Introduction
This album features repertoire centred on a novel idea: French grand opera solely composed by two Italian bel canto greats. Thoughtful programming provides a balance of contrasts. Renowned soprano Lisette Oropesa, along with conductor Corrado Rovaris, weave together beloved bel canto standards from La fille du régiment and Guillaume Tell with lesser produced gems like Le siège de Corinthe, Le comte Ory, Les martyrs, and, most surprisingly, the other Lucia, Lucie de Lammermoor. While Rossini and Donizetti are known for shaping the Italian tradition in the first half of the nineteenth century, this compilation of their French works presents a delightful and insightful perspective into Parisian grand opera of the 1820s–30s. The album is separated equally between the two behemoths with four substantial arias by each composer.
The liner notes by musicologist Francesco Izzo span six pages and provide detailed historical background and musical analyses. Izzo argues that Rossini's revisions are not ‘straightforward translations or rushed adaptations of their Italian sources’ (liner notes, 9).Footnote 1 Rather, they show Rossini's creative prowess to combine newly composed music and declamatory French melodies with thoughtfully adapted selections from his Italian operas. Considering whether the French style and Italian bel canto are contradictory, Izzo claims that while these two national schools are presumably incompatible, they ‘actually shared a great deal. The idea of French bel canto, to be sure, is no oxymoron; it is an emblem of a world of opera in which stylistic and esthetical overlaps coexisted with long-standing notions of national culture and genres’ (liner notes, 14).
Printed materials also include clear translations and photos of the recording. Particularly poignant is a photograph of the orchestra, spaced sufficiently away from one another, depicting the circumstances of recording during the Covid-19 pandemic in April 2021. Since the album's release in 2022, it has won best Recording ‘Solo Recital’ at the 2023 International Opera Awards. And in this author's opinion, the album lives up to the award, as the subsequent observations will illuminate.
Famous Sopranos
Is Lisette Oropesa our generation's Laure Cinti-Damoreau (1801–1863)? Cinti-Damoreau, an adored French soprano, debuted three Rossini French prima donna roles showcased on this album: Pamyre, Adèle, and Mathilde. Working at the Théâtre-Italien when Rossini took over in the autumn of 1824, Cinti-Damoreau had already sung five of Rossini's Italian operas, including Il Barbiere, Tancredi, Elisabetta, Moïsè, and La Cenerentola. While Rossini preferred to cast the Italian singers in the company, he favoured Cinti-Damoreau, who was well-trained in the Italian bel canto repertoire, particularly, his. She ‘became the French spearhead of Rossini's Italian invasion’,Footnote 2 and the composer wrote his French leads for her.
Examining the careers of the sopranos who debuted the French repertoire of Rossini and Donizetti reveals what constitutes the ideal voices for these roles. By 1835, Belgian soprano Julie Dorus-Gras (1805–1896) had replaced Cinti-Damoreau as the desired soprano at the Paris Opéra.Footnote 3 While Cinti-Damoreau had originated Elvire in Auber's La Muette de Portici in Paris, Dorus-Gras won fame singing Elvire in the Brussels premiere. Both Dorus-Gras and Cinti-Damoreau sang the Countess in Rossini's Le comte Ory and Mathilde in Guillaume Tell. This overlap of roles indicates their voices possessed similar required qualities, like extreme agility and range. During Dorus-Gras’ 15-year tenure at the Opéra, she debuted many new roles by Donizetti as well, including Pauline in his Les martyrs as well as sections of Lucie.Footnote 4 It stands to say, then, that Oropesa must possess a similar vocal facility in flexibility and florid execution to these two premiere sopranos.
Oropesa holds a position as one of the rising stars of our generation. Most recently, she was heralded for her ‘shimmering, luminous soprano voice, ideally suited for bel canto’.Footnote 5 Singing the demanding repertoire with such finesse and skill, Oropesa's voice may be the next in the lineage of other renowned sopranos who sang these roles over the centuries. Among the lesser performed operas, the leading heroine in Rossini's Le siège de Corinthe was performed in Italian by Renata Tebaldi in Florence (1949), while Beverly Sills made her house debuts with Pamyre at La Scala (1969) and the Metropolitan Opera (1975).Footnote 6
Of the staple repertoire on this album, Marie in La fille du régiment is a role that has bolstered the fame of many a soprano. Notable historical interpretations include Jenny Lind in London (1847), Lily Pons in New York City (1940s), and Joan Sutherland in both London (1966) and New York (1972).Footnote 7 In the twenty-first century, Natalie Dessay made Marie one of her signature roles, specifically in the 2007 Laurent Pelly production of La fille. The visually captivating production has made the rounds among the top-tier opera houses over the last decade and a half, with Oropesa wearing Pelly's iconic red, spiky pixie cut complete with swooped ponytail at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2023.
