burgmein (a.k.a., Giulio Ricordi
himself), Catalani, Franchetti, Mascagni (Iris), Ponchielli, Puccini, Verdi (Aida, Don Carlos, Falstaff, Otello, Un Ballo in Maschera), and Zandonai, among others. But in France, Tavan also published fantasies on operas by Auber, Donizetti, Gounod, Massenet, Meyer-beer, Offenbach, R. Strauss, Wagner (Rienzi, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan, Der Meistersinger, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, Parsifal), and Weber. Even though it seems that by now the whole world
knows Puccini’s operas and there is no need for popularization, there are still some intriguing reasons to explore Tavan’s fantasies on his works. For instance, not many people know Puccini’s first opera, Le Villi, or even his 1910 “American” opera, La Fanciulla del West, and thus they would not likely search for them on the Internet. Second, these fantasies have historical precedents: similar pastiches were sometimes used to accompany silent movie versions of operas. Furthermore, Puccini was a great improviser: when he wrote an opera, his first step was to annotate the libretto with musical cues and then connect them all at the piano, reading from this libretto, whenever he had to demonstrate an unfinished opera. Puccini played such a “fantasy” for Victorien Sardou, the playwright who wrote the original play La Tosca, before the opera on which it was based was completed.
Tavan’s fantasies on Puccini’s operas highlight the most memorable passages, but often they do so out of dramatic order. For instance, in the first Tosca fantasy (there were eleven editions published between 1903 and 1947, in threelanguages), the entrance of the sacristan comes after the love duet, followed by the third-act “E lucevan le stelle”; in the second Tosca fantasy, we hear the second-act “Vissi d’arte,” then the firstact “Non lo sospiri,” followed by the second-act
“Gavotta,” and finally the first-act “Te Deum.” Moreover, the pieces are often transposed from their original keys so that, one supposes, they create a more flowing musical progress-sion from one quoted moment to the next. This in turn speaks to perennial problem of whether the words or music come first in opera: that is, does the musical sense outweigh the dramatic inconsistencies? Given the popular success of these fantasies at the time, it seems clear that - at
least in these cases - the music predominates. Tavan also wrote many of his own compositions, including several with an exotic flavor, such as his
“Noce arabe,” “Fête havanaise,” and his many “Hongroises.” He is also known for “Oceana” a suite of waltzes (which is very traditionally tonal), many polkas, mazurkas and a Chopin-like nocturne entitled “Seule au monde.” But when he died on the day after Christmas 1929, at Gassicourt (Seine and Oise), we can definitely say that this successful musician was definitely not “alone in the world.”