dream and language
by
Douglas Messerli
Henri
Cain (libretto, based on the story by Charles Perreault), Jules Massenet
(composer) Cendrillon / 1899; the
production I saw was the Metropolitan Opera’s live HD production on April 29,
2018
Jules
Massenet’s 1899 Cinderalla-based opera, Cendrillon,
was a big hit upon its premiere at Paris’ Opéra-Comique; but only this year
received a production for the first time at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Tastes changed early in the 20th century, and Massenet’s beautiful
scores, with their tributes to everyone from Mendelsohn to Wagner, with a few
stops for Mozart and Strauss along the way grew out of favor. But the fact that Cendrillon had never previously made it
to Broadway seems to be a particularly sad event.
Fortunately, the great American
mezzo-soprano, Joyce DiDonato rediscovered the work (after it had performed by Frederica
von Stade) more than a decade ago and warmed up to it playing in a Laurent
Pelly production (he also designed the remarkable costumes) in Santa Fe,
London, Brussels, and elsewhere. As a regular in MET productions, it was perhaps inevitable that eventually DiDonato would be featured in a production in New York; and we can now hope that, given its great success, it may join the MET
repertoire. Certainly, it was visionary of the MET to include it their famed
live HD series, which my husband Howard and I saw yesterday in a Los Angeles
movie theater, and which may help make it a production which audiences will
embrace. The elderly audience with whom we saw it loved it.
Unlike Rossini’s better known La Cenerentola (in which DiDonato has also performed the Cinderalla role), the Massenet version does not focus as much on the young step-daughter’s ill treatment as much as it does on the fairy-tale elements of the work, going back to the original Perreault story for its source. The mean step-mother is this version, with her two fawning and fairly ignorant daughters, is much closer to the mother and daughters of Beauty and the Beast than the wicked figures of Rossini’s world.
Like Belle, Massenet’s Lucette (Cinderalla’s
real name in this version) basically accepts her life as a cleaning woman to
the vain stepmother, Madame de la Haltière (the always wonderful Stephanie
Blythe) and her almost-idiot like step-sisters, dressed in comical-like balloon-like
dresses that evidently stand for the haute-couture of the day. In comparison,
at least in the early scenes, Lucette looks like a peasant woman from a Verdi
opera. And despite her hard life, she is deeply loved still by her weak-willed
father, Pandolfe (Laurent Naouri) who, after his wife’s death, inexplicably
chose this monstrous woman of a self-declared royal background. It may be that his little
farm in the forest was simply not successful enough to pay the rent. Now the
man simply suffers for his horrible mistake, his daughter paying the punishment
for the crime.
Most of Lucette’s life, when she isn't busy
cleaning up the story-book-like house—set designer Barbara de Limburg has
covered the walls of the constantly shifting rooms with phrases from the Perreault tale—is
spent sleeping and dreaming, and, in fact, she has a hard time, as we may as
well, in knowing whether her experiences are real or simply dreams.
It is certainly a dream of an opera, with
the soaring phrases of beauty, suddenly transforming into more comic passages,
and moving back again into glorious romanticism. One, moreover, cannot imagine a
more remarkable cast: besides DiDonato, Blythe, and the long-performing Naouri, are the remarkable soprano Kathleen Kim (playing The Fairy Godmother) and another
regular MET performer Alice Coote (who performs the “soprano de sentiment” role
of Prince Charming). It may be true, as The
New York Times reviewer Zachary Wolfe argues, that Coote's "voice is too blunt
to expand over the score’s long lines,” but in the production I saw, she came
off amazingly real in her trouser role as the unhappy prince who cannot find
anyone in his kingdom to love. And when he does meet his love in the form of a surprise
guest at the ball, Lucette in a stunningly beautiful sequined white gown which gradually
cascades into darker colors at the bottom (all others are dressed in comically outrageous
versions of red) she/he sings in quite beautiful awe about the event.
If this Massenet work is about the
confusion of dream and reality—there are long periods when Lucette simply
believes she has dreamed her entire visit to the ball and her later encounter
with the Prince in the forest—this version, at least, is also all about hearing
and language, the joy of being told the tale through words. Not only the walls,
but chairs, tables, and the wonderful carriage on which Lucette rides to the
ball are identified with their linguistic equivalents, the carriage itself made
up of the letters spelling “carosse,” the old French word meaning “coach.”
Quite vindictively, it at first appears,
The Fairy God Mother refuses to let the loving couple see one another in the
forest, only allowing them to hear each other’s sad pleas. Yet that’s precisely
the point. Hearing and reading reality is what truly matters here, not action
and adventures. The only incredible actions in this work are Lucette’s flight from the ball at midnight, whereupon she loses her shoe, and the impossible
attempts to find the foot that fits her glass slipper. Otherwise, Cendrillon is a work of poetical and
musical wonderment, even to the point of having The Fairy Godmother save the day by riding in on a pile of gigantic books. And Pelly’s and De Limburg’s direction and sets put their
faith on spectral elements, allowing the Perreault tale to come alive in a way
that Verdi or even the later Puccini might never have been able to imagine.
The opera closes suddenly, since we
already know the end, with the chorus announcing that their tale has come to an
ending, the most lovely ending one might ever imagine, the char-woman in the Prince’s
arms and even the terrible stepmother admitting—now that Lucette has found her
own royalty—that she truly loves her. If we don’t believe her one little bit,
it doesn’t matter. Cendrillon is a
fairy-tale, as the host, Ailyn Pérez announced early on before the opera began,
a much needed tonic these days.
Los
Angeles, April 29, 2018
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2018).
