The Private Proust: Letters and Drawings to Composer Reynaldo Hahn

[jserraglio]

A beautifully and lovingly designed website, a tribute to imaginative scholarship: http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/hought ... proust.cfm

Proust and Hahn are in the news after some of Proust's love letters to Hahn were auctioned off at Southbys this week.


Here Proust inscribes Hahn’s initials (RH) on the female figure’s crown and on the pages of the open book. He replaces the caption “Concordia” with the biblical “Esther,” the subject of a 1905 opera by Hahn, and he sets her next to her adoptive father “Mordecai,” drawn from a statue of Saint Jerome. Below, Proust writes that Esther is shown “with little bbirds,” while Mordecai is “botsched.”


Reynaldo Hahn by Nadar (1898