In the same year that Mary Garden recorded her first “Depuis le jour,” a young French soprano, Ninon Vallin, made her own Opéra-Comique debut. That was as Micaëla, but she soon added Louise to her repertoire, and went on to become the leading French lyric soprano of the interwar years. She apparently made a recording of “Depuis le jour” as early as 1913—an acoustical, which I’ve not yet been able to track, though I have heard an early Odéon electrical. It brings us a cherishable interpretation, as we would expect from the singer who made many captivating recordings of French song and operetta material. But it stops just short of the repetition of “quelle belle vie!“, and thus that of “ah je suis heu-reuse!“, the phrase that contains the long-held high B that is supposed to start pp, evenly swell to forte, and then descend on an allargando. So the aria’s conclusion, with its biggest vocal test at the high end, along with its following inflectionally important lines near the low, are missing. Vallin got another crack at the aria, though, in the 1935 album that was the first recording to represent significant stretches of the music of Louise. It was to be yet another twenty years before the opera received a “complete” recording, but that was diminished by important cuts, some of which are shared by nearly all performances of the opera, whether in the theatre or the studio. And since much of what we are meant to absorb of Louise is involved in the decisions of what to include or redact, I’d like to look at some of those aspects of the work before commenting on the chosen recordings, which all date from that twenty-year span, when Louise was still something more than a rarity in our opera houses.

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“Atmosphere,“ The City, and “genre” scenes: As I noted above, it was a sense of recalled atmosphere that summoned Louise for me while listening to Iris, and several of my correspondents followed up on the prevalence of atmospheric passages in veristic operas—mood-setting interludes, entr’actes, intermezzi that not infrequently offer some of a score’s most eloquent music. In Louise, we have highly evocative orchestral introductions to all four acts. In the outer acts, these draw us into the family foyer and its emotional tone. In Acts 2 and 3, they are directed out into The City and are given titles—”Paris s’éveille,” “Vers la cité lointaine.” Between the scenes of Act 2 (the first, the crossways at the foot of the Hill of Montmartre; then a dressmaker’s working-room) there is an interlude (in practical terms, to cover the major scene change) that segues into the whirring and clacking of the sewing machines. In addition, there are interlude passages within the household scenes, most notably the long one after The Father’s first  entrance, during which Louise tends the fire and sets the table, Father reads Julien’s letter, father and daughter embrace, Mother brings the soup, and Father serves it. The orchestra, at a slow tempo, weaves a fabric both warm and melancholy, primarily of the themes associated with Father, as the domestic pantomime proceeds. The characters’ silence holds in the day’s emotional tensions (the mother-daughter quarrel; the hopes and fears attached to the letter) in an extended, emotionally pregnant moment of the kind found in Chekhov that is sometimes termed “pan-psychic” (that is, it consists of the audience’s awareness of the unspoken feelings and thoughts of all the characters present). Such moments recur in the first act, after Father’s jolly proclamation of “Je suis heureux!“, as he re-reads the letter, and in the fourth, between the bitter conclusion of “Les pauvres gens peuvent-ils être heureux?” and the beginning of “Voir naître une enfant” (in effect, between the halves of a long harangue, of which the first half is a discharge of despair and disillusion, the second of personal reproach and insult, in an even more charged situation).