Yesterday, July 14, was the French holiday, Bastille Day, or Le jour de la Bastille. In France, it is better known as la fête nationale, a national holiday. And in honor of said holiday, our topic today is French opera.
A rarely heard late nineteenth-century work, Jules Massenet's charming Cendrillon, based on French author Charles Perrault's fairy-tale rendering of Cinderella, was given its first Metropolitan Opera production nearly 120 years too late. Nevertheless, the opera worked its magic on Met audiences and on the Saturday radio broadcast of April 28, 2018.
Originally in four acts, this piece was presented in a lengthy two-act version with the original first-night cast intact. That cast included, among others, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as Cendrillon, mezzo-soprano Alice Coote as Prince Charming, contralto Stephanie Blythe as Madame de la Haltière (the Wicked Stepmother), soprano Ying Fang and mezzo Maya Lahyani as the ditzy stepsisters Noémie and Dorothée, bass-baritone Laurent Naouri as Cendrillon's father Pandolfe, and the stratospheric coloratura Kathleen Kim as the Fairy Godmother, called La Fée.
The opera was conducted by a fellow Frenchman, maestro Bertrand de Billy, and staged by Laurent Pelly who also provided the fanciful costume designs (it originated at Santa Fe Opera, in New Mexico, in 2006). The sets were the work of Barbara de Limburg, and the Met Opera's own Donald Palumbo served as chorus master.
French opera, as far as history records for us, has been deemed a close cousin to the Italian variety. And there is much truth in that connection. For centuries, Italy and France shared like thoughts regarding the genre. This extends to their respective languages. Unusual for such an expressly Mediterranean art form as opera, its development in France ran almost parallel to what was happening in the Italian peninsula. Where the two countries branched off was in their choice of subject and performance styles, specifically the formulaic approach taken by composers Jean-Baptiste Lully (Italian by birth), Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Christoph Willibald von Gluck (of German background and birth).
Classicism, in the main, was most favored at the court of Sun King Louis XIV, where mythological themes from classical antiquity aspired to "enlighten" the ruling classes (fat chance of that!). The resultant fervor of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte brought many changes to French society and to opera as well: in other words, opera as entertainment but on a grand scale, where pageantry took precedent over the mundane. These changes had a profound effect on the likes of Luigi Cherubini, another transplanted Italian expatriate, and on his contemporaries, Gaspare Spontini and Antonio Salieri.
Interestingly, as the French style began to encompass habitual practices - to include extended ballet sequences, pastorals, mighty choruses, solos, and other hackneyed elements - any connection to actual drama and perceived human emotions was secondary at best; they were given much less prominence in the overall structure than the meandering plots and the characters' clichéd interactions. Gluck's innovations along this front, then, were strategic in recapturing the essence of the story while refocusing the drama on the struggles of his operas' main protagonists.
It was about this same time that opera in Italy began to capitalize on the bel canto advances developed by Messrs. Vincenzo Bellini, Gioachino Rossini, and Gaetano Donizetti. In time, however, even the epicurean Rossini, accustomed to finery in all its richly embroidered form, relocated to Gay Paree where his final opera, the truly grandiose Guillaume Tell, made its rousing debut.
A return to classicism of a sort occurred with the advent of Hector Berlioz and his highly individual choice of subjects (i.e., The Damnation of Faust, Benvenuto Cellini, and Béatrice et Bénédict based on Shakespeare's play Much Ado About Nothing). Many of these works followed the traditional path of elevated stories based on classical mythology or other literary components. The most ambitious of which, the two-part Les Troyens ("The Trojans"), gave Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid a colossal stage treatment that influenced a host of admirers, among them one Richard Wagner and his equally momentous Ring of the Nibelung saga.
Concurrently with Berlioz, opera in France - in particular, at the artistic epicenter of the City of Light, and the Paris Opéra - became the focal point for the career of Giacomo Meyerbeer, one of the most wildly celebrated composers of that era. Born Jacob Liebmann Beer, the rechristened Meyerbeer, a Prussian-born Jewish descendant, began his studies in Berlin and elsewhere. While traveling to Italy, he developed his own brand of opera that emulated, for a brief time, the Rossinian model. Venturing forth to the neighboring France, Meyerbeer settled down in Paris where, with such oeuvres as Robert Le Diable, Les Huguenots, Le Prophète, and L'Étoile du Nord (each of them incredibly elaborate five-act monstrosities), he set the operatic world on fire.
