Cadmus & Hermione: tragédie lyrique de Lully et Quinalut
by Benjamin Lazar, Martin Fraudreau
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Actor: André Morsch, Arnaud Marzorati, Claire Lefilliâtre, Isabelle Druet, Vincent DumestreDirector: Benjamin Lazar, Martin Fraudreau
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); German (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); Dutch (Subtitled); Italian (Subtitled); English (Original Language); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; German (Original Language); Italian (Original Language); Japanese (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language)
Format: Classical, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 120 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-02-10
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Alpha Productions
DVD Reviews of Cadmus & Hermione: tragédie lyrique de Lully et Quinalut
DVD Review: Lully - La musique c'est moi.
Summary: 5 Stars
This production is so excellent that in order to appreciate fully its splendor it is necessary to look into history regarding the time it was premiered and at the composer's place in music, mainly in France. I would like to quote some great text from an important source:
""A very special sort of opera that would reign in France, one tailored to accommodate national prejudices, court traditions, and royal prerogatives. As the French court was the exemplary aristocratic establishment, so the French national opera was the courtiest court opera that ever was-- and hence the one most committed to the politics of affirmation. Like every other aspect of French administrative culture, it was wholly centralized. Its primary purpose was to furnish propaganda for the state and for the divine right of the king, and only secondarily to provide entertainment for the nobility and bourgeoisie. Indeed, no operatic spectacle could be shown to the French public that had not been prescreened, and approved, at court. At the same time, French opera aimed far higher than the "musical tale" of the Italians, which was essentially a pastoral play. The French form aspired to the status of a full-fledged tragédie en musique later tragédie lyrique, which meant that the values of the spoken drama, France's greatest cultural treasure, were as tar as possible to be preserved in spite of the music.
To reconcile the claims of court pageantry with those of dramatic gravity was no mean trick. Only a very special genius could bring it off - and it happened to be Giovanni Battista Lulli, a Florentine boy who had been brought over in 1646, at the age of thirteen, to serve as garcon de chambreto Madame de Montpensier, a Parisian lady who wanted to practice her Italian. She also supported his training in courtly dancing and violin playing. When his patroness, a Frondist, was exiled in 1652, Lulli secured release from her employ and found work as a dancer and a mime at the royal court, where he danced alongside, and made friends with, the teenaged king. Upon the death of his violin teacher the next year, Lulli assumed his position as court composer of instrumental music. His rise to supreme power was steady and unstoppable, for Lulli was a veritable musical Mazarin, an Italian-born French political manipulator of genius. With the founding in 1669 of the Académie Royale de Musique, Louis XIV's opera establishment (which the king shortly deeded over to his by then naturalized friend who, Like Mazarin, had Frenchified his name), Jean-Baptiste Lully became himself a musical Sun King, the absolute autocrat of French music, which he re-created in his own image. He died in 1687 (with his boots on, as it were, following a mishap with a time-beating cane), having produced thirteen tragedies lyriques.
The pattern that he set with them became the standard to which any composer aspiring to a court performance had to conform. Two generations of French musicians thus became Lully's dynastic heirs. His works would dominate the repertory for half a century after his death, in response not to market forces or to public demand but by royal decree, giving Lully a vicarious reign comparable in length of years to his patron's, and extending through most of the reign of the next king, Louis XV. His style did not merely define an art form; it defined a national identity. La musique, he might have said, c'est moi.
The ultimate "representation of power," the Lullian tragedie lyrique was from first to last a sumptuously outfitted--but, in another sense, quite thinly clad--metaphor for the grandeur and the authority of the court that it adorned. The monumental mythological or heroic-historical plots, some at first chosen by the king himself, celebrated the implacable universal order and the supremacy of divine or divinely appointed rulers.
A metaphor from first to last. First, following a marchlike overture whose stilted rhythms became a universal code for pomp, there had to be a panegyric prologue of a full act's duration. Here mythological beings were summoned to extol the French king's magnificent person and his deeds of war and peace with choral pageantry and with suites of dances modeled on the actual ballet de cour, an elaborate ritual, in which the king himself took part, that symbolized the social hierarchy.
Throughout the spectacle that followed, dancing, ceremonial movement accompanied by the grandest and most disciplined orchestra in Europe, would furnish a lavish symbolic counterpoint to the words, at times enlarging on the dramatic action, at times contrasting with it. The contemporary relevance of the allegory proclaimed at the first and affirmed at the last, was what really counted in a tragédie lyrique. To drive it home the players wore "modern dress," adapted from contemporary court regalia, just as the dances they danced were the sarabands, the gavottes, and the passepieds of the contemporary ballroom. The theatrical pageant was not merely reminiscent of a social dance; it wasa social dance enacted by professional proxies. The whole drama was conceived as a sublimated court ritual. Royal and noble spectators were looking not for transcendence but for validation. They did not value the kind of verisimilitude that makes the imaginary seem real. They wanted just the opposite: to see the real--that is, themselves--projected in to the fabulous and the archetypal.
