Daniel-Fran

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Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber (1782-1871), once one of the most well-known and well-loved names in French 19th-century opera, came later in life than many famous composers to his art, yet had one of the longest and most successful careers. He studied with Cherubini after abandoning an initial attempt to establish a career in commerce, and experienced his first real triumph at the age of 38 with La Bergere Chateleine (1820). His subsequent association with the librettist Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), a collaboration that lasted until Scribe's death, became one of the most famous and successful partnerships in musical history. Works such as "Le Macon (1825) and La Muette de Portici (1828) cemented Auber's popularity with the public and drew official recognition and honours. In 1829 he was appointed a member of the Institut, in 1839 Director of Concerts at Court, in 1842 Director of the Conservatoire, in 1852 Musical Director of the Imperial Chapel, and in 1861 Grand Officer of the Legion d'Honneur. Auber's grand opera La Muette de Portici (also known by its hero's name as Masaniello) a work of great significance in the history of opera, is set against a background of revolution and uprising - a situation that Auber knew only too well. He lived through four French Revolutions (1789, 1830, 1848, 1870), dying at the advanced age of 89 in the desperate conditions of the Commune, of a long-standing illness aggravated by the dangers and privations that attended the Siege of Paris. Auber had always loved his home city, and was not prepared to leave it, even after his house had been set on fire by the petroleurs et petroleuses. Ironically, a mark had been placed against the house of the composer of La Muette de Porticia man so successful in depicting revolutionary fervour that a performance of this opera in Brussels in 1830 had helped to inspire the revolution that led to the separation of Belgium from Holland. Auber's charming and graceful overtures were once staples of the light Classical repertoire, known and loved everywhere. His gracious melodies and dance rhythms had an overwhelming influence on piano and instrumental music, and on the genre of Romantic comic opera, especially in Germany. His operas, apart from Fra Diavolo (1830), have virtually passed out of the repertoire. Contemporary audiences are not attuned to Auber's elegant and restrained art, accustomed as they are to verismo, Wagnerian transcendentalism, and twentieth-century experimentalism, but those willing to listen are rewarded by works that retain all their freshness, delicacy and charm. La Circassiennean opera-comique in three acts, with libretto by Eugene Scribe, was first performed at the Opera-Comique (Deuxieme Salle Favart), on 2 February 1861. The story is based on the novel Les Amours du chevalier de Faulas(1787-90) by Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray. The locale is the Caucasus and Moscow, around 1840. A group of bored Russian officers, snowed in inside their fort in the Caucasus, plan to put on Dalayrac's Adolphe et Clara. Alexis, who has just related an anecdote of how he disguised himself in women's clothes to carry out an errand, is chosen for the female role and dressed a la Circassienne since no other costume is available. The new commandant, General Orsakoff falls in love with Prascovia. The Circassians attack by surprise and carry off Prascovia and Orsakoff's niece and ward, Olga, but the Russians manage to escape. Back in Moscow, the painter Lanskoi tries to dissuade Orsakoff from finding Prascovia by announcing that she has entered a convent. The overture captures something of the pert and satirical aspects of the potentially louche plot, reflecting an appropriate tone for the subtle inversions of expectations and values endemic to


About the Author


Robert Ignatius Letellier has specialized in the music and literature of the Romantic Period. He has studied the work of Giacomo Meyerbeer (a four-volume English edition of his diar