The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (61 page)

Poulenc’s memories of the persecutions attendant on the Nazi occupation of France, as well as the drawn-out and painful death of Poulenc’s lover, colour this opera, the underlying theme of which is fear – the fear bred by political terror, Blanche’s fear of commitment to God, and the fear of the
agony of death, as suffered by the old Prioress.
The drama is also rich in the erotic element in Catholic mysticism, but its attitude to marytrdom is entirely unsentimental and the nuns’ final march to the guillotine, singing the ‘Salve regina’ is more stomach-churning than uplifting.

Outstanding productions of this magnificently theatrical and emotionally devastating work – one of the masterpieces of the second half of the twentieth century – include those by John Dexter at the Met and by Phyllida Lloyd for ENO, both of them visually austere and sharply focused on the intense psychological drama of Blanche’s spiritual pilgrimage.

Recording

CD: Denise Duval (Blanche); Pierre Dervaux (cond.).
EMI 7 67135 2

PART FIVE

Operetta

Operetta grew out of the eighteenth-century French
opéra-comique,
the German
Singspiel
(both of which employed spoken dialogue between musical numbers) and the Italian
opera
buffa,
as well as various national traditions of popular entertainment involving songs and satire.
It tends to fit more happily into theatres than large opera houses, and uses lighter voices and smaller orchestras than those required for Verdi and Wagner.

Beyond that, operetta is difficult to define.
The key figure in its development is Jacques Offenbach.
Like Meyerbeer, Offenbach was a German-born Jew who settled as a young man in Paris.
Hugely prolific and versatile, he produced a long series of short, saucy and piquant comedies, fall of little tunes and wry jokes, which delighted the cynical, pleasure-loving society of Second Empire Paris.

Offenbach’s lightness of touch made its mark on the Anglo-Irish composer Arthur Sullivan and his librettist William Schwenck Gilbert.
Together they developed their own distinctively English version of Offenbach’s operetta style – devoid of French salaciousness, shot through with a vein of sentiment, and hitting a wide range of satirical targets, from the Houses of Parliament (
Iolanthe
) to the Aesthetic Movement (
Patience
) and Italian opera (
The
Sorcerer
).

Offenbach was hugely popular in Vienna, too, but in
Die
Fledermaus
and
Der
Zigeunerbaron
(
The
Gypsy
Baron
), the ‘Waltz King’ Johann Strauss made something rather more musically substantial of the operetta concept than was customary in Paris: dance sequences played a prominent role, and story-lines were more romantic and realistic than satirical or fantastic.
For the Edwardian era, Franz Lehár’s sensuous and sumptuous
The
Merry
Widow,
with its cosmopolitan sophistication and Ruritanian intrigues caught the mood of Europe on the brink of the catastrophe of the First World War.

Following Lehár’s lead, twentieth-century operetta lost its satirical edge and became even more romantic in tone: from
the USA came
Kismet,
The
Student
Prince’
and
The
Desert
Song;
from England, Ivor Novello’s
Perchance
to
Dream
and Noel Coward’s
Bitter
Sweet.
But since the Second World War, operetta has virtually died, superseded by the vigour of American musical comedy.
This tradition first flourished in the 1920s in the glamorous and urbane, if flimsily plotted, entertainments composed with a jazzy touch by George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers in collaboration with the lyricist Lorenz Hart.

A landmark is the 1927 première of Jerome Kern’s
Show
Boat,
which boldly dealt with issues of interracial marriage, presaging the greater dramatic coherence and darker themes introduced in the 1940s by Richard Rodgers and his second major collaborator Oscar Hammerstein in
Oklahoma!,
Carousel
and
South
Pacific.
In their wake came a series of shows which have already established themselves as classics:
My
Fair
Lady
and
Camelot,
with music by Frederick Loewe, a composer who was Viennese in origin and whose father had sung in the first performance of
The
Merry
Widow
; Frank Loesser’s comic
Guys
and
Dolls
and Leonard Bernstein’s tragic
West
Side
Story,
both quintessentially New York in character; John Kander and Fred Ebb’s brilliant
Cabaret,
set in Berlin during the rise of Nazism.
Latest and perhaps last in the line of great musical comedy composers is Stephen Sondheim, whose shows have great artistic ambition and complexity.
One of his most charming works is
A
Little
Night
Music,
a true operetta harking back to the elegant waltz and schmaltz of Strauss and Lehár.
Several of Sondheim’s shows have been successfully presented by opera companies.

