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5 Joseph Quesnel’s Colas et Colinette The French émigré Joseph Quesnel was known as a prosperous businessman and French-language literary figure in post-Conquest Montreal, but his musical accomplishments were not investigated before HK’s 1952 visit to the Archives du Séminaire, Quebec City, where he examined the vocal scores of two stage pieces with words and music by Quesnel. HK described Quesnel’s musical activities and opinions at length in his A History of Music in Canada 1534–1914 (1960), and once referred to Quesnel as one of three émigré composers in Canada’s past whose stories had especially sparked his curiosity as a researcher—the others being Theodore Molt from Germany and James Paton Clarke from Scotland. With the inauguration in 1962 of Toronto’s Ten Centuries Concerts, by R. Murray Schafer and several other young composers, HK’s suggestion of a realization of Quesnel ’s first musical comedy, Colas et Colinette, became a reality. The revival was featured on the opening concert in the organization’s second season, 6 October 1963, conducted by Godfrey Ridout, who had completed the score and composed an overture based on some of its themes. For the Ten Centuries program booklet, HK wrote this unusually full background essay. The work was well received , broadcast on both English and French CBC Radio networks in 1965, and mounted by CBC Television in Montreal in 1969. An LP recording of excerpts appeared in 1968 (RCI 234), and the publisher Gordon V. Thompson brought out a piano/vocal score of Ridout’s restoration in 1974; for both HK provided a historical preface based on his original essay. Recognized as one of the earliest original music theatre works composed in North America, Colas enjoyed further stagings Program Note for Ten Centuries Concerts, 6 October 1963 Mapping Canada’s Music 50 in half a dozen other centres in the 1970s and 1980s. Quesnel’s Lucas et Cécile was revived in concert and stage versions in the 1990s in a restoration by John Beckwith, published in 1992 by Doberman/Yppan, Quebec City.  Introducing Mr. Quesnel How old is Canadian opera? An article in Opera in Canada early last year began with this pronouncement: “Canadian Opera has just come of age! It is in its twenty-first year.”1 The writer, John Adaskin, was referring to Healey Willan’s Transit through Fire which he had had a hand in commissioning for the CBC in 1941. In the Encyclopedia Canadiana the late Colin Sabiston identified the beginning of professional opera performance with the Montreal Opera Guild (1941). Why foreshorten historical perspective so severely? The Montreal Opera Company (1910–13) was a professional ensemble; a serious operatic work, Torquil by Charles Harriss, was published and performed at the turn of the century; and even earlier, in 1889, Oscar Telgmann’s military opera Leo, the Royal Cadet had the first of a reputed 150 performances. Other light operas of that period could be cited. Instead, leaping backwards to the known beginnings of Canadian opera, let me tell the story of M. Joseph Quesnel. If his name suggests nothing to you but a frontier town in British Columbia ’s Cariboo district you are merely on a side line, not on the wrong track. The town was named after Jules Maurice Quesnel, a fur-trader who accompanied Simon Fraser on his famous journey down the Fraser River in 1808. He later returned to Lower Canada and, like his brother Frédéric Auguste, served as a member of the Legislative Assembly. Jules Maurice had no doubt inherited his spirit of adventure from his father Joseph (1749–1809),2 a native of Saint-Malo in France. Marked by his family for a naval career, Joseph had sailed to Madagascar , Pondicherry [in former French India], Brazil and other exotic destinations before he came to Canada at the age of thirty. His arrival here was an adventure in itself. Quesnel commanded a ship which was carrying provisions and munitions to the American revolutionaries when a British frigate captured the vessel off the coast of Nova Scotia. Quesnel was taken to Halifax. Even though he had been on a mission to help the enemy , his sympathies with republicanism were not deep enough to prevent him from seeking and being granted citizenship in Canada. Later he explored the Mississippi Valley and, as documents reveal, he intended to visit Philadelphia in 1786 and England two years later. [18.116.42.208] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 02...

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