William Christie turned 80 on December 19 this yr. He selected, as his birthday current, to conduct Rameau’s Les Fêtes d’Hébé in a brand new staging by Robert Carsen, on the Opéra Comique, Christie’s thirteenth manufacturing there for the reason that well-known Atys of 1987.
In doing so, he supplied an impressive Christmas current to us all. As that is one in every of Rameau’s finest, however not best-known, works, I’ll start with somewhat bit about it. As traditional, anybody not needing an intro can skip it.
Premiered in 1739 by the Académie royale de musique (now the Paris Opera) in its Palais-Royal home, Les Fêtes d’Hébé, ou les Talens Lyriques (or Abilities Liriques, as the quilt of the rating in France’s Nationwide Library spells it) is the composer’s second ‘opéra-ballet’, after Les Indes Galantes (1735). It adopted Castor et Pollux (1737), which I’ll see later this season on the Palais Garnier, and is without doubt one of the works by which Rameau recycled music composed for the Samson(1734) that he labored on with Voltaire – banned by the censors for mixing the sacred and profane and due to this fact deserted. Claus Guth and Raphaël Pichon have put collectively a reconstruction-cum-pastiche of Samson, carried outin Aix in July this yr, and I’ll see that on the Opéra Comique subsequent spring.
In 1739, Rameau, by then in his mid-fifties, was at his peak. Regardless of its feeble libretto, criticized from the outset and revised inside months of the premiere, Les Fêtes d’Hébé comprises a few of his most ingenious and variegated music, whether or not comedian, tragic or pastoral, and was one in every of his best hits. Rameau claimed he may efficiently set the newspaper to music; modern author Guillaume Raynal retorted that having heard Hébé, he may effectively imagine it. With a forged that included Rameau faithfuls Marie Fel, Pierre Jélyotte, Marie Pélissier, and the dancer and choreographer Marie Sallé as Terpsichore, the work initially ran for six months continuous, each night time the home was open, and was carried out practically 400 instances in all in the course of the composer’s lifetime.
The plot is, if doable, slighter nonetheless than that of Les Indes Galantes, and takes the identical type: a Prologue and a collection of ‘entrées,’ alternating music and ballet. Within the current case, these are three quick tales of affection first thwarted however finally prevailing, that commemorate the mixed powers of youth and poetry, music and dance in flip. In antiquity, Hébé was alleged to have been banished from Olympus for spilling the gods’ nectar. Right here, she is led by the Zephyrs (or on this manufacturing, despatched, on a bicycle) to the banks of the Seine, the place the motion, similar to it’s, takes place.
All you should know to comply with Robert Carsen’s intelligent updating is (1) that French president Emmanuel Macron’s nickname is Jupiter (on account of his supposedly Olympian presidential model); (2) that every yr, the Metropolis of Paris transforms the Seine embankments right into a ‘seaside’ space, with deckchairs, video games and dancing, referred to as ‘Paris Plage’; and (3), supposing you didn’t know already, that the 2024 Olympic Video games passed off in Paris, after a gap ceremony alongside the river, and ended, because the Olympic flame ascended in a balloon, with Céline Dion singing Piaf’s Hymne à l’amour at a glowing Eiffel Tower.
At curtain-up, Robert Carsen’s manufacturing swaps Olympus for a photographic mock-up, columns, chandeliers and all, of the Elysée Palace, seat of the French presidency. Emmanuel Macron and his spouse Brigitte — performed by lookalikes — are entertaining company in fits and cocktail attire, some carrying briefcases. Catastrophe strikes: Hébé, a waitress, journeys and spills crimson wine on Brigitte’s immaculate white ensemble. She is fired on the spot by Macron/Jupiter. She leaves, adopted by Momus. The company pour out to type a line on the taxi stand. Amour, right here a glamorous influencer in a protracted, crimson, satin costume slit to the thigh, ropes within the two good-looking, grinning policemen guarding the doorway to take images whereas she strikes a collection of more and more zany voguing poses earlier than the palace. The queuing company brandish their smartphones to seize the scene as Amour consoles Hébé and urges every body, together with Hébé on her bike, to collect for enjoyable and video games on the banks of the Seine. It’s already apparent by this level that Carsen has given everybody on stage, individually, particular comedian instructions, adopted with alacrity.
The primary entrée, La Poésie, finds us at Paris Plage. Younger staff in turquoise polo shirts, title tags spherical their necks, are organising deck-chairs below a row of potted palms on the embankment. The Elysée company change on stage into colourful beachwear (this counts as a ballet, although no-one truly dances), and a visibly satisfied chief of France’s CRS riot police takes the place of Hymas, King of Lesbos, to observe the present devised by Sappho. Her success is such that cartons quickly arrive, stuffed with books of her poetry, scorching off the press and handed out to her followers, the company. Thelemus, the unfortunate suitor, is garlanded with seaweed and chucked into the Seine with a splash.
The second entrée, La Musique, is about on a Left-Financial institution quayside, full with bouquinistes’ dark-green cubicles on the parapet, and (video) plane-trees above, rustling gently in a summer season breeze. Princess Iphise, right here already in a marriage costume and veil, might solely marry a hero who has defeated the Messenians; in Carsen’s imaginative and prescient, Tyrtaeus is the captain of France’s soccer crew, who arrive on the river (i.e. by the auditorium, home lights on) and set off to problem the Greeks. They return victorious, with their delirious followers, the previous Elysée company, now brandishing flags and scarves. There follows an interesting soccer mime/ballet, by which ft kick and eyes comply with invisible balls. Iphise, after all, marries the coach.