Two Italians Composing in France
While Rossini and Donizetti each wished to work in Paris for its reputation, their means of attaining contracts differed. The state-supported Parisian theatres needed new talent to revitalize public enthusiasm for opera following the Napoleonic wars and the restoration of the conservative Bourbon monarchy in 1814.Footnote 8 Rossini's international recognition made him highly desirable. In 1821, the royal theatre administrator, Baron de La Freté, invited Rossini to compose for the Paris Opéra. Yet his first position in the city was as Directeur de la musique et de la scene (Director of Music and Stage) at the Théâtre-Italien from 1824–26. When that expired, the government of King Charles X appointed him Inspecteur general du chant en France (General Inspector of Singing in France), and he began to write in French for the Opéra.
Stendhal's preface to La Vie de Rossini in 1823 puts Rossini's transnational celebrity status into perspective. ‘Depuis la mort de Napoléon, il s'est trouvé un autre homme duquel on parle tous les jours à Moscou comme à Naples, à Londres comme à Vienne, à Paris comme à Calcutta. La gloire de cet homme ne connaît d'autres bornes que celles de la civilisation, et il n'a pas trente-deux ans!’ (After the death of Napoleon, one has found another man whose name is spoken every day from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, from Paris to Calcutta. The glory of this man knows no other limits than those of civilization, and he is only 32 years old!).Footnote 9 Though Stendhal's admiring bias is evident, his statements depict the cultural fascination with the composer. Rossini's fame only continued to grow by the time of the highly anticipated Guillaume Tell at the end of the decade. To be sure, the vocal lyricism and visual grandeur of Tell demonstrated Rossini's mature command of assimilating national styles.
Both composers sought to insert their compositions into the institutions of Paris, and they went about doing so in similar fashions: self-borrowing. Rossini expert Phillip Gossett clarified Rossini's practice of borrowing as ‘selective’, noting that Rossini tended to re-use music that was not widely circulated or not expected to endure in the repertoire. Yet, ‘once an opera was popular, he left it alone’.Footnote 10 All three of the operas presented on this album represent Rossini's common practice of borrowing. The music of Le siège de Corinthe and Le comte Ory, especially, have similar self-borrowing histories. Le comte is an expanded version of his coronation entertainment Il viaggio a Reims from three years earlier, and Le siège is an edited version of his Neapolitan opera Maometto II from six years before. Guillaume Tell, too, includes self-borrowed music from many of his earlier operas, though much of it was newly composed. James H. Johnson describes Rossini's French works at the Paris Opéra in the 1820s as ‘a shot of adrenaline’ to the rigid institution.Footnote 11 Le siège brought the crowds and the spectacle, signalling towards the next monumental genre of French theatre, grand opéra, while Guillaume Tell marks the mastering of the genre.
Donizetti's path to Paris was not as welcoming. For three years Donizetti worked to secure contracts at the Théâtre-Italian. However, his reputation in France was unstable. Despite rumours of his productivity and compositional speed, he was not taken seriously by the director of the Opéra, Charles Duponchel. But his production of Lucia di Lammermoor at the Théâtre-Italian in December 1837 finally won him regard. William Ashbrook describes the Lucia mania, saying, ‘the enthusiasm it evoked bordered on hysteria. From the start it was clear that here was a triumph not only for extraordinary singers but for a composer whose music touched contemporary sensibilities to their depths’.Footnote 12 This success secured Donizetti's entrance into the Parisian theatrical scene.
Following the Neapolitan king's ban on his opera Poliuto for its religious topic about a martyr, Donizetti gladly left Naples in October 1838. Foremost among his various reasons, Poliuto would have another chance at production since the French censors allowed multiple types of death to be expressed on stage. Additionally, fees were higher, and publishers tended to offer better terms. Most significant, Donizetti was attracted to the prestige of Paris that would boost his budding career. Donizetti agreed to give two French operas at the Paris Opéra, using this as an opportunity to expand the three act Poliuto into four acts as Les martyrs. His compositional self-borrowing processes, described in his correspondence, included rewriting recitatives, writing a new Act 1 finale, as well as adding new arias, trios, and ballets.
