Pénélope (Fauré)
| Opera dates | |
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| Title: | Penelope |
Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse : Poster from 1913 |
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| Shape: | “Poème lyrique” in three acts |
| Original language: | French |
| Music: | Gabriel Fauré |
| Libretto : | René Fauchois |
| Literary source: | Homer : Odyssey |
| Premiere: | March 4, 1913 |
| Place of premiere: | Monte Carlo Opera |
| Playing time: | about 2 hours |
| Place and time of the action: | The island of Ithaca after the Trojan War |
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Pénélope is an opera (original name: "Poème lyrique") in three acts by Gabriel Fauré (music) with a libretto by René Fauchois . It was premiered on March 4, 1913 at the Monte Carlo Opera.
action
The opera deals with the last chants of Homer's Odyssey . After the end of the ten-year Trojan War , Odysseus (here called Ulysse in French) had to wander for another ten years before he was able to return to his home in Ithaca . His wife Penelope (Pénélope) faithfully waited for his return. However, she was pressured by various aristocratic suitors to give up hope and marry one of them. Ulysse finally returns and initially explores the situation disguised as a beggar. The suitors are defeated after a "bow test" before the couple reunites.
first act
Antechamber of the Pénélopes apartments
Scene 1. The Pénélopes maids are spinning and talking about their mistress, who, despite the long absence of her husband Ulysse after the Trojan War, still insists on waiting for him to return. For more than ten years, Pénélope has been harassed by suitors who vainly vie for her hand. Most of the girls would not turn them down.
Scene 2. Eurymaque, Antinoüs, and the other suitors appear and demand to see the queen. Since Pénélope has forbidden them to enter their rooms, they demand that she come out to them.
Scene 3. Ulysses old nurse Euryclée rebukes the suitors. Finally Pénélope emerges from the room.
Scene 4. The suitors urge Pénélope to finally choose one of them. But Pénélope is certain that Ulysse is still alive and will return home. She also despises the suitors who spend the whole day drinking and drinking. She points out that she still has to work on her father-in-law Laërte's shroud . Only when that is done will she choose one of them. The suitors call musicians and dancers to celebrate. Pénélope fervently begs her absent husband to return and help her.
Scene 5. Ulysse, disguised as a ragged beggar, knocks on the door and asks for food and a place to sleep. Eurymaque shows him away. Pénélope, however, knows that the gods sometimes appear in the form of beggars. She lets him in. Meanwhile, the suitors are having fun with Mélantho and the other maids.
Scene 6. Pénélope tells Euryclée to wash the stranger's feet before he has his meal. Euryclée feels reminded of Ulysse at the sight of him. But Pénélope remembers him younger and bigger. While she is thinking about how her husband will fare now, Euryclée begins washing. In doing so, she discovers a familiar scar. Ulysse reveals himself to her and asks her to keep quiet.
Scene 7. Alone in her room, Pénélope begins to untie Laërtes' shroud to buy time. The suitors enter unnoticed and now realize why the weaving takes so long. They now insist that Pénélope choose one of them the next day.
Scene 8. The stranger and Euryclée comfort Pénélope with the hope that her husband could return that night. Pénélope and Euryclée go off to get their coats. Like every evening, they want to look out on the beach.
Scene 9. Ulysse meanwhile looks around the room, looks at his old possessions and remembers the love he had for his wife.
Scene 10. Pénélope and Euryclée make their way to the beach. Ulysse follows them.
Second act
On a hill overlooking the sea
A round bench in front of a marble column wound with roses, shepherds' tents on the left, sunset by moonlight
Scene 1. The old shepherd Eumée enjoys the evening and says goodbye to his comrades.
Scene 2. Pénélope, the beggar, Euryclée, and some of the maids arrive. Pénélope remembers her evenings with Ulysse in this place. Eumée hopes that he will see his master return. He joins the other shepherds. The beggar replies evasively to Pénélope's questions about his past. But he says that he once gave Ulysse refuge in his house in Crete during a long storm. Because he can describe Ulysses clothes exactly, Pénélope believes him. The beggar also assures her that Ulysse has remained loyal to her. He advises her to choose the suitor the next day who is capable of drawing Ulysses's great bow. Pénélope returns to the house with the women.
Scene 3. Ulysse reveals himself to Eumée and the shepherds. He asks her to be ready to help him fight the suitors.
Third act
The great hall in the Ulysses palace, a throne, tall columns left and right, in the morning
Scene 1. After Ulysse has scouted the building during the night and examined his old weapons, he hides a sword under the throne.
