Fantasio (opera)
| Work data | |
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| Title: | Fantasio |
Title page of the piano reduction, 1872 |
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| Shape: | Opéra-comique in three acts |
| Original language: | French |
| Music: | Jacques Offenbach |
| Libretto : | Paul de Musset and Charles Nuitter |
| Literary source: | Alfred de Musset : Fantasio |
| Premiere: | January 18, 1872 |
| Place of premiere: | Opéra-Comique , Paris |
| Playing time: | approx. 2 ½ hours |
| Place and time of the action: | Bavaria in a fairytale time |
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Fantasio is an opera-comique in three acts by Jacques Offenbach with a libretto by Paul de Musset and Charles Nuitter based on Alfred de Musset 's comedy of the same name. It was first played on January 18, 1872 in the Salle Favart of the Paris Opéra-Comique .
action
first act
Square in front of the palace
The citizens of Bavaria are celebrating the upcoming wedding of the king's daughter to the prince of Mantua. The wedding is supposed to avert the impending bankruptcy of Bavaria and a war between the two countries. A horde of students gossip about the bourgeois tranquility of the residents and decide to disturb the night's sleep with their chants. The King appears and proclaims the wisdom of his plan. He gives out free beer to win over citizens.
Fantasio appears, eternal student and in debt. Under the castle window he hears the singing of Princess Elsbeth, who is afraid of the wedding with a stranger. They sing in a duet; do not see each other, but fall in love with their voices. A choir bears the jester St. Jean to his grave. Fantasio joins them. He decides to dress up as a fool to be let into the castle and win the princess.
Enter the Prince of Mantua and his aide Marinoni. The prince had the great idea of exchanging clothes with Marinoni in order to initially observe his future bride incognito in his role as adjutant.
Together with Fantasio in a fool's costume, the students roam the community. They sing the praises of foolishness: It can break the human tendency to oppress others and is therefore the truly sensible way of life.
Second act
Palace garden
The next morning the ladies-in-waiting in the castle dress the princess for the wedding. Elsbeth is angry and depressed, but surrenders to her fate. The king introduces her to the bridegroom, not realizing that it is not the prince, but his adjutant. The real prince falls in love with the princess. He wants to be loved for himself and not because of his position in authority. He approaches her again and again in a clumsy and clumsy way and is brusquely rejected by her and his father several times.
Fantasio approaches the princess in the disguise of a fool. He promises her on the head that she will be unhappy in the forced marriage. He promises to help her and persuades her not to obey. When the ceremony begins, Fantasio pulls the pants of the supposed Prince Marinoni down in front of the assembled court and makes him look ridiculous. The court and the Italian guests demand a severe punishment for the fool.
Third act
jail
Elsbeth sneaks into Fantasio's dungeon. This pretends to be asleep. Elsbeth looks at his face. He reveals his love to her. At first she is reluctant: the peace and the well-being of the state are at stake. Fantasio drops his fool's mask. Elsbeth surrenders to him and escapes with him from the castle.
Square in front of the palace
Meanwhile, Bavaria is bankrupt. The students in the city call on the people to war against Mantua. Fantasio appears and gives a speech against war and for foolishness. The people proclaim him leader. The Prince of Mantua appears and announces that he will send his soldiers. Fantasio confronts him: If the leaders feel like fighting, they should fight it out personally instead of letting the people bleed for themselves. He challenges the prince to a duel. He wants to send his adjutant as a deputy. Marinoni refuses: He is out of practice. The prince has an understanding and announced that he will spread the cloak of oblivion over the shame he has suffered. Both the Prince of Mantua and the King of Bavaria elevated Fantasio to the nobility.
Instrumentation
The orchestral line-up for the opera includes the following instruments:
- Woodwinds : two flutes (2nd also piccolo ), two oboes , two clarinets , two bassoons
- Brass : four horns , two trumpets , three trombones
- Timpani , percussion : snare drum , bass drum , triangle , glockenspiel , cymbals , tambourine
- harp
- Strings
Work history
Musset's reading drama
In 1832 Princess Louise of Orléans married King Leopold I of Belgium . The princess was 20, the king 42. The marriage was concluded for reasons of state : Leopold wanted to achieve a reconciliation between France and Germany through his marriage.
Louise really loved her husband, but hardly anyone believed that. Not even Alfred de Musset , who adored the young princess. So he took up a material that originally appeared as an episode in ETA Hoffmann's views of the life of the cat Murr : The forced marriage of a princess with an idiot Italian prince. In reality, Princess Louise's wedding could not prevent the war because the Netherlands did not want to accept a defection from Belgium. Musset's story also ends with the students going to war jubilantly. Offenbach as a staunch pacifist rejected this conclusion and opted for a peaceful turn.
In 1834 Georg Büchner read Musset's story in Strasbourg and used it - with many literal quotations - for his comedy Leonce and Lena .