Impressively, Donizetti was simultaneously working on Les martyrs, Lucie, and La fille from 1839–1840 – along with other composition projects. No wonder his letters from this period recount his exhaustion and bad health. Despite finishing Les martyrs first, its production was held up at the Opéra, meaning La fille was the first of his French operas to be premiered. While initially met with bad reviews, these were believed to have been targeted by his rivals to defame him. But to no avail, as the opera's prolonged history in the canon proves.Footnote 13
Reception History and Oropesa's Embodiment
Le siège de Corinthe and Pamyre
Though Rossini was writing for the Opéra during the tensions of the Bourbon Restoration, his first fully French opera in 1826, Le siège de Corinthe, was eagerly received by audiences and the state theatrical administrations alike, with some calling it a ‘revolution in French opera’.Footnote 14 By 1839, it had one hundred performances, and it remained in the Opéra's repertoire until 1844.Footnote 15 It was then produced in Italian all over Italy and the rest of Europe through the end of the century. While its Italian version was revived in the mid-twentieth century, the opera was not heard again in French until 1992 and has not become a regularly produced opera, making its inclusion in this album particularly distinct.
The first aria, ‘Que vai-je devenir … Du séjour de la lumière’ (Act II, No.5), opens the album with immense verve and pending excitement. The string tremolos underpin an accompagnato recitative full of inquiry and emotional unrest. From phoneme to phrase, Oropesa demonstrates her immediate mastery of the French language. At ‘O Patrie’, the rhythmic march-like scoring exudes patriotism, breaking with the accompagnato's trembling and inviting characteristic Rossinian coloratura to ornament a four-line stanza that triumphantly finishes the first section of this double-aria.
Upon first listening, I was struck with how the prayerful text of the subsequent section evokes an association of Bellini's ‘Casta diva’. While one can only speculate whether Bellini heard (and therefore, was influenced by) a production of Le siège, the libretto for Norma was adapted from the French playwright Alexandre Soumet, who happened to be the co-librettist of Le siège.Footnote 16 This peculiar overlap signifies some notable connection between Norma and Le siège that could be further investigated.
The four-line stanza in the second section of the aria, ‘Du séjour de la lumière’, is set three times, each with new musical material.Footnote 17 Oropesa handles each setting's patterns, whether standard triplet or turn or trill, with captivating clarity. As Pamyre begs the tender mother to hear her prayer again in the second setting, Rossini depicts a sombre mood by thickening the texture with sustained brass and woodwinds over new heartbeat-like syncopations in the strings. The demanding vocal demisemiquaver figures in the final setting of the text, especially, bring the supplicant and urgent character of the music to fruition. Despite the demanding coloratura, Oropesa produces an ultimate legato balanced with note precision. The full, yet blended, women's chorus matches her beauty.
At ‘Mais après’ (but after), Oropesa demonstrates her evenness of scale; the lower notes in the primo passagio are rich and full, particularly the E4 on ‘mais’, which brings attention to the power of this conjunction to introduce dramatic conflict. Impressively, she easily ascends into the top with the same richness possessed on the E4. The voice does not thin out in her upper extension but maintains a luscious, balanced chiaroscuro.
Her full resonance does not weigh her down, either. She closes the aria with effervescence and efficiency in the exceedingly fast-moving passages that bring the 12-minute scene to a triumphant flourishing finish. The scene exemplifies Rossini's compositional talent to merge new music, especially refined recitatives in the French style, with existing music from the original Italian opera Maometto II. Izzo charts the exact nature of this adaption in the liner notes (10).
The next aria is from Act III of Le siège. It presents the voice and harp in duet with an exposed, yet entrancing, texture. Combined with Oropesa's floating, unpresuming execution of delicate coloratura, the aria exhibits Rossini's ability to capture the audience through not only grand spectacle but also through intimacy.
Le comte Ory and Adèle
Rossini continued to win success in Paris with Le comte Ory. Similar to Le siège, Le comte Ory initially charmed audiences, remained in the Opéra's repertoire of years, and was produced internationally in the decades after its premiere.Footnote 18 While it was also revived in Italian in the mid-twentieth century, its contemporary performances in French have only been more regular in the last two decades. Four revivals in the United Kingdom took place in the 1950s and another in Rome in 1970. It took nearly thirty years for the opera to be performed again, in 1996 at Opéra de Lausanne in Switzerland. Since that revival, Le comte Ory has been produced 136 times, according to the records on operabase.com.Footnote 19
In terms of self-borrowing, five of Il viaggio a Reims’ nine numbers were repurposed in Le comte Ory. The elaborate aria, ‘En proie à la tristesse’, is an adaption of Contessa di Folleville's aria, ‘Partir, o ciel! Desio’ from Il viaggio. The original setting calls for parody, as the melodramatic Contessa bemoans the loss of her expensive attire in a carriage accident. No one likes missing luggage, after all. In the context of the new plot, though, La Comtesse Adèle must express honest inner conflict over her loneliness and concern for her brother fighting in the Crusades.
