Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 5 - Le Comte Ory

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 34 Given its problematic birth, Le Comte Ory should have turned out to be a musical and dramatic muddle. The libretto began life as a one-act vaudeville play written in 1817 by Eugène Scribe and Charles- Gaspard Delestre-Poirson, based on a Crusaders’ ballad from Picardy about Count Ory and his followers, who disguise themselves as nuns to gain entry to the castle of Formoutiers so that Ory can try to win the affections of the Countess while her brother is away at the Crusades. For Rossini, Scribe added a prefatory act that recounts Ory’s initial attempt to breach the Countess’s defenses. Six musical numbers from Il viaggio a Reims (1825), an operatic entertainment Rossini wrote (in Italian) to celebrate the coronation of King Charles X in France, were recycled into the score of Ory . So artfully did Rossini adapt the self-borrowed numbers to their new dramatic context that the amalgam works beautifully in every respect. When Le Comte Ory had its premiere at the Paris Opera in 1828, it was rightly praised as one of Rossini’s most seamless and sophisticated inspirations. How, then, did the sound, rhythm, and phrasing of spoken French inspire Rossini musically? “I’m not sure it was an inspiration,” Mazzola replies. “We must remember that, at the time, Paris was the main opera house of the world: Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi all needed to have their works performed at the prestigious Opera. That meant adapting to a different language. But, in fact, the French language created problems for those composers. Fast, syllabic singing works perfectly well in Italian, because we have very clear vowels. But sung French requires the composers to slow things down. “And there’s another point—in the Italian school, the recitatives always follow the timing of the words. When sung in French, the rhythm of the recitative is written out, and you have to follow it. So when you perform Il viaggio a Reims and Le Comte Ory , they sound different, with different tempi and different recitative arrangements.” Only a single piece in Act I of Ory is entirely new— the duet for the Count and his page, Isolier (sung by mezzo-soprano Kayleigh Decker, an alumna of Lyric’s Ryan Opera Center). And, the situation is almost entirely reversed in Act II, for which Rossini borrowed only two compositions from Il viaggio . “It’s very peculiar for Rossini to reuse his own material; still, Le Comte Ory is not the only example of this,” Mazzola observes, citing the composer’s 1816 La gazzetta ( The Newspaper ), a comic pastiche that includes pieces from his earlier stage successes Barbiere , L’Italiana in Algeri , Il turco in Italia , and La Cenerentola . Jacob F.Lucas/Seattle Opera Lawrence Brownlee,mostly disguised, in a production at Seattle Opera.