Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 3 - Daughter of the Regiment

25 | Lyric Opera of Chicago in ways that would buttress his own regime. To this end, he took the initiative of getting Britain to agree to the return of Napoleon’s ashes from Saint-Helena where the British had con ned him in his last years. In a hugely spectacular ceremony in December 1840, the ex- Emperor’s remains were interred in the Invalides. The setting of the hyper-nationalistic The Daughter of the Regiment in Napoleonic Italy had personal resonance for Donizetti: It was where the composer was born and bred. He was born in the city of Bergamo in 1797, a matter of months after it was incorporated into the pro-French Cisalpine Republic, one of the so-called “Sister Republics” that Napoleon had set up all over the Italian peninsula after his brilliant Italian campaigns of 1796–97. The region would later be incorporated into the kingdom of Italy, a key part of the transnational Napoleonic empire. In 1815, Donizetti’s elder brother volunteered (like Tyrolean Tonio in the opera) for service in Napoleon’s Grand Army. Given these connections, Donizetti must have followed the return of Napoleon’s ashes with great interest. Reports of the day’s ceremonies highlighted the presence, wearing their old, threadbare uniforms, of many so-called grognards (“old grunters”), that is, veterans from Napoleonic armies. Since the 1820s, the grognard had become a stock type in the literature, popular songs, engravings, and caricatures that had burnished the Napoleonic Legend among the French people. Though still a serving of cer, Donizetti’s Sulpice is very much in the literary grognard mode. Heroine Marie, for her part, was modelled on the related stereotype of the vivandière . Such women, selling troops tobacco, alcohol, and other petty commodities to supplement army rations, and adopting laundry and nursing duties, had a history going back well into the 17th century. But they were particularly numerous in the Napoleonic wars and reputed for acts of patriotic valor and devotion. Ex-v ivandières rubbed shoulders with Napoleon’s grognards in the watching crowds. Threatening to thwart Tonio and Marie’s happy ending are forces both international and domestic. On the one hand, the French army removes the heel of reactionary Austrian and Bavarians rulers—represented in the opera by the Germanic-sounding Marquise de Berken eld—over the Italian peasantry. The latter warm to French conquerors who have brought them “land, culture, and equality,” and they look to bene t from the con scation of aristocratic lands, including the Marquise’s manor-house. They feel comfortable with the fraternal, egalitarian backslapping of the French soldiery, which shocks the Marquise, who confesses to regarding as “nonsensical, absurd, and preposterous” the democratic ideal of the common people governing the state. The con ict of values between the Tyrolean ruling classes and the French patriots is most clearly evidenced in the singing lesson that the Marquise administers to a very resistant Marie. The song at issue is not a Germanic Lied , moreover, but a French poem and melody. Yet it is of an out-of-date, whimsically arti cial sort that Donizetti’s bourgeois opera audiences would have associated with the old French aristocracy. Music comes to mirror the Marquise’s progressively comical failure to produce a veneer of gentility in an increasingly rebellious Marie. The winsome simpering ditty is drowned out by the marches and fanfares of trumpets, trombones, and drum-rolls of the French nation in arms. The music thus underlines the moral: Following one’s heart is always to be preferred to social promotion into the hide- bound aristocracy, and a noble heart will always trump a noble escutcheon. So Marie gives up high heels for army boots, abandoning her German, aristocratic, and anti-democratic mother so as to remain under the protection of her adoptive father, the 21st “La France” Regiment—and thus, more broadly, of her fatherland. With The Daughter of the Regiment , Donizetti gave the French public what he thought it would like to hear, as a shrewd but effective means of ensuring his own Parisian consecration. It showed a receptive audience that French patriotism could be seen and felt and sung— and all the better in the context of a successful love story. In that respect, Donizetti took a leaf out of the book of an earlier itinerant composer keen to make his mark in the Parisian opera world, namely, Mozart. In The Marriage of Figaro as in The Daughter of the Regiment , “ tout nit par des chansons ”—a fact that all lovers of happy endings and great operas will strongly approve. Colin Jones is Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London and Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. His many books include Paris: Biography of a City (2006). The bravura performances of Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti (shown here in 1973) cemented the opera’s popularity in the U.S. Met Archives / Met Opera