little riddle. What French playwright saw the 400th anniversary of his birth "forgotten" this year? Pierre Corneille, of course!
Also amazing as it sounds, the author of the Cid was born June 6, 1606 has been no commemoration worthy of the name of France preferred to look at Mozart, composer of great talent (the largest in fact) but Austrian. Stories and controversies will fix this oversight!
Corneille was born in Rouen. He is the eldest of six children of a family of magistrates of Rouen. Logically, at age 22, the young man began a legal career, but fate decided otherwise: a disappointment in love in 1629, made him write poetry. He discovered a passion for this art and began writing tragedies. But unlike some of these "competitors", he directed the society of the seventeenth century and do not necessarily seek its references in antiquity. Shareholder
one moment to the state (Richelieu made a copyright official), he broke with it to write pieces on the high nobility whose greatest pride is the cid. In 1647 he was elected to the French Academy.
Cornelius will use the crisis of the Fronde and the death of Richelieu to settle some scores with the Cardinal Louis XIII, including the death of Pompey. He wondered about the civil war with Rodogne. If the Fronde was not a civil war, it was no less fierce fighting between the parties the most powerful kingdom. Finally, one can also cite Heraclius, Don Sanche and Andromeda, where he focuses on the nature of the king.
But from 1650, his plays were less successful. Jean Racine is the fashionable playwright and his plays are more access on sentiment.
Cornelius nevertheless continued his work as a playwright. It also improves the machinery of the theater, developing the "special effects" (in The Golden Fleece, for example). His latest play, Suren, date from 1674
But the end of his life is difficult. Boileau should even ask for him a royal pension that Louis XIV might be accorded. He died in Paris on 1 October 1684. Pierre Corneille
Why is it "denied" by the state but his work is universally known. Probably because of the Cid.
Indeed, the play takes place during the Reconquista, which sees the Iberian Peninsula resume gradually its territory from the Moors, 711 and installed since the fall of the Visigothic kingdom. Refugees in the north, the Christian kings have never accepted the loss of their kingdoms and they will engage in a war over 700 years (it finally completed in 1492 with the fall of Granada) marked by setbacks (the period of the year one thousand who saw the victories of the powerful Berber-Man Al Sur) and victories. The Cid is so against the backdrop of the battle of King of Castile, who has just transferred his court from Burgos to Seville to fight more effectively against the Moors.
Exhibit contains some magnificent lines, entered the legend of literature as:
O rage! O despair! O old enemy!
Have I lived so long for this infamy? Or
I'm young, it is true, but the noble souls
The value does not depend upon years. (Act II, Scene 2, Don Rodrigue the Count)
The problem of Cornelius would therefore, in these times when the cowards who govern us fear the reaction of the streets and suburbs, he speaks of a conflict between Christians and Muslims. Incidentally, this is absolutely not the subject of the piece (this is the thwarted love between Rodrigue and Chimene). It is amusing (or appalling) to see the reluctance of leaders who prefer to put it under a bushel one of the greatest French playwrights in order not to offend the sensibilities of "lunch" of suburbs. Or another case, ignorance is so crass that they have totally is silent on Pierre Corneille. What is not very reassuring either!
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