The required vulnerability may be new, but according to Osborne, Rossini's vocal writing for this aria is perhaps the singular example in the French version that maintains his characteristic earlier virtuosic demanded of soprano heroines.Footnote 20 Indeed, I have performed the role of the Contessa and know the complexities of this aria's coloratura: demisemiquavers and hemidemisemiquavers abound. Furthermore, when the Metropolitan Opera revived Le comte Ory in 2011, Diana Damrau set a standard for singing this role. Cemented in my memory is Damrau, clad in a striking iridescent violet gown, performing Adèle with silvery smooth precision. Oropesa holds her own against this vivid recollection. Her voice possesses such fullness of resonance matched with a sparkling vibrato amidst the aria's overly active melismas. Particularly notable is Oropesa's adept handling of the languid triplet passages and the exact descending scales in the breakneck speed of the cabaletta. Her mastery of the French language and style are showcased, yet again.
Guillaume Tell and Mathilde
Responding to the 1829 premiere of Guillaume Tell, a Le Globe critic professed, ‘For three years Rossini has been practicing with our language and preparing his singers, his public, and his genius for the extraordinary work that has just been born. A conqueror as prude as he is daring, he did not venture on foreign grounds’.Footnote 21 By the time of Charles X's overthrow a year later, Rossini's Tell had been produced 43 times at the Opéra.Footnote 22 In the years following, the opera was produced in cut-up, reduced, and varying versions.
The heightened political milieu of the July Revolution reflects audience taste. The Tell story was well known in European society, and by the end of the 1820s, multiple theatres were producing various versions of it, like the Opéra-Comique revival of Grétry's 1791 opera. How did Rossini's grand opera fit into this popular culture? Was it his spectacle and grandeur of sound and sight that captivated audiences? Or did the revolutionary parallel of Swiss liberals fighting against the oppressive tyranny of absolute rulers resonate with audiences? Likely, some of both, but while the latter makes for a riveting story, James Johnson and Benjamin Walton have determined that it is improbable that Rossini's stage work, in particular, incited the Opéra's middle- and upper-class citizens to revolt.Footnote 23
The second act was especially beloved. So much so that upon hearing the opera, Donizetti remarked that Act II possesses such genius it must be composed by God.Footnote 24 The album features No. 9 from this act. In the recording of ‘Ils s’éloignent enfin’, honourable mention goes to the woodwinds of the Dresdner Philharmonie in the accompagnato recitativo. Weaving in and out of one another, the timbres of the woodwinds and the soprano positively influence each other to illuminate new resonance colours. In the aria that follows, ‘Sombre forêt’, Oropesa executes a liquid legato that encapsulates the pastoral nature of this text's passage beautifully. Her character seeks to come to terms with who she really loves. She maintains fluidity in the melismatic passages, too. Oropesa produces a subdued but sparkling effect, especially on the words ‘redira mes secrets’ (will repeat my secrets), capturing the subtext of the character's revelation that she wishes Arnold to be her star and guide, ‘mon étoile et mon guide’.
It is hard to find fault in Oropesa's precise technique and artistic interpretation. She mentioned in an interview for the album that this aria is the most challenging for her to sing due to its exposed and unornamented melody: ‘The simpler it looks on the page, the more difficult it is to sing – at least for me. I feel that a simpler line, a less decorated line, is extremely difficult to really nail. To get to the core of whatever that musical phrase is doing. So, for that reason, I felt like ‘Sombre forêt’ is the most difficult track on the album’.Footnote 25 From a singer's perspective, it does take dedicated patience to embody the ‘core’ of a bel canto melody. But Oropesa certainly captures it with fullness and finesse.
Les martyrs and Pauline
Unlike the three French Rossini operas that remained in the repertoire for long periods and have come back into production periodically since the mid-twentieth century, Donizetti's Les martyrs was removed from the Opéra repertory after only 20 performances. The reasons for this vary. It is probable that the heightened religious topic concerning conflicts between pagan and early Christian devoutness did not appeal to refined Parisians tastes. There were also disputes at the administrative level, namely between the director Léon Pillet and Duponchel. Reexamining Donizetti's output mid-twentieth century resulted in the reemergence of this French version. It was performed in concert in London and a Bergamo conference in 1975, returned to the stage in 1978 in France, and has been performed in four productions since 1996.Footnote 26
If the listener happens to be experiencing the album in chronological order, the nuanced style shift from Rossini to Donizetti is clear. Oropesa employs more chest in her mix in the middle to lower registers, while still maintaining an evenness of scale and melisma.Footnote 27 The orchestration, too, is expanded and more lyrical compared to the Rossini operas. Despite an early removal of Les martyrs from the repertory, one hopes this recording will put the aria, ‘Ô ma mère! Qu'ici ta main glacée bénisse ton enfant’, on the radar for lyric coloraturas to learn. It has mesmerizing potential to become an exciting ‘new’ French aria to add to the current repertoire.
