# The roots of the opéra-comique: Dauvergne, Philidor, Monsigny



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

I

The opéra-comique - a mixture of elegant music and spoken dialogue is the quintessential French form, Camille Bellaigue declared in 1886. "Notre oeuvre, à nous … ce n'est que lui, mais nous y avons excellé." Lighter than the tragédie lyrique of the 18th century, or the grand opéra of the 19th, it embodies the Gallic virtues of clarity, taste, and, above all, moderation. Remember, though, that it is not necessarily comic; the most famous example, after all, ends with a brutal murder.

The opéras comiques of Grétry, Boieldieu, Herold, Auber, and Adam were popular throughout Europe, particularly in German-speaking countries. (They were still performed in translation there long after France had forgotten them.) Weber thought they represented reason and wit, in contrast to the passion of Germany and Italy.

"Here is true French music!" the poet Heine enthused. "The most serene grace, an ingenuous gentleness, a freshness similar to the perfume of woodland flowers, a true naturalness, truth and nature, and even poetry. Yes, the latter is not absent; but it is a poetry without the frisson of the infinite, without mysterious charm, without bitterness, without irony, without morbidezza. I would almost say a poetry enjoying good health."

The Singspiel and the Viennese operetta - with their relatable characters, and more domestic settings - owe much to the opéra-comique, as does, more distantly, 20th century American musical theatre.

The tradition began with the comédies en vaudevilles performed at Paris's two yearly fairs, the Foire St Germain (February 3 to Palm Sunday) and the Foire St Laurent (mid-June to September). These were not yet opera, but rather spoken plays with popular songs, dances, and parodies of Lullyan tragédie lyrique. These were great favourites with the public, but the Opéra and the Comédie-Française jealously tried to stifle the infant genre.

The fairground stages were flimsy, Bellaigue records, and more than once they were rudely assaulted. The performances were stormy; people brawled, and benches were shattered. From time to time, authority intervened; they closed the theatre. But the brave little theatre defended itself well and wittily. They may be forced to reduce or eliminate the orchestra; the songs continued, and were better heard. If performers were forbidden to sing the lyrics, they wrote them on cue cards in large letters - and the audience all sang them in chorus. "One does not prevent the French from laughing - and they laughed at the fair, with or without permission."

In 1715, the year of Louis XIV's death, some of the vaudeville theatres formed the Théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique, and gained permission to perform light musical comedies. They were still not yet opéra-comique as we understand it, but the old form of old songs with new words. The music, Félix Clément claimed, was no more than a banal accompaniment.

So it continued for nearly 40 years, until Pergolesi's _Serva padrona _was performed in 1752.

The little Italian intermezzo took Paris by storm. (It had been performed a few years before, without causing a furore.) Audiences and critics tired of the dreary, stereotyped tragédie lyrique hailed it as a model for French opera to follow: fast-paced, natural, human. A dozen more Italian opera buffas were performed in Paris between 1752 and 1753, by Scarlatti, Cocchi, Latilla, and Jomelli.

And the Querelle des Bouffons erupted between the pro-Italian faction led by Rousseau, and the conservative defenders of Rameau and the tragédie lyrique. Rousseau followed his _Devin du village _(1752) with his _Lettre sur la musique françoise_, which concluded that the French, in fact, had none.

The enterprising Jean Monnet, director of the Foire St Laurent theatre, saw his chance. He commissioned Antoine Dauvergne, superintendent of the King's music, to write Les troqueurs (1753), based on a tale of La Fontaine.






It's a fast-paced tale of fiancée swapping, 18th-century style. The peasant lads Lubin and Lucas are soon to marry Margot and Fanchon - but Margot is flighty, and Fanchon slow and lazy. They decide to exchange ladies - much to their disgust. They pretend to accept, and the boys are happy - at first. Margot terrifies Lucas: she loves games, dancing, and spending money, and throws tantrums if she's crossed; while Fanchon sits around yawning. The men, on their knees, beg their original fiancées to forgive them, and take them back. The ladies mock them, but relent - on the proviso that they will be the mistress in the house, and their husband obey them unquestioningly.

The opera proper only lasts half an hour, between a three-part Italianate overture and a 15-minute ballet. (Could it work as a curtain-raiser for Mozart's _Così fan tutte_?) It's an attractively spirited little work, full of duos ("Troquons, troquons!"(, da capo arias, and quartets.

