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SEEN AND HEARD UK OPERA REVIEW
 

Donizetti, La Fille du régiment: Soloists, chorus and orchestra of The Royal Opera. Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. 27.5.2010 (JPr)

Nathalie Dessay (Marie) Colin Lee (Tonio) and Alessandro Corbelli (Sulpice)

 

Last week I reported on Rossini’s Guillaume Tell an early-nineteenth century work with a Tyrolean setting by an Italian composer and intended for Paris and here I’m at it again, more or less. La Fille du régiment comes from roughly the same moment in time as Tell, has a similar setting and it’s also by an Italian. This time we have a comedy however, and not an evening to be taken very seriously.

 

In August 1839 Donizetti was at a loose end for a number of reasons. He was approached by the Opéra-Comique in Paris and commissioned to compose La Fille du régiment, a comic opera with dialogue. Jules Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Jean-François-Alfred Bayard, had written a libretto with a typically absurd operatic plot: the young foundling Marie, raised from childhood by her ‘papas’ of the French army’s 21st regiment loves Tonio, a young man from the Tyrol, who joins the regiment to be with her. As the plot unfolds, Marie is horrified to discover that she is really a noblewoman abandoned by her mother as a baby but now intended to marry someone of her ‘own’ social class - until love wins through in the end of course.

Donizetti composed his 55th opera in only two months and the première was on 11 February 1840 : it was the first of his operas composed in French to reach the Paris stage. The composer pays obvious tribute to French pride and nationalism while gently making fun of army life and Donizetti went out of his way to endear himself to the French public by including moments such as in Act II when Marie finds herself at the château of the Marquise de Berkenfeld yet longing for her ‘family’ of the 21^st. She then hears the roll of the drums that announces the arrival of her beloved soldiers and sings a song of praise to France. She will repeat it with the entire ensemble to bring down the curtain at the end of the opera: ‘Salut à la France!’This song alone became an enormous hit and was published and sold separately, and enshrined as an unofficial French national anthem, second only to La Marseillaise.

Among the generally positive reviews following the premiere there was only one major dissenting opinion and that was from Hector Berlioz who seemed to harbour some resentment at an Italian usurper’s success in the land of his birth. After a recent setback with Benvenuto Cellini, Berlioz had resorted to making a living as a critic and his review was scathing about a score in which he considered: ‘that neither the composer nor the public takes seriously. The harmony, melody, rhythmic effects, instrumental and vocal combinations; it’s music, if you wish, but not new music. The orchestra consumes itself in useless noises ...’

But this is exactly the point of Laurent Pelly’s production for The Royal Opera which has proved popular with audiences in London, Vienna, New York and San Francisco since it was first seen in 2007 – nothing is ever taken seriously by anyone, except perhaps the heart-warming central love story between Marie and Tonio. Everything else is played for laughs and always allows the audience to luxuriate in the many vocal highlights. The production is updated from Napoleonic times to Chantal Thomas’s prosaic postcard-inspired Tyrol setting at the time of the World War I.

 

 

Colin Lee as Tonio

The curtain rises on a Les Misérables-inspired group of refugees trundling the carts with their belongings in them and fearing the advance of the French soldiers. Their invocation for help from God in their struggle is at odds with all the ensuing silliness that is redolent of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup - yet without the Marxes. Travel maps and those postcards are a recurring visual motif. In Act I Marie does some manic ironing, peels potatoes and looks wretchedly tomboyish. Her singing is intermittently interrupted by clothes lines of long johns stretching across the stage. Tonio is not surprisingly wearing lederhosen. In Act II the Berkenfeld castle is represented by just the outline of a wood-panelled salon, initially being dusted by some Monty Pythonesque men-dressed-as-women cleaners. There is an amusing gaggle of inebriated elderly wedding guests before Tonio returns to reclaim Marie atop a solidly three-dimensional World war I tank. At the end of the opera a giant postcard of a French rooster descends as everyone crows that final chorus of ‘Salut à la France!’ and the curtain descends.

The important issue for the audience at the particular performance was whether this revival would survive without Juan Diego Flórez the star tenor Tonio, who was succeeded by Colin Lee. Never having heard Flórez sing ‘Ah! mes amis’ with the infamous nine high Cs, I cannot make a direct comparison but I doubt that he could surpass Mr Lee. He received a prolonged ovation for this defining moment at the end of Act I, when he hit the top notes solidly without the slightest hint of strain. I was also grateful that he was not a typically French-sounding tenor with a slender, reedy tone: he has a much more resonant, full-bodied sound and he sang winningly – and most affectingly – throughout the evening while acting a suitably gauche, but heroic, Tonio.

I also doubt however whether this La Fille would survive the recasting of Marie with anyone other than Natalie Dessay. She seems such a natural comedienne that I wonder how much of the posturing, gesticulating, and willingness to sing coloratura in every possible position including being carried aloft horizontally in the raised arms of her ‘papas’, was her idea or Mr Pelly’s. I am a little carping here perhaps, when I say that Miss Dessay’s voice sounded just a touch tired at times but she was still capable of bringing over her two slow arias ‘Il faut partir’ in Act I and ‘Par le rang et l’opulence’ in Act II with beautiful poignancy.

The supporting cast is given little to do by Donizetti but was uniformly excellent and included Ann Murray as the Marquise who is revealed near the end to be Marie’s mother, Alessandro Corbelli as Sergeant Sulpice and Donald Maxwell as the Major-domo, Hortensius. Dawn French returned in the non-singing role of La Duchesse de Crackentorp and through being as ‘Stately as a Galleon’, while dressed like Margaret Dumont, the Marx Brothers’ old-time comic foil, but simply being her much-loved self, she almost stole the show in Act II.

Much fun was had by all and it would be too easy to neglect the important contribution of Bruno Campanella’s energetic, idiomatic, conducting. His sparkling orchestra made this a light-hearted, fun-filled evening that was full of good cheer. In my Guillaume Tell review I wrote ‘the singers that Chelsea Opera Group used, presented an ensemble of talent rarely equalled on any London concert platform or opera house recently from my experience’. I never expected them to be surpassed quite so quickly as they were by this high-spirited evening!

Jim Pritchard

Pictures © The Royal Opera / Bill Cooper