Spyridon SAMARAS (1861-1917)
Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle (1905)
Chevalier d’Aubigny - Angelo Simos (tenor)
Duc de Richelieu - Tassis Christoyannis (baritone)
Duc d’Aumont - Pavlos Maropoulos (bass)
Chevalier d’Auvray - Pantelis Kontos (baritone)
Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Belle-Isle - Martha Arapis (soprano)
Marquise de Prie - Marina Krilovici (soprano)
Pazardzhik Symphony Orchestra and Kaval Choir of Sofia/Byron Fidetzis
rec. 16-22 June 1995, Municipal Theatre of Pazardzhik, Bulgaria
French libretto with Greek, German, and Italian translations
NAXOS 8.660508-09 [58:02 + 57:38]
Puccini has been allowed, by opera houses, recording companies, critics and audiences alike, to dominate a whole era of Italian opera, from around 1890 to 1930. He stands on a lonely pinnacle, his leading rivals, talented composers like Catalani, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Giordano, Montemezzi and Zandonai, all effectively relegated to a sort of ‘second division’ (and all, oddly, chiefly remembered for a single, popular opera). This state of affairs has the knock-on effect of ensuring that a much larger group of not-quite-such-talented (or at least less established) composers, who might otherwise make up the second division, has been relegated to a third division, where performances and recordings are in distinctly short supply. One of these third division composers is Spyridon Samaras (1861-1917), three years younger than Puccini and two years older than Mascagni. Born in Corfu, he studied music in Greece before continuing his studies at the Paris Conservatoire in 1882, taking lessons from some of the leading French composers. He moved to Italy in 1885, to pursue a career as an opera composer; there he adapted his name to ‘Spiro Samara’ (or sometimes ‘Spyros Samara’), creating a confusion for his subsequent reception history that has never gone away. It is notable, for example, that the only previous recording of a Samaras opera to be formally released, La martire, gave the composer’s name as ‘Spyro Samara’. Recordings of some other Samaras operas, all conducted by Byron Fedetzis, have been uploaded to YouTube, giving the composer’s name as ‘Spyros Samaras’.
Samaras’ first opera to be completed and performed was Flora mirabilis, staged in 1886; it had a libretto by Ferdinando Fontana, the librettist of Puccini’s first two operas, Le Villi (1884) and Edgar (1889). Flora mirabilis was published by Edoardo Sonzogno, the ambitious businessman who would, in 1888, launch the competition for a new opera famously won by Mascagni with Cavalleria rusticana. There is no doubt, then, that Samaras was quickly moving in the same world as Puccini and Mascagni, meeting the same people, and participating in the same restless operatic mood as composers sought a distinct post-Verdi style. He enjoyed moderate success, and by the end of 1895 had seen five operas staged in Italy, none of which, however, had captured the public imagination in the same way as rival operas by Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and others, and of which Flora mirabilis, the first, had proved the most popular. This was doubtless discouraging, and Samaras seems to have experienced something of a crisis in his operatic career at this time, for his next opera, Storia d’amore, was not staged until 1903 (in the interim, Samaras had, notably, composed a cantata for the first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896). Storia d’amore had a libretto by Paul Milliet (1848-1924), who then continued to work with Samaras on Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle (1905), the opera under review, and Rhea (1908), the work which effectively represents the end of the composer’s operatic career. (Samaras did start work on a later opera, Tigra; Fedetzis’ orchestration of what survives of this is on YouTube.)
Milliet wrote original librettos in French – he was, notably, one of the co-authors of Massenet’s Werther – but also devoted much of his energy to translating Italian librettos into French, including, say, producing the French versions of Cavalleria rusticana and Andrea Chénier. In a sense, then, he stood on the border between two operatic cultures. His working practice with Samaras was to produce a libretto in French, which would subsequently be translated into Italian, and all three of their collaborations were first staged in Italy, in Italian. An obvious question is whether Samaras regarded these as primarily French operas first performed in Italian merely because most of his operatic connections were in Italy, or as primarily Italian operas first written in French simply because Milliet was French. I’m not aware of any statement he made on this, but the published vocal scores provide some clues, while also complicating the question. Storia d’amore was published with the Italian as the main singing line, with a French translation underneath, but Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle reversed this, giving priority to the French text. The recording was made with the French text – no explanation of the choice is given – which will no doubt push Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle at least towards categorisation as a French opera.
