Description
The first of its kind, this is a customized La Fée-only audition cut of "Ah! Douce enfant," Scene VI from Jules Massenet's increasingly popular opera Cendrillon (Cinderella). In the past, singers wishing to audition for this role would have to make a series of awkward cuts to eliminate the gaps created by the choral parts ("voix lointaines") when performing this excerpt. The current edition omits those passages and knits together La Fée's own lines with stylistically coherent cuts and additions. All cuts are marked with asterisks in both the voice part and piano reduction. This cut ends just before the start of the "Vif" passage in E major and 3/8 time.
The piano reduction itself has not been simplified or drastically altered (at the commissioner's request), although the engraving features minor changes from the original edition (for example, eliminating cross-staff chord notation and inserting a few logical enharmonic respellings).