Balfe was born in Dublin
in 1808, therefore a bicentenary looms.
As Heyward John St Leger says in his
Reminiscences of Balfe - written
in 1870 and not a trustworthy biography
but nevertheless ‘interspersed with
many interesting and humorous anecdotes’
- ‘at 21 years of age he was a linguist,
a good violinist, a charming vocalist,
a clever pianist, a young composer,
and a generally well-informed man. He
had an ardent temperament, quick to
receive impressions, and enthusiastic
in all he undertook’.
On the death of his
father, Balfe came to in London for
two years (1823-25), studied composition
with Charles Horn (organist at St George’s
Chapel, Windsor), and played violin
in the orchestra at Drury Lane, after
which he went to Paris where he met
Cherubini and Rossini. On the latter’s
advice he went to Milan where he studied
singing with Filippo Galli and composition
with Ferdinando Paer in Rome. He returned
to Paris in 1827 and the following year
sang Figaro in Rossini’s Barber of
Seville under the composer’s direction
at the Italian Theatre. In 1829 he returned
to Italy, where at Palermo he took a
part in Bellini’s La straniera
in January 1830. In 1831 he met and
married a Hungarian soprano called Lina
Roser and together they sang in operas
by Bellini and Rossini. In 1834 he made
his debut at La Scala, Milan singing
with the famous diva Maria Malibran
in Rossini’s Otello and went
on to sing with her in Barber of
Seville and Bellini’s La Sonnambula.
Malibran called Balfe Il Rossini
Inglese, and recommended him to
the impresario and playwright Alfred
Bunn in London, whence he returned in
1835. In Italy he had already written
three operas - for the cities of Palermo,
Pavia and Milan - but his first opera
for London opened on 28 October 1835
and was called The Siege of Rochelle.
It was performed at Drury Lane, where
his statue, sculpted in 1874 by Leo
Malempré, stands in the inner
lobby to this day. The opera was so
successful that Bunn commissioned Balfe
to write an opera for Malibran, loosely
based on Abbé Prévost’s
Manon Lescaut, The Maid of
Artois was another huge success.
In 1846 Balfe succeeded Costa at Her
Majesty’s Theatre in London until 1852,
in which year he visited Petrograd.
Of his 25 operas (in English, Italian
and French) written at a consistent
pace of one a year from 1835-1860, it
is The Bohemian Girl (1843),
probably the most popular opera in the
second half of nineteenth century England,
with which his name endures to this
day. It was soon performed in theatres
from New York (1844) to Sydney (1846),
Dublin (1844) to Cape Town (1887), and
Prague (1847) to Toronto (1874). Among
other Balfe operas are Catherine
Grey (Drury Lane, 1837), Joan
of Arc (1837), Diadeste or
The Veiled Lady (1838), Falstaff
(1838), Keolanthe or The Unearthly
Bride (1841), The Daughter of
St Mark (1844), The Enchantress
(1845), The Bondman (1846), The
Devil’s In It (1847), The Maid
of Honour (1847, The Sicilian
Bride (1852), The Rose of Castile
(1857), Satanella or The Power
of Love (1858), and Bianca
or The Bravo’s Bride (1860).
His operas were taken up by touring
companies run by the likes of Carl Rosa
and Moody Manners, assuaging a Victorian
thirst for opera which combined ballad
and dialogue, a formula eventually superseded
by the musical. Judging by the colourful
portrait which adorns this CD set, Maria
Malibran was a dazzling beauty, all
the more tragic that she died in November
1836, a matter of weeks after her last
performance of the run of The Maid
of Artois (16 July 1836). She was
only 28 years old, and her death may
well have been caused by a fall from
her horse during pregnancy.
Balfe’s opera was revived
a decade later for Anna Bishop, so there
are two versions ‘out there’. Printed
vocal scores of the original version,
1837, are in the Henry Watson Music
Library, Manchester, while those marked
New Edition of 1846 are in Liverpool
Public Library. The original manuscript
is in the British Library carrying orange
coloured changes. Here’s what St Leger
has to say about The Maid of Artois:-
"When Balfe
was composing his opera The Maid
of Artois Madame Malibran de
Bériot did not like the finale,
so she requested him to write another,
when he composed the world-renowned
aria ‘With Rapture Dwelling’. On
Balfe taking the manuscript to Madame
Malibran she was in bed indisposed,
and wishing to hear the new finale,
we had a cottage piano carried upstairs
to her room; and Madame Malibran’s
joy was unbounded at the brilliant
and beautiful aria, which, on the
first night of performance, was
honoured with a double encore, and
was so popular among the Russian
Imperial family that Balfe was called
by them Monsieur Balfe de l’air.
