Waiting for the words

KT5 - waiting

Waiting for the Words

One of the earliest of Chabrier’s compositions - preserved in a notebook he carried round with him during his last year at school in Paris - is a little piece in G major which, he writes, “could be the introduction and opening chorus for an operetta (I’m waiting for the words).”

That was story of his life. He was always waiting for the words. He was always waiting for a subject for an opera and, when he thought he had found it, he was waiting for a librettist to supply the words and, when the text proved unsuitable, he was waiting for different words - usually in a state of intense exasperation which, in a flood of brilliantly angry and wickedly witty letters, he would inflict at length on his hapless publishers.

In a way though Enoch & Costellat deserved it: they should have heeded Chabrier’s heart-felt pleas to find him a “good Spanish libretto” when he came back from Spain in 1882, his Latin temperament burning with inspiration. If he had written the operatic equivalent of España, just as Ravel was to follow the Rapsodie espagnole with L’Heure espagnole, his career would have been very different and neither he nor his publishers would have had to suffer the agonies associated with Le Roi malgré lui and Briséis.

Coping with the multiple-librettist problems in making a half-way present­able operetta out of Le Roi malgré lui, a fifty-year-old vaudeville by Mme Ancelot - the rights to which were kindly passed on to him by his friend and composer-colleague Victorin Joncières in 1883 - did not require the supreme life-or-death effort which would be involved in attempting to complete Briséis. It was an extremely frustrating experience even so.

Just why Chabrier had to depend on the talents of writers as undistinguished as Paul Burani and Emile de Najac, not to mention Armand Silvestre and Jean Richepin, it is not entirely easy to say. Chabrier was a composer who, in his twenties, had secured the unique distinction of working on operetta projects with no less a poet than Paul Verlaine. He was as familiar with the habitués of the literary salons of fashionable Paris as he was with the Bohemian circle of artists and writers gathered round Edouard Manet at the Café Guerbois in Montmartre. Every author worth knowing he must have known, or could have got to know if he had wanted to. But while an inferior composer like Alfred Bruneau was able to secure the collaboration of as superior a writer as Emile Zola, Chabrier could find no one more inspired than that fustian Parnassian, Catulle Mendès.

The opéra-bouffe

The most capable librettists Chabrier ever found were Eugène Leterrier and Albert Vanloo, authors of L’Etoile and Une Education manquée. He considered them for Le Roi malgré lui and Vanloo did promise to read the play. Since the piece was originally intended to be an opéra-bouffe and since Leterrier and Vanloo were acknowledged experts in that area - though more for their work with Lecocq at the Théâtre de la Renaissance than for their part in L’Etoile at the Bouffes-parisiens - they would have been the obvious choice. They would also have been a most unfortunate choice, as it turned out, since Leterrier died only a few months after the libretto was awarded to Paul Burani and Armand Silvestre.

Silvestre, who was wary about joining in - he had already worked with Chabrier on two failed opera projects - seems to have lost interest at an early stage. He suggested at one point that the action should be shifted from Poland to Russia, so as to avoid giving offence to the Polish director of the Théâtre de la Renaissance, but his contribution to the actual text was probably very small. Burani, on the other hand, worked hard on it and by the summer of 1884 had sent the composer at least enough to convince him that it was “good, great, perfect” and that he would “make a gem of it.”

Eager to write a coloratura number, Chabrier applied himself first to Alexina’s aria - which, ironically, has been cut from most productions since the very first (though not from this one). Another early item, on the other hand, was the most successful of all, the introduction to Act 2, now known as the Fête polonaise: a Viennese-style waltz, it “is so sexy,” he said, “that they’ll be making babies in the auditorium and on the stage!” Work stopped abruptly, however, when, in spite of Silvestre’s diplomacy, Okolowitz finally decided not to stage Le Roi malgré lui at the Renaissance and Cantin found it “too intellectual” for the Bouffes-parisiens. Cantin did suggest that the score could be simplified to suite the taste of his public but Chabrier refused to have anything to do with it.

The opéra-comique

If Chabrier was depressed by this turn of events there were brighter prospects for Gwendoline, the first of his serious opera-projects undertaken in col­laboration with Catulle Mendès. The Paris Opéra didn’t want it but La Monnaie in Brussels did and it was first performed there in April 1886. Although the theatre was closed down after only five performances, following the bankruptcy of the owner, the success of Gwendoline in Brussels added considerably to the composer’s reputation Paris. Only a month later he was invited to the Opéra-Comique to meet the director, Léon Carvalho, who had a gap to fill in his schedule. “Have you got anything ready right now - in the bouffe style?” asked Carvalho. “My God,” said Chabrier, “I’ve written the music for an operetta, Le Roi malgré lui … but it’s not respectable enough for your theatre.” “Let me hear it all the same!”

Carvalho liked the high spirits and the originality of the score. The comedy, however, he considered too farcical for the Opéra-comique and suggested that Emile de Najac should be commissioned to collaborate with Burani in restyling it. A little later another writer, Jean Richepin (who insisted on remaining anonymous but who responsible for some of the better numbers) was invited to join the team, making a total of four librettists in all - or five, taking into account the contributions of the composer himself, who had invented the character of Fritelli and who made several late amendments to the text.

Anyway, whatever librettist problems Chabrier had before, they were now doubled. According to a report in a newspaper of the time, “M. Burani sends scenes and numbers to M. de Najac, who looks over them and addresses them to M. Chabrier. He examines them in his turn, makes his observations and sends everything back to M. Burani, who passes his revisions to M. de Najac, who makes the last judgement and sends the packet to M. Chabrier with the final seal of approval: ready to set to music.”

Waiting for the words not just once but three times over was not Chabrier’s only problem, however. He had to adjust what he had already written for the opéra-bouffe, which was most of two acts, and rewrite it to suit the new text for the opéra-comique. He wasn’t very happy about it, as he wrote to his friend Paul Lacome in June 1886: “I have to do three acts in three months - I can’t manage it. They let you rot for 15 years and then they want everything straight away…Oh! how I hate being rushed and how - above all - I refuse to compromise…It will be performed only when I am happy with it…Everything is hard work for me. I don’t have what they call ‘facility’…But the piece has to be very cheerful, nimbly executed, and I want everyone who sees it to laugh a lot and to laugh some more.”

In fact, it was nearly a year, rather than three months, before Le Roi malgré lui was ready. It was first performed at the Opéra-comique on 18 May, 1887. Seven days and two performances later the theatre was burned to the ground.

Gerald Larner