Scene 2. Euryclée tells Ulysse that Pénélope couldn't sleep because of worries. Ulysse encourages her because nobody but him can draw the bow. That evening she would see Penelope smile again.
Scene 3. Eumée tells Ulysse that the suitors have ordered sacrificial animals for the wedding ceremony. This is an ideal excuse for the shepherds to bring their knives.
Scene 4. The suitors appear to make the final preparations. Antinoüs is particularly looking forward to not having to see the beggar's hated face much longer. Ulysse replies that soon this will no longer be the case. The other suitors report bad omens. The tables are set and the Pénélope is expected.
Scene 5. Pénélope enters with Euryclée and the governess Eurynome. She announces that she will receive her hand among them who can draw Ulysses' bow and shoot an arrow through twelve rings. The suitors doubt that this is possible. Nevertheless, Eurymaque, Pisandre and Antinoüs try. All three fail miserably. Now Ulysse hesitantly asks for a try. He has no difficulty with the task. His second shot is Eurymaque. Everyone is horrified. But Pénélope now recognizes who they are looking at. Ulysse calls the shepherds and together they massacre the suitors. None survived.
Scene 6. Now that justice has been done, Pénélope and Ulysse can celebrate their reunion.
Scene 7. Together with the people of Ithaca, all praise the god Zeus for the homecoming of their king.
layout
Instrumentation
The orchestral line-up for the opera includes the following instruments:
- Woodwinds: two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon
- Brass: four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba
- Timpani, drums
- harp
- Strings
music
The score of the Pénélope is carefully worked out. Fauré used high quality leitmotifs. Those associated with Pénélope and Ulysse are introduced in the foreplay. The Wagnerian influence is particularly evident in the quieter sections. However, Fauré used the leitmotifs differently than Wagner. They are not highlighted in a striking way like “business cards”, but woven into the composition or used “for the purpose of lyrical spinning”. Fauré himself wrote to his wife on August 16, 1907: “I am trying out all the possibilities to change the subject and use it to produce various effects, either as a whole or in extracts.” There are leitmotifs for the figure of the Pénélope as well as for both of them Personalities of Ulysse. Disguised as a beggar, he has a theme with “chorale-like, slowly winding up second steps”, while his ruler figure is “in a bold octave stretching with the following ascent of the major second and subsequent leaps in fifths”. The motifs for the shroud of Laërte and the bow rehearsal are played exclusively in the orchestra.
Despite the large orchestra, the singers never have to push. The score shows great transparency and shows the composer's experience in chamber music. The sound of the strings and "muted pastel colors" predominate. Fauré orchestrated the opera in the sense of a “prudent classicism”. Ulrich Schreiber named Pénélope as an example of “French Hellenism”, through which the culture of France is praised as being in the footsteps of antiquity. In it he compared them with works such as Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune or Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé . However, it represents a moral antithesis to these erotically more permissive works.
The scenes of the opera flow into one another. Hard changes of pace are avoided. The style of the solo passages is more reminiscent of Fauré's late songs than of the French operatic style of his contemporaries. The music is emotional ("sentiment"), but not sentimental ("sentimentality"). The overall structure of the opera and the dance movements of the outer acts are reminiscent of Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila . Compared to the operas by Debussy ( Pelléas et Mélisande , 1902) and Dukas' ( Ariane et Barbe-Bleue , 1907), which had appeared a few years earlier, Pénélope is less declamatory. Instead, there are song-like melodies and occasional references to the classical sequence of recitative, arioso and aria.
The wet nurse Euryclée and the shepherd Eumée are presented particularly positively. But Fauré also dedicates the aria “Depuis qu'en ce travail” (first act, scene 4) and the aria “Qu'il est doux de sentir sa jeunesse” (third act, scene 4) to the two suitors Eurymaque and Antinoüs soulful music. The duet “O mon hôte! à présent, puis-je t'interroger? ”of the two main characters (second act, scene 2) in the second act, Schreiber believes that it is less dramaturgically successful, because here both main motifs of Ulysse appear, the ruler and the beggar motif.
Work history
Gabriel Fauré made a concrete decision to write his first opera at an advanced age. However, he had been looking for a suitable material since the beginning of his career. He had also composed a number of theatrical music, so he already had some theater experience. When he was looking for a libretto, the singer Lucienne Bréval (1869–1935) suggested a text by René Fauchois about the return of Odysseus from the last songs of Homer's Odyssey . Fauré liked the piece and started working two months later in 1907.
