For various reasons, it failed this rather unusually rigorous test of "verisimilitude": those Meridionaux who attended the premiere expecting Mistral's evocations of their older rural cousins to come to life beyond the footlights were doomed to a disappointment that still resonates in respect of modern productions. (3) Gounod's operatic setting catalyzed a second wave of debate on the value of regional difference in general, and of Mistral's lyrical defense of local customs and identity in particular, with the result that the opera's fidelity or lack thereof to the vision of the activist poet came under especially close scrutiny. (2) In 1859, Alphonse de Lamartine's gushing if primitivizing appraisal of Mistral's original as Homeric epic had conferred instant Parisian celebrity on Mireio and its young author, and instant topicality on the regionalist question. (1) Moreover, that appeal was presented in operatic guise at the Thatre-Lyrique, one of the capital's national, subsidized, stages. Published with parallel columns in Provencal and French, it challenged the centralization characteristic of the French state since the Revolution of 1789 via an appeal to regionalism: the preservation and celebration of traditional forms of local identity, and the invention of new ones. But the nature of Mistral's poem as a call to revalorize the cultures of the Midi-which included all the areas of southern France in which versions of Occitan, the "Langue d'Oc," were spoken-made it even more unusual. For an opera on a near-contemporary subject, this was exceptional-as indeed was the presence of peasant protagonists in the tragedy of a wealthy farmer's daughter who defies parental rejection of her impecunious basketweaver lover Vincent journeys west across the stony Crau desert to find solace at the church of Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer after Vincent is injured by Ourrias, her approved suitor and dies of sunstroke in the attempt. Keywords: France, regionalism, opera, Gounod, Mistralįirst published in Avignon in February 1859, Frederic Mistral's Provencal manifesto, the pastoral epic Mireio reached the operatic stage in just five years, on 19 March 1864, courtesy of Michel Carre and Charles Gounod. Joep Leerssen's theory of cultural nationalism provides a frame for analyzing how and why this opera, which set a regionalist manifesto to music but was not a manifesto itself, could be only incompletely appropriated by Mistral and his felibres as an emblematic "national" work. In this article the resulting invented tradition, which began thirty-five years after the opera's Paris premiere and rested on standard notions of authenticity and belonging, is contextualized by reference to the very different life it led in the Midi as a standard "municipal" opera sent out, after significant revision, from Paris. It also, in a paradoxical sense, came "home" to Arles-a town that the original poem's author, Frederic Mistral, made clear his heroine had never visited. In 1899, six years after Gounod's death, his Provencal opera Mireille (1864) suddenly became a focal point for regionalist celebration and debate in the
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |