<<  -- 7 --  Roderic Dunnett    IN FESTIVE MOOD

Another rediscovery, he recalls, 'was Cassandra. This was a full-blooded opera (in a prologue and two parts) to a libretto by one of the librettists of Puccini's Tosca, Luigi Ilica. Its composer was the Milan-born Vittorio Gnecchi (1876-1954), a fellow-student of Tullio Serafin, and it was competed by 1903. Initially praised by Toscanini, it received its world première under him at the Teatro Comunale, Bologna in December 1905. Consistently the subject of virulent exchanges between those who favoured or disapproved of the composer and questioned his talents, and the subject of bizarre exchanges regarding plagiarism (by Strauss, in Elektra), Cassandra enjoyed a few tentative revivals but never broke through this barrier to establish itself firmly in the repertoire. Of its weight and impact -- even set alongside Strauss's Elektra, which followed -- there can be little doubt (the opera is recorded on Agora AG 260.2).

It was René Koering whose enthusiasms and knowledge of the repertoire lay behind the reemergence of the 12th of Mascagni's operas, Parisina (1913), to a libretto by the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio (which came after Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, L'Amico Fritz and Iris), and also of Bizet's Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), which drew wide accolades when it was recorded on disc by Radio France (on Naïve V 4940). Koering has taken a fresh look at the operas of Cherubini; presented Bloch's Macbeth several seasons before it was staged in Frankfurt last year; brought life to Charles Koechlin's The Jungle Book; and, amazingly, looked afresh at Etienne Marcel, an opera virtually noone has heard of, or at least pays heed to, by Camille Saint-Saëns. The fourth of his twelve operas, it followed Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila and the one-act La princesse jaune. Etienne Marcel is set in 1358, during the 100 Years' War, at the time of the popular uprising in Paris and the jockeying for power between the Royal Houses of France and Navarre, in which the title character played a significant role as a popular leader and duly lost his life.

One of René Koering's most intriguing excavations was a rare opera by a woman composer of the early to mid 19th century. 'This was Louise Bertin (1805-77),' says Koering. 'Her opera Esmerelda was not only based on Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame); it was a collaboration with him: Hugo drafted the libretto at the same time as the novel (first published in 1831). Bertin was the daughter of Berlioz's editor at Le Journal des Débats; indeed he may even have suggested the idea to her.'

Louise Bertin's imaginative handling of melody and harmony also makes remarkably early use, for 1836, of harmonic and rhythmic motifs, and judiciously deployed recurring melodic allusions, before Liszt and Wagner had seriously advanced a process that surely dates back at least to one of Bertin's strongest and gratefully appreciated influences, Weber. Bertin also composed a Faust in 1826-7 (briefly staged in 1831), anticipating both Berlioz and Gounod, while the first of her four operas. Guy Mannering, composed when she was still a girl of not quite twenty, belongs to that other genre, epitomised by Donizetti (and used to remarkable effect by Rossini in La donna del lago), the Walter Scott-based opera; in that case, Bertin devised the libretto herself.

Performing Esmerelda proved to be a glorious experience, enthuses Koering, genuinely delighted with, and fondly possessive about, his discovery; 'It's a fascinating score, and was a great success both then, at the première, and when we did it here in Montpellier. A phenomenal achievement! She uses a substantial, Berlioz-like orchestration, and the whole work has a considerable weight and power. The piano reduction was by made in 1837 by none other than Franz Liszt!'

Continue >>