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Could it be magic?
The Adventures of Pinocchio by Jonathan Dove is a new opera in a long, magical tradition. JULIAN GRANT conjures up its family tree
…vehicle for sopranos, orchestras and set designers, even if the plot remains baffling.
La commedia non è finita
Wagner might seem the embodiment of German nationalism, yet Die Feen is in fact drawn from an Italian literary source, the Fiabe teatricali (theatrical fables) of Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806). These plays, a blend of folk tale and commedia dell’arte, provided rich pickings for 20th-century composers, including Ferruccio Busoni, Alfredo Casella, Hans Werner Henze, and, most famously, Giacomo Puccini. Turandot, the tale of a man-hating Chinese princess, is often described as a fairy-tale opera, although there are no genies or magical transformations. Busoni’s 1917 version is more fantastical and heartless than Puccini’s multi-layered interpretation, left unfinished at his death in 1924. Another opera based on Gozzi is Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges (1921), a comical and sometimes scurrilous piece. The mercurial music is not always easy to grasp – the famous March is the biggest tune – but the work’s pace, drama and irreverence make it eminently theatrical.
Out of the nursery
Remarkably few repertoire operas are based on household-name fairy tales. Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1893) is an obvious exception. Humperdinck was making a conscious attempt to write something German, yet populist – a reaction against Wagner’s mythic enormity on one hand and popular Italian realism (verismo) on the other. Richard Strauss, who conducted many early performances, predicted huge success for Hänsel, and he was right: by World War I, it had been translated into twenty languages. Wagner’s influence is evident in its orchestration and harmonies, but the melodic style is much lighter and more clearly inspired by folk tunes, while the characters retain the freshness, simplicity and clarity of a genuine folk-tale. As for Cinderella, Rossini leads the operatic league. Yet his La Cenerentola of 1816 (the focus of a recent OperaLovers podcast) has no explicit magical elements. Instead of a Fairy Godmother, Cinderella has Dandini – a Figaro-style (or maybe Buttons-style) jack-of-all-trades – while the glass slipper is replaced by a bracelet: Rome’s sensitive censor would not tolerate an unshod feminine foot onstage. The other great composers of Italy’s 19th-century golden age, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, favour human rather than supernatural drama, although Puccini’s early Le villi, like Adam’s famous ballet Giselle, tells the story of a jilted girl whose spirit returns to haunt her lover.
Massenet’s 1899 version of Cinderella, Cendrillon retains the magic ingredients. This glittering and bubbly, if slightly protracted, score has recently resurfaced with some success. A quarter century later, the writer Colette made a sophisticated fairy-tale assemblage for Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges (The Child and the Spells). It begins with a naughty child vandalising his nursery in a tantrum – foreshadowing Maurice Sendak’s now classic book Where the Wild Things Are, seen in Oliver Knussen’s operatic version at Glyndebourne in 1984.
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