Knowing that an impartial judgement would be impossible, Monnet passed the work off as the work of an Italian composer living in Vienna, who wanted to exercise his skill in French. "The fanatics of Italian music, convinced that the French had no music, would not have let the work succeed." Both parties, in fact, were pleased with the work. Rameau admired the refinement of the score; Rousseau its verve and naturalism. When Monnet revealed that a Frenchman was the real Orpheus of Vienna ... quelle scandale!

The work was performed until September 1753, withdrawn only because ticket sales overshadowed those at the Opéra. It was soon performed in Brussels, Stockholm, Vienna, Frankfurt, St Petersburg, and Dresden: the first of many opéras comiques to travel abroad.

And it established a genre: the comédie mêlée d'ariette (play with songs), combining French words with Italianate music. Unlike its descendants, the action was conveyed through sung recitative, rather than spoken dialogue. It was soon followed by Edigio Duni's _Ninette à la cour _and Philidor's _Blaise le savetier_.

"The works are still more than naïve: insignificant accompaniment, monotonous cadences, clumsy modulations, but we can already feel the melody and the mischief," Bellaigue wrote.

A decade later, in 1762, the Opéra-Comique merged with the Comédie-Italienne, gaining a home in the Hôtel de Bourgogne. (They occupied the site until 1783, when they moved into the Salle Favart, home of today's Opéra-Comique.) Through intrigue, the Comédie-Italienne managed to close the Théâtre de la Foire, under the condition of incorporating its troupe and repertory into itself.

"The fate of the opéra-comique has been decided," playwright and theatre manager Charles-Simon Favart wrote. "No more opéra-comique at the fairs, but at the Théâtre-Italien all year round, except for Holy Week, during which we will perform, as usual, on the Opéra-Comique theatre, at the foire Saint-Germain, our little farces for the enjoyment of the poor and the edification of onlookers."

The plan misfired. Far from suppressing the Opéra-Comique, the Opéra-Comique frenchified the Italian comedy. "Actors, plays, music, everything became French at the theatre in the rue Mauconseil, and the Comédie-Italienne, which had flattered itself on absorbing the Opéra-Comique, was absorbed by it," Bellaigue wrote.

"Our national genre was founded."

WORKS CONSULTED
Thomas Bauman, "The eighteenth century: Comic opera", in _The Oxford History of Opera_, ed. Roger Parker, Oxford University Press, 1996
Camille Bellaigue, "Un Siècle de musique français - l'Opéra-comique", _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1886
Félix Clément, _Dictionnaire des opéras_, 1869
Vincent Giroud, _French Opera: A Short History_, Yale University Press, 2010
Piotr Kaminski, _Mille et un opéras_, Paris : Fayard, 2003
Arthur Pougin, _Monsigny et son temps: L'opéra-comique et l'opéra italienne: Les auteurs, les compositeurs, les chanteurs_, Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1908
"Les Troqueurs", Opéra Baroque


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

II

André Danican Philidor was both the greatest chess player of his day, and one of the fathers of the opéra-comique. _Tom Jones _(1765), an adaptation of Fielding's picaresque 1749 novel, is considered his best work. Some critics even consider it the best opéra-comique.

"A profound musician," Grétry wrote after Philidor's death (Mercure français, 1795), "he was the first to bring to the French stage the melodious accents of the Italians combined with the strength of German harmony and genius."

Philidor, Bonnet (1921) argued, began composing at the moment when two artistic currents clashed; his originality was to ally the almost contradictory qualities of both styles; he yielded to new tendencies, without denying ancient traditions. To the theatre-going public, he offered a living music, expressing the verve and gaiety, the tenderness and love of everyday people. At the same time, he preserved the old national characteristics: firmness of line, purity of expression, sobriety of accent, harmonic and instrumental innovation.










He was, Rushton (1976) claims, a decisive influence in the shift of French taste towards the Italian-based lingua franca of the rest of musical Europe, and raised opéra comique from a primitive condition to an art of real sophistication. His orchestration was more elaborate, his vocal style more expressive, inspired by Italian models, Kaminski (2003) argues.

