Daniel-François-Esprit Auber: La Fiancée du roi de Garbe
Editor: Robert Ignatius Letellier
Date Of Publication: May 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2887-1
Isbn: 1-4438-2887-4
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, high Wagnerian transcendentalism, and 20th-century experimentalism.

La Fiancée du Roi de Garbe, an opéra-comique in three acts, with libretto by Eugène Scribe and Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges, was premiered at the Opéra-Comique (Deuxième Salle Favart) on 11 January 1864.

The subject is borrowed from a story by Boccaccio, which had been turned into a short erotic tale in verse by La Fontaine. It has a partly Oriental setting; ‘Garbe’ is an Arabic word for the West, suggesting that this may originally have been an Arab tale before being taken up by Boccaccio.

In La Fontaine’s tale, Alaciel, the daughter of Zaïr, the sultan of Alexandria, is to marry the King of Garbe. Alaciel sets out to sea on her journey accompanied by Hispal, a young noble who is in love with her. They are attacked by pirates, jump overboard, and are washed up on a desert shore. The young princess experiences many adventures before finally reaching her destination, where there is a happy ending, and the King of Garbe accepts her as his bride.

Scribe and Saint-Georges adapted this conte to the mores of the time and the exigencies of the stage. It becomes a picaresque tale built around Alaciel’s journey from Garbe, where she marries the king (in act 1), through various adventures to her home to Egypt (in act 2), and back to Garbe (in act 3), attended all the while by the king’s dashing nephew Don Alvar, with his entourage of the royal barber Figurina, and his cupbearer Truxillo. The pirates, and various characters from Arabic folklore (the imam and the hermit), feature in the central desert act, while the outer two are set in the Occidental royal court of Garbe.

This was the last collaboration between Auber and Scribe, terminated, after the death of the latter, by Saint-Georges. The work was treated by both authors and musician in the manner of an operetta, apart from the fourth tableau, the scene of the pirates, which has the dramatic character of an operatic finale.

Act 2 of La Fiancée du Roi de Garbe shows Saint-Georges trying to bring in various elements from the source. The composer derived positive inspiration from some of the characters, and he was especially taken by Alaciel and her companion, in their tent set up in the desert for them by Don Alvar. He set this scene to music with his familiar spirit, youthfulness of melody, and finesse of harmony. This act comes across musically as the best section of the score.

The cast were: Victor Prilleux (Bobolin, the King of Garbe); Valérie Tual (Alaciel); Léon Achard (Don Alvar); Alexandrine Cico (Figurina); Charles-Louis Sainte-Foy (Truxillo); Davoust (the Sultan of Egypt); Charles-Amable Bataille (Kouli-Rouka); Charles-Francois Duvernoy (Hatchi-Bounan); Elias Nathan (Ali-Caphar); and Zoé Bélia and Augusta Colas (Raphael and Paer). The opera did not endure beyond a first flush of enthusiasm. It was in the repertoire for one year, l864, and numbered 33 performances.

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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