The libretto originally had five acts. In terms of content, it corresponds to Homer's submission. Fauchois only omitted the active intervention of the goddess Athena, as it did not fit his psychological view of the work. Fauré revised the libretto together with Fauchois and shortened it to three acts, completely removing the subplot and the person of Telemachos . In the verses he made lines in order to bring the length of the presentation, which is much longer when singing than when speaking, into an acceptable framework. He also changed the order of the scenes and redesigned entire paragraphs to bring out the motivation of the people more clearly. Fauré saw a particular credibility problem in the fact that Pénélope spoke to her husband over long distances, but still did not recognize him.
The theme of Odysseus' homecoming had been brought to the opera stage several times. The best-known is Claudio Monteverdi's version Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (Venice 1640). Other earlier compositions are by Reinhard Keizer ( Penelope or Ulysses anders Theil, Braunschweig 1696), Baldassare Galuppi ( Penelope, London 1741), Niccolò Piccinni ( Pénélope, Fontainebleau 1785), Domenico Cimarosa ( Penelope, Naples 1794/95) and August Bungert ( Odysseus' Homecoming from the tetralogy Homeric World , 1896). Rolf Liebermann's Penelope from 1954 is from the 20th century .
Since Fauré was limited in time because of his work as director of the Paris Conservatory, he could practically only use the summer months for the composition. For this reason, among other things, it took him five years to complete the opera. He reported in detail about the progress in letters to his wife. Due to lack of time, he asked the young composer Fernand Pécoud (1879–1940) to help him with the orchestration. This concerned the end of the second act and smaller parts of the finale.
The premiere took place on March 4, 1913 under the musical direction of Léon Jehin at the Opera of Monte Carlo, where Pénélope was neglected and only performed three times. Fauré himself saw this as a test performance for the two months later, on May 10, under the direction of Louis Hasselmans, which took place in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées . For this he expanded the duet Pénélope / Ulysse in the second act. Lucienne Bréval sang the title role in both productions. Ulysse was sung by Charles Rousselière in Monte Carlo and by Lucien Muratore in Paris . The Paris performance was a triumphant success. However, the theater had financial problems and went bankrupt after 17 performances. The opera's sets and costumes were auctioned. During the following years of the First World War there was no question of another performance, and so Pénélope was only performed again in Paris in 1919, this time in a new production by the Opéra-Comique . Here the opera was repeated 63 times until 1931.
Although opera was highly valued by experts, it has not found a permanent place in the repertoire. Most of the performances took place in France and occasionally in other Romance-speaking countries. Important interpreters of the title role were Germaine Lubin , Claire Croiza , Suzanne Balguerie , Régine Crespin and Jessye Norman . The German premiere took place in Chemnitz in 2002.
A 2015 production of the Opéra national du Rhin was televised on Arte and also streamed on the internet on Arte Concert . In 2019 the Frankfurt Opera presented the work in a production by Corinna Tetzel and the musical direction by Joana Mallwitz with Paula Murrihy in the title role.
Recordings
- May 4, 1956 (live, in concert from Paris): Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht (conductor), Orchester National de France , Chœurs du Radio France . Régine Crespin (Pénélope), Raoul Jobin (Ulysse), Christiane Gayraud (Euryclée), André Vessières (Eumée), Joseph Peyron (Antinoüs), Robert Massard (Eurymaque), Michel Hamel (Léodès), Bernard Demigny (Ctésippe), Pierre Germain (Pisandre), Madeleine Gagnard (Cléone), Françoise Ogéas (Mélantho), Geneviève Macaux (Alkandre), Nicole Robin (Phylo and Lydie). Rodolphe CD: RPC 32447/48, Rodolphe LP: RP 12447/48, Dicoreale LP: 10012/14, Cantus Classics 50851 (2 CD).
- 1977 (live, in concert from Cardiff): David Lloyd-Jones (conductor), BBC Symphony Orchestra , BBC Symphony Chorus London. Josephine Veasey (Pénélope), André Turp (Ulysse), Johanna Peters (Euryclée), Richard van Allan (Eumée), Alexander Oliver (Antinoüs), Nell Howlett (Eurymaque), Gerald English (Léodès and Pisandre), Richard Angas (Ctésippe) , Sarah Walker (Cléone), Sara de Javelin (Alkandre), Susan Lee (Phylo), Sally de Sage (Lydie), Rosanne Creffield (Melas). Gala GL 100.705 (2 CD).
