Waiting in the wings

Concerned though Chabrier surely was for the victims of the fire that burned down the Opéra-Comique on 25 May 1887 - only a week after Le Roi malgré lui had opened there - and disappointed though he certainly was that a work he so cherished had achieved no more than a dress rehearsal and two performances, he was relieved to find that his score had been saved from the conflagration. In fact, when he was told of its survival he broke down in tears and went into a fit of hysterics.

Although it survived the fire intact, the score has been vulnerable ever since through the weakness of its committee-generated libretto - which, as Chabrier was the first to acknowledge, is a mess: “a bouillabaisse of Najac and Burani cooked by Richepin and spiced by me.” When the Opéra-Comique company performed the production again in the Théâtre des Nations in November 1897 there were two significant cuts. Chabrier probably didn’t much mind the removal of Alexina’s aria, which Vincent d’Indy (whom he trusted) had told him weighed down the first act, but he was not at all happy about the loss of the Conspirators’ Ensemble, a brilliant Meyerbeer parody, in the second act. He did at least make sure that when the opera was first performed in Germany - in Karlsruhe in 1890 under the direction of his friend Felix Mottl - the Conspirators’ Ensemble was included even though it was not in the material delivered by his publishers.

The only other productions of Le Roi malgré lui during the composer’s lifetime were in Dresden in 1890 (Ernest von Schuch), in Cologne in 1891 (Julius Hofmann), and at the Capitole in Toulouse in 1892 (Armand Raynaud). It was then neglected for nearly forty years until it was revived at the Opéra-Comique in 1929 when Albert Carré, the director of the theatre, was moved to rewrite the whole thing. Retaining the original 16th-century Polish setting, he improved nothing in terms of clarification, character, or comedy. It was last seen at the Opéra-Comique - presumably still in the Carré version, which its present publishers seem to regard as standard - in the 1950s. The Capitole in Toulouse took it up again in 1978 and the most recent production, in what was claimed to be the original version, was staged at the Opéra de Nantes in 1993.

Le Roi malgré lui was first performed in Britain in a concert version in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1992.

Gerald Larner