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Article: Last illusion
- Article from:
- Opera News
- Article date:
- April 13, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Metropolitan Opera Guild, Incorporated Apr 13, 1996. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Before stepping into the turnbril that would take him to the guillotine, the poet Andre Chenier handed his heartbreaking poem "La Jeune Captive" to his muse, Anne Francoise-Aimee de Franquetot de Coigny, who absent-mindedly passed the poem to a friend and neglected even to remember Chenier's name in her memoirs. In Umberto Giordano's historical opera Andrea Chenier, the heroine, Maddalena di Coigny, conspires to join her lover in death. But the real Aimee de Coigny and her lover of the moment, Casimir de Montrand, managed to bribe their jailer, Pepin de Grouettes, with 100 louis and escape the guillotine. Aimee lived on to take other lovers and rejoin Parisian society as one of its more ...
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