Adrienne Lecouvreur

Adrienne Couvreur, called Lecouvreur, ( born April 5, 1692 in Damery near Epernay, † March 20, 1730 in Paris ) was considered as the most important French actress of her time.

Life

Adrienne Lecouvreur was the daughter of a washerwoman and a rock -maker. She had her first engagement at the theater in Lille and then went to Paris, where she 1717 Jean Racine's Mithridate drama drew attention to himself for the first time. In June of the same year she joined the Comédie- Française, where she reüssierte as a tragic heroine and achieved great success with the public.

Lecouvreur had numerous affairs, including with Count Maurice of Saxony, an illegitimate son of Augustus the Strong. This love affair and the fact established rivalry with the Duchess of Bouillon was rumored to be linked to her sudden death at the age of only 37 years. In fact, it 's probably died of pelvic inflammatory disease, in the arms of her friend Voltaire, to whom she was closely associated both artistically and personally. A few days before her death she had been in the role of Jocasta from Oedipus Voltaire on stage. The church, which was acting as a disreputable activity, refused her a Christian burial, and it was without the presence of a priest in the embankment of the Seine, on the Champ de Mars today, buried. This circumstance prompted Voltaire to Ode La mort de Mademoiselle Lecouvreur with the closing verses: " Dieux! pourquoi mon pays n'est -il plus la patrie / Et de la gloire et des talents? » ( " Heaven Why is my country not the home / Both of fame and the talent? ")

The devotion that still was bestowed her beyond death, and the Enlightenment critique of the church, which manifested itself here, is expressed in the brief passage from the Règlement pour l' Opéra de Paris, avec des notes historiques a " Monsieur de Querlon " (pseudonym ) from 1743: " Toi qui méritais of autels, et qu'un cruel préjugé private du tombeau, divine Le Couvreur, qu'il soit permis de jeter me en passant quelques fleurs sur tes cendres indignées de notre barbarie. [ ... ] Le temps qui abat les Pyramides Fieres et qui ne peut ruin les orgueilleux monuments rien contre ta mémoire. » ( " You, the altars deserved and has been robbed by a cruel prejudice of the grave, divine Le Couvreur, it allowed me in passing some flowers to lay your ashes that are outraged by our barbarism. [ ... ] The time, the low- wringing proud pyramids and the haughty monuments destroyed, nothing can against the memory of you. " )

Stage and Screen

The history of Adrienne Lecouvreur was material for a play by Eugène Scribe (1849, dt Thadden G. Hermann 1850), an opera by Francesco Cilea ( Adriana Lecouvreur, premiere in 1902 with Enrico Caruso, sound recording in 1954 with Maria Callas ) and an operetta ( Adrienne ) by Walter Wilhelm Goetze and for three films named Adrienne Lecouvreur (1913, 1938 and 1955), the first of which Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. Giuseppe Verdi was considering for a short time a musical work about the actress.