From the late 1970s, elements of rock music have been used to vivify and extend the possibilities of musical comedy.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Evita
and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s
Les
Misérables
went one stage further, with their serious themes and highly emotional scores uninterrupted by dialogue, indirectly influenced by opera composers such as Meyerbeer, Wagner and Puccini.
Such works also lean heavily for their effectiveness on electronic amplification and spectacular staging.

Jacques Offenbach

(1819–80)

(
See
also
Part Four, French Opera)
Orphée
aux
Enfers
(
Orpheus
in
the
Underworld
)

Two acts. First performed Paris, 1858.

Libretto by Hector Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy

Offenbach, a German Jew who emigrated to Paris, had enjoyed some success with his smaller-scale operettas, but it was the saucy and irreverent
Orphée,
with its irresistible ‘
galop
infernal’
in the can-can style, which won him sensational fame and which stands as the first great operetta.
A good-humoured satire on the pomposity and corruption of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, it was revised and expanded in 1874: this provides the basis for the versions performed today.

Plot

The fiddle-playing Orpheus and his flirtatious wife Eurydice are tired of each other.
Orpheus lays a trap for Eurydice’s disguised lover Pluto, but it is Eurydice herself who falls for it – with the happy result of her being dragged off to the Underworld by its king, Pluto himself.
In the interests of respectability, Public Opinion advises Orpheus to retrieve his wife.

The gods on Mount Olympus are bored with their heavenly life and complain about Jupiter’s autocratic ways.
Mercury brings news of Pluto’s abduction of Eurydice, which causes a furore.
Jupiter calms everybody down by proposing a trip to the Underworld, aimed at forcing Pluto to return Eurydice to Orpheus.

Eurydice languishes in the Underworld and decides she wants to return to earth.
She is locked up to prevent her escaping.
Jupiter arrives and falls in love with Eurydice, transforming himself into a fly in order to gain admittance to the locked room.
When Eurydice catches the fly and kisses it,
Jupiter is transformed and promises to take Eurydice with him to Olympus.

Pluto throws a party for the visiting gods.
Jupiter and the disguised Eurydice are about to depart, when Orpheus and Public Opinion arrive.
Orpheus is told that he can rescue his wife so long as he does not look behind him on their way back to earth.
But Jupiter launches a thunderbolt which shocks Orpheus into doing just that.
Eurydice is sent back to the Underworld – to the satisfaction of everyone except Public Opinion.

What to listen for

Offenbach never overplays his hand – his music remains ‘light’ in the sense of orchestral texture as well as mood and pace.
Nothing is over-egged or pretentious, none of the numbers lasts longer than a pop single, and many are barely a minute long.
Apart from the pounding can-can of the
galop
infernal
in the last scene, highlights include the captivating hummed ‘slumber’ chorus and the gods’ martial ‘rebellion’ chorus, both in the second scene, and the buzzing fly duet for Eurydice and Jupiter in the third scene.
Much of the best solo music is accorded to Eurydice, a role which demands virtuosic coloratura and rises to a high E – innocent musical-comedy soubrettes, beware.
The quotation from Gluck’s ‘J’ai perdu mon Eurydice’ (‘What is life to me without thee?’) as Orpheus announces that he wishes to redeem Eurydice from Hades is made with an
élan
typical of Offenbach.

In performance

For ENO, the satirical cartoonist Gerald Scarfe provided sets dominated by huge, monstrous caricatures of Victorian respectability, the effect was perhaps overwhelmingly grotesque for such a drily witty opera.
Teutonically intellectualized productions have been offered by Herbert Wernicke in Brussels and at Berlin’s Komische Oper by Harry Kupfer, but the most successful recent version has been that of Laurent Pelly, first seen in Geneva in 1998, in which the humour is understated and the sexiness Gallically alluring rather than coarsely semaphored.

Recording