"By the way,
talking of this air, Balfe told
me one night he was at the Imperial
Palace at St Petersburg, in the
time of the late Emperor Nicholas,
and on his leaving, as he was descending
the staircase, he heard someone
whistling ‘With rapture dwelling’
[Leger meant ‘The rapture swelling’].
To his surprise he found it was
the Grand Duchess Constantine. On
perceiving Balfe, her Imperial Highness
and one of her sisters laughed when
Balfe said ‘I know your Imperial
Highness has many accomplishments,
but I was not aware whistling was
one, and I feel highly honoured
at hearing my aria whistled so exquisitely."
The opera is set in
the gardens of the Palais Royal in 18th
century Paris at the end of the reign
of Louis XV, followed by scenes in an
apartment and salon in the Marquis’
mansion (Act One). Other scenes include
the courtyard of a fortress, with prison
cells and a redoubt lined with cannon,
at Sinamari (French Guyana) overlooking
the sea (Act Two), and finally in a
sandy desert near Cayenne (Act Three).
The story revolves around the love between
Jules and his sweetheart Isoline who
has been lost to the Marquis de Chateau-Vieux,
while Jules is forcibly enlisted into
the service of the Marquis. Jules is
sent into exile, having wounded the
Marquis in a duel, and it takes years
for Isoline (disguised as a sailor)
to track him down to the fortress at
Sinamari. The final act begins with
the young couple dying of thirst in
the desert, that is until the distant
sounds of a marching band announce rescue
and a happy ending.
That the music is vastly
superior to the libretto is the work’s
saving grace, but nevertheless the North-West-based
Victorian Opera is to be sincerely congratulated
for reviving The Maid of Artois,
especially as we know only of performances
in London (the initial run begun on
27 May 1836), a benefit performance
on 7 June 1838 in which Balfe himself
sang the Marquis, the run with Anna
Bishop beginning 8 October 1846, further
performances in New York and Philadelphia
in 1847, and back in England in Hull
in 1849. It would be ideal for a Festival
such as Wexford, Buxton, Garsington
or Grange Park, rather than for the
repertoire of a permanent opera house.
In the CD booklet one
can mine a rich seam of research, such
as an introductory essay contributed
by Richard Bonynge on the relationship
between Malibran and Balfe. There’s
also Raymond J Walker’s synopsis and
brief but informative essays on the
opera, composer and libretto. Musicologist
Valerie Langfield describes with expert
clarity the preparation of the music
and the performing edition used. This
restores Balfe’s original intentions,
distorted as they were by his experience
of the Malibran run, so he excised the
changes and interpolations she introduced
to show off her vocal prowess in a display
of virtuosity. Balfe wrote not only
operas but many songs. His music owes
much to his contemporaries Rossini,
Donizetti and Auber, but in turn there
is the noteworthy influence he clearly
had on Sullivan - let alone on Verdi
whose first successful opera, Nabucco,
Balfe conducted in London, and who was
entrusted with his I Masnadieri
with Jenny Lind in the cast, having
conducted the first two performances
in 1847. The music of the Maid of
Artois is often sentimental, a prime
ingredient of the Victorian ballad,
but Balfe in his later works replaced
it with scena-style writing as
taste changed.
The Victorian Opera
orchestra gets stuck in right away with
a spirited rendition of the substantial
(ten minutes) overture with its side-drum
ending recalling the falling guillotine
at the end of the March to the Scaffold
in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique
a decade or so earlier. Soon after the
overture begins there appears to be
some interesting scoring highlighting
a double-bass line independent of the
cellos. Because the double-bass achieves
a prominence elsewhere in the opera
(for example at the start of track 8),
it occurred to this reviewer that it
may have been microphone positioning
favouring the bass at the expense of
the two cellos, which are hardly ever
heard apart from a brief solo late on
in the opera, rather than an imaginative
selection of instrumental colour on
the composer’s part. Without a score
one is dependent solely on what one
hears. There are, however, a couple
of striking moments of original instrumentation,
the horn solo at the start of Jules’
cavatina in Act One (track 5), and the
splendid combination of harp with trumpet
(even better would have been the cornet
Balfe wanted) for ‘The Light of Other
Days’ sung by the Marquis. It also indicates
the calibre of instrumental playing
available to the composer at Drury Lane,
where he might have had as many as seventy
players with him in the pit. On this
recording the string strength is modest
and consists of six firsts, four seconds,
three violas, two cellos and a single
bass, while elsewhere two horns and
a serpent are dropped from the double
winds, horns and trumpets, plus three
trombones, timpani, percussion and harp.