- 1980 (studio recording, complete, Opernwelt CD tip: “artistically valuable”): Charles Dutoit (conductor), Orchester Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, Ensemble Vocal Jean Laforge. Jessye Norman (Pénélope), Alain Vanzo (Ulysse), Jocelyne Taillon (Euryclée), José van Dam (Eumée), Jean Dupouy (Antinoüs), Philippe Huttenlocher (Eurymaque), Gérard Friedman (Léodès), Paul Guigue (Ctésippe), François Le Roux (Pisandre), Norma Lerer (Cléone), Michèle Command (Mélantho), Colette Alliot-Lugaz (Alkandre), Christine Barbeaux (Phylo), Danièle Borst (Lydie). Erato CD: 2292-45405-2, Erato LP: STU 71386.
- August 27, 2000 (live, in concert from Edinburgh): Jean-Yves Ossonce (conductor), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra , Chorus of the Scottish National Opera. Michelle DeYoung (Pénélope), Michael Schade (Ulysse), Nadine Denize (Euryclée), Donald Maxwell (Eumée), Marc Laho (Antinoüs), Christopher Maltman (Eurymaque), Jamie MacDougall (Léodès), Isabelle Cals (Cléone).
- June 14, 2001 (live, in concert from the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées Paris): Claude Schnitzler or Pinchas Steinberg (conductor), Orchester National de France , Chœurs du Radio France . Isabelle Vernet (Pénélope), Luca Lombardo (Ulysse), Sylvie Sullé (Euryclée), Gilles Cachemaille (Eumée), Guy Fletcher (Antinoüs), François Le Roux (Eurymaque), Pascal Aubert (Léodès), Pierre Vaello (Ctésippe), Bernard Dubois (Pisandre), Douglas Dutheil (Schäfer), Élodie Méchain (Cléone), Elsa Maurus or Gaëlle Méchaly (Mélantho), Brigitte Vinson (Alkandre), Marie Boyer (Phylo and Eurynome), Anne-Marie Elo (Lydie).
- April 27, 2002 (live from Chemnitz): Fabrice Bollon (conductor), Arila Siegert (production), Robert-Schumann-Philharmonie-Chemnitz, Choir of the Chemnitz Opera . Nancy Gibson (Pénélope), Richard Berkeley-Steele (Ulysse), Monika Straube (Euryclée), Yue Liu (Eumée), Kay Frenzel (Antinoüs), Dietrich Greve (Eurymaque), André Riemer (Léodès), Matthias Winter (Ctésippe), Munki Lee (Pisandre), Donna Morein (Cléone).
- October 21, 2005 (live from Wexford): Jean-Luc Tignaud (conductor), Renaud Doucet (production), Krakow Philharmonic Orchestra, Wexford Festival Chorus. Nora Sourouzian (Pénélope), Gerard Powers (Ulysse), Lorena Scarlata Rizzo (Euryclée), Vincent Pavesi (Eumée), David Curry (Antinoüs).
literature
- Jenny Marie Houghton: Pénélope in the Press, 1913: The Early Critical Reception of Gabriel Faurés Only Opera. MA, University of Maryland, 2012 ( online PDF; 784 kB).
Web links
- Pénélope : Sheet music and audio files in the International Music Score Library Project
- Libretto (French, PDF) on fichier-pdf.fr
- Work information on klassika.info
Individual evidence
- ↑ Work data on Pénélope based on the MGG with discography at Operone, accessed on March 31, 2016.
- ↑ a b c d e f Ronald Crichton: Pénélope. In: Grove Music Online (English; subscription required).
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Bradford Robinson: Foreword to the work edition, 2010 , accessed on March 30, 2016.
- ↑ a b c d e Pénélope. In: Harenberg opera guide. 4th edition. Meyers Lexikonverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-411-76107-5 , p. 251.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Ulrich Schreiber : Opera guide for advanced learners. 20th Century II. German and Italian Opera after 1945, France, Great Britain. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2005, ISBN 3-7618-1437-2 .
- ^ Jean-Michel Nectoux: Fauré. Le voci del chiaroscuro. EDT srl, Turin 2004, ISBN 88-7063-531-7 , p. 561 ( limited preview on Google Books ).
- ^ Pénélope - Opera in three acts by Gabriel Fauré on Arte Concert ( Memento from June 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive ).
- ^ Gerhard R. Koch : Better no apotheosis. Review of the performance in Frankfurt 2019. In: Opernwelt , January 2020, p. 14.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Gabriel Fauré. In: Andreas Ommer: Directory of all opera complete recordings. Zeno.org , volume 20.