Some Opera as Opera news: the inventory of the book’s second printing is down to single digits, but after considerable travail (long story), we have been able to get underway with a third printing. It is possible that, given the required lead press time, there will be a brief interim with inventory at zero. Pre-orders will be taken, however, and fulfilled as quickly as inventory is restored. I will keep you posted here. Thanks.
Louise popped back into my consciousness while I was writing my last post, on Mascagni’s Iris. It’s not that these two operas are all that much alike (for starters, Louise is lovable, Iris not, except in a perverse sort of way), but apart from my general mind-drift through the subject of verismo, there was something in the atmosphere of the Act 3 prelude in Iris (the descent into the underworld of the sewer) that put me in mind of the interlude at the start of Act 2 of Louise, “Paris Awakes,” which introduces us to the street life at the foot of Montmartre at daybreak. And Louise is true verismo, both in subject matter and musical style—the only French example of that genre to achieve a lasting success. Its composer, Gustave Charpentier, called it a “musical novel,” and it does suggest both a Zola-esque naturalism and a Balzacian ambition, the latter particularly when we think of its stillborn successor, Julien, which sought to carry its protagonists forward into other adventures with other characters. Here in New York, it is one of five operas that had been fairly regularly in the repertory of the Metropolitan through the 1940s but vanished abruptly as of 1950, never since to return. (The others: Mignon, Lakmé, The Golden Cockerel—but sung in French, as Le Coq d’or—and L’Amore dei tre re.) All five were given some life support by the New York City Opera at one point or another, with Louise and Golden Cockerel (with the Sills/Treigle team) getting the best response, and the San Francisco Opera staged Louise for Renée Fleming as recently as 1999. But Louise is now no more than an antique curiosity for American operagoers, and not much more than that even in France. Which is a shame.
Looking back over some of my Louise recordings and materials, I re-read, I believe for the first time since its publication, my High Fidelity review of the 1977 Columbia recording, conducted by George Prêtre.(I) I was interested to find that, already aware that Louise was fading from our ken and thinking in the context of socially committed theatre like ours of the 1930s, I was concerned to locate points of connection between the work and contemporaneous audiences. And now, in this time of Mandatory Relevance and much confusion as to just what “relevance” is, I cannot do better than to cite myself on the aboutness of Louise: “[it] is in part about the lot of the urban workingman; in part about a young woman’s difficulty in establishing an identity vis-à-vis restrictive parents or a dominant lover; in part about the overwhelming nature of the modern city, whose powers of magnetism and alienation seem so tightly knit together; in part about the qualities of what we now call the nuclear family and the patterns of tyranny and rebellion we so often see as native to it; and in part about the very perplexing question of just what does constitute personal ‘freedom.'” I later speculate on what may become of Louise now that she has fled her home for the final time under wrenching circumstances, and I note that Julien (himself immature and self-centered, I’d now add) seems only the catalyst to this action—Louise has fled to the city itself, the “Paris tout en fête” in which she will now have to make her way, “en fête” or not.
Footnotes
| ↑I | This review was included in the Records in Review volume for 1978, and my colleague Kenneth Furie’s of the EMI/Rudel recording in that for 1979. Long runs of High Fidelity are findable on the net, and would be other sources for these articles. |
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