# Delibes - Lakmé



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

LAKMÉ
Opéra in 3 acts

Composer: Léo Delibes

Libretto: Edmond Gondinet & Philippe Gille

First performed: Opéra-Comique, Paris, 14 April 1883

*STORY: 
*Lakmé, daughter of a Brahmin priest, falls in love with an English soldier. When he leaves her to return to his regiment, she eats the flowers of the datura plant - and dies.

You'd know, if nothing else from it, the Flower Duet and the Bell Song.

Here's the Flower Duet:





And a famous recording of the Bell Song:





*COMMENTARY
*"It is hard to understand how Lakmé got under the wire into the field of Grand Opera," sniffed Sir Denis Forman in his _Good Opera Guide_.

"It certainly isn't grand nor is it an opera, except in the sense that any piece staged with singers and a full orchestra is an opera. … So I would advise against spending the price of an opera ticket on Lakmé. Indeed, if the sale were challenged on the grounds of infringing the Trades Descriptions Act, I would not be surprised."

Hush, tish, and pibble. No, Sir Denis, _Lakmé_ isn't a grand opera; it's an opéra comique, a very different kettle of eels.










Grand opéra, you will remember, O Best Beloved, is a serious work in five (sometimes four) acts, sung throughout; often on a historical theme; with plenty of spectacle, impressive orchestral and choral forces, virtuoso singing, and at least one ballet, usually in the third act. Typical stories include revolutions, popular uprisings, massacres, executions, excommunications, and natural disasters. The best-known today are probably Rossini's _Guillaume Tell_ (1829) and Verdi's _Don Carlos _(1867). The best include Meyerbeer's _Huguenots _(1836) and _Prophète _(1849), and Halévy's _Juive _(1835).









Auber's grand opera _La muette de Portici_ (1828) - with erupting volcano

Opéra comique - the form performed at the theatre of the same name - contains both singing and spoken dialogue. It is lighter than grand opera, but not necessarily comic. Some are indeed light-hearted comedies: Boieldieu's _Dame blanche _(1825), Auber's _Fra Diavolo _(1830), Donizetti's _Fille du regiment_ (1839). Some have serious plots, or even deaths, but end happily: Herold's _Zampa _(1831) and _Pré-aux-clercs_ (1832), Auber's _Haydée _(1847). And the rare one ends unhappily: Auber's _Manon Lescaut_ (1856). Nothing, though, to shock the bourgeoisie; this was a family theatre, attended by respectable matrons and daughters.

By the end of the 19th century, the opéra-comique had evolved into something more serious, and often sung-through. The best-known today is Bizet's _Carmen_ (1875), which shocked audiences. The heroine dies - violently - and the characters are smugglers, gypsies, bull-fighters, and other lowlifes. (Several Massenet works, Debussy's _Pelléas et Mélisande_ [1902], and Dukas' _Ariane et Barbe-bleue_ [1907] were also first performed at the Opéra-Comique.)

And _Lakmé_ is very much an opéra comique, in its classical form.

For a start, it was performed at the Opéra-Comique, and was one of the biggest successes since the glory days of Auber - thanks, Arthur Pougin wrote,

to its music full of charm, poetry, colour and originality… It's truly French music, clear, limpid, elegant, really inspired. (_Dictionnaire des opéras_, 1903)​
It carried on the opéra-comique tradition, rather than rebelling against it like Bizet, with his cry of "No more _Dame blanche_!"

Camille Bellaigue ("Les Époques de la musique - L'Opéra-Comique", _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1905) wrote that Delibes' score is infinitely less rich, and weaker than _Carmen_, but truer to the tone of opéra-comique. 

« Pas une seule fois elle ne dépasse le caractère, ou le demi-caractère du genre. »


Lagenevais (_Revue des Deux Mondes_, 14 July 1883) places Delibes squarely in the line of Auber, the genre's most famous practitioner. 

« C'est le même art de convention, subtil, délicat, habile, historié, émaillé selon le goût régnant. … C'est la tradition de Boieldieu, d'Herold, d'Adam, d'Auber et d'Halévy, tradition pure et simple que l'auteur a depuis modifiée suivant son tempérament et l'esprit de réforme applicable au genre. Plus prés d'Halévy dans _Jean de Nivelle_, plus voisin d'Auber dans _Lakmé_, il vous le rappelle par la grâce et les élégances de son écriture, pour l'abondance du motif, que nous lui reprocherions de ne point creuser assez, - un Auber plus en surface et moins les grandes envolées de la _Muette_. »


More, the tune for the market chorus in Act II is lifted straight from the one in Auber's _Muette de Portici_. (Compare here and here.) The comic quintet that reminded a fuming Forman of Gilbert and Sullivan is also in the tradition of Auber. (Like, for example, this.)

And it's in the opéra-comique sub-genre of stories about the British in India [1], and a wider genre of French opera - both grand and comique - set in India and other exotic climes [2].

[1] Such as Halévy's _Nabab_ (1853), or Auber's _Premier jour de bonheur_ (1868).