"Nearly every one, even of his lightest comic operas," Allen (1863) wrote, "gives evidence, not merely of originality in general, but also of novel improvement in the details - some unprecedented combination of the voices, some expressive ingenuity of rhythm, some bold innovation in managing the scanty resources of his orchestra. So far, in fact, was Philidor in advance of his countrymen, in his genius for instrumentation, that he even anticipated some of the effects, which are the glory of the great German school." That said, some listeners found his scores 'too noisy' - "for such was the name given to a dramatic employment of the instruments, by those who had been accustomed to hear them only as an inexpressive accompaniment: Philidor was 'noisy,' in short, because he anticipated Gluck in making his orchestra, what Horace would have his Chorus, one of his dramatis personae."

Philidor's family had been court musicians since the time of Louis XIII (1610-43). His father was Louis XIV's musician of the royal chapel and librarian; his elder brother, oboist at the Grande Ecurie, founded the Concert Spirituel.

Born in 1726, the young Philidor studied with André Campra (composer of _Tancrède_) at Versailles, and composed his first motet at 12. Around this time, he learnt to play chess. He lived in in London for a decade; there, he once played three games simultaneously, with his back to the board, and beat his opponents. His monumental _Analyse des échecs_, the standard text for more than a century, was published in 1749.

On his return to France in 1754, he took up opera seriously. During his travels, he had learnt the Neapolitan style of opera. He composed his first opéra-comiques with Sedaine: _Blaise le savetier _(1759) and _L'huître et les plaideurs _(1759), both based on La Fontaine. Clément called Blaise the work of a more skillful contrapuntist than French composers of his generation - but thought neither work of great merit.

Philidor achieved his first success with _Le Maréchal ferrant _(1761), performed more than 200 times. The harmony was treated with exceptional skill, Clément thought, and the tunes were often interesting. _Le Sorcier _(1764) was another hit; Philidor and his librettist were called onstage to receive applause; before them, only Voltaire had received such an honour. A one-act reduction was performed in 1869, and still pleased the public.

_Tom Jones_, on the other hand, was a flop; it closed after only six performances. Clément thought only Philidor's music saved Poinsinet and Daverne's bad adaptation from a complete fiasco.

The librettists had reduced Fielding's sprawling novel (18 books, nearly 347,000-words) into a little opéra comique. The story takes place among the huntin' shootin' gentry of Somerset. Tom Jones, a foundling, has been brought up by the blustering Squire Western and his formidable sister (ancestress of the Oscar Wilde dowager parts). Jones loves Sophia, daughter of Western's neighbor Allworthy, but their elders arrange a marriage between Sophia and Allworthy's loathsome nephew Blifil. Jones is banished, and starts to make his way to London. On the way, he stops at an inn; there, the lawyer Dowling reveals that he is really Allworthy's nephew, and Blifil's elder brother. With no restrictions of class or legitimacy, Jones and Sophia are free to marry, with their relatives' blessing.

The opera is considerably toned down from the novel. Many of the characters and episodes are missing, as is the sexual frankness. Here, Tom is an amiable youth, but not Fielding's lusty roisterer (no rolls in the hay, or bedding women who may be his mother). Born out of wedlock in the novel, Philidor's character is the product of a secret marriage - a sop to bourgeois sensibilities.

Sedaine revised the work; its performance on 30 January 1766 was the greatest triumph in Philidor's operatic career. It was soon performed throughout Europe (1766: Geneva, Brussels, Dresden; 1767: Amsterdam; 1768: Vienna; 1769: Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Lübeck; 1776: Florence; 1778: Turin; 1779: Hamburg). Hailed as "le plus bel ouvrage qui soit au théâtre", it was performed 124 times at the Opéra-Comique between 1771 and 1780.

Kaminski believes _Tom Jones _marks the evolution of the opéra-comique towards greater feeling, inspired by tragic models. Bonnet called it probably the masterpiece of the French opéra-comique repertoire. It is a true bourgeois comedy, where lifelike characters express sincere feelings in an almost plausible intrigue, passing through moods from exuberant gaiety to poignant sadness. He praises the freshness of its tunes, the fullness and delicacy of its harmony, the picturesque instrumentation, and the variety of sentiments - an ensemble of qualities he says one searches for in vain in all the French or Italian opéra-comique.

