Something Missing from 'Une éducation manquée'

(L to R) Sopranos Amel Brahim-Djelloul and Sophie Junker in Une Éducation Manquée, Opera Lafayette (photo by Louis Forget)

People should perform the music of Emmanuel Chabrier more than they do. The good folks at Opera Lafayette have done their part, adding Chabrier to their list of revivals of 19th-century operas. On Tuesday evening in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, the company presented a staged version of Chabrier's Une éducation manquée, a charming one-act operetta composed two years after L'étoile. On the basis of what I have heard so far, put me down for any performances of Chabrier's other comic operas or his serious work Gwendoline.

The libretto, by Eugène Leterrier and Albert Vanloo, recounts the dilemma of a young married couple, played by two sopranos, who have reached their wedding night without really knowing about what they are supposed to do with each other when the lights are out. The husband, Gontran, calls back his drunken tutor, Master Pausanias, to berate him on account of this deficiency in his education, but the elderly abbé is not much help. Only when lightning and thunder strike, driving the wife, Hélène, into her husband's arms, does the hapless couple figure things out.

Soprano Sophie Junker was a wide-eyed Hélène, with some bell-like top notes and a beautiful overall tone, with soprano Amel Brahim-Djelloul a little more tested at the high end but showing a charming boyishness in the trouser role of Gontran. Baritone Dominique Côté had smart comic timing as Pausanias, if some tentative qualities on the high parts of the role. Opera Lafayette extended the short work to about an hour of music by introducing the opera with four of Chabrier's charming animal-themed songs (Villanelle des petits canards, Pastorale des cochons roses, Les Cigales, and the hilarious Cocodette et Cocorico, in which a hen and rooster find each other). For these scenes director Bertrand Deletré created little vignettes showing the charmed youth of the two leads, played by an adorable group of child supernumeraries.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, An evanescent French rarity by Chabrier returns to the stage (Washington Post, February 4)

Chabrier debuted the opera, in a semi-private performance, in his own piano reduction, but that does not seem like a sufficient reason to forego the composer's orchestral version of the score. Pianist Jeffrey Watson did the piano version justice, with probably unnecessary direction from conductor Ryan Brown, creating an intimate ambiance as heard from the close rows. Perhaps a future project could focus instead on Darius Milhaud's expanded version of this opera, created for Sergei Diaghilev in 1924, with Milhaud's recitatives and new number (Couplets de Mariette) for Hélène.

This performance repeats Friday and Saturday, at the French Institute Alliance Française in New York.

High Camp With Elegance: Alden’s Fabulously Entertaining L’étoile

Emmanuel Chabrier’s opéra bouffe L'étoile is very light stuff. The music is fluffy enough to make Wodehouse seem somber reading in comparison. But as with Wodehouse, the craftsmanship is audible, the ingredients refined, and the outcome of the kind of pretty sophistication that belies its superficial simplicity.

There’s plenty of dialogue in the opéra bouffe which raises the question of whether to put the thing on in the vernacular or not. David Alden, who does silly better than anyone else, kept the text French which, given excellent supertitles and a diligent, largely non-native French speaking cast, worked well.

Chabrier, L’étoile, J.E.Gardiner / Opera de Lyon EMI

Much like Chabrier’s music, Alden’s production is an act of light genius, a high wire act between high camp and cleverness. His adept hand with comedy means that L’étoile, which in conventional garb could have so easily tipped over and failed as crude, low-brow slapstick, remained a genuinely funny, playfully sexualized romp that entertained even the bourgeois ladies in the (sadly sparse) audience. The signature items of an Alden production were all there: loud colors, creative costumes, polished floors, animal prints, clever furniture, clear lines, and elegant curves… all courtesy Alden’s set and costume designer Gideon Davey.

The plot, in summary: Meet King Ouf the First (the endlessly deft Comédie Française & Opéra-Comique Paris Ouf-veteran Christophe Mortagne, modeled on Gene Wilder, with strong overtones of Willy Wonka). He is about to celebrate his name day (Saint Ouf) with the annual celebratory public execution. Unfortunately there is nobody at hand to continue the tradition, so he wanders the streets disguised, hoping to find an executable subject. Finally he meets the frustrated, lovelorn street hawker Lazuli (the stage loving and stage-loved Paula Murrihy) who vents his temper in the face of King Ouf. Bingo! Unfortunately that’s where astrologer Sirocco (the hilarious Simon Bailey in a hoot of a rôle) who seems to do air traffic control for a living, with fortune-telling on the side, informs the king that Lazuli’s life is linked to that of monarch, both meant to die within 24 hours of each other. And since Ouf’s testament designates Siroco’s execution 15 minutes after his boss’ demise (this considerably fosters on-the-job motivation), the two are linked to the young man’s fate. The impalement is scratched and instead they coddle him at the palace.

Consider also Princess Laoula (Anna Ryberg, announced as unwell; though no one would ever have guessed). She is a high-octane wild thing, just arrived from abroad, and pretend-married to Prince Hérisson de Porc-Epic (Michael McCown, also allegedly indisposed and not seriously impeded). The latter’s actual wife Aloès (Sharon Carty) is also in tow: for their duration of this diplomatic trip, the mission of which is to get the Princess married to the King, has to pretend to be married to Tapioca, the bumbling Prince’s secretary (Julian Prégardien). In the confusion of convoluted mistaken identities, Lazuli is given the princess to marry (the presumed husband will just have to understand). When the misunderstanding is discovered, it’s too late to do much about it and Lazuli and Laoula are happily united as the future royal couple. Let the relationship diagram above clarify matters, if this sounded discombobulating. The orchestra under Sebastian Zierer made the music sound easy, a feat in and of itself that deserves more than just one sentence. At least two.

