Please join us for Concert I of the On the Margins Festival...
Rebecca Ringle, mezzo-soprano William Ferguson, tenor Kenneth Merrill, fortepiano
On the Margins of the Opéra Comique: Jewish Composers, Covert Spaces, and the Legacy of the Wagnerian Suppression
Friday, October 28th 8:00pm The Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium 417 East 61st Street between First and York Avenues
The Opéra Comique
Much has been written and analyzed around the hardship that these composers’ music suffered as a result of Anti-Semitism present in Europe during their lifetime, and amplified by Richard Wagner. As I prepared this music, I couldn’t escape the feeling that anyone who dismissed this music as shallow or overly cosmopolitan had not only missed the point, but a fine party as well. These composers were in love with life, wrote well across a range of moods, wrote fluent tragedy, satire and romance, and their music speaks for itself. They had been successful in their time for compelling reasons but like Rossini, they understood art not as a religion, but as a job, albeit an intensely fun, rewarding job. I find this approach so refreshing and they have been a blast to spend time with. This is extroverted, emotionally vivid music written to impress and dazzle.
Stendahl
Nineteenth century Parisian salon culture saw a greater mix of social classes and professions than Europe had ever seen. Between 1815 and 1871, Paris saw four bloody changes of government and many more intense riots as it whipsawed back and forth between egalitarian and traditionalist ways of life. Rive Droite bankers and industrialists replaced Rive Gauche aristocracy as the leaders of society. The population grew from 700,000 to 2 million and public opera houses and private salons replaced Versailles as the “see and be seen” centers of the civilized world. Important social and political changes took root in the private salon even as everyone flirted, jockeyed for influence, and met future collaborators. Steam engines and the new omnibus carriages made it possible to move around France within days and around Paris within hours. (Stendhal’s Memoirs of Egotism, published after his death, gives you fantastic contemporary gossip of the time.)
Giacomo Meyerbeer
It was within this environment that Giacomo Meyerbeer (born Jacob Liebmann Beer), Fromental Halévy and Jacques Offenbach (born Jakob Offenbach) made their careers. All three men were born Jewish and two of them moved to Paris from outside of France and spoke French as a second language. Before looking at them individually, we need to note that these men knew each other well. Offenbach had started his Parisian career as a cellist in the pit for operas by Meyerbeer and Halévy. Years later, Meyerbeer adored Offenbach’s satires of his own operas and sat in a special box at Offenbach’s theater. Halévy’s nephew Ludovic wrote libretti for many of Offenbach’s operettas.
For a while, I mentally titled this first set by Giacomo Meyerbeer set, “How to Flirt, Mostly on Water, in Four Different Countries.” I love Meyerbeer’s fluency with the essential salon set piece: the flirty song. Meyerbeer was born into a very wealthy Prussian family and had grown up in high society as a musical prodigy. He understands what a singer wants in a personality song: wit, variety, a little exoticism and most of all, charm
We start the recital off in German as a nod to Meyerbeer and Offenbach’s first language. “Komm” is on a poem by the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine and was also famously set by Schubert. Heine and Meyerbeer were friends, although Heine, like many other artists of the time made fun of Meyerbeer’s tendency to fund his own operas from his family wealth. “The Invisible Woman (Persian Song)” shows the fashion of the time to throw modern love through the prism of an exotic culture. The earliest song on this recital, “Ma barque légère” (1829), is incredible for it’s near PG-13 rating.
Fromental Halevy
Fromental Halévy was named after the date of his birth (May 26) in the anti-Catholic revolutionary calendar in use in 1799. He was a prominent voice coach in Paris as well as a prolific composer. He’s the only native French speaking composer on this recital and I find his text setting the easiest to perform. He really knows how to write a vocal line as well. At the conservatoire, Halévy taught both Georges Bizet and Camille Saint-Saens. He judged a comic opera competition instituted by Offenbach. Bizet won and later married Halévy’s daughter.
The Halévy song collection that we used for this concert only came into print in 2008 from manuscripts edited by the musicologist Peter Kaiser. It includes pieces written for famous singers of the opera at that time, including Maria Malibran, one of Rossini’s favorite mezzos.
The first two songs of this set, “Les heures du soir,” and “Fleurs de souvenance” are gorgeous, sentimental evening songs that remind me of the American hits of Stephen Foster from the same period. “Chanson avec écho” was written as a set piece for a play and “Le follet” is a classic ghost story we included as a nod to Halloween. Parisians of this period shared the obsession for the Middle Ages that had swept the rest of Europe. I think of “Le follet” and “Deux Ménéstrel” from the next set by Offenbach as song versions of the colorful Pre-Raphaelite paintings England produced during the same time.
Jacques Offenbach
Jacques Offenbach was my great discovery of this recital. Although I’d performed in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, I feel that with this concert, we’ve become friends. Offenbach grew up playing popular music in the cafes of Cologne with his siblings. After traveling to Paris with the help of this working class musician father, he dropped out of the Conservatoire to play cello in the pits of Parisian theaters and opera houses. He often had his pay docked for playing pranks: conspiring with colleagues to play wrong notes on purpose or rigging other musicians’ stands to collapse during performance. During this time he studied with Halévy who wrote to Offenbach’s father that he was destined to be a great composer.
Offenbach was said to have approached the Opéra Comique thousands of times to try to have his music performed. After twenty years as a cellist, he started his own tiny theater to perform satires and operettas on what was then the edge of Paris. He was so successful that Rossini called him the Mozart of the Champs Élysées. After two bloody revolutions over 20 years, Parisians badly needed to laugh. Offenbach played political scandals for publicity and the subjects of his satire (including Napoleon III) were some of his biggest fans.
The first set of Fables by La Fontaine has text that French school children still memorize today. These three poke fun at the proud (Le Rat de Ville) and the lazy (La Cigale). The final set shows Offenbach’s treatment of sincere emotion, and includes two poems by Théophile Gautier that we mostly know from Berlioz’ Les nuits d’été from the cycle Les Voix Mystérieuses that Offenbach dedicated to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte.
This concert’s preparation brought me so much sweetness and insight into fleeting history and eternal human nature that I hope you have have half as much fun this evening as we had finding and rehearsing these pieces for you.