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Etienne-Nicolas MÉHUL (1763-1817) L’Irato ou l’Emporté – opera-comique in one act
(libretto by Benoît-Joseph Marsollier) (1801) Ouverture du Ballet de Pâris à Grand Orchestre (1793)
Miljenko
Turk (baritone) – Scapin, servant of Lysandre
Cyril Auvity (tenor) – Lysandre, in love with Isabelle
Pauline Courtin (soprano) – Isabelle, daughter of Pandolphe
Alain Buet (bass) – Pandolphe, uncle of Lysandre
Svenja Hempel (soprano) – Nérine, servant of Isabelle
Georg Poplutz (tenor) – Balouard, pedant Bonner Kammerchor; L’arte del mondo/Werner
Ehrhardt rec. 18 September 2005, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn CAPRICCIO 60128 [64:20]
As I write this review, deception in the world of music is
very much the topic of the day (week, month …). My concern
here is with another tale of deception, but one that is rather
happier than the sad story/stories of Joyce Hatto.
Napoleon was especially fond of Italian music; he made an
Italian, Giovanni Paisiello his official musician. He declared
that “Italian singing has a charm which is always new” -
and perhaps the same went for Italian vocalists, given his
affair with the Milanese singer Giuseppina Grassini …. It
is said that Napoleon, though he respected Méhul, complained
that his music was too ‘academic’ and lacked Italianate grace.
Méhul hatched a scheme to write an opera very much in the
prevailing Italian style, with a libretto by Benoît-Joseph
Marsollier (1750-1817). The opera, which as you will have
guessed, was the one here recorded, was written away from
prying eyes and ears and staged as the supposed work of a
non-existent Neapolitan composer called Fiorelli - shades
of the Marx Brothers and A Night at the Opera! - who
had died young. Napoleon attended a performance, seated next
to Méhul, and praised this new Italian work. When Méhul revealed
that he was the composer, Napoleon declared himself happy
to be tricked in this way when the resulting music gave him
so much pleasure. This story may be apocryphal, though it
is told by Mme Ducrest, the adopted daughter of the Empress
Josephine. Whether or not it is literally true, the story
certainly illustrates very aptly – and memorably – how a
significant French composer responded to the prevailing fashion
set by operas such as Paisiello’s La Molinara (1788)
and Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto (1792).
Méhul’s own story is an interesting one. Born in a family
with no musical traditions, at Givet in the Ardennes, the
young Méhul, fascinated by music, studied with the blind
organist of a local church, Eventually, after such further
teaching as he could afford, he made his way to Paris in
1778. He is reported to have been at the premiere of Iphigénie
en Tauride in the following year. It was the example – and
the advice – of Gluck which encouraged the young Méhul to
write for the theatre rather than devote himself solely to
music for the church. Success only really came with his opera
comique Euphrosine et Coradin, performed at the Théâtre
Favart in 1790. The duet ‘Gardez-vous de la jalousie’ became
a decided hit. Méhul’s career was properly launched and,
with only minor setbacks, he was established as a significant
composer, working in a number of genres, his output including
many more operas, both comic and serious, cantatas, songs,
sinfonias. Berlioz, though his admiration was not unqualified,
thought him one of the ablest French composers of the previous
generation. His work remained an influence on later French
composers for some considerable time. In his book Écolebuissonnière of
1913 Saint-Saens still recalled with pleasure performances
he heard in his teens of Méhul’s Joseph and
of “Irato, a curious and charming work”. In
1898 the sixty three year old Saint-Saens had refused an
invitation to join a committee working for the erection
of a monument to Franck, declaring “Franck's
influence on the French school was not a benign one, and
a monument to Rameau, Méhul or Hérold would seem to me far
more fitting”. A full-scale reassessment of Méhul
would be a very desirable thing.
The plot of L’Irato adheres to a comic pattern familiar
at least from the time of the Roman comedies of Plautus in
the second century BC. The young man is thwarted in his love
for a young woman by the opposition of an older representative
of authority (his father, her father, an uncle or whatever),
but with the aid of a clever servant he finally rescues her
from an unsuitable suitor and gets to marry her. It is a
plot that has served a legion of dramatists (not least Molière)
throughout European theatrical history and it does its job
well enough here in Marsollier’s libretto and, in Méhul’s setting the results are, indeed “curious
and charming”.
Played with great vivacity by the period instruments of L’arte
del mondo, sung – and spoken – with commitment and wit by
what appears to be a mostly very young cast, and conducted
with clear understanding of the stylistic idiom by Werner
Ehrhardt, this is delightful way of passing an hour. None
of the singers strike one as necessarily destined for major
stardom, but all are, at the very least highly competent.
As Isabelle, Pauline Courtin sings with a kind of sparky
charm that refuses all sentimentality (except when it serves
her own interests); Miljenko Turk might perhaps have made
his Scapin a tad more rogueish, but he has a pleasant, clear
baritone and is very easy on the ear; so too is the light
tenor voice of Cyril Auvitry, who invests Lysandre with a
slightly naïve heroism entirely appropriate to the role;
Alain Buet’s bass is well-used in the characterisation of
the obstructive uncle, Pandolphe, whose grumpiness comes
close to shading over into madness; as Nerine and Balouard,
respectively, Svenja Hempel and Georg Poplutz acquit themselves
well, though Poplutz sounds vocally too young for the role.
Marsollier’s libretto is full of witty self-awareness; he – and
his younger characters at any rate – know that they are acting
out a familiar plot. When Marsollier’s Scapin invokes the
aid of “the spirit of my predecessors” he is thinking of
a whole tradition of witty stage-servants and, above all,
of his namesake (not accidentally), the Scapin of Molière’s
marvellous play Les
Fourberies de Scapin (1671);
Isabelle declares: “Je chéris la scène lyrique, / je chante
la nuit et le jour” and certainly is happy to find herself
part of a plot which imitates “la scène lyrique”. When the
young lovers approach Pandolphe, at the work’s conclusion,
for his permission to marry, Lysandre councils “my companions
in misfortune, let us all throw ourselves at his feet … this
never fails to work at the end of comic plays”. In much the
same way that Marsollier’s
libretto repeatedly acknowledges the tradition to which it
belongs, so Méhul’s music is full of echoes of, allusions
to, that of his operatic predecessors. The result – words
and music taken together – is a work which contrives to be
simultaneously innocent and thoroughly knowing.
L’Irato ou l’Emporté would,I suspect, still work well on stage, in a sympathetic
production, if sung and played as well as it is here. Its
charming duets and quartets, its drunken trio, its witty
arias all offer plenty of scope for the right singers, its
narrative plenty of suggestive possibilities for the right
director.
This is not profound music and L’Irato is not a neglected
masterpiece; but it is a representative example of one aspect
of an interesting (and historically significant) composer’s
work, a very sympathetic recording of a fine example of a
largely neglected genre – and it is great fun!
The CD is rounded off by one of Méhul’s overtures, originally
performed in March 1793, for a work devised by the choreographer
and dancer Pierre Gardel. After initial popularity the Ouverture
was forgotten, until revived by Michael Stegemann and Werner
Ehrhardt for a seminar in Dortmund in 2004. It is not, perhaps,
a piece of especial distinction, but it is characterised
by some intriguing orchestral colours and it makes a pleasant
bonus to an attractive CD.
Glyn Pursglove
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