Emmanuel Chabrier was an outsider amongst composers of his day, and particularly amongst masters of the operetta form. But with L’Étoile he contributed a glittering gift to the repertoire, now made available in a reliable Urtext edition by Hugh Macdonald.
First performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens (one of Offenbach's regular theatres) in 1877, Chabrier's L'Étoile was a success. It received forty-seven performances and then disappeared, along with countless other operettas of the time, from the repertory. Composers in this area of musical entertainment did not expect their works to survive beyond their first appearance; most of Offenbach's numerous operettas were just as ephemeral as those of Lecocq, Hervé, Planquette, Audran, Messager and Ganne, with just a handful of gems resonating in the public's ears for a few decades into the twentieth century.
Chabrier is an outsider in this company, since although his career began with operettas while he was still employed by the Ministry of the Interior, he was by no means a specialist in the genre. His talents and ambitions lay equally in the field of piano music and the more elevated forms of opéra-comique. He was also a connoisseur of painting and poetry and would never have wanted to be confined to boulevard entertainment. But he had a highly developed sense of humour which supported his abundant musical gifts, and in L'Étoile he composed a light masterpiece that has come to be revived ever more frequently in recent years.
It was first revived in 1925 by Albert Wolff, then by Désormières at the Opéra-Comique in 1941, and since 1977, its centenary, the operetta has become ever more popular, assisted by recordings by Jacques Mercier and John Eliot Gardiner. The libretto is by Eugène Leterrier and Albert Vanloo, the latter of whom recalled in his memoirs that Chabrier set the libretto at great speed, having two numbers (“Ô petite étoile” and the “Couplets du pal”) already written for earlier works and now adapted for their place in the new work. When rehearsals began, the orchestra was in revolt: “Being accustomed to the quite simple accompaniments normal in operetta needing only five or six rehearsals, the musicians were horrified when they saw the parts in front of them. Couplets in which the second verse's accompaniment was different from that of the first! Imagine! Then accidentals, marks of expression, changing tempi! They were not employed at the Bouffes in order to play Wagner! Poor Chabrier couldn't get over it. ‘I made it as simple as I could,’ he mumbled.”
The story of the opera is set in motion by Ouf I, king of the Thirty-Six Kingdoms, who gratifies his subjects each year on his birthday with an execution. The problem is that he can detect no crime, no subversion and no victim in his realm. A party of diplomats arrives from a neighbouring king in order to arrange the marriage of his daughter Princess Laoula to Ouf. For no clear reason they are disguised as travelling salesmen. The central character of the piece, Lazuli (mezzo-soprano en travesti), a young ‘colporteur’ who supplies women with every kind of fashion accessory, sees the beautiful Louala from afar and falls in love with her.
A series of mistaken identities causes Lazuli to strike Ouf, who is delighted to have someone he can execute for insulting the king. The story is complicated by Ouf's dependence upon his astrologer Siroco, who has read in the stars that the king's destiny is linked to that of Lazuli, to the point that his death must follow his victim's within a day, and that he, Siroco, must follow his master to the grave a quarter of an hour after that. Lazuli has to be pardoned, in fact carefully protected.
Lazuli and Laoula escape in a boat and only Laoula reappears, to Ouf's consternation, Lazuli being presumed drowned. Revelations and diplomacy eventually ensure a happy ending, with Lazuli and his princess in each others' arms.
The score is abundantly tuneful and orchestrated with great subtlety and taste. Chabrier was strictly speaking an amateur since almost alone among French musicians of his generation he did not attend the Paris Conservatoire, but he had studied music with various individual teachers and had a formidable natural gift and a sharp ear. Lazuli has no less than four solo numbers, including the “Rondeau du Colporteur” in which he introduces himself (a favourite device in operetta) and the 'Romance de l'étoile', the touching sentimental song about his guiding star: “Et dis-moi, l'avenir, ah! ma petite étoile.” The “Couplets du mari” in the second act is a delightful song commending husbands for being so insignificant an obstacle in the pursuit of love.
The “Couplets du pal” close the first act and return as both an entr'acte and for the final chorus, an ensemble number in which all thrill at the prospect of the victim's torture and death, miraculously transformed into his rescue and elevation. Ouf himself leads the number off, but has little elsewhere on his own. His most memorable number is the duet with Siroco, the “Duetto de la Chartreuse verte”, a brilliant comedy song for two drunks, scored with great delicacy.
A similar lightness of touch marks the opening chorus where the men lurk in the streets wary of the king, who is thought to be in disguise searching for transgressors. Something close to a full operatic ensemble is found as the finale for Act II, when a shot is heard. The king is fearful that Lazuli is dead, and the whole company share his consternation in an ensemble that seems to satirize those “frozen moments” in Halévy or Meyerbeer when the reaction to bad news is expressed in a long slow-moving ensemble.
The vocal score of L'Étoile was published by Enoch et Cie in 1877, but the full score has not been published until now. In order to prepare the work for a new publication I have had to reconcile the Enoch vocal score with the autograph orchestral score, held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The printed vocal score made a number of significant changes, including a redistribution of the three female voices (Laoula, Aloès and Lazuli) and the insertion of expression marks, metronome marks, pauses, and other details which are not found in the autograph. It is possible that Chabrier himself added these details during the rehearsal period in 1877, especially since Vanloo's memoirs say “Chabrier's failing was constantly going over a number which he had finished to revise it and modify it and sometimes complicate it. We had to keep telling him to stop, and like a good collaborator he agreed to whatever we asked with a good grace.”
On the other hand, the vocal score was prepared by Léon Roques, who was also the conductor of the performances at the Bouffes-Parisiens. The extra markings and changes in the vocal score seem exactly to reflect a conductor's concern to coach his singers with accents, phrasing, and expression, and to insert metronome marks to remind himself and his assistants how each piece goes. While it is possible that Chabrier approved all of Roques's suggestions, I have preferred in the new edition to present the score with many fewer marks of expression since they are not found in the autograph and since the music really does not need them. The autograph still shows evidence of many revisions, of the composer changing his mind, making cuts and additions, and revising the scoring, probably in order to correct the balance in the theatre.
The libretto was published by Allouard in Paris in 1877. As with all dialogue operas in the nineteenth century, the vocal score did not print the dialogue but merely indicated the cues leading into each number. The dialogue for L'Étoile is very extensive, and it will be included complete in the new edition. It is a fact of modern life that dialogue in opera is now almost always removed or reduced in performances and recordings. We have lost the earlier French way of thinking, by which an opéra-comique was as much a play with music as an opera with dialogue. We perceive the dialogue in Die Zauberflöte or Carmen or The Mikado as merely a device for explaining the plot, but the authors of librettos (whether Schikaneder, Meilhac, Halévy, Gilbert, Leterrier or Vanloo) would surely reject that idea with scorn. They were all playwrights with a reputation at stake.
It is ironic to be treating such a charmingly light work with the serious attention we usually reserve for Bach's cantatas or Beethoven's quartets, but Chabrier was much more than a facile tunesmith; he was a master of the delicate and difficult art of musical comedy, a domain in which he can reasonably be compared with Offenbach, Rossini and even Mozart.
Hugh Macdonald
from [t]akte 2/2009