Tag Archives: valiquette

Les Génies

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duval - geniesLes Génies ou les Caractères de l’Amour is an opera/ballet of 1736 by one Mademoiselle Duval who was 22 at the time.  Almost nothing is known about Duval except that she was at one time a chorus member at the Royal Opera in Paris.  It seems reasonable to deduce that she was from a family of professional musicians and that’s how she got her training.  FWIW Les Génies was only the second opera by a woman to be produced by the Royal Opera.  It’s recently been recorded for CD under the auspices of Château de Versailles Spectacles. Continue reading →

Phryné

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BRZ_21_09_phryne_cov_b01The latest release in the CD/book series from the Palazetto Bru Zane is Saint-Saëns’s 1893 opéra comique,  Phryné, loosely based on an incident in the life of the famous 4th century BCE courtesan. It’s a two-act piece lasting about 65 minutes. The original was given with spoken dialogue, but as so often with this genre, recitatives (here added by André Messager in 1896) have been used in this recording, as they were in most contemporary performances.

The plot is straightforward enough. Dicéphile is a rather pompous magistrate and has just been honoured by the city with a bust. His nephew/ward Nicias is in love with Phryné, but also broke and about to be arrested for debt. With the help of Phryné’s servants, he beats up the officials sent to arrest him and hides in her house, where, after the usual confusion, she admits to being in love with him. Dicéphile shows up to find that his bust has been disfigured with a wineskin and remonstrates with Phryné, who quickly changes the subject to her upcoming trial on a charge of impiety. Dicéphile is overcome by her (obvious) charms and agrees to drop the charges.  He also agrees to share his fortune with Nicias and all live happily ever after. Continue reading →

Le postillon de Lonjumeau

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Most people probably know Adolphe Adam as the  composer of the music for the ballet Giselle but he was more than that. He was also a scholar who worked hard to study and revive the work of Rameau and other pre-Revolution composers. So, when tasked with composing a piece for the Opéra Comique he chose to combine elements that had produced previous “hits”; a vocationally based plot, a love story and so on with a Louis XV setting that allowed him to include pastiche Baroque. The result was Le postillon de Lonjumeau; a work that had much success across Europe during the mid 19th century (Wagner conducted it in Riga) but which had long disappeared from the repertory when the Opéra Comique revived it in 2019. Denise Wendel-Poray reviewed it in the Summer 2019 issue of Opera Canada and it has now been released on DVD and Blu-ray.

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