Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui.
Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui. This glorious cornucopia of intoxicating invention has ‘enjoyed’ a history of bad luck: the delirious imbecility of the plot — ‘a negative tour de force, to invent such a confusing story with so few characters’ — has occasioned two comprehensive overhauls (most recent the brave rewrite mounted by Opera North in the mid-1990s). Maybe to revert to the original, embrace the absurdities, and enjoy the music for all it’s worth, is after all the best solution; a counsel of victory rather than despair.
And, if anywhere, at the Opéra Comique, its natural habitat. The lovable theatre, lavish with ornament outside and within, makes the perfect visual complement to Le roi, save only for the quantum difference between the décor’s generalised period idiom and the score’s minute particularity. This music is charged with 22-carat treasures of ardour, colour, wit, expressivity, intensity, originality, appreciated at its true worth by Ravel, who claimed with outrageous honesty that he’d rather have composed it than Wagner’s Ring or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.
The Opéra Comique’s production used the original, but twisted the plot around to be self-reflexive, a sleight of hand potentially pretentious yet, in practice, so deftly executed, a decided success. Spoken dialogue was cut to the bone and toned up for speed and sparkle; the actual score was left intact, given complete, using moreover the exact words that Chabrier set, full of inimitable touches lost when any other text is substituted, however skilled and sympathetic. The cast was spirited and idiomatic; one real star shone clear above the rest in vocal and physical lustre, the Minka of Magali Léger. The chorus imported from the Lyons Opéra were heroic in their elaborate, demanding part, the Orchestre de Paris provided just the right timbre and inflection for such indigenous music (despite the setting in Poland, the date of 1574, the heavenly Venetian strains permeating the love scenes, this piece is bred and born of Paris in the 1880s). A special word of praise to the timpanist, whose role goes far beyond marking the accents in climaxes, to encompass numerous nuances of great delicacy, sometimes in unlikely places. For indeed Chabrier’s orchestration is as original, detailed as his melody and harmony, often achieving astonishingly complex textures, at once rich and diaphanous, as though Ravel had taken a hand in what he so admired.
All this Frenchness cohered and fused under the baton of an English conductor, William Lacey, who manifestly not only cherishes and understands every delicious twist and surprise, but can translate such knowledge into actual sound, moment to moment and in the long view. (But then no one ever did Berlioz, Bizet, Delibes, and indeed Chabrier, so well as the impeccably English Sir Thomas Beecham.)
Hard to pick out plums from a long show consisting wholly of inspiration without lapse or padding. While I quiver most responsibly to the dulcet tenderness and fervent yet contained eroticism of the love music, it’s the physical vitality of the communal element that sets the feet tapping and the pulses racing. Nowhere more than in the celebrated fête polonaise. The composer’s own anticipation of his ballroom sequence, in a letter of September 1884, is worth quoting*:
I’m going to have a waltz, Austrian style, at the start of Act II which is so sexy that, when they hear it, people will be making babies in the auditorium and on stage; the old men won’t any longer need peacock feathers stuck up their bum; the young girls, with their eyes rolled upwards, will be uttering little yelps; they’ll have to call Charcot into the house.
Well, at the Sunday matinée I attended the audience’s age averaged around 65; no babies being made that I could see. The whole sequence, exuberantly choreographed, played, sung, brought the house down — the house that Pierre Boulez once wished to be blown up (for all that Debussy’s Pelléas premiered here in 1902) — without requiring the services of the St Jean ambulance corps, let alone Charcot; highpoint for joyous brio, if not for sentiment, of a wonderful afternoon.
*My reference for the composer’s letter comes from Roger Nichols, biographer of Ravel among many other things. He also provides the translation, adding wryly that he has failed twice to get it past the censors of Radio Three. I’m sure the tolerant columns of The Spectator will take such exuberant Rabelaisism in the right spirit!
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