A lost opera offers enlightenment
Victor Gavenda was a music grad student at UC Berkeley in the mid-1980s, mulling dissertation ideas about the great French Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, when a professor suggested he study a rare Rameau manuscript in the university’s Hargrove Music Library.
It was a version of the operaballet “Le Temple de la Gloire” (“The Temple of Glory”) with music that differed from the published edition of the work, composed by Rameau to a libretto by the towering French Enlightenment writer Voltaire.
Bound with a lavishly illustrated copy of the libretto, the manuscript turned out to be the only known copy of the original opera premiered at Versailles in 1745. An “allegorical lecture” on enlightened despotism, as Gavenda calls it, the work did not do well at the Paris Opera, where it was revamped the next year to appeal to the public’s preference for love-focused fare.
“I saw an opportunity to bring to light a version of an opera that was thought to be lost, and that’s always exciting,” Gavenda recalls.
He mentioned his project to Nicholas McGegan, soon-tobe music director of the Bay Area’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, who dreamed of staging a full-blown production of the original “Temple of Glory.” Thirty years later, he’s doing it.
From Friday to Sunday, April 28-30, at Cal’s Zellerbach Hall, McGegan will conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra & Chorale, an international cast of singers and the New York Baroque Dance Company in an ornate period production billed as the first performances in more than 270 years of the original Rameau-Voltaire creation.
A co-production of Philharmonia, Cal Performances and the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, it’s also the first fully staged opera presented by Philharmonia, which in the 1990s recorded instrumental music from the opera in editions prepared by Gavenda. (French musicologist Julien Dubruque compiled the new edition McGegan will conduct.)
A freelance writer and editor as well as choirmaster at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley, Gavenda spent several years researching the manuscript and its relationship to the “production” score at the Paris Opera. He and other scholars believe it was the source for this reduced score, which was apparently intended for publication, a plan that was scotched when the original opera flopped.
The Berkeley manuscript, Gavenda explains, was notated by the same copyists who did the production score from bits and pieces Rameau handed them. That score was repeatedly changed — “things were pasted in or ripped out, or scribbled in the margins” — over the course of rehearsals and performances.
The opera tells the story of three ancient kings trying to enter the Mount Parnassus temple tended by the Muses and reserved by Apollo for only the bighearted.
Bélus is barred for being a bloodthirsty brute, Bacchus because he created wine and encouraged debauchery. Trajan gains entry by showing mercy to those he’s conquered, insisting the Temple of Glory become a Temple of Happiness for all people.
The story, Gavenda says, was a directive to Louis XV “on how to be a good king, to be benevolent and put the happiness of your people above everything else.”
The monarch, who had commissioned the work and apparently expected an operatic celebration of his latest military victory, reputedly gave Voltaire a chilly stare when the writer asked at the post-premiere party if Trajan was happy.
Rameau, who had turned the art form “upside down with his dazzling music and innovative approach to the use of dance,” as Gavenda writes in the program notes, opens the opera with a massive, blazing chord, using horns, trumpets and timpani to augment the usual strings and reeds. Some commentators ascribe a military character to it, but not Gavenda.
“My theory is that brilliant E major chord is a flash of light — it represents enlightenment,” Gavenda says. “That’s what the opera is about.”
In 1991, New York Baroque Dance Company director Catherine Turocy staged the first modern production of the revised, 1746 version of “The Temple of Glory.” It’s entertaining and has beautiful music, says Turocy, who created the choreography for, and is staging, this new production. But the impact of the original opera, whose final act she describes as devastatingly beautiful, is far greater.
“There’s a monumental sense about it,” says Turocy, who praises the producers for mounting the work “with all the force needed to do it. I think these will be once-in-a-lifetime performances.”
For more information, go to www.calperformances.org.
Opera Parallèle adds tech leader to board
Susan McConkey, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s vice president of strategic initiatives and a tech-savvy arts honcho, has worked in software development at Hewlett Packard and other firms and was the San Francisco Opera’s chief information officer. In June, she can add president of the board of Opera Parallèle to that resume, too. McConkey will succeed Robert Ripps.
The rising chamber company closes its season May 26-28 with performances at the Conservatory of Philip Glass’ danceopera “Les Enfants Terribles.”
For information, visit www.operaparallele.org.