His praise is rather overstated, partly because he detests 19th century opéra-comique (facile, vulgar, and Italianate). _Tom Jones _is an agreeable little opera, but the score, to my ears, lacks the variety and invention - the comic wit - of Monsigny or Grétry, let alone Auber or Boieldieu. Most of the numbers are arias; the notable ones include Squire Western's hunting song "D'un cerf dix cors"; Tom's "Vous voulez que je vous oublie"; and Sophie's almost Mozartean "Ô toi qui ne peut m'entendre".





_Tom Jones _is also one of the earliest French opéra-comiques to use finales and ensembles. Grétry hailed Philidor as the inventor of musical numbers with several subjects or rhythms; to him, the duet "Que les devoirs que tu m'imposes" was the best in this genre. Act II ends with a septet where the principals express their varying feelings (outrage, triumph, thwarted love, concern), while Act III opens with the first a cappella ensemble in French opera. Innovative as these were at the time, I prefer the ensembles in Monsigny's _Roi et fermier_.

There are two recordings of _Tom Jones_: an English language version performed at Sweden's Drottningholm Theatre, 1995; and a provincial French recording (Lausanne, 2006), conducted by Jean-Claude Malgoire.

The Drottningholm production: an English translation of a French opera performed in Sweden with Italian subtitles. How's that for multiculturalism?





Philidor's tragédie lyrique _Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège _(1767) "marked an epoch", in the opinion of Pierre-Louis Ginguené (1777); it was "the first in our theatres to replace the archaic and soporific French psalmody by simply declaimed recitative, and by arias, duets, trios and other pieces of measured music in the Italian style". Praised by Berlioz, Rushton considers it "probably the most important work staged at the Paris Opéra between Rameau and Gluck". The opera has not been recorded.

More opéras-comiques and tragedies-lyriques, many unsuccessful, followed. During the Revolution, Philidor escaped to London in 1792, and died there in 1795. His works disappeared from the stage.

"The death of Philidor coincided with the dark days immediately following the Terror," Bonnet wrote. "The torrent of the Revolution had engulfed the subtle and refined society which the author of Tom Jones had been able to please, and never were mentalities more different, more diametrically opposed, than those of the two generations separated by the great upheaval. Nothing that delighted the first could the second love. Philidor's art had too well expressed the discreet and fine sensibility of the ancien régime to please the heirs of the regicides, the ideologues in love with antiquity, any more than, in the years that followed, the fiery apostles of Romanticism or the somewhat leaden bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy…. Those who appreciated the flat opéra-comique of the 19th century could no longer savour the delicate and firm art of a Philidor."

WORKS CONSULTED
George Allen, _The Life of Philidor: Musician and Chess-Player_, Philadelphia: E.H. Butler & Co., 1863
George-Edgar Bonnet, _Philidor et l'évolution de la musique française au XVIIIè siècle_, Paris : Librairie Delagrave, 1921
Félix Clément, _Les Musiciens célèbres du seizième siècle à nos jours_, Paris : Hachette, 1868
Félix Clément, _Dictionnaire des opéras_, 1869
Vincent Giroud, _French Opera: A Short History_, Yale University Press, 2010
Piotr Kaminski, _Mille et un opéras_, Paris : Fayard, 2003
Julian Rushton, "Philidor and the Tragédie Lyrique", _The Musical Times_, Vol. 117, No. 1603 (September 1976), pp. 734-37


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

III

The 1760s and 1770s were, Giroud (2010) argued, the golden age of the opéra-comique. "Its vogue paralleled an evolution of the French theatre in general, away from the classical tragedy and its mythological or ancient themes, and towards what Diderot called the "drame bourgeois": serious plays, usually in prose, set in the present, and involving characters with whom a middle-class audience could identify and situations it would recognise."

And Monsigny - with Duni and Philidor - gave French audiences a pleasure yet unknown, Pougin (1908) wrote. "It was with a real joy, almost enthusiasm, that spectators applauded the qualities of grace, charm, tenderness, warm inspiration, which the musicians lavished on works of so new a character." Similarly, Bellaigue (1886) hailed Monsigny, with Grétry, Dalayrac, and Nicolò as the first masters, the exquisite masters of the oldest French melody.

