I know not all of my readers share my enthusiasm for opera but stay with me while I tell you about why I’m so interested in this thing about Mignon. I have tickets for a new production (by New Sussex Opera) of the little performed opera, Mignon (1866), by the relatively unknown French composer Ambroise Thomas (1811 – 1896).  No reason to go on about it, you may think.  New Sussex Opera is based in my (well known) home town of Lewes and specialises in productions of lesser known gems from the operatic repertoire so I’m excited to see what they make of it when I’m at the Eastbourne performance on November 22nd but that’s not the whole story.

The opera is a reworking of the tragic tale of little Mignon, the most sympathetic character in the great German writer, Goethe’s influential, Romantic and wildly popular novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1796). Goethe was a good bet as a primary source when 19th Century French opera was all the rage – the equivalent of 20th Century Hollywood movies which also raided literary classics for sensational effect. Thomas’ Mignon (1866) was preceded by Gounod’s greatest hit, Faust (1859) and followed by Massenet’s Werther (1887). Lovers of Goethe tend to sneer at these examples of operatic showbiz but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us can’t enjoy them for what they are. I, for one, have always had an unhealthy interest in the backwaters of 19th Century opera.

In the opera, Mignon is promoted to the main character. She is an innocent young woman, a wandering singer who was kidnapped by gypsies as a baby and only has distant memories of her origins in an ancient castle and now makes her melancholy way through life with her companion, an old man with a harp. We all love a melancholy maiden apparently and the opera made Mignon an international celebrity popularised by a series of best-selling postcard photographs – another phenomenon of the 1860s – and even finding a place on restaurant menus as a recipe for pinkish pork or beef,  Filet Mignon.

 

Victorian postcard photographs of Mignon.

My fascination with this period and with opera in particular stems from my schoolboy obsession born from multiple readings of an old book that is still in my possession even if, like me, it now really shows its age. The Complete Opera Book is an incomplete guide to opera by pioneering American music critic Gustav Kobbé. It is incomplete because Gustav Kobbé (1857 – 1918) died before completing his manuscript and the book was first published (posthumously) in the United States in 1919 (USA) and then an English edition in 1922.

 

I have had my precious copy of the 1925 reprint since I was but a lad of 13 and, although there have been a number of updated versions, known as Kobbé’s Opera Book (notably by the confidently opera-literate royal, the Earl of Harewood in 1954),  I’ve always stuck with the original, wondering why anyone could think that they could add to something that had such inimitable charm. I prefer pure Kobbé even though my copy is much damaged and, sadly on one occasion, leaked on from above in a plumbing disaster. Kobbé’s final entry was for the Spanish composer  Enrique Granados’ 1916 opera, Goyescas and I have always been happy to leave this lovely book there.

 

Gustav Kobbé (1857 – 1918)

It is a marvellous document of the period with wonderfully personal and often erudite opinions based on Gustav Kobbé’s memories, mostly at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, of opera productions with the legendary opera singers of the 1890s until the early 20th Century – illustrated with classic photographs of the main stars, Nellie Melba, Enrico Caruso, Jean and Edouard de Reszke, Pol Plançon and Emmy Destinn amongst others. These people were some of the earliest operatic ‘celebrities’ to fascinate me and led me to develop an interest in old opera recordings of the early 20th Century – a true Golden Age for singing.

It was also in this book where I first read about Ambroise Thomas’ Mignon where Kobbé tells us that even by the 1890s, this popular ‘hit’ had begun to fade writing that “it is a work of delicate texture; of charm rather than passion; with a story that is, perhaps, too ingenuous to appeal to sophisticated audiences of the modern opera house.” His opinion is sound, I think, but maybe today’s so-called sophisticated audiences might find more attraction in the work’s period charm than Kobbé did when he first saw the work on the 5th December, 1883.

 

In my early teens I had all the patience of an adolescent stamp collector so I pawed over these pages memorising cast lists and production dates and trying to imagine what these pieces would have sounded like. I knew what they looked like, of course, because of those old photographs and the others I struggled to find – including this moody photograph of the very first Mignon, the French mezzo-soprano Célestine Galli-Marié (1840-1905). Later, after Mignon’s 1866 debut, Mme Célestine Galli-Marié was also the first Carmen in Bizet’s famous opera of the same name (1875). An apparently infatuated Georges Bizet is reported to have found her perfect in the role so I am assuming she was pretty good as Mignon too as the opera became an instant hit.

 

Célestine Galli-Marié  was also the first Carmen.

My first encounter with any of the music from Mignon was when I heard a recording of the opera’s most famous aria, ‘Connais-tu le pays?‘ sung by the phenomenal American mezzo-soprano, Marilyn Horne who, with the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland, had introduced me to many of the so-called ‘forgotten’ operas of the 19th Century. Like so many of the other operas I had read about in Kobbé, Mignon seemed not just to contain beautiful music but it seemed perfectly stage-worthy too. Marilyn Horne performed the part in a 1970s production in Dallas, Texas and then went on to record the complete opera which I devoured with genuine curiosity mixed with enthusiasm. Well, most things that I heard Marilyn Horne sing were alright by me. It was also performed successfully by that other great American mezzo Federica von Stade in 1984. I missed those performances and missed it again later at the 1986 Wexford Festival.

 

Marilyn Horne as Mignon in Dallas, 1974.

I haven’t been able to see any of the other, admittedly infrequent productions of Mignon either even when it was staged in the UK at the Buxton Opera Festival in 2011.

