ABSTRACT
Andre Jolivet was appointed Director of Music at the Comedie-Francaise in 1945. Six years later, in 1951, he orchestrated a new version of Lully's stage music for a revival of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme in a production by Jean Meyer. The company left Paris on 6 April 1954, travelling via Berlin, where Soviet planes waited to transfer them to Moscow. On the morning after arrival, Jolivet began rehearsals for Le Bourgeois gentilhomme with twenty-nine musicians, four principal singers and a chorus of sixteen. To a subsequent letter from Jolivet, Maria Yudina replied: The procedure is this: when a foreign country invites Soviet artists, they should contact the USSR Ministry of Culture, which arranges the details of the tours. Jolivet wanted to advance the project and, at the end of February 1961, sent Yudina's address to the cultural department at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asking them to carry out the appropriate consultations with the Soviet authorities.