[2] For example, Auber's _Dieu et la bayadère_ (1830), Halévy's _Fée aux roses_ (1849) and _Jaguarita l'indienne_ (1855), David's _Perle du Brésil_ (1851), Bizet's _Pearl Fishers_ (1863), Meyerbeer's _Africaine_ (1865), and Massenet's _Roi de Lahore_ (1877).​









_Lakmé_ brought Delibes - hitherto known as a composer of ballets and Offenbachian opéra-bouffe - success. He was elected to the Académie des beaux-arts, replacing Victor Massé. He had made his name.

The opera soon travelled around the world. Every coloratura soprano wanted to show off her voice in the Bell Song. (Today, Offenbach's Doll Song, from _Les contes d'Hoffmann_, has replaced it in concerts.)

The post-war world has had less time for it. True, it's been a vehicle for star sopranos like Joan Sutherland, and British Airways hijacked the Flower Duet. But the work itself has largely fallen from the repertoire.

It's towards the tail end of the 200 most performed operas in the world, sandwiched between Ullmann's _Kaiser von Atlantis_ and Ades' _Powder her face_. If you want to see it in 2018/19, you'll have to visit Oman or Bulgaria.

I saw it at the Sydney Opera House in 2006, conducted by Richard Bonynge, in a colourful, Hergé-inspired production.






Listening to the 1967 Joan Sutherland recording, it's easy to see why the opera charmed, and why it fell from the repertoire. It's a pretty opera, but not really a dramatic one.

The music is lovely. There's the Flower Duet, five minutes of blissful soprano and mezzo canoodling. There's the Bell Song, of course. (I do, though, prefer the sinuous conspiracy chorus that follows.) There are some great tunes; Gérald's aria "Fantaisie aux divins mensonges", or the phrases "Oublier que je t'ai vue" and " C'est le dieu de la jeunesse" in the Act I love duet. The orchestral writing throughout is refined, sometimes using « exotic » instruments like tambourines and triangles.






But it's pretty soft-focused. It lacks that vulgar little thing called "go". With (or for) all its grace and elegance, it's closer to the world of Auber or Messager, than to Massenet, Meyerbeer, or even Bizet.

The story is, as critics like Bellaigue and Jullien (_Musiciens d'aujourd'hui_, II) observed, _L'Africaine _writ small. Lakmé expires prettily, rather than affectingly.

« Héroïne d'amour, et jusqu'à la mort, la petite Hindoue est une sœur gracieuse de l'Africaine, mais gracieuse seulement. Elle ne cherche pas, pour mourir, l'ombre d'un arbre immense et le suc d'une fleur suffit à son suicide d'enfant. » (Bellaigue)​


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## Granate (Jun 25, 2016)

What a beautiful post, Nick. That's a great effort of yours. 

Through my journey through French Opera (including opéra-comique and grand-opera), without having tried Pélléas et Mélisande and Samson et Dalila, Lakmé is one of the operas whose musical score I've liked the most. The vocal gravity written for Nilakantha and the virtue demanded by the title character help to challenge other French operas in musical score.

However, has the libretto's topic become unfashionable? We don't certainly see colonisation in today's times the way the French saw it in the 19th century. I would personally not want to see this opera staged, especially given the first scene of Act II which shows the different positions of power between the Indian merchands and the governante Bentson.

In the scale of explicitness, doesn't this opera rank really high in the topic "Foreign worlds through the eyes of Western civilizations"?


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Granate said:


> What a beautiful post, Nick. That's a great effort of yours.
> 
> Through my journey through French Opera (including opéra-comique and grand-opera), without having tried Pélléas et Mélisande and Samson et Dalila, Lakmé is one of the operas whose musical score I've liked the most. The vocal gravity written for Nilakantha and the virtue demanded by the title character help to challenge other French operas in musical score.
> 
> ...


Thanks, Granate!

I don't think it's a pro-colonial opera. True, a lot of the appeal for the original audiences was the Indian exotic - lotuses, temples, Brahmins - but the British come across as insular, and out of their depth. Certainly, Mistress Bentson isn't a sympathetic character; she's prejudiced, small-minded, and rather hysterical - the ghastly European abroad. Ellen and Rose are flibbertigibbets. And Gérard treats Lakmé as a child, with tragic consequences.

I don't know much about Delibes' politics, but I'd guess he, and his librettists, were at least liberal. His last opera, _Kassya_, is very left-wing. It involves class war in Eastern Europe; a proletariat hero; a peasants' revolution; the nobility banished; the violent death of a woman seduced by luxury; and happiness in a humble cottage.

I also like that French audiences were assumed to know a little about Hinduism (even if the libretto calls Vishnu the son of Brahma). How many moviegoers - or, indeed, tourists in India - would know anything about the Trimurti?

Amusingly, one of the biggest cosmetics brands in India is called Lakmé. It was named after the opera! (Arguably, it's a colonised country reclaiming a European artefact.)


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