But Meyerbeer's flame, which burned so bright for so long, soon began to fade from view. After the posthumous premiere of his final work, L'Africaine (originally titled Vasco de Gama) - a startlingly derivative piece reminiscent of Berlioz's Les Troyens - the way was cleared for a variety of composers to make their individual marks on the art form: Charles Gounod ( Faust, Roméo et Juliette), Fromental Halévy ( La Juive), Georges Bizet ( The Pearl Fishers, Carmen), Ambroise Thomas ( Mignon, Hamlet), Léo Delibes ( Lakmé), Jacques Offenbach ( Les contes d'Hoffmann), Édouard Lalo ( Le roi d'Ys), Camille Saint-Saëns ( Samson et Dalila), Claude Debussy ( Pelléas et Mélisande), Paul Dukas ( Ariane et Barbe-bleu), Maurice Ravel ( L'heure espagnole, L'enfant et les sortilèges), and Ernest Chausson ( Le roi Arthus), were some of the more familiar names who thrived during the latter part of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century.
Although French opera had staggered, this way and that, from the sumptuously elaborate to the intensely personal, with the lighter-touched opéra-comique serving as an intermediary between the two forms, relatively few composers had the wherewithal to artfully navigate between theses variations.
Interspersed between the above-named masters of their craft, one must conclude that Jules Massenet (1842-1912), born near the Loire Valley of France, eventually emerged as among his country's finest composers of opera. His major works traversed an immense range of subjects, styles, genres, and literary and poetic influences, from the heroic and the epic, to the biblical and pseudo-historical: Le roi de Lahore, Hérodiade, Manon, Le Cid, Esclarmonde, Werther, Thaïs, La Navarraise, Sapho, Grisélidis, Le jongleur de Notre Dame, Chérubin, Thérèse, and Don Quichotte.
With so much creative output to his credit, one has to wonder when Massenet could find the time to relax from his labors. To many critics and musicologists, he became the French answer to Italy's Puccini. That's not entirely accurate; however, for our purposes we can cite his one-act La Navarraise as the Gallic equivalent of Italian verismo. For the most part, though, Massenet was his own "made man," a fellow who marched to the tune of whatever suited him best: namely, the feminine mystique. Whether on an epic or grand scale, Massenet never lost touch with the unique qualities associated with his female subjects.
Performance Becomes ArtSo where did Cendrillon fit in? Sliced in between Sapho and Grisélidis, the delightful Cendrillon was conceived and composed between 1894 and 1896. The libretto by Henri Cain adheres closely to the Perrault story, including all the hocus-pocus antics. The later version of the tale, compiled by the Brothers Grimm, introduced the grittier, less pleasant elements into the fabric. We make note, too, of Rossini's La Cenerentola, an opera buffa as popular at the time (if slightly less so today) as the same composer's The Barber of Seville.
In Cenerentola, the title character Angelina is a scullery maid in her adopted family's service. The fantastical aspects of the Fairy Godmother, for instance, or the magical transformation, and, of course, the proverbial "glass slipper" (which may or may not be a mistranslation of the original pantoufle de vair, or "fur slipper") are non-existent in Rossini, in exchange for a more down-to-earth sensibility.
Whereas in Monsieur Massenet's construct, the characters are more broadly etched, even one-dimensional (as is the case of the stern Stepmother and her meddlesome daughters), their humanity has been preserved for us in music of a sweetly caressing nature, with pathos and tenderness taking equal turns with the bittersweet in the romance of Cendrillon and her lovesick Prince Charming. It is here that we begin to appreciate that Cendrillon is anything but a cardboard figure straight out of a Disney animated feature. And the incredibly tantalizing depiction of the Fairy Godmother, as luminously effervescent a musical realization as any in opera, ring true for our time.