Lucie de Lammermoor and Lucie
Lucie has a distinct commissioning and producing history compared to the other operas on the album. Performed at the private theatre, Théâtre de la Renaissance, it attracted enormous crowds to the lesser venue in 1839 and later toured France in the provincial theatres. The opera finally made its way to the Opéra in February 1846. Another curious element of the adaption is Lucie's entrance aria. Dating back to Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani's debut of Lucia at the original opera's premiere in 1835, Tacchinardi-Persiani did not care for Donizetti's cantabile-cabaletta ‘Regnava nel silenzio’. She requested to substitute it with the aria composed for her in Rosmonda d'Inghilterra (1834). This temporary substitution in the Italian production became the music Donizetti selected to introduce Lucie in the French revision. Therefore, this aria is an adaption from a different Italian work.
Oropesa specifically mentions some of these differences in the entrance aria, noting its higher key, increased florid passages, and lack of lyrical line. The expressive meaning is adjusted, too. Lucie is hopeful rather than the melancholy of Lucia: ‘The telling of the ghost story is not fleshed out the way it is in the Italian version’, Oropesa says. ‘Instead, the French aria gives us Lucie's vision for a reuniting with Edgard, in a world that is more receptive to their love than the current world in which they live’ (liner notes, 7). Beyond the drama, the vocal writing, too, is modified within the expected style. I noticed less contrast from the cantabile to the cabaletta. While the latter still offers embellishment, it is to a different effect than its Italian counterpart. The French coloratura is more delicate, comparatively. Even Oropesa's voice quality is thinner to encapsulate these subtle differences in national style.
La fille du régiment and Marie
The final Donizetti opera, and arguably the most beloved, La fille du régiment was moderately received at its initial premiere. While critics accused Donizetti of self-borrowing from his Italian repertoire in efforts to discredit him, Donizetti confirmed that the score of La fille was a wholly new composition.Footnote 28 By 1914, the opera had been performed one thousand times. Ashbrook says, ‘No other score composed by a non-Frenchman for the Opéra-Comqiue has come even close to matching the record of La fille du régiment on that stage’.Footnote 29
The spitfire role of Marie is one Oropesa has played many times over in her career. In terms of curating an album, it makes sense that she would close this compilation of repertoire with arias so established in her voice. Her voice's stability and full-bodied commitment embrace Donizetti's melodies like a perfect fitting glove. In the sombre ‘Il faut partir’, Donizetti's writing on the ‘adieu’ passages captivates, and Oropesa's smooth legato captures such depth of emotion. Rich singing by the male characters fill out the texture and intensify the sadness of her farewell to her friends and life-long companions.
In ‘C'en est donc fait’, honourable mention goes to the cello player of the Dresdner Philharmonie. The longing lyrical line gorgeously pulls the listener into Marie's sad state in this scene. Clear rhythmic precision in the syncopation and French swing exemplifies Oropesa's interpretation. She represents what it means to sing in style. The following ‘Salut à la France’ brings this fully embodied album to an exclamation point finish. It is no surprise that ‘Salut a la France’ became an unofficial national anthem during the Second Empire.Footnote 30
Closing Thoughts
Offering one last general observation, other American sopranos should take note of Oropesa's [u] vowel.Footnote 31 She stunningly maintains the pure vowel's integrity, not over modifying or manipulating through the secondo passagio and upper extension. It serves as a masterclass on how to properly sing in French, despite high register demands.
According to her updated website, Oropesa has performed a remarkable 47 roles in her career thus far.Footnote 32 Of those roles, her most performed character from this album is Marie, of which she has performed a cumulative 16 performances at Pittsburgh Opera (2015); Washington National Opera (2016) and Lyric Opera of Chicago (2023). Since this recording in 2021, she has added Lucie and Mathilde to her repertoire. Lucie was a one-night performance Festival d'Aix-en Provence (2023), while Mathilde had a full run of four performances at Wiener Staatsoper (2024). One can only hope the opportunity will present itself for her to debut the entirety of Le siège de Corinthe, Le comte Ory, or Les martyrs, too, so we may witness her entire embodiment of the role beyond this album's stunning aria interpretations.
