More than 150 years after its successful performance at the Paris Opéra, Halévy’s La Magicienne returns. This striking opera now deserves a new staged production.
After his successful opera La Juive, which returned to the Paris Opéra in February 2007 after a break of seventy-three years, the music of La Magicienne was heard again in France in July 2011. This was Fromental Halévy’s sixth and last opera. A concert performance of the work opened the Festival de Radio-France et Montpellier, Languedoc-Roussillon. No less than four generations have elapsed since the forty-five performances of La Magicienne at the Paris Opéra in 1858–59.
The first decade of the Second French Empire was no longer a time when audiences wanted to see dramatically pointed religious conflicts (La Juive, Les Huguenots) or wistfully national or social revolutionary upsurges (Charles VI, Le Prophète) on the operatic stage. A stage work which makes mythically inflated emotional conflicts visible and audible corresponded more with the expectations of a society moved, to a certain extent, to renewed religious feelings after the shock of the events of 1848.
The text of the opera deals, in a freely adapted way, with the medieval legend of the fair Melusine. Through a pact with Stello (= Satan), she gained an irresistible seductive power in return for pledging her soul, and immediately set about using this at once on René, Blanche’s bridegroom. Through a magic web, Melusine succeeds in feigning Blanche’s unfaithfulness to René, thus kindling his jealousy. Yet Stello also loves Melusine and is able to thwart Melusine’s love for René through his convincing magical powers. When René, informed of Blanche’s total innocence, pushes Melusine away from himself with abhorrence, she is moved by genuine feelings of remorse. Now Stello demands Melusine’s soul as the price of the devil’s pact. Only the devout intercession, recited three times by Blanche, René and Blanche’s father the Count of Poitou, wrecks all the devil’s power. Melusine professes to be a Christian and dies in Blanche’s arms.
Melusine, vested with irresistible seductive power, can be understood as the personification of timeless male fears of “the” woman, which is inseparably associated with “evil” in this delusion. At the end, the sorceress Melusine is granted a purification and a Christian redemption, made possible by her repentance. She dies in and from an excess of enlightenment, as do Thaïs and Jean, the Jongleur de Notre-Dame after her, since, as we read in Exodus 33 v. 20, “there shall no man see me [God], and live”.
Fromental Halévy’s operatic music remains within the traditional framework of a sequence of clearly demarcated “numbers” – arias, ensembles and (some danced) choruses. The mastery of his musico-dramatic composing remained undiminished twenty-three years after La Juive. The melodic structure, starting point and heart of his composition is also characterized in La Magicienne by the relentless striving for “distinction”, with a scrupulous avoidance of any hint of triviality. If we listen to the music of La Juive (1835), Charles VI (1843) and La Magicienne in sequence, as we can now do again, it becomes undeniable that Halévy barely aspired to outdo recent operatic masterpieces through radical stylistic innovations. And so, the words which Jules Janin found to describe Auber’s music for Gustave III in March 1833 might also apply to Halévy’s stage works as a whole, in a general sense: “musique de souvenir plutôt que d’imagination, musique de regret plutôt que d’esperance” (music of memory rather than imagination, music of regret rather than hope).
Karl Leich-Galland
from [t]akte 2/2011