Within the third and closing entrée, La Danse, somewhat blue DJ’s shack is about up on an embankment with a broadside view of Notre Dame and her spire, beside a dance flooring staked out below strings of naked bulbs. Mercury arrives on a bike and takes over the turntables. Eglé’s suitors (there’s a dance-off for her hand) and her virtuoso dancer buddies put on modern social gathering garments: fancy dinner jackets, shiny materials, spangled tops. The villagers who rush to her marriage ceremony with Mercury are, after all, none apart from these Elysée company once more. The luxuriant backyard evoked by the stage instructions is the Hébé, a cardboard cut-out bateau Mouche, with Hebe herself as tour information. All aboard, the entire crowd set gaily off west alongside the Seine, gleefully snapping images and selfies as they go (the entire manufacturing is below the signal of Instagram), until the Eiffel Tower looms up and bursts into glowing lights towards a background of fireworks. Curtain – and applause, a lot of it.
I mentioned simply now that Carsen’s updating of the plot was ‘intelligent’. It was very intelligent, as by holding us questioning what the following, enjoyable clin d’oeil at modern France could be, he eradicated any danger of boredom. To create a story thread for a libretto that didn’t beforehand have one, he linked the three entrées collectively below the one, Paris Plage idea, and hit on believable, amusing modern transpositions of the vintage story with out resorting to slapstick gags. Carsen is Carsen: it’s humorous, however nonetheless stylish. At a pinch, you may complain that street-inspired dance in Rameau is now déjà vu; however folks lap it up, and I don’t assume anybody there was in a temper for complaining. Removed from it. The detailed motion is fantastically managed, to the final look and gesture, from begin to end. The athletic, witty ballets merge seamlessly with the motion and singing, and make uncommon calls for on soloists and refrain, proving that Lea Desandre, who truly has a sinuous, solo modern dance of her personal within the closing entrée, and others do greater than ‘simply’ sing.
However sing they do. It’s at all times exhausting to do justice in writing to music and singing at this excessive normal. What are you able to say, apart from that the whole lot was fab? William Christie is succesful, as we all know, of casting weak singers. (A pal of mine calls these his ‘unvoiced wonders.’) Singing Rameau isn’t a stroll within the park: his idiom requires a demanding mixture of declamatory talent with vocal agility and adaptability of a sort that at instances nearly remembers classical Center Jap songs. It’s exhausting, and you may’t simply wander into it from different rep and carry it off. However on this forged there wasn’t one weak hyperlink. Right here, everybody, from the smallest to the celebs, had each the correct model and — mirabile dictu — good diction; what a aid to not spend the night glued to the supertitles. And never a single countertenor in sight. The refrain was on prime type, and no quantity of simultaneous performing and dancing may throw them off the beat. If there was one weak point, it was maybe the minor quibble that the voices within the decrease male supporting roles tended to peter out on the backside: a well-recognized subject.
Emmanuelle de Negri, who’s sung with Christie for not less than fifteen years, set the joyful tone of the night as Hébé, deploying a darkish, supple soprano voice with vivacity and presence. Cyril Auvity, one other ‘Christie veteran,’ eternally youthful (if now gray on the temples) stays immediately recognizable, singing extra forcefully and steadily than from time to time, proper to the haute contre prime.
Ana Vieira Leite and Lea Desandre had been each method higher employed right here than they had been straying into Médée final spring at Garnier, the place they sounded two sizes too small. Nonetheless, I famous then that ‘Ana Vieira Leite sings fantastically, with a reasonably, silvery sound,’ and right here she mixed that with vivacious comedian performing as a glamorous, barely ditzy however decided influencer. Lea Desandre appeared to ‘personal’ her three roles, displaying exceptional ease within the model: supple, delicate, assorted in shade and dynamics… It was as if she’d sung all of them her life. She was fairly clearly the vocal star of the night. And much more than the remainder of the forged, her singing, performing and dancing had been all one, forming an built-in entire.
Solely that stardom was very practically snatched away from her on the final hour by Marc Mauillon. The position of Momus doesn’t actually supply the possibility to shine. However Mercury is Mercury and was initially sung by Jélyotte. His simply recognizable arias — florid, sensible and excessive — are among the many hardest in Rameau to get proper. Mauillon did it, placing in an astonishing efficiency that, to be sincere, based mostly on previous expertise, I had no concept he had in him. Not, I feel, since Topi Lehtipuu had I heard one in every of these dazzling, clarion-call arias carried off with such gleeful brio.
William Christie, at 80, conducts Rameau with much more vigor than ever. I’ve tended, prior to now, to affiliate him with a fragile, feathery, contact, even when his tempi have at all times been brisk. However right here, with fairly a big orchestra together with 4 oboes, 4 bassoons, and a musette, the enjoying was not simply vigorous however wealthy, colourful, and beefy — extra ‘muscular’ than traditional. His years of French baroque have culminated in absolute mastery of the model, giving him freedom to navigate, along with his gamers and refrain, essentially the most putting variations in shade, tempo, rhythm and dynamics. If, above, I wrote that Lea Desandre was the vocal star, it was so I may now say that the actual stars of this specific present had been, certainly, Christie and his gamers. A feast. He appeared as happy as punch in the course of the curtain calls, and as traditional led an encore from the stage whereas capering, in his dapper white tie and tails, with the forged.
On Tuesday night, ticket touts had been out on the Métro exits, scouting for spare seats. I’m unsure they discovered any. The home was packed. However not as soon as, remarkably, did Christie want to show and scowl at folks coughing or telephones tootling. On the finish, after all, the silence exploded into cheers. He performed once more on Thursday: his birthday. I ought to think about the cheers, for Hébé but in addition for all of the conductor’s lengthy profession in France, in assist of French 18th century repertoire, had been louder nonetheless.
Images: Vincent Pontet
