Daniel-François-Esprit Auber: Haydée
Editor: Robert Ignatius Letellier
Date Of Publication: Apr 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2854-3
Isbn: 1-4438-2854-8
Daniel-François-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 Bergère Châteleine (1820), written at the age of 38, established him as an operatic composer. He then met the librettist Eugène 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 Maçon (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 Légion 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, Wagnerian transcendentalism, and twentieth-century experimentalism.

Haydée, an opéra-comique in three acts, with libretto by Eugène Scribe, was first performed at the Opéra-Comique (Deuxième Salle Favart), on 28 December 1847. 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 Mérimée’s novella collection La Partie de trictrac (1830) and Alexandre Dumas (père)’s novel Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1845). He obtained the central anecdote of the plot from one of Prosper Merimée’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 16th century. Lorédan 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 Lorédan has brought up his daughter Rafaëla, and has been searching for the senator’s son, Andrea. The disquieted Lorédan is blackmailed by the unscrupulous Malipieri until the latter is killed in a duel, and it is revealed that Andrea is the long-lost son of the senator Donato. Lorédan is elevated to the dignity of doge of Venice. He reunites Rafaëla and Andrea, and himself marries his Cypriot slave, Haydée.

The opera belongs to the genre of the serious opéra-comique. The chief themes are Lorédan’s pangs of conscience, Malipieri’s villainy, and the growing love between Lorédan and Haydée. Both text and music derive their strongest effect from the continual contrast between external action (nautical life, popular songs and Venetian pomp) and the convolutions of inner drama. There is hardly a weak moment in the score, and in the serious sections it achieves a height and intensity that Auber had not attained in the serious mode since La Muette de Portici (1828). This work is the most distinguished product of the third period of Auber’s career, and is one of his richest scores, a feature apparent from the musical treatment of the tenor hero, a substantial role conceived from the first with the great Gustave Roger in mind. The heroine is also depicted with subtlety. Haydée’s tender understanding, her devotion to Lorédan, the totality of her self-sacrificing love, are revealed in the course of the opera. She becomes one of Scribe’s great female characters.

The strength and controlled forcefulness of the story are consistently reflected in the masterful musical conception of the score. The quasi-tragic nature of the action is underpinned in the power of the music, with its strong writing for brass and woodwind, and its very emphatic rhythms. It is ultimately a concern with psychological exploration, its reflection in formal invention and development, the elemental and local apprehension of colour, and the depiction of the Venetian spirit of military prowess and pride that give the score its unique place in the composer’s work.

The roles were created by Gustave-Hippolyte Roger (Lorédan Grimani); Léonard Hermann-Léon (Malipieri); Louise Lavoye (Haydée); Sophie Grimm (Rafaëla); Marius-Pierre Audran (Andrea Donato); and Ricquier (Domenico, a sailor). Haydée was one of the most successful of all Auber’s operas, especially in Paris where, with interruptions, it was retained in the repertoire until 1894, attaining 499 performances.

This edition reproduces the vocal score published in Paris by Brandus & Dufour (1848).

Robert Ignatius Letellier has specialized in the music and literature of the Romantic Period. He has studied the work of Giacomo Meyerbeer (a four-volume English edition of his diaries, a collection of critical and biographical studies, a guide to research, two readings of the operas, as well as compiling and introducing editions of the complete libretti and non-operatic texts, and a selection of manuscripts facsimiles). He has also written on the ballets of Ludwig Minkus, compiled a series of scores on the Romantic Ballet, and produced studies of the opéra-comique and Daniel-François-Esprit Auber.

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