Daniel-François-Esprit Auber: Haydée

Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber (1782-1871), the most amiable French composer of the 19th century, came to his abilities late in life. After a stalled commercial career, he studied with Cherubini. His first works were not a success, but La Bergere Chateleine (1820), written at the age of 38, established him as an operatic composer. He then met the librettist Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), with whom he developed a working partnership, one of the most successful in musical history, that lasted until Scribe's death. After Le Macon (1825) and La Muette de Portici (1828), Auber's life was filled with success. In 1829 he was appointed a member of the Institut, in 1839 Director of Concerts at Court, in 1842 Director of the Conservatoire, in 1852 Musical Director of the Imperial Chapel, and in 1861 Grand Officer of the Legion d'Honneur. Auber's famous historical grand opera La Muette de Portici (also known by its hero's name as Masaniello) is a key work in operatic history, and helped to inspire the 1830 revolution in Brussels that led to the separation of Belgium from Holland. Auber himself experienced four French Revolutions (1789, 1830, 1848, 1870). The latter (The Commune) hastened the end of his life. He died on 12 May 1871, at the advanced old age of 89, and in the pitiful conditions of civil strife, after a long and painful illness which worsened during the Siege of Paris. He had refused to leave the city he had always loved despite the dangers and privation, even after his house had been set on fire by the petroleurs et petroleuses. By some irony a mark had been placed against the house of the composer of Masaniello, the very voice of Romantic liberty! Auber's overtures were once known everywhere, a staple of the light Classical repertoire. The influence of his gracious melodies and dance rhythms on piano and instrumental music, and on the genre of Romantic comic opera, especially in Germany, was overwhelming. The operas themselves, apart from Fra Diavolo (1830), have virtually passed out of the repertoire, since Auber's elegant and restrained art now has little appeal for the world of music, attuned as it is to the meatier substance of verismo, high Wagnerian ideology, and twentieth-century experimentalism. Haydee an opera-comique in three acts, with libretto by Eugene Scribe, was first performed at the Opera-Comique (Deuxieme Salle Favart), on 28 December 1847. It remained in the repertoire until 1894. The opera derives from Auber's third period, and after ;La Muette de Portici, Fra Diavolo and Le Domino noir, was the composer's best work. Scribe's Venetian tale uses motifs derived from Prosper Merimee's novella collection La Partie de trictrac (1830) and Alexandre Dumas (pere)'s novel Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1845). He obtained the central anecdote of the plot from one of Prosper Merimee's short stories translated from Russian Six et quatre, written in 1830. The opera is set in Dalmatia and Venice during the early years of the sixteenth century. Loredan Grimani, a victorious Venetian admiral, is haunted by the memory that several years previously he ruined his best friend, the senator Donato, at cards through cheating. The senator killed himself that night, and in reparation Loredan has brought up his daughter Rafaela, and has been searching for the senator's son, Andrea. The disquieted Loredan is blackmailed by the unscrupulous Malipieri until- Mal-ipieri is killed in a duel, and it is revealed that Andrea is the long-lost son of the senator Donato. Loredan is elevated to the dignity of doge of Venice. He reunites Rafaela and Andrea, and himself marries his Cypriot slave, Haydee. The opera belongs to the genre of the serious opera-comique. The chief themes are Loredan's pangs of conscience, Malipieri's villainy