The three main
HERCULANUM
Herculanum by Felicien David (1810 - 1876). Opera in four acts with a Libretto by Joseph Mery and Terence Hadot. Sung in French.
First performed in Paris at the Theatre Imperial de L’Opera on March 4, 1859. Presented with the support of Palazzeto Bru Zane.
Kings and princes come to pay tribute to Olympia in her palace in Herculaneum in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. Two Christians Hélios and Lilia are brought before her by a crowd clamouring for them to be put to death. Olympia’s brother, the proconsul Nicanor, is in favour of their immediate execution but Olympia is struck by the beauty of Hélios and she spares them. After sending Lilia away, she uses a magic potion to seduce Hélios. The earth quakes and a prophet, Magnus, warns of imminent doom.
Nicanor himself attempts to seduce the slave Lilia but is struck dead when he tells her that God does not exist. Soon Satan appears and declaring his hatred for humanity, begins to play havoc with everyone’s lives, forcing Helios to choose between marrying Olympia and leaving Lilia to die.
Helios yields to Olympia in the beautiful palace gardens. But amidst the bacchanalia, Lilia appears to remind him of his vows. Olympia gives him a choice: either he accepts the throne as her husband or Lilia will die. He opts for a pagan marriage declaring ‘Queen, I am yours!. I love you Olyympia’ and Satan is jubilant.
Lilia sings an intense Creda. Satan, disguised as Nicanor persuades Olympia to spare her life, As the ominous rumblings of Mount Vesuvius grow, Satan summons the slaves who have taken advantage of the situation to esscape. He encourages them to rise up against their masters and thus help him in his mission.
The roar of thunder and the rumbling of underground activity grow louder while lightning streaks across the sky. Finally, a tremendous noise is heard as buildings begin to collapse.
In the midst of the chaos Helios appears on the terrace of Olympia’s palace and half crazed, he calls out Lilia’s name. She comes to him and forgives him his infidelity. The volcano erupts. Olympia arrives and Satan reveals his identity to her. The palace and the remaining buildings crumble. The last refuge of the queen and the population is buried under volcanic rubble.
The Christians die happy in the belief that they will have eternal life. The air clears to reveal a scene of desolation with Vesuvius in the background still belching smoke and fire.
The music of David has sometimes been compared to that of Berlioz who himself welcomed Herculanum warmly in a review.
Having studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Cherubini, David visited the Middle East and remains best remembered today as the composer of the ‘ode symphonique’ ‘Le Desert’.
Several of his works reflect this interest too, notably Lalla-Roukh, Eden and Moise au Sinai though other works such as Christophe Colomb and La Perle du Bresil suggest the equal draw of the New world. Herculanum was to remain the composer’s only grand opera.
Vanessa by Samuel Barber (1910-1981). An opera in three acts with libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti. Sung in English.
First performed in New York at the Metropolitan Opera on January 15, 1958.
Vanessa received a glamorous premiere at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1958, directed by Menotti,designed by Cecil Beaton and conducted by Dmitri Mitropoulos.
The cast featured Eleanor Steber, Rosalind Elias, Regina Resnik and Nicolai Gedda. Maria Callas had turned down the title role because no one could expect her to fall for a man who had slept with a mezzo-soprano!
Six years later, Barber tightened the opera, reducing it from four to three acts. It is this more compact, two-hour version that will be seen in Wexford.
Vanessa and her mother, the Old Baroness and her niece Erika have waited 20 years for the return of Vanessa’s lover Anatol. Vanessa frets over every detail from the French menu to the flowers and the necessity of keeping the bell at the gate ringing in case the sleigh is lost in the storm.
Vanessa insists on meeting him alone. When he arrives, she gives him no chance to speak, but pours out the emotions of two decades of waiting. The visitor explains that he is Anatol, the son of Vanessa’s old lover, who has died. He has come to see the woman whom his mother hated and his father longed for.
Vanessa and the younger Anatol are drawn to each other, leaving Erika -seduced by Anatol on his first night at the house -pregnant and suicidal.
A month later Erika confesses to her grandmother that she is passionately in love with Anatol. Although he has offered to marry her, she senses he is incapable of returning her love. She has noticed that Vanessa too is in love with him.
as the engagement of Vanessa and Anatol is announced at a New Year’s Eve party, Erika, weak and pale, appears at the back of the crowded room, clutching her stomach. Later, she slips out into the cold. The Baroness sees her running toward the lake and raises the alarm. She is found the next morning, unconscious.
Anatol denies to Vanessa that Erika loves him and Vanessa begs him to take her away. They leave for Paris. Erika tells her grandmother that she was pregnant but her child will not be born.
As they depart, Vanessa asks Erika for the truth of what happened, Erika says only that she loved someone who didn’t love her – and swears it was not Anatol. As Anatol reminds Erika that he once thought she would be the one with whom he would leave, she urges him to make Vanessa happy.
When Vanessa and Anatol have left, Erika orders the mirrors in the house to be covered again and the gate locked. As she sits by her silent grandmother, she says, Now it is my turn to wait.
Maria de Rudenz by Gaetano Donizetto (1797 - 1848). Opera in three acts with libretto by Salvadore Cammarano. Sung in Italian.
First performed in Venice at the Teatro la Fenice on January 30, 1838.
Maria de Rudenz has been described as ‘per- haps the darkest of Donizetti’s tragedies’ and may account for the opera’s long-standing neglect.
It tells the story of how Maria falls in love with Corrado against her father’s wishes and flees with him to Venice where Corrado abandons her and heads back to the de Rudenz family castle, falling in love this time with Maria’s cousin Matilde di Wolf.
Maria returns to the castle and discovers that her lover is not only going to marry her cousin but is also, in fact, the son of a notorious criminal. On the wedding day of Matilde and Corrado, Maria appears and reveals Corrado’s secret, murders Matilde and takes her own life.
Filled with remorse, Corrado declares that it is his punishment to have to continue to live.
|First performed at La Fenice in Venice in 1838, Maria de Rudenz had its first modern staging, also at La Fenice, in 1980 and still awaits a full production in both the United Kingdon and the United States.
This autumn’s Irish premiere is the latest in a series of important donizetti revivals at Wexford which has played a major role in what remains an ongoing Donizetti renaissance.
It is no coincidence that Wexford Festival Opera;s lifetime has overlapped with Donizetti’s reversal of fortune – the composer who 65 years ago was all but written off as intellectually disreputable has now regained his place in the operatic canon.