Along with this peerless feast of symbolic movement and rich sonority went an unparalleled courtly intolerance of virtuoso singing, abjured not only for the usual negative reasons--uppity singers symbolized a polity in disarray--but for more positive reasons having to do with the theatrical traditions of France. Here verisimilitude of a very particular sort--fidelity to articulate language, which is the first thing that goes in florid, legato, "operatic" singing--suddenly loomed very large. The lead performers in French court opera remained nominally acteurs, and the voice of the castrato went unheard.
Rarely were French singing actors called upon to contend with the full orchestra. Their interminable scenes and confrontations were played against a bare figured bass in a stately, richly nuanced recitative whose supple rhythms in mixed meters caught the lofty cadence of French theatrical declamation. Lully for whom French was a second language, was said to have modeled this style directly on the closely observed delivery--the contours, the tempos, the rhythms, and the inflections--of La Champmeslé, Racine's handpicked tragedienne. There were no roulades and no cadenzas, but there were an infinity of "graces": tiny conventional embellishments--shakes, slides, swells-- that worked in harness with the bass harmony to punctuate the lines and to enhance their rhetorical projection. And there were all kinds of subtly graded transitions in and out of minuscule, simply structured "airs," set in plain couplets to dance rhythms, that animated the prosody while placing minimum barriers in the way of understanding.
This, in its way, was the perfect opera for opera haters: an eyeful of spectacle, one ear full of opulent instrumental timbre, the other ear full of high rhetorical declamation. Vocal melody was far from the first ingredient or the most potent one, and the singers were held forcibly in check. Vocal virtuosity was admitted only in a decorative capacity on a par with orchestral color and stage machinery--never as a metaphor of emotion run amok!--and had to emanate from the lips of anonymous coryphées: members of the populace, shades, athletes, planets. The dazzling general impression took absolute precedence over the particular participants. The concert of myriad forces in perfect harness under the aegis of a mastermind was the real message, whatever the story. While even Saint-Evremond had to admit that "no man can perform better than Lully upon an ill-conceived subject," he turned it into a barb: "I don't question but that in operas at the Palace-Royal, Lully is 1oo times more thought of than Theseus or Cadmus," his heroes. But that was all right, since the king was even more thought of than Lully. ""
We can see that this production perfectly abides by the rules prescribed to the opera by French culture at the time. The costumes and mise-en-scène so meticulously done in the period style, we can easily imagine ourselves in Versailles attending a performance, with the Sun King and the court present. The text/libretto is so incredibly smart and moralizing; it is an example of the typical baroque mindset - rational, a wry humor, deep feelings alongside sophistication and wisdom.
The singing is flawless; the acting is beautiful - the gestures, the ballet - such a perfection, and of course, it has a healthy dose of fun - the whole dragon affair is so entertaining, and surely inspires many smiles.
Of course, the allegory here is for the France confrontation with Holland in 1672; it seems as the defeated dragon is an allegory of Prince William III of Orange, who had been forced to raise the siege of Charleroi on 22 December. Needless to say, Louis is represented by Apollo, his traditional allegorical divinity, and the references to the bright sun in whose rays people warm are to Sun King himself.
The music is often so reminiscent of Monteverdi; to me the resemblance was the most striking in the duet of Cadmus and Hermione Act II, Scene IV "Je vais partir, belle Hermione" - toward the end when Hermione asks Cadmus to stay: "Vous fuyez?", the music reminds of a similar part of the Poppea and Nerone duet, where Poppea asks Nerone when he would come again: "Tornerai?".
My only wish would be that a libretto is included in DVD package, as it is commonly done in CDs.
Overall, it is the highest quality production and I highly recommend it to baroque opera lovers.
Description of Cadmus & Hermione: tragédie lyrique de Lully et Quinalut
The event of the year! Three years after Le Poème Harmonique's European DVD release of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (which sold 25,000+ copies), the team led by Vincent Dumestre and Benjamin Lazar has produced Cadmus & Hermione, the very first French opera, composed in 1673 by Lully on a libretto by Quinault. With reconstructed sets and costumes, this entirely candle-lit production will become a landmark in the rediscovery of baroque opera, providing a unique opportunity to discover a musical masterpiece that has fallen into oblivion over the last three centuries. Playable in all regions. Approx run time 120 min.Classical Music CDs
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