NTSC All Region
Sound: LPCM 2.0
Color
Aspect Ratio: 16/9
Duration: 139 mins.
Subtitled in Italian, English, German, French & Spanish

François-André revealed, since his early days, great and eclectic talents, excelling not only in the field of music but also in such a different one as the game of chess. A pupil of Campra, he had been accepted into the Royal Chapel at Versailles at a very early age. However, he was apparently driven out of France because of debts, till 1945. It was the outbreak of the Querelle des Bouffons, in 1752, which was the indirect cause of his return to France. Diderot, who was a good friend of his and held him in great esteem, urged him to return to his native country to contribute to the development of French music. If in the field of serious opera it was Gluck who gave a clear and original answer to the need of renovating the tragédie-lyrique, in that of comic opera the rivalry with Pergolesi’s intermezzo produced one of the most original and glorious creations of 18th-century French music: the opéra-comique, destined to become one the of most popular genres in France. Between 1756 and 1788 Philidor had some twenty titles staged in Parisian theatres; having debuted in 1756 with Le diable à quatre, Philidor obtained his first great success three years later with Blaise le savetier. But this genre’s masterpiece would come in 1765 with Tom Jones.

The history of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was published in London in 1749, and it was probably in the English capital that Philidor read it for the first time. The novel tells the vicissitudes of the foundling Tom Jones, a youth full of optimism and life, the adoptive child of the rich philanthropist Allworthy who raised him together with his nephew Blifil. In the libretto written by Antoine-Henry Poinsinet in 1765, the story is of course shortened and simplified. In the opera, moreover, Tom is no longer an illegitimate child, because Allworthy’s sister before dying had secretly married Tom’s father. In the passage from novel to opera libretto all the characters undergo, from a psychological point of view, a process of simplification; which is - it ought to be said - virtually inevitable. Tom Jones, in particular, ends up losing all the libertine traits he has in Fielding’s novel and becomes a model of virtue. Poinsinet’s libretto was universally criticised as being quite modest at the time of the opera’s première, which took place at Paris’s Comédie-Italienne on 27th February 1765 and was quite badly received, despite the beauty of its music. For Philidor’s good fortune, one year later Michel-Jean Sedaine, one of the days’ best librettists in the field of opéra-comique, revised the text, shortening and improving the dialogues, while Philidor modified two airs and re-wrote the finale. This new version of Tom Jones triumphed on the stage of the Comédie-Italienne in 1766, exactly one year after the failure of its first performance.