MARIE ANTOINETTE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 July 1939, Page 2

MARIE ANTOINETTE

BALLAD TO BE SUNG FOR FIRST TIME.

A ballad composed by Marie Antoinette will 'be sung at a concert devoted to ancient music to be given in the chapel of the Palace of Versailles. The score of the ballad composed by the unfortunate queen was discovered in London, where it had probably been carried by some devoted royalist exile in the dark days of the Revolution. At the same concert an air for soprano composed by Louis XVI will be sung. Marie Antoinette was a great lover of music, and a harp which she played is preserved in the Versailles Public Library, next to a bust of Gluck, whose music she greatly admired.

In the small, private apartments of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, where she could escape for rest from the SLimptuous mirrored halls of the greatest royal palace in the world, there is a musical box which plays different airs. It is made to work'now only for distinguished visitors. Some of the tunes of the days of long ago have never been identified. Marie Antoinette was also a lover of private theatricals, and in the small village Louis XVI caused to be built for her in the park of Versailles there is her own private theatre, on the stage of which, before a very small company of friends, with her royal husband occupying the principal seat in the stalls, she used to act, with the Comte d’Artois, the King's brother, in the leading male role. Her favourite play was the “Devin du Village,” by Jean Jacques Rousseau. The light comedy was unknown tragedy for her, for the author of the lines was a precursor of the Revolution whose writings, with those of Voltaire, did more than the works of any other to bring about the cataclym in which both king and queen lost their lives.