Chabrier: L’étoile at RNCM
Johnny James, Managing Editor
Step into the eccentric world of Emmanuel Chabrier’s L’étoile, an opéra bouffe bursting with wit, satire, and fantastical music.
The 1877 opera, whose title translates as ‘The Lucky Star’, is one of the great works in the opera bouffe (literally, ‘comic opera’) tradition, closely associated with Jacques Offenbach, who produced many of them at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens. But Chabrier’s work, which also premiered at the small boulevard theatre, is much more sophisticated than anything Offenbach wrote there – indeed in its initial run the members of the small orchestra were appalled at the difficulty of the score, which Stravinsky considered a masterpiece and which was held in high esteem by Debussy and Ravel.
The opera unfolds in a fictional kingdom where King Ouf I, notorious for celebrating his birthday with a public execution, meets his match in the spirited peddler Lazuli. In disguise, whilst searching for his next victim, King Ouf encounters Lazuli who is heartbroken over a lost love. After a heated exchange, the king sentences Lazuli to death only to be thwarted by the royal astrologer Siroco, whose predictions reveal Lazuli’s fate is closely linked to the king’s own mortality. Consequently, Lazuli is spared and lavished with luxuries, but remains closely watched as he plots to win the heart of Laoula, the woman he loves.
A rollercoaster of humorous happenings, mistaken identities, and comical disguises ensues. The score, in parallel, takes all kinds of delicious twists and turns, keeping us forever on our toes. With a typical lightness of touch, Chabrier’s music takes flight in a way that is difficult to achieve in music of this style – but then Chabrier always was a master of the sensitive and complicated art of musical comedy, enchanting with inventive flair and leading listeners on a whimsical and joyously entertaining journey.
That journey doesn’t come around often enough; while L’étoile has been performed with increasing frequency and more widely in the 21st century, it’s still relatively rare to see it make the stage, especially in the north. But happily the RNCM is staging it over multiple nights this December, bringing this zany box of delights to life in all the lavish style it deserves. It must have been written in the stars…
