It’s a story that could not be more romantic. Scores written by Adèle Hugo, the daughter of Victor Hugo, were found by the French composer Richard Dubugnon. The pieces found, which are intended to be played by an orchestra, will be performed on Tuesday by the Victor Hugo formation from Franche-Comté at the Berlioz classical music festival, at La Côte Saint-André, in Isère.
The melodies were in a trunk in the writer’s house in Guernsey, where he was for a time in exile. If in the music world, everyone knew this story, no one had ever bothered to check. The musician Richard Dubugnon was the first to seek out the seventeen pieces written by Adèle Hugo. Some are adaptations, as for a musical, of his father’s great novel, Les Miserables.
The result lives up to the expectations of the composer, who then arranges them so that they can be played by the Victor Hugo orchestra, conducted by Jean-François Verdier. “Everything is of quality, everything is very naturally done (…), explained the person concerned at the microphone of France Inter. We were very happy to find out that it existed, but we wouldn’t have played the songs if they hadn’t been good.”
The scores would have been written by Adèle during her father’s exile in Guernsey. The young woman, then 22 years old, followed her father and spent between 5 and 6 years on the island. Very educated and gifted at the piano, Adèle composes and writes every day in a diary which totals more than 1,600 pages. Victor Hugo’s daughter, whose fate was portrayed in the cinema by François Truffaut (The Story of Adèle H.), leaves the island to follow an officer with whom she falls in love, before losing her mind. She ends her life at 85, in a psychiatric hospital in Suresnes.
His texts and scores had never been researched. “You have to believe that there was no room for two geniuses”, supposes Jean-François Verdier. The composer Richard Dubugnon got down to putting the scores back into shape – which had gotten mixed up in the trunk -, putting them back together and classifying them. “As in a puzzle”, explains Jean-François Verdier again.
And for those who could not go to Isère to listen to the melodies of Adèle Hugo, the conductor plans to record a disc. Recorded with a large panel of French singers and singers, it should be released in a few months.