 

Mignon at the Buxton Opera Festival (2011)

So, now you know why, after all these years,  I’m so interested to see the latest production by New Sussex Opera and I hope, at last to discover whether Gustav Kobbé was right about the opera as being perhaps “too ingenuous to appeal to sophisticated audiences of the modern opera house.” It won’t be too ingenuous for me, that’s for sure, so let’s hope it isn’t for the sophisticated Eastbourne and Lewes audiences either.

 

Oh yes, lest I forget, you might want to hear that famous aria from the opera, ‘Connais-tu le pays?’

as recorded by Marilyn Horne in 1968. Give it a go, you might like it:

 

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As a rather moody eighteen year old, I had a Summer holiday job working as a waiter in the small and very pretty Sussex village of Alfriston.  For over two months I lived in the building on the left of the photograph below called, accurately enough, the Tudor House. It was indeed a largely Sixteenth Century building with earlier bits discernable if you looked hard enough.  It was a beautiful if somewhat spooky house owned by a couple whose son, about my age, was away for the Summer doing something much more exciting than working as a waiter. I inherited his room at the front on the left hand side with a very atmospheric view down the High Street.

It was mostly very hard work. My job was to get the place ready every morning in time to open for morning coffee then to serve the pre-lunch customers – mostly coffee and scones – and then to gradually set up the tables for lunch when I was joined by two or three other waiters or waitresses who travelled in by bus from a nearby town. Alfriston was, and I guess still is, a very busy tourist village in the Summer so we were kept pretty active serving meals indoors and in the garden at the back from Noon until 2.30 every day and then taking half an hour for our own lunch before turning the restaurant round again for afternoon tea when even larger crowds, often in coach-loads,  descended on us for cream teas with cakes and icecream. Two or three evenings a week I served dinner too so there wasn’t a lot of time to mess around.

I remember the Summer of my eighteenth year as hot and long but then that might be true of everyone’s memories of that most atmospheric of times in our lives. I enjoyed living in this old house and, once I had decided not to be spooked by stories of the place’s ghost and learnt to ignore those bumps in the night, I felt almost at home. The owners mostly left me to myself when I was off duty so I could spend my time idling with a book, playing with the two large Alsatian dogs or the two rather sinister black cats hoping that my waiter’s feet would eventually stop aching all the time. They did and soon it was as if I had always been a waiter in this lovely place.

The proprietors’ son was obviously cherished, if not spoiled, by his parents because, much to my envy, they had build him a chalet at the bottom of the garden that he used as his study/den and, most enviably of all, because it was a long way from the house and the neighbours, he was given a powerful stereo system that he could play away from prying ears. I was determined to get in there and to try it out as I had only ever heard hi-fi equipment in Music classes at school. I was scheduled to go to music college that Autumn and music was, as it still is, my obsession.

My relatives had been buying me opera recordings since my early teens but the newer stereo recordings had to be played in boring old mono. My wages were never going to buy a decent stereo player so I had to content myself with envious daydreams about that little wooden building at the bottom of the garden. On a rare day off, I returned home and secreted away my latest opera recording, Ponchielli’s La Gioconda (written as you may have guessed if you have been following these blogs) in 1875. This story came back to me because I have just been listening to music written that year as part of my self-imposed journey through the history of classical music.

The composer, Amilcare Ponchielli, is not one of the greats but in this passionate, tuneful and wonderfully melodramatic opera, he found his voice and wrote something that instantly blew the moodily eighteen year old me away. I just had to hear it on that stereo system with the giant speakers I had spotted through the window. I thought up various devious ways of getting in there but in the end just asked the owners and they said yes.

Now this was my first solo experience with very expensive hi-fi and excited would be an understatement for the way I felt. I was free that evening, it was one of those endlessly light Summer evenings when the temperature never dropped below very hot. I went down there with the key, sorted out the controls, put on the first LP and sat back across the room on an indulgently comfortable sofa ignoring the sauna conditions soon generated by having to keep the windows closed. Now for me there is only one volume for Italian opera and that is as loud as you can make it. The  stereo system didn’t disappoint and the little wooden shed truly rocked.

The role of La Gioconda was taken by the great Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi, nearing the end of her career as the possessor of the best lyric soprano voice of her generation. For her twilight career, she decided to let rip and in this recording threw caution to the wind and gave it her considerable best plus a whole lot more. The other stars met her on her own level and fulfilled the promise of this opera where all the main characters are totally out of control and often hysterical  through the extremes of passionate love. This was, in my opinion, what love was meant to be like. The opera performance that evening will always play in my memory as one of the most exciting moments of my life – sad though that might seem to you.

The evening turned to night and the last note faded leaving me silent, overwhelmed and thrilled. I savoured the moment for as long as I could but then there was a knock on the door.

Yes, you may have guessed, what had been the right volume to my ears, had been received as an outrageous onslaught on the tranquil sensibilities of Alfriston’s villagers. Apparently there had been telephone calls from irate people way down the High Street but the owners of the restaurant, bless them, didn’t tell me about it until the music ended.

I couldn’t repeat the experience, of course, as I wasn’t interested in playing the music pianissimo but I didn’t regret it or, in my youthful arrogance, express any remorse. There could never be a more exciting way to experience the all-or-nothing glories of Ponchielli’s opera. It still had that power when I played the recording again, decades later, as part of my nerdy musical project.

If you dare, play this clip from the recording as loud as you can and, hopefully you will see what I mean when the two main females, Renata Tebaldi and Marilyn Horne sing ferociously in a vocal competition to see who loved the poor tenor hero , Enzo, the most. Horne, as Laura, sings “I love him as the very breath of life!” but Gioconda counters with “I love him like the lion loves when it’s drawn to blood, the wind to flight, the lightning to the summit…and the eagle to the sun!” These women are not to be messed with, either of them.

This is the music I still hear when I walk down that quaintly beautiful Sussex village high street:

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