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Die Heimkehr
(The Homecoming / Le Retour) (1954, rev.1956)Libretto by Karl Heinrich Ruppel after Guy de Maupassant. French translation by Claude Rostand (G,F)
2S,dramA,2lyrT,BBar,speaker; chorus;
1(=picc).1.2(II=bcl).1-2.2.1.0-timp.perc-pft-cel-strings
Abbreviations (PDF)
B&B
Frankfurt a.M.
Company: Hessischer Rundfunk
Dusseldorf
Company: Unknown
Hamburg
Company: Hamburg
| THE MOTHER | Dramatic Contralto |
| THE FATHER | Lyric Tenor |
| MARIE and ESTELLE, the daughters | Soprano, Soubrette Soprano |
| THE STRANGER | Bass Baritone |
| CHICOT, who runs the "Café du Commerce" | Lyric Tenor |
| THE SPEAKER | |
| Voices of the waves and of the house |
A small Normandy fishing port in the 19th century
A sailor from a small Normandy fishing village, who was thought lost at sea, returns home after an absence of seventeen years. He finds his wife married to another man by whom she has two children and whom the sailor's own two daughters – now nearly grown up – call "Father". This very short story is about a real conflict, but the ending is not tragic. The situation would seem to demand that one of the three people involved in the conflict should bid adieu – not only to the situation but to life itself. This would then be, so to speak, the typical tragedy of the homecomer. However, Maupassant's fishermen are good and upright people who have looked Death in the face on the high sea often enough and are not in a mind to give him an easy victory, when they see that life can go on.
K. H. Ruppel
Poetic