Un jardin sur l'Oronte
 | |
| Author | Maurice Barrès |
|---|---|
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
Publication date | 1922 |
Un jardin sur l'Oronte (A Garden on the Orontes) is a novel by Maurice Barrès, which was first published in 1922 by Plon-Nourrit. Barrès purportedly transcribed in it a story which an Irish archaeologist had translated to him from a manuscript one evening of June 1914, at a café in Hama by the Orontes River. The tale of love of "a Christian and a Sarrasin" is set in the crusading era of the Middle Ages.[1][2]
The publication triggered what would be called la querelle de l'Oronte[3][4] (the Orontes Quarrel): as worded by Jane F. Fulcher, "despite the widely known conservatism of Barrès, the novel created a scandal, particularly in the Catholic press, which perceived its sensuality as an outrage to religious morality."[2] After Barrès' death, the work onto which Barrès "claimed to have projected a Wagnerian conception" was adapted into an opera of the same name with a libretto by Franc-Nohain and music by Alfred Bachelet, which was created, undoubtedly delayed by the scandal, on 7 November 1932.[2]
References
- ^ The London Mercury. Vol. 6. 1922. p. 645.
- ^ a b c Fulcher, Jane F. (2005). The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France, 1914–1940. Oxford University Press.
- ^ Cavet, Jean (1927). D'une critique catholique (in French).
- ^ Frandon, Ida-Marie (1952). L'Orient de Maurice Barrès (in French).
Further reading
- Hufnagel, Henning (2015). "All the Colours of the East. 'Ideological Geography', Orientalism, and the Fluctuating Semantics of the East in the Works of Maurice Barrès". Babel. 32. doi:10.4000/babel.4300.
External links