Conductor Philip Mackenzie has grasped
the style of the music and generally
settles on appropriate tempi, though
some accelerandos seem to take
a while to get going as the numbers
round the bend and head down the final
straight.
In her booklet essay
Dr Langfield challenges professional
opera companies to take up the work,
exhorting them to judge its virtues
and suitability for themselves, and
offering them the inducement of a ready-made
set of new performing materials largely
based upon the 1846 revised version.
The question therefore must be asked
whether this recording is good enough
to persuade such professional companies
to take up the work. Plain speaking
requires an emphatic ‘yes’ but with
a huge caveat, because where
it does fall down is where similar problems
would present themselves to professional
companies. First it needs a diva of
Malibran’s quality, let’s say Joan Sutherland
to bring it nearer to our own day. Kay
Jordan makes a valiant attempt and largely
carries off the fiendishly difficult
coloratura and vocal pyrotechnics
of the part. Malibran was variously
described as anything from a contralto,
through mezzo to a soprano. Ms Jordan
is emphatically stronger in the middle
and higher registers of the part than
in the lower, but she has a fine sense
of style and produces much agility,
especially in the fearsome demands of
Act One Scene 3 in which she hardly
stops singing: two arias, a duet, a
trio and an ensemble finale. Stephen
Anthony Brown struggles manfully with
some equally fearsome and persistent
high register work, but where the vocal
line is less flamboyant and the mood
calmer, he produces some lovely lyrical
sounds reminiscent of the young Pears.
And there we get to the heart of the
matter. Balfe is not an English composer
under the influence of Mendelssohn,
to whom he would have succumbed like
all other composers of his day if he
had stayed in England; instead he went
to Italy and came back reeking of Rossini,
Bellini and Donizetti - flavoured with
a touch of Auber in Paris. And it requires
Italianate voices with watertight vocal
security to bring off all the bel
canto and florid coloratura
such music demands. The final lines
of the verses in Jonathan Pugsley’s
initial aria as the Marquis stretch
the top of his voice to produce some
uncomfortably flat intonation - and
he is by no means alone among the principals
to lapse into this failing.
Balfe is relentlessly
demanding of his singers; virtually
every aria has repeats, and the music
does not get any easier the second time
around. There is dialogue in the opera
but not included on this recording,
so 2½ hours of recitatives, arias and
ensembles would extend to more than
three hours, a tough ask on the singers.
The chorus (there are 35 of them) makes
a sterling contribution to the overall
result, despite some dubious tuning
among the maidens at the start of Act
One, Scene 3. The opening drinking chorus
and the patter-on-a-monotone principle
must surely have impacted on Sullivan
forty years and more later, whilst Gilbert
at least managed to avoid some of the
worst of Bunn’s politically highly incorrect
texts such as
Was there ever known a set
Of such slaves together met.
There’s a fellow at his work
Just as lazy as a Turk;
And another by his side
Skulking back himself to hide.
That rascal’s giving him the wink
To leave his task and cut a caper,
And now through faces black as ink,
They’re blushing white as writing
paper.
Neither can one imagine
how many more words ending in ‘-ounded’
Bunn might have used in the Trio finale
of Act One, ‘bounded’, ‘founded’, ‘sounded’,
‘astounded’, ‘surrounded’, ‘confounded’,
and ‘grounded’ in what is definitely
not a comedy. But it is Victorian melodrama
which can produce an exchange such as
this. Jules: ‘What wretch are you to
lay a hand on one so dear to me? And
by what right?’. Marquis: ‘Those I command,
my fittest answer be. Appear! Appear!
I summon you here, my servants, friends,
and guard at hand’.
This is a splendidly
produced recording into which a lot
of hard work and a labour of love has
gone. It seems that it was recorded
in just two days (i.e. four sessions),
not nearly long enough for such a substantial
work, and probably the dangers to a
singer’s health which prevail in the
month of February - lethal to most vocal
chords - will not have helped. Money
was probably the reason more time could
not be found. Nevertheless it is a grand
achievement, one which has awakened
us all to the huge importance of the
music of Balfe, of which there is still
a vast amount to explore, probably -
despite the early demise of La Malibran
- most of it just as hard to sing. This
is not forgotten music, in this 21st
century it is unknown music, and Victorian
Opera Northwest have put us on the road
to rectify matters.
Christopher Fifield
Victorian Opera Chorus and Orchestra/Philip Mackenzie
for
details
