Death of a Little Girl with Doves for soprano & orchestra
Reviews
“[Death of a Little Girl with Doves] is a deeply attractive and touching piece of writing which I recommend urgently for its imperious melodic confidence, fluent emotional command and yielding tenderness. ... Let’s now have Death of a Little Girl with Doves in the 2005 Proms please. Imaginative sopranos with good diction and adventurous and capable music directors should be seeking out this [work]. Do not delay.”
- Rob Barnett
MusicWeb International
Death of a Little Girl with Doves is an operatic soliloquy based on the life of the French sculptor Camille Claudel (1864-1943). Claudel was an accomplished and celebrated sculptor in late-19th century Paris, where she was known as the talented and original young apprentice to Auguste Rodin. In addition to her own powerful work, Claudel assisted on many of Rodin’s most famous sculptures, including his “La Porte d’enfer” (The Gates of Hell). Claudel and the much-older Rodin became lovers, and their breakup precipitated Claudel’s mental and physical collapse. After ten years of intense creative activity, in 1913, she was committed to the psychiatric hospital at Ville-Évrard against her will. Claudel died in 1943, after thirty years of seclusion, in the asylum of Montdevergues, near Avignon. Hers is a story of Art, love, innocence betrayed, and the tragedy of a young woman’s persecution for being imaginative and independent during a time when such characteristics were viewed as inappropriate and dangerous for women.
Camille Claudel “Little Girl With Doves” (1898)
Death of a Little Girl with Doves is in two parts, subtitled “In Paris” and “In the Asylum.” Each of these two parts is then also divided into two movements. The music and text often move rapidly through different moods and time frames, reflecting the instability of Claudel’s life, and its ultimate dissolution.
This composition is a fantasy. It was inspired by the life and letters of Camille Claudel; however, the depictions of the characters who appear in it are fictional, as are many of the events described. The overall title of the work is taken from the title of one of Camille Claudel’s own paintings, the painting to which she refers in movements one and four. Although created as a concert work, the subject matter lends itself to being staged as a type of monodrama.
Death of a Little Girl with Doves was composed from May to December 1998 for Leslie Morgan, soprano, and the Waterloo/Cedar Falls Symphony Orchestra (Iowa) and premiered in Iowa in 1999. This work appears on my 2004 CD Wave (innova 612), featuring Rayanne Dupuis, soprano, with the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Kirk Trevor, conductor.
In 2023, soprano Rayna Mia Campbell won the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s Voice Concerto Competition with this work. She gave the West coast premiere of the work 10 May 2024 with the San Francisco Ballet and Conservatory Orchestra, Martin West, conductor. (Scroll down for the video).
In 2021, while enjoying a residency at The Hambidge Center, I created a version of this composition for soprano accompanied by a chamber orchestra of twelve players, to hopefully help facilitate more performances of this work.
When ordering a PDF of the score alone, you will receive
a copy of the piano/vocal score.
When ordering a PDF of the score and parts, you will receive
a copy of the chamber orchestra version.
The full orchestra version of Death of a Little Girl with Doves is available on a rental basis from:
The Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music
The Free Library of Philadelphia
1901 Vine Street Philadelphia, PA 19103-1116
tel (215) 686-5313
fleisher@freelibrary.org
- Instrumentation:
- 3333/4331/timp.+3/hp/pno/soprano solo/stgs
- Date completed:
- 1998
- Duration:
- ca. 32:00
- Author:
- Text written and arranged by the composer, adapted and inspired by the life and letters of Camille Claudel
- Audio:
In Paris (I)
In Paris (II)
The Asylum (III)
The Asylum (IV)
- Publisher:
- Fleisher Collection (rental agent) [search catalog for "Jeremy Beck"]
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Licensing Options
Request a grand rights license, to produce a live, staged performance of this work.
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