"Of all the composers of our country," Paul Dukas wrote in 1883, "he is probably the first who had the gift of true, human emotion, of communicative expression and of the right feeling … The frail melodies of Monsigny are no doubt nothing more than melodies, but of such moving inspiration, of such sincere accent, of such natural and charming shape that one freely ignores their feeble harmonic support and one forgives this instinctive musician, who dreamt them up, his unaffected artistry, in favor of the pleasure that he provides us."










Monsigny devoted himself to a musical career after seeing Pergolesi's _Serva padrona _in 1754. His early works, written for the Foire theatres, include _Les aveux indiscrets _(1759) and _Le cadi dupé _(1761). On hearing this work, the librettist Sedaine exclaimed: "Voilà mon homme!" Their first joint work was _On ne s'avise jamais de tout_, performed at Fontainebleau in 1770, then at the Foire St-Laurent in 1771. It was a favourite with Louis XV.

_Le roi et le fermier _(1762), Bauman (1996) claims, is ground-breaking. "It enlarged the dramatic weight of Rousseau's opposition of healthy rustic innocence and corrupt courtly mores. In so doing, it revealed new powers of social and political criticism."

It may just be the first really enjoyable French opera: full of tunes, good cheer, ingenious sonic effects, and actual people. Rameau's _Hippolyte et Aricie _is magnificent, but it's a historic artifact. With Monsigny's opera, we step straight from the classical world of tragédie lyrique, with its gods, heroes, kings, and monsters, into an intimate, human sphere close to Weber's _Freischütz_.

The plot comes from Robert Dodsley's _The King and the Miller of Mansfield _(1737), translated into French by one Patu. Charles V or Henry IV, according to tradition, spent a night lost in a forest after a hunt; he entered a woodcutter's cottage; and there, for the first time, he saw what a man is to another man stripped by his ignorance of respect for his king.

"Never has a scene in the theatre opened to any poet a wider career, a simpler means of making useful truths heard," Sedaine wrote in his preface.

The action takes place in Sherwood Forest, several centuries after Robin Hood. The farmer, Richard, gamekeeper inspector of the forest, is beside himself with jealousy and worry ("Je ne sais à quoi me résoudre");






His fiancée, Jenny, entered the castle of "Milord", a lustful despot aptly named Lurewell, and Richard fears the worst ("D'elle même, et sans effort"). Jenny escapes Milord's clutches, shinning down the traditional set of knotted sheets; she reassures Richard that she didn't suffer a fate worse than death, in an aria that could have been written by Boieldieu or Auber; and the couple are united. That's the first act.

A storm breaks during the finale; storm clouds gather, strings growl, the wind howls, trees come crashing down; the king's hunting party gallops by, blowing horns; shots ring out. (Weber must have had it in mind when he composed the Wolfsschlucht scene half a century later.)















Act II opens with a brace of gamekeepers, lost in the dark, singing a patter duo; it anticipates, in a way, Meyerbeer's _Pardon de Ploërmel_. The king has been separated from his companions; in the bravura aria "Dans les combats", he reflects that cannons and battles cannot daunt him, but the woods fill him with horror.






Passing himself off as a mere courtier, he meets Richard, who invites him home for supper. Lurewell was also among the hunters, and he and a courtier are lost in forest. Unaware that Jenny has escaped, he looks forward to exercising his droit de seigneur ("Un fin chasseur") - but Richard's gamekeepers mistake them for poachers and arrest them, in a quartet finale.






The third act is cozily domestic; we are in the bosom of Richard's family, with his kindly if distracted mother, and his sweet sister. As they spin and tat, the women sing three different arias, which Monsigny ingeniously combines.

The peasants entertain their guest, the mother somewhat embarrassed to serve a nobleman their simple rustic fare. This down-to-earth, human cheerfulness is like little we've seen in French opera before; when Rameau wrote comedy, it was either mythological (as in _Platée_) or exotic ballet (_Indes galantes_).

There's even some pointed political commentary: that kings are surrounded by flatterers, and are never in a position to see men as they are. A far cry from "Hail Louis XIV, greatest monarch of the universe!" Richard claims that true happiness is only to be found in humble cottages ("Ce n'est ici, ce n'est qu'au village"), while the king maintains that the highest happiness for a royal is to make others happy ("Le bonheur est de le répandre").






