First performed at the Paris Opera Theatre on 9 June, 1842 - six years before France finally abolished the slave trade - Le Code Noir was an adaptation of Madame Charles Reybaud’s 1838 novella Les Épaves.
This handsomely bound volume comprises the engraved music and lyrics for the eleven songs in the piece. It opens with a list of the actors playing each role as well as a lists each of the eleven songs citing the characters singing each. Antoinette Réveilly (1822-99) gave one of her finest performances in the role of Gabrielle.
Set in Martinique, the heart of the work is essentially a love triangle between Donatien, Gabrielle and Cécile. However, Scribe made a small but important change to Reybaud’s text. He dispensed with the character of Cécile, a marriageable white woman, which in his version, allows for the enslaved woman Zoé to enter the picture. She “gets to marry Donatien at the auction scene, and he is the best and most desirable match for her … the triangular inter-racial romance that is resolved with an interracial marriage in Reybaud … is replaced by an interracial match in Scribe after several interracial courtships” (Sollors). In addition we see the enslaved characters liberated and meet their family again.
While being somewhat dismissive of Clapisson (1808-66) as a composer, Gustave Chouquette’s article on him in A Dictionary of Music and Musicians … clarifies that there “is however much good music in ‘Gibby,’ ‘Le Code noir,’ and several others. His style is somewhat bombastic and deficient in genuine inspiration; but, in almost every one of his operas there are to be found graceful and fluent tunes, fine harmonies, pathetic passages, and characteristic effects of orchestration.”
The work was also printed in Brussels in the same year. There are a number of copies of this work listed on OCLC but this is the libretto, rather than the songs themselves.
Chuoquet, G “Antoine Louis Clapisson” in Grove, G., A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, )p. ; Sollors, W., Neither Black nor White Yet Both (OUP, 1997), p.183.