Opera lovers gladly travel far and wide for a Ring production, or a high-profile serious opera (much as I had gone to Frankfurt for the Claus Guth/Christian Gerhaher Pelléas et Mélisande). It turns out that this soufflé of an opera is a production well worth a journey, much more so than many other productions I've seen this year.

Repeat performances this season (2013) on March 02, 08, and 15.

Pictures (after the jump) courtesy Frankfurt Opera, © Wolfgang Runkel

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Opera on DVD: Chabrier's L'Etoile

Available on Amazon: Chabrier, L'Etoile, Opéra national de Lyon / Gardiner, Alliot-Lugaz, Gautier, Le Roux (1986) Also on Ionarts: Chabrier, L'Etoile (November 19, 2005)

Glimmerglass Opera and New York City Opera together revived Emmanuel Chabrier's opéra bouffe L'Etoile (1877) a few years ago, when New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini called it "one of the best-kept secrets of 19th-century French opera." L'Opéra de Montréal mounted that production again this season, as I noted here last fall, Opera Boston will produce the opera this March, and Cincinnati Opera is going to do it this June as part of their summer opera festival, where Ionarts might try to catch it during our annual opera peregrinations. None of this would have been possible except that John Eliot Gardiner put together a complete edition of Chabrier's opera, for his own group to perform in 1984. Gardiner conducts this DVD version, with a cast of young singers at the Opéra national de Lyon.

The story, like most operetta and much opera, is kind of silly. I had to draw a diagram to make sense of it, with all of the people disguised as other people and such nonsense. The music that accompanies that nonsense, however, is a series of sweet bonbons, just as you would expect from Offenbach or Johann Strauss, Jr. There is a trouser role with beautiful music, Lazuli, the beggar boy who falls in love with the princess the disguised King Ouf is supposed to marry, while she is in disguise, too. Lazuli assaults King Ouf and is condemned to be executed, a fate he is spared only because the king believes his astrologer's claim that the fates of king and peddlar are intertwined. Most of the musical things you would expect to find in a comic operetta are here, brilliant ensembles ("Cela va mieux," with the two pairs of lovers), sweet melodies (Laoula's "Toujours je penserai à vous" and the central theme "Tenez-vous là"), laughing music (the trio "C'est le mari"), sneezing music ("Achoo! achoo!"), drinking songs ("Je me sens, hélas" sung as the king and his astrologer get loaded on Chartreuse verte), and fun choral scenes ("Puisqu'il est mort" and many others). It's all very charming, but not easy to pull off, as shown by Pierre Marc Bellemare in an article (L'Étoile or the Demands of Comic Music (translated by Jane Brierley, vol. 11/3, December 12, 2005) for La Scena Musicale.

Colette Alliot-Lugaz is a great Lazuli, with a dark, sometimes timorous quality that is quite boyish. Georges Gautier (Le Roi Ouf 1er) is perhaps not always vocally the best, but he captures the loony king perfectly. Ghyslaine Raphanel is a sweet, unaffected Princesse Laoula, and François Le Roux is an inspired and ridiculous Hérisson de Porc-Epic. This is the only DVD version of this nutty opera available at this point. I have only one real reservation, and that is the sound quality. The staging was beautifully done, but the sound is obviously dubbed in, and quite badly, since it rarely corresponds with the movement of the singer's mouths. It also happens to be the only full recording of the opera, too, no longer even available on CD in the United States. If you want to get to know the opera, you may as well buy the DVD. Even better, see it live in one of the upcoming productions. As suggested in this review of a December 2003 production of L'Etoile in Nantes, companies everywhere should consider this opera as an alternative to the annual New Year's productions of The Merry Widow or Die Fledermaus.

Chabrier, L'Etoile

I try to focus on the rare and strange in my Opera Preview, and it reminds me to look for reviews of operatic oddities around the world. That was the case with the production of Emmanuel Chabrier's little-known opera L'Étoile (borrowed from the 2001 version at Glimmerglass and New York City Opera) at L'Opéra de Montréal, from November 5 to 17, which I would have loved to have heard. There were some reviews, beginning with Jim Lowe (Montréal Opera's 'L'Étoile' is a sexy romp, November 10) for -- wait for it -- the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus:

Gilbert and Sullivan with sex and sophisticated music? In fact, Emmanuel Chabrier's comic operetta "L'Étoile" received one of its early runs at the famous G and S haunt, London's Savoy Theatre. L'Opéra de Montréal opened a charming and hilarious production of this sophisticated comedy Saturday at the Place des Arts' Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Employing excellent young Canadian singers — largely from Montreal — it benefited from stylish sets and costumes created jointly by Glimmerglass Opera and New York City Opera for their 2001 production.

Alan Conter's review (A light entertainment is in the stars, November 8) for the Toronto Globe and Mail was also positive:

At first you have to wonder what's with the current revival of Emmanuel Chabrier's silly 1877 operetta L'Étoile. It can't be the score. Pretty as it is, a half-hour after leaving the theatre you'd be hard-pressed to hum a few bars. So is the book funny enough that a good half-dozen North American companies are staging it through 2006? A closer look reveals that opera companies aren't banking on Chabrier at the box office. They're nuts about Mark Lamos's brilliantly whimsical interpretation of L'Étoile. Lamos collaborated with Andrew Lieberman (sets) and Constance Hoffman (costumes) to design the show in 2001 for the Glimmerglass Opera and the New York City Opera. It's a production that Eddy and Patsy of AbFab fame would swoon over -- a light political satire dressed up in a contemporary take on sixties excess. It is fabulous.

Watch for it when this production comes to an opera theater near you.