The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (62 page)

CD: Natalie Dessay (Eurydice); Marc Minkowski (cond.).
EMI 5 56725 2 0

La
Belle
Helénè

Three acts. First performed Paris, 1864.

Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy

Another satire on the pleasure-loving, materialistic France of the Second Empire, full of digs at the political shenanigans of the day and the pretensions of grand opera.

Plot

In Sparta, before the outbreak of the Trojan War, the priest Calchas laments the lack of interest in his temple and the public’s obsession with Venus ever since she won the golden apple from Paris by promising to deliver him Helen, the most beautiful girl on earth.
Helen is bored with her dull husband Menelaus, and is delighted when the handsome shepherd Paris comes to claim her.
Menelaus’s allies, the Greek kings Agamemnon, Achilles and the two Ajaxes, organize a game of charades; when Paris wins, he reveals his true identity as a Trojan prince, much to everyone’s consternation.
Calchas announces that Menelaus has been banished to Crete for a month, leaving the field clear for Paris and Helen.

Helen dallies with Paris for a month without actually making love to him.
But while Helen is dreaming in bed, Paris takes advantage of her – just as Menelaus returns to discover them in a clinch.
Everyone departs for a seaside holiday.
On the beach, Menelaus confronts Helen with her adultery, but she insists that she was tricked into surrendering her virtue.
Her sincerity may be doubted.
When others blame the ubiquitous influence of Venus for this state of affairs, Menelaus demands a visit from her High Priest.
The High Priest duly appears, announcing that he will make amends by
taking Helen away to participate in a ritual sacrifice.
But this High Priest is none other than Paris in disguise, and as he and Helen sail off to Troy, the Greek kings vow that they will avenge the wrong done to Menelaus by declaring war.

What to listen for

A more graceful, lyrical score than that of the fizz-pop
Orphée
aux
Enfers.
Two of its best solo numbers occur in the first scene: Paris’s jaunty, ‘Au Mont Ida’ and Helen’s wistful ‘Amours divins’ show two aspects of Offenbach’s genius at their best.
Other highlights include Helen’s seductive ‘Dis-moi, Vénus’; the duet for Helen and Paris, ‘Oui, c’est un rêve’; and the affectionate parody of patriotic marches by Rossini and Wagner.
Paris’s Tyrolean yodelling in the final scene never fails to win a laugh.
Unlike the stratospherically high-lying role of Eurydice, Helen lies happily in the mezzo-soprano range.
Paris requires a tenor with more beef than operetta usually demands.

In performance

In 1932,
La
Belle
Hélène
was rewritten as
Helen,
a West End musical by the composer Erich Korngold and librettist A.
P.
Herbert; it had enormous success, but dated quickly.
In 1995, the management of ENO commissioned the playwright Michael Frayn to try again: he stripped away the mythological trappings and came up with
La
Belle
Vivette,
located in Second-Empire Paris with Vivette-Hélène played as a courtesan-cum-operetta-star and Menelaus as her elderly protector. Result: an abysmally unfunny disaster.
Much better, as Laurent Pelly at the Châtelet and Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser for Scottish Opera have proved, to stick with Meilhac and Halévy’s original libretto and simply insert a few well-placed topical references.
The charades played in Act I refers to a game popular at the court of Napoleon III.

Recording

CD and DVD: Felicity Lott (Hélène); Marc Minkowski (cond.).
Virgin 545 477 2 (CD); DVO PLBH (DVD)

Johann Strauss

(1825–99)

Die
Fledermaus
(
The
Bat
)

Three acts. First performed Vienna, 1874.

Libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée

Based on a French farce, this musically rich and vocally challenging operetta has found a firm foothold in conventional opera houses, and many great singers (among them Lotte Lehmann, Elisabeth Schumann, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Kiri Te Kanawa, Hermann Prey, Thomas Allen) and conductors (Bruno Walter, Herbert von Karajan, Carlos Kleiber) have been among its finest interpreters.

Plot

Eisenstein, a Viennese gentlemen, is about to spend a day in prison after being convicted of a tax dodge, thus giving his wife Rosalinde a chance to dally with her lover, the operatic tenor Alfred.
Her maid Adele asks for the evening off to visit her aged aunt, but permission is refused – much to her fury, as she was in fact hoping to attend Prince Orlofsky’s exotic ball with her sister Ida.
Eisenstein’s friend Dr Falke reminds Eisenstein of a night when Eisenstein made Falke walk home after a fancy-dress ball, dressed as a bat.
Meanwhile, he encourages Eisenstein to accompany him to Orlofsky’s ball for an evening of naughty fun before he begins his day in prison.
Rosalinde is dining secretly with Alfred when the police arrive and arrest him, mistaking him for Eisenstein.
To avoid scandal, Rosalinde does not offer the obvious explanation.

At the ball, Falke tells Orlofsky how he plans a comical revenge on Eisenstein for the bat episode.
He has orchestrated what follows, much to Orlofsky’s amusement.
Eisenstein appears, disguised as ‘Monsieur Renard’, followed by Adele, who has managed to escape her domestic duties, and is accompanied by her sister Ida.
Adele denies her identity to Eisenstein, who flirts with her.
‘Monsieur Renard’ is then
introduced to Frank the prison governor, himself disguised as another French gentleman, and then to a mysterious Hungarian countess – in fact Rosalinde, also in disguise.
Unaware that she is his wife, Eisenstein flirts with her too, and she goes off with his watch.
Eisenstein boasts to everyone about the jape he played on Falke, and at dawn leaves to start his prison sentence.

In the prison, the idiotic jailor Frosch tries to stop Alfred singing.
Adele and Ida appear in search of the ‘French nobleman’ whom they had met at the ball – Adele’s real hope being that he might help her to become an actress.
Eisenstein appears with Falke to give himself up, only to find that Alfred is serving his sentence for him.
He disguises himself as a lawyer in order to interrogate both Alfred and Rosalinde, who has come to the prison to secure Alfred’s release.
Eisenstein is outraged by Rosalinde’s deceit, until she produces the tell-tale watch as evidence of his own misbehaviour.
Everybody finally reveals their true identity, and Falke is delighted at the mayhem he has provoked.
All ends in good humour, however, and a general toast to champagne, on whose inebriating effects all the confusion is blamed.

What to listen for

Strauss’s style was influenced by Offenbach, but his idiom stretches into more lush and sentimental territory, with longer numbers and a more symphonic attitude to orchestration.
The superb overture is more than a pot-pourri of the best tunes: it is a display of Strauss’s wonderful command of dance rhythms – polka, waltz, march and mazurka.
Act I contains some sparkling duets and trios, but it is Act II, the party scene, presided over by the spirit of champagne, which provides a forty-minute unbroken string of hit numbers (only broken when gala performances introduce special-guest star turns half-way through): the ‘laughing’ song for Adele (coloratura soubrette soprano), the sly ‘Ich lade gern’ for Orlofsky (usually played by a mezzo-soprano with a taste for camping it up in drag, but sometimes taken by counter-tenors
or tenors), the ‘ticking watch’ duet for Eisenstein and Rosalinde (lyric soprano), the brilliant and taxing Czardas for the disguised Rosalinde, and the chorus ‘Brüderlein und Schwesterlein’, the quintessence of maudlin Viennese schmaltz, which leads into the effervescent waltz finale.
Eisenstein is a gift for a lively high baritone, while Alfred parodies the ardour of the operatic tenor.

In performance