While on the subject of language, there is an odd feature of this release that I must emphasise. The liner notes include introductory essays and a synopsis of the plot in English and Greek. The libretto, only available on the Naxos website, offers the French text with translations in Greek, German, and Italian. At first, I thought I must be missing something, but when I contacted Naxos, they confirmed that there had been no plan to make the libretto available in English. This is unfortunate when it comes to an intricate plot built around romantic entanglements, tricks, misunderstandings and the like, in which the Marquise de Prie loves the Chevalier d’Aubigny who loves Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle who is being pursued by the Duc de Richelieu who is currently the lover of … the Marquise de Prie! It is adapted from the five-act play Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle (1839) by Alexandre Dumas père, and like its source is set in early eighteenth-century France.
Much of Samaras’ music was lost after his death; some of the operas have completely disappeared, others survive only in part, and even the ‘complete’ ones apparently need a good deal of editorial work. Fedetzis, who has been enthusiastically championing Samaras since the 1980s, not only conducts the current recording, but edited the score. His introduction explains what this involved: ‘the surviving material consists of the score of the second, third and fourth acts, the orchestral parts – with the exception of the two oboe, the three trombone and the harp parts – a printed libretto in Italian, as well as two vocal scores – one in Franco-Italian and another in German, differing in quite a few places. … I filled in all the parts cut out, as well as the parts of the score missing as compared against the two vocal scores, so that the music as originally composed could be recorded almost in its entirety.’ Fedetzis does not explain why this opera in particular was felt to merit a formal release through Naxos, rather than being uploaded to YouTube. The obvious conclusion would seem to be, though, that he regards Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle as perhaps the best introduction to the composer’s work, and having particular musical value. As Fedetzis knows Samaras’ music better than anyone, his judgement on such a point is important.
The Naxos recording certainly demonstrates Samaras’ prowess as an opera composer very convincingly. The opera’s most winning quality is a delightful lyrical freshness which never sounds stale or conventional, or excessively melodramatic. The libretto, which to some extent betrays its origins as a spoken play, contains a great deal of bustle and dialogue, and few introspective moments, but presumably this is what Samaras wanted, and one can only admire the easy grace with which he maintains a sense of conversational flow; the brisk pace ensures that the entire four-act opera comes in at considerably less than two hours. The vocal lines are comparable to those of the Italian composers of the giovane scuola, but tempered with a certain precise French elegance. The delicate orchestrations set them off beautifully, and Samaras reveals his French training, perhaps, in making every word easy to hear. Some of the orchestral material has an eighteenth-century ‘period’ flavour, but this is just one element in the score, and never sounds like pastiche. Fidetzis leads a performance that comes across as carefully prepared and utterly committed. The soloists are all Greek, apart from the Romanian Krilovici, yet sing with real idiomatic flair, to the point where you feel these were just the kind of voices Samaras had in mind as he composed his score. The recording quality is sometimes a little rough, perhaps reflecting the many years it has been waiting for a proper release, but not in a way to seriously interrupt the listener’s pleasure in Samaras’ distinctively atmospheric musical world
Samaras’ music, like that of nearly all his Italian contemporaries, tends to be insistently compared to Puccini’s, and in a sense judged ‘good’ when it comes closest to the scores of the Tuscan master. To my ear, Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle sounds distinctively ‘lighter’ than anything Puccini had composed by this time, and closer to the world of Romantic operetta – thus it is perhaps not surprising that Samaras turned to the composition of operettas in the 1910s. This ‘lightness’, if it is felt, is interpretatively important, as it very much suggests the world of romantic comedy, which is what Dumas’s play is. And yet, as with almost any story, the hero (the Chevalier d’Aubigny) can be killed off in the last five minutes, and remarkably that is exactly what happened in the original Italian version of the opera. In a later French version, prepared for Monte Carlo, there is a happy ending, closer to that of the play, with d’Aubigny saved from a pointless suicide just in time. Both endings are recorded here, so the listener can make his or her choice, but I would be astonished if anyone felt that the tragic ending was a natural and organic conclusion to the dramatic and musical material preceding it. Samaras surely thought he was composing a romantic comedy until, at some late stage, he was persuaded that Italian audiences of the period were more likely to welcome a loosely Pucciniesque tragedy. This is certainly one justification for giving the preference to the French text of the opera today.
Altogether, this recording of Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle makes a triumphant case for the value of a neglected composer’s work, and it is recommended to anyone interested in the fascinating question of what else was happening in Italian opera during the reign of Puccini.
David Chandler
