Class. One reason we call any opera “veristic” is its involvement with the lower strata of society. In Louise, there is no suggestion of an Upper Class—it’s as though there were no such thing in fin de siècle Paris. Louise’s family is working class, not prosperous enough to be considered bourgeois, just able to get along, and our largely unsympathetic view of The Mother should be tempered by our awareness that if The Father is for any reason unable to work, Louise’s meagre income from the atelier would be the household’s only means of support. The Father undergoes a change in attitude between Acts 1 and 4. In the first scene he professes contentment with his lot, despite the draining physical demands of his job. Happiness lies in the togetherness of family, and those who are wealthy today may not be so tomorrow. But by Act 4, just able to start back to work after his illness (and quite a bit of time has passed, we gather, for the tenement opposite theirs, with the terrace from which Julien sang to Louise, is gone, and the view open to the city), the tone is quite different: “Poor people, how can they be happy?” he rails, calling himself a beast of burden, a pitiful plaything under Fatality’s yoke. And for him, it’s all entangled with the ingratitude of the young, with their “egoïsme d’amour.”

Out on the street in Act 2, several strata are shown, and there is much discussion about class, and one’s place in the city, among them. The Little Ragpicker envies rich women their silk sheets; the Charcoal Scavenger tells her they wear out quicker; but later The Little Ragpicker asks herself why such luxuries aren’t for everyone. The Dairywoman has never been in love, because she hasn’t had the time. The Roadsweeper once had horses and carriages; no more, but it’s all right because Paris is a paradise; the Street Arab says that’s funny, because he’s been here all his life, and never perceived that. The First Philosopher says that the workers’ ideal is to be bourgeois; the desire of the bourgeois is to be great lords; and the dream of great lords is to become artists. “And the dream of artists?” asks The Painter. “To be gods!” The Bohemian friends of Julien, already hatching a plan to crown Louise as The Muse, insist they’re always gay, though indigent. All this has an air of making the best of things, of finding a way to adapt, of entrepreneurial street smarts, and leaves the impression that although the Louise & Parents concern is actually on the top rung of this little economic footstool, that’s the most precarious perch of all. Still, it would seem from this stageworld that no one in Paris has any prospects, or any plan of action. There’s no one to even rise up in protest, as Luigi will in a few years in another slice of Parisian working life, Il Tabarro. To no avail, of course. And by the way: where’s Julien living now?

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The ’35 “abridgment,” originally released by Columbia on 16 78-rpm sides and seldom out of circulation since, is a necessary resource for those interested in Louise, and as far as it goes (it contains roughly half the music) still gives great pleasure. With a Parisian orchestra and the Choeurs Félix Raugel under Eugène Bigot, and with the best singers France then had to offer in the leading roles, it’s as close as we can get to a performance that is both entirely idiomatic and excellent. Even the uncredited singers of small parts give good flavor to the scraps of their scenes that made the cut, and what remains of the more important supporting roles (Aimée Lecouvreur as The Mother, Christiane Gaudel as Irma) also do well. But of course it is the leading singers who are the set’s main attraction, and while we regret the absence of so much of their music, there is more than enough here to show the high quality of their work. Vallin is the best Louise I know of, the most fetching, the most touching. Her native fluency with the language and with the conversational musical gesture takes us directly into Louise’s life in its more quotidian aspects, and her beautiful lyric soprano, with its pearly line and inflectional sensitivity, carry us unresisting into her ecstasies. Though she sang at the Opéra, at the Colon, and other larger venues, hers was essentially a top-of-the-line Comique voice in calibration. Like most sopranos, she is extended by the stresses of the final scene, and that high B in “Depuis le jour” is in quest of the complete stability that would enable her to match Garden’s treatment of it. Which is only to say that she falls slightly short of the ideal, and is merely wonderful.