The king unmasks himself to punish Lurewell, launching a spirited confusion septet ("Le Roi, le Roi"). He banishes Lurewell, knights Richard, and give Jenny a dowry to marry him. A vaudeville finale closes the work, with the catchy refrain: « Il ne faut s'etonner du rien, il n'est qu'un pas du mal au bien ».










Monsigny and Sedaine dreamt of a more serious opéra comique than hitherto known, Pougin wrote, where, if emotion and sensibility were not always absent, public and authors alike looked above all for gaiety, even coarse buffoonery. Le roi et le fermier certainly didn't lack comedy, but it was less frivolous, with a more developed plot and sustained interest than was customary.

"Never did good or bad work have so much trouble to appear in the theatre," Sedaine wrote. "I had to find a great artist, a skillful musician, with confidence in me; a friend who wanted to risk a new genre in music; and however rare poets are in this new genre, musicians are even more so."

The newness of the subject unsettled audiences; they greeted it at first with reserve, even coldness. The _Mercure_, not wanting to commit itself, merely announced the work's appearance on the boards, leaving a detailed account until its success or failure had been decided.

"At the first performance, this piece, in the modern genre of intermèdes, although applauded, appeared to be of doubtful success. Several pieces of music were, nevertheless, applauded. The public seemed to demand some cuts; these have been made; and the performances continue with a sufficient number of spectators. We shall speak in more detail of this novelty, and with more certainty as to its fate in the next _Mercure_."

Enthusiasm soon followed caution, and the work was performed more than 200 times, bringing more than 20,000 francs to the composer and librettist. "The composer deserves his praise," the Mercure wrote in its second article, "not only for the beautiful, ingenious, and reasoned images in his symphonies [Pougin thought this referred to the storm entr'acte] but for the sagacity with which he found a way to make singing speak, and to make it speak without confusion in its ensembles."

The work soon reached Vienna ("Never has an opéra comique met greater success in this country") and St Petersburg. Marie Antoinette sang the role of Jenny on her private stage in the 1780s. (The sets somehow survived the Revolution, and were used at Opera Lafayette's production this decade.) The work seems to have last been performed in France in 1806.

Nineteenth-century critics found it naïve, but admirable. It is never boring, Pougin thought; it offers a truly theatrical subject, which excites the sympathies, and engages the audience throughout. Clément thought the work might suffer from meagre and even defective harmony and clumsily written vocal phrases, but it was grippingly natural, truly sensitive, and even passionate. Monsigny may have less genius and invention than Grétry, but greater depth of feeling. With less art, he could move audiences.

Who needs art? Scudo could have retorted. Monsigny, in his view, may not have been a trained musician like Rameau or Philidor, but his lively sensibility and his natural instinct for melody allowed him to bypass a science that had not saved his two illustrious contemporaries' works.

Certainly, this is an opera that could still please today.

(I will discuss _Le déserteur_, Monsigny's best-known work, later this month.)

WORKS CONSULTED
Thomas Bauman, "The eighteenth century: Comic opera", in _The Oxford History of Opera_, ed. Roger Parker, Oxford University Press, 1996
Camille Bellaigue, "Un Siècle de musique français - l'Opéra-comique", _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1886
Félix Clément, _Dictionnaire des opéras_, 1869
Vincent Giroud, _French Opera: A Short History_, Yale University Press, 2010
Piotr Kaminski, _Mille et un opéras_, Paris : Fayard, 2003
Nizam Kettaneh, « Le roi et le fermier », Naxos
Arthur Pougin, _Monsigny et son temps: L'opéra-comique et l'opéra italienne: Les auteurs, les compositeurs, les chanteurs_, Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1908
Pierre Scudo, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Revue_musicale,_1862/03 - Pierre Scudo

SUGGESTED RECORDING








Thomas Michael Allen (Le Roi), William Sharp (Richard), Dominique Labelle (Jenny), Thomas Dolié (Rustaut), Jeffrey Thompson (Lurewel), Delores Ziegler (La Mère), Yulia Van Doren (Betsy), David Newman (Charlot), and Tony Boutté (Le Courtisan). Ryan Brown conducting Opera Lafayette Orchestra, Naxos, 2012.


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