Meyerbeer's L'Africaine

[edurban]

[I've split this topic off from the discussion about whether we should allow advertisements. Mark]

This reminds me to start a thread about the upcoming NY performance of Meyerbeer's Africaine Now that's unsung!

David

[JimL]

I forget.  Was that left unfinished at his death and completed by someone else?  Or have I conflated it with Hoffman?

[edurban]

Jim, I think it was very much like the Hoffman situation: opera actually in rehearsal, many changes half made, numerous versions and half-versions to choose from, few if any final decisions made, then the composer dies without seeing it through.  Then in both cases the Opera management steps in and 'makes their own version.'   I'd love to see some of the alternate material for Africaine, but I guess we're lucky to see anything at all...

David

[JimL]

Yes, from what I understand, the opera contains some of Meyerbeer's best music, historical preposterousness of the plot aside.  I'd also tend to trust the version put out by the management a little bit more than others.  After all, they probably knew Meyerbeer better than anybody else, save his family!

[edurban]

Thanks, Mark.  I got caught up in my Mexican Football League postings and forgot to start this thread.  Good thing someone's paying attention ...

Jim, I think the problem at the Paris opera was that it was an absolute army of bureaucrats.  Verdi found them maddening and philistinic.  Meyerbeer had mastered the system, but his method had always been to save a lot of decisions for the rehearsal period, when he would essentially recompose a lot of the new opera.  At his death, the machine took control, as it did when Offenbach died during the Hoffman rehearsals.  (For a century, scholars & performers have been struggling to return Hoffman to something like Offenbach's 'original' intentions...the version at the Met opera is head-scratchingly different from the standard Hoffmans recorded in the 50s-70s.)  Sadly, there is no comparable level of interest in Meyerbeer scholarship...
"...from what I understand, the opera contains some of Meyerbeer's best music..."  So true, and he was really trying to do something new and different.  30 years had passed, after all, since Huguenots.

David

There are still tickets for the Lincoln Center performance, which Eve Queler will conduct.  This is the first NY performance of L'Africaine in 40 years!

[Alan Howe]

Thanks for the reminder about L'Africaine. A quick internet hunt turned up a DVD featuring Domingo and Verrett from 1988, so the order's gone in...

[edurban]

Alan, we just finished watching the Domingo/Verrett dvd and it's certainly a very enjoyable experience.  But...the piece seemed so choppy and unlike Meyerbeer's usual vast canvas of choruses and carefully built up scenes (sometimes, especially in the shipwreck act, it seemed almost like 'highlights'.) that I went looking for info on the 'performing edition'.  On the Meyerbeer Fan Club website, which seems no longer to be updated, there was an excellent article by R.I. Letellier that details some of the indignities the score was subjected to after Meyerbeer's death.  Although a full score was completed by the composer just before he died, the Opera management entrusted it to the eminent musicologist/teacher/composer Fetis who cut and recomposed his way to a 'performing edition', even changing Meyerbeer's title Vasco da Gama to the more exotic, if a good deal less Hindu title we know today.  Here's the link:

http://www.meyerbeer.com/lafricai.htm

I also had a look at the original, and much admired, set designs, which can be seen here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:L%27Africaine_1865_-_settings_-_Gallica.jpg

Off to see some version of the opera tonight! 

David

[edurban]

Nice review in the NY Times of a very exciting evening.  The conductor added some numbers left out by Fetis (Ines' 5th act aria), included the sailors' prayer left out on the San Francisco dvd, but cut so much connecting material the people in the audience must have been scratching their heads wondering what the devil was going on.  Still, how could you not enjoy so much glorious music!  This opera needs a critical edition and a complete studio recording, but don't hold your breath...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/arts/music/04eve.html?ref=music
David