The one major character left out of previous versions of the story is Pandolfe, Cendrillon's doting parent, the paterfamilias - a rather foppish fellow, but a caring individual nonetheless. There are a few moody moments in their tender third-act father-daughter duet, which Parisian-born Laurent Naouri delivered in deliciously natural-sounding French. His rich enunciation of the text (again, based on Perrault) was the equivalent of a fine French wine come to sparkling life.
The singing throughout the broadcast performance was on a respectably high level. Curiously, the normally spectacular Joyce DiDonato was more subdued than the norm for this talented artist. Perhaps this opera's late season start or the harshness of New York's weather prevented DiDonato from expanding her vibrant mezzo into the farthest reaches of the Met's massive auditorium. It's my understanding that the staging by Laurent Pelly had placed the characters well to the back of the theater. And the lack of physical structures to bounce one's voice from may also have inhibited more accurate displays of vocal fireworks. No matter, since Ms. DiDonato's portrayal onstage was instantly adorable from her first entrance onward. In softer, gentler passages, Joyce was untouchable. There are few singers of her caliber who could establish a character with her presence alone.
British mezzo Alice Coote, as Prince Charming (a "trouser" role, in the tradition of Der Rosenkavalier's Octavian, or Mozart's Cherubino from The Marriage of Figaro), was also off her generally fine form. This wonderful singer, for whom this writer has often heard and long extolled the many virtues of, could have found, as DiDonato also did, that Massenet's music is a shade too high for either of them at this stage in their respective careers. DiDonato, who will be 50 next year, and Coote, who is already 50, may have approached the age when, vocally speaking, the effort at embodying youthful exuberance has given way to reality. That the voice tends to get less flexible with age; that tautness sets in when one least expects it; and that the requirements of agility and lightness of tone diminish, are all given. Physically, both artists looked divine.
Physicality as a positive trait was the province of contralto Stephanie Blythe as the haughty Madame de la Haltière. This force of nature galvanized Met audiences with her patented Earth-Mother approach to the part of Cendrillon's Wicked Stepmother. That she used her (ahem) natural endowment to the betterment of her characterization is one of many reasons why Blythe remains a compelling artist. She, too, is fast approaching middle age; but in her case, there has been little diminution in vocal output. Too, Blythe has a natural talent for broad comedy and slapstick, which was used by director Pelly to exaggerate her character's dubious nature.
The two stepdaughters, sung by Maya Lahyani and Ying Fang, profited from the ridiculous costumes they and Ms. Blythe wore, clothing that accentuated their broad, over-the-top personalities. As an example, both Fang and Lahyani wore dresses that made them look like upside-down pomegranates. Their gowns were also ridiculously overboard. Beside DiDonato, Coote and Blythe, the incredibly able warbling of soprano Kathleen Kim, in her stratospheric assumption of the Fairy Godmother, was the shimmering candle atop this lighted wedding cake. Thanks to Massenet, who provided music of the most delectable variety - one hesitates to use the term "gossamer," but in this instance, the word fits - Kim outshone all the others.
The staging left something to be desired, what with its overuse of Perrault's text (in French, mind you!) lining the walls of the sets throughout. Unless one is fluent in French, the words lose their connection to the stage action. But never mind. The finest aspects of this long-awaited production were the marvelous stage pictures, among them the magical horse-driven carriage that swept Cendrillon to the Prince's ball, and the carrying-on of the participants (especially, the parade of contestants for the Prince's hand) at the ball itself. Holding it all together was Bertrand de Billy, who only sped up the orchestra slightly during the Cendrillon-Prince Charming encounter.
The winner had to be Massenet. If I were to describe this piece, I'd say that if you are familiar with the opening segments of Werther or Manon - that is, the hustle and bustle of daily life, and the scampering about that occurs when people are trying to get on with their business - then you would have a relatively good idea of what Cendrillon sounds like, but only to a point. Surprises are in store for those who wait, and that includes the lovely Cinderella herself.
This is one fairy tale that came true!
Copyright © 2018 by Josmar F. Lopes
