From (Symphony to) Opera to Symphony

Édouard Lalo wrote most of his Symphony in G Minor between August and November of 1886. The work, however, resulted from a long and circuitous genesis extending at least as far back as the early 1860s. Like his contemporary Gounod and the slightly younger Saint-Saëns, Lalo (1823–92) had composed two symphonies relatively early in his career, both apparently completed by 1862. As he recounted in an often-quoted letter to A. B. Marcel, he presented one to Pasdeloup in the hope of securing a performance, but the eminent conductor rejected the work and burst out laughing at the scherzo. Believing that “the great man could not be wrong,” Lalo put the symphony in his drawer and eventually destroyed it—but not all of it died.

In response to a competition organized by the Théâtre Lyrique with backing from the minister of state, Lalo embarked on an opera in 1866. He evidently felt strongly enough about the abandoned symphony to resurrect at least some of its material and incorporate it into Fiesque, a “grand opéra” in three acts on a libretto by Charles Beauquier after Schiller's early play Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua (Fiesco; sometimes Fiesco's Conspiracy at Genoa). The extent to which Lalo drew on the symphony remains unclear as no traces of it appear to have survived; in the letter cited above, he claimed to have reused “all of its themes,” but he only elaborated on the destination of the scherzo (which became an act 1 choral dance) and the trio (which became a lament immediately following the dance).