The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (60 page)

Recordings

CD: Irène Joachim (Mélisande): Roger Désormière (cond.).
EMI 7 61038 2

Video: Alison Hagley (Mélisande); Pierre Boulez (cond.).
WNO production.
DG 072 431 3

Maurice Ravel

(1875–1937)

L’Enfant et les sortilèges
(
The Child and the Magic Spells
)

One act. First performed Monte Carlo, 1925.

Libretto by Colette

An opera originally conceived as a ballet, which in its vein of surrealist fantasy and scenic fluidity also bears the marks of Ravel’s fascination with the cinema.
Often performed in a double bill with Ravel’s other one-act opera,
L’Heure
Espagnole,
a farce about a Spanish clock-maker with an adulterous wife.

Plot

A recalcitrant little boy is scolded by his mother over his failure to finish his homework.
In a rage, he sets about attacking everything in his room – he kicks the cat, upsets a kettle, smashes a teapot, pulls strips off the wallpaper and breaks the pendulum on a grandfather clock.
But suddenly the assaulted objects and animals decide to speak back and teach the child a salutary lesson.
A chair recoils when he tries to sit in it; the teapot challenges him to a boxing match, the fire spits back at him and so forth.

Finally, two cats leap out into the garden.
The child follows them, only to face further criticism from the objects of the child’s destructiveness – including a tree, a dragonfly and a squirrel who pleads for another of his kind to be released from captivity in the child’s room.
The child feels lonely and unloved, and the animals begin to batter him and then each other.
The child escapes from the fray and binds the paw of a wounded squirrel.
The animals are delighted by this act of kindness.
They forgive the chastened child and help him to call for his mother.

What to listen for

Ravel’s richly coloured and inventive score offers the cast only short cameo roles but also demands some virtuoso singing.
Ravel enjoyed writing for the extremes of the vocal ranges: for example, Fire, the Nightingale and the Princess (which the composer specifies should be sung by the same soprano) demand trills and a Queen-of-the-Night top F – a note which the character tenor playing Arithmetic also has to touch.
The Child should be performed by a slight-figured mezzo-soprano.

The opera is full of delicate pastiche and dances – a minuet for two armchairs, a nonsense Chinese pentatonic foxtrot for the cup and teapot, a pastorale for the wallpaper shepherd and shepherdess, and an extended orchestral waltz for the frogs.
The squirrel’s lament is vocally perhaps the most purely beautiful section of the score, though the final fugal chorus of farewell runs it a close second.
Note the elements of jazz, blues, ragtime and American popular music, especially in the piano part.

In performance

An enchanting fantasy with a moral, which doesn’t allow directors much room for interpretation, but which has given artists such as David Hockney (at the Met) and the children’s books illustrator Maurice Sendak (at Glyndebourne) a chance to let their whimsies rip.
Ravel is reported to have enjoyed Walt Disney’s early cartoons and to have believed that the medium could have animated the opera as he had always dreamed.

Recording

CD: Colette Alliot-Lugaz (L’Enfant); Charles Dutoit (cond.).
Decca 44 333 3

Francis Poulenc

(1899–1963)

Dialogues des Carmélites

Three acts. First performed Milan, 1957.

Libretto by the composer

One of the most successful of post-war operas – startlingly dramatic, profoundly moving and rich in psychological complexities. The story is broadly based on historical fact: the actual libretto is adapted from a play by George Bernanos, itself based on a German novel drawn from Mother Marie’s memoirs of the episode.

Plot

Shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, there is a violent attack outside the mansion of the Chevalier de la Force.
His neurotic daughter Blanche wants to joins a Carmelite convent.
The elderly Prioress, Madame de Croissy, questions Blanche’s motivation sceptically, but admits her as a novice.

Blanche befriends cheerful Sister Constance.
The Prioress dies in agony, and a new Prioress, Madame Lidoine, is appointed.
As the Revolution intensifies, Blanche’s brother attempts to persuade her to leave the convent, but she refuses – although it is not clear of what she is fearful, or what she is evading.

The nuns are expelled from the convent and take a vow of martyrdom.
Blanche flees the convent in terror.
She returns home and discovers that her father has been guillotined.
Mother Marie, the Prioress’s deputy, arrives to take Blanche back to the convent, but she is too afraid to leave.

The Carmelites are condemned to death for supporting the royalist regime.
Because of her visit to Blanche, Mother Marie is separated from her sisters, and she is dismayed that she cannot join them in their ordeal: her confessor suggests that it is the will of God.
The remaining nuns mount the scaffold one by one, singing the ‘Salve regina’.
Constance,
the last to be executed, is overjoyed when a spiritually resolved Blanche finally appears to join her sisters in their martyrdom.

What to listen for

The vocal line contains no formal arias and little easy melody.
It is largely couched as lyrical solo declamation, and the influence of Monteverdi’s operas, Mussorgsky’s
Boris
Godunov
and Debussy’s
Pelléas
et
Mélisande
is evident throughout.
Communicating the text to the audience is paramount: Poulenc was a great composer for the human voice, and the opera was carefully written to be sung with verbal clarity.
The score is unfailingly dramatic in the way it creates an everthickening atmosphere of imminent menace and anxiety, contrasted with the calm and certainty implied by the nuns’ chants and rituals.

Women’s voices dominate – the male roles are all small and peripheral – and the five central characters are all carefully contrasted in vocal colour and type.
Blanche, written for lyric soprano, is the most psychologically complex role, her personality a fascinating mixture of neuroses and hysteria; Constance is designed for a fresh, youthful soubrette, and her music contains the opera’s only element of sweetness and charm; Madame Lidoine is for a high-lying Straussian soprano, Mother Marie for dramatic soprano and the Old Prioress, contralto.
This latter role is usually taken by an elderly prima donna who may compensate for her vocal shortcomings by falling back on ham: the effect will be much greater, however, if Poulenc’s notes are as potently interpreted as they are by singers of the class of Rita Gorr or Felicity Palmer.

In performance