Adolphe Adam – Chant de Victoire (1855)

[Originally authored on July 12, 2019]

Though not a particularly well-known composer today, Adolphe Adam (1803–56) was a dominating force in nineteenth-century French music. Adam was the author of more than 80 staged works, many of which were performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and he is probably best-known today for his ballet Giselle. The Chant de Victoire (1855) is one of two autograph Adam manuscripts held at the Memorial Library of Music at Stanford University, along with Alcindor’s Air, no. 7 (ca. 1836), and Stanford is also home to the original autograph of the Chant’s poem by Alphonse Baralle (not ‘Garalle’, as was incorrectly listed in the 1950 Memorial Library of Music catalog). The Chant de Victoire was ultimately published by Garreau in Paris, though the date of publication is unclear. The work is distinct from Adam’s better-known Victoire!, a cantata also from 1855 with words by Michel Carré in honor of the taking of Sebastopol during the Crimean War.

In 1849 Félix Dupanloup, a member of the French academy, became Bishop of Orléans, a position he held for twenty-nine years until the year of his death. Before his ascent to the post, Orléans’s devotion to Joan was a local cult: they had never forgotten her role defending the city during the siege by the English in April/May 1429. However, annual festivities in the city had stopped in the 1840s, and Dupanloup worked quickly to reinstate them. Edme-François-Étienne Gois’s somewhat-less-elegant statue Jeanne d’Arc guerrière (1804) (fig. 1) was moved to the southern end of the new bridge (“pont Royal,” today “pont George-V”), and a new equestrian statue by Denis Foyatier took its place in the center of the town’s square as part of a May 1855 four-day celebration. For this event in honor of the city’s hero, artistic contributions included thematically appropriate works by Alfred Duchesne, Adolphe Nibelle, and Jean-Benoit Salesses as well as Adam’s Chant de Victoire.

The manuscript measures 13.5 by 10 inches and is bound in a mid-twentieth-century red binding done by Stanford. The manuscript is four pages in length and is dated March 30, 1855 on its final page. Adam’s music, for four male voices, is mostly homophonic with brief antiphonal passages with interplay between the upper two and lower two voices. It ends with an emphatic “victoire victoire victoire victoire.”

The autograph shows the evolution of Adam’s composition and was probably not used in rehearsal: Adam writes numerous repeats in shorthand and has crossed out four bars on the first page (see fig. 3), in addition to a few other notes throughout. It seems likely that the autograph headed from the composer to a copyist, who transcribed the sort work sometime in between the end of March and early May.

A score with modern clefs can be seen in fig. 4. The sunny D Major mood is punctuated by the martial rhythms in the four voices, and frequent moves to B-flat Major can be heard. 

The Chant de Victoire was performed at the foot of the statue on May 8, 1855, though the review in Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris talks about another Adam piece performed for the celebration, Les Enfants de Paris. Whether it was well-received is unclear. It is, however, an excellent example of a nineteenth-century occasional piece and a testament to the enduring popularity of one of France’s greatest heroines.

Benjamin Ory received his Ph.D. in musicology from Stanford University in 2022

This article is one in a series highlighting rare music materials in the Stanford Libraries collections.