Offenbach's work and performances
Offenbach wrote his opera Fantasio in late 1869 and early 1870. In July 1870, when Offenbach was in the middle of rehearsals for Fantasio at the Paris Opéra-Comique , the Franco-Prussian War began . Offenbach fell into a serious creative crisis. Plagued by gout , he wandered through Europe, hostile both by Germans, who insulted the emigrant Offenbach as a traitor to the fatherland, and by the French, who suspected him of spying for Prussia. The criticism in France accused him that his works had led to the softening in the Second Empire and thus contributed to the defeat.
Offenbach did not resume rehearsals for Fantasio until November 1871 . Before that, he rewrote the title role from tenor to mezzo-soprano . The tenor Victor Capoul , to whom he had assigned the role and who had sung for him in his previous work Vert-Vert , had fled the war for an engagement in London and never returned from there. Instead, Célestine Galli-Marié , who was already involved in the premiere of Offenbach's Robinson Crusoé , sang the title role. Offenbach also seems to have expanded the pacifist passages, because the libretto of the premiere differs significantly from the version that he had submitted to the censors two months earlier. The premiere finally took place on January 18, 1872.
Immediately afterwards Offenbach traveled to Vienna to premiere the German version in the Theater an der Wien on February 21. This Viennese version by Eduard Mauthner and Richard Genée , entitled Fantasio or Der Fool of the Duke, has a different plot with different music than the Paris version. Scenes were deleted and the text adapted to the understanding of the German-speaking audience. Offenbach transposed the title role to the soprano for the singer Marie Geistinger . The Paris version was a failure with 10 performances. After the defeat and the humiliating peace conditions, the Parisian audience was looking for revenge and did not want to hear the pacifist appeals of the play, as was evident from the criticism of Gustave Bertrand in the Ménestrel . With 27 performances, the Viennese version was not particularly successful by Offenbach's standards either. It was re-enacted in Graz, Prague and Berlin in October 1872 before it disappeared into oblivion.
Missing documents
The orchestral material for the Paris performance was probably destroyed in the fire at the Opéra Comique in 1887. Offenbach's handwritten score went to his daughter Jacqueline. To avoid claims from her sisters, she kept the property secret. After Jacqueline's death in 1937, the leaves were distributed to the sisters' descendants. They occasionally sold them sheet by sheet, so that the manuscript is scattered today. One part is in London, another at the Kniecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and a third at an anonymous descendant. Individual sheets, partly cut into four parts, can be found scattered around the world. The Parisian libretto for the premiere has also been lost, although it was sold at the box office, as is now the case with programs. The different libretto, which was submitted to the censorship authorities in December 1871, is fortunately in the French National Archives . A piano reduction of the world premiere without speaking scenes, printed by Choudens in 1872, was also preserved.
The Vienna performance was better documented because the archive of the Berlin Offenbach publisher Bote & Bock contains both a copy of the score and a complete libretto.
New performances
The few performances in the 20th century were based on these Berlin documents: in 1927 in Magdeburg, in 1957 in concert with the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne , in 1994 in Gelsenkirchen and Wuppertal. For these performances, the parts that were missing in the Vienna score were re-orchestrated based on the Choudens piano reduction. The title role was transposed from soprano to tenor. In 2000 a new production was performed in Rennes , Nantes , Angers and Tours . For them, the German text was translated back into French.
From 1999 Boosey & Hawkes and Bote & Bock published the critical new OEK edition by Jean-Christophe Keck . The conductor, singer, composer and musicologist Keck has been associated with Offenbach since his youth. He bought his first collector's items in Offenbach when he was 18 years old. The Choudens piano reduction was his second acquisition. In 2011 he found the last missing number of the handwritten Paris score, the Couplet des Prince, in private hands. With this find, the new edition came to an end. With the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment , the Paris version was heard for the first time on December 15, 2013; concert performance in Offenbach's original instrumentation. The scenic premiere of the critical new edition took place on December 13, 2014 at the State Theater in Karlsruhe . Here the princess was called "Theres", a departure from the original.
literature
- Boris Kehrmann (texts), Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe (ed.): Fantasio . Program No. 223, Karlsruhe 2014
Web links
- Fantasio : Sheet music and audio files in the International Music Score Library Project
- Jean-Christophe Keck : Offenbach - Keck: Fantasio (OEK critical edition). Boosey & Hawkes, accessed September 11, 2016 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Josef Heinzelmann : Fantasio. In: Piper's Encyclopedia of Musical Theater . Volume 4: Works. Massine - Piccinni. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-492-02414-9 , pp. 560-562.
- ↑ The presentation of the history of genesis and performance follows Boris Kehrmann: Am Puls der Zeit , in: Fantasio , program No. 223 of the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, pp. 8-13.
- ↑ Publisher's information on the critical new edition , accessed on January 2, 2015.
- ↑ Susanne Benda: Von Scherzen und Zeiten , criticism of the Karlsruhe performance in the Stuttgarter Nachrichten, December 15, 2014, accessed on January 2, 2015.
- ↑ Uwe Friedrich: Missed insubordination , review of the Karlsruhe performance at SWR 2 Kultur, December 15, 2014, accessed on January 2, 2015.
- ↑ Program of the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe , p. 21.