Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
L’Ancêtre, drame lyrique in three acts (1905)
Nunciata: Jennifer Holloway (soprano), Vanina: Gaëlle Arquez (mezzo-soprano), Margarita: Hélène Carpentier (soprano), Tébaldo: Julien Henric (tenor), Raphaël: Michael Arivony (baritone), Bursica: Matthieu Lécroart (bass-baritone)
Philharmonic Chorus of Tokyo
Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo/Kazuki Yamada
rec. 2024. L’Auditorium Rainier III, Monaco
French libretto with English translation
Bru Zane BZ 1061 Book (128pp) [2 CDs: 90]
Of Saint-Saëns’ thirteen operas, only Samson et Dalila remains in the standard repertoire; indeed, it ranks among my personal favourites. Both Henry VIII and his final work here, L’Ancêtre, were regularly staged internationally during the composer’s lifetime but soon sank into oblivion. However, in recent years several of his operas have been successfully revived; critics rushed to praise the revival of L’Ancêtre in Munich in 2019 and its concert performance in 2024 which served as preparation for this recording; hence it sits centrally within Bru Zane’s brief of championing neglected French works deserving re-evaluation. Fittingly, this recording was made in Monte-Carlo, where it was premiered in 1906 at the behest of Prince Albert I.
L’Ancêtre explores the familiar operatic tropes of a long-standing feud between two families and a tragic love story, much in the style of Romeo and Juliet, but is set in Corsica during the First French Empire. It was hardly the first opera to draw on the themes of vendetta, divided loyalties and the code of honour, and the composer and his librettist Augé de Lassus went to considerable lengths to ensure authenticity, travelling there for inspiration to write in a genre approaching verismo – although their subsequent collaboration was hardly smooth. There are echoes of Saint-Saëns’ contemporary Massenet here, too – especially La Navarraise – although L’Ancêtre is more classically restrained in style. Its length of an hour and a half has perhaps worked against its stageability, being slightly too long to be paired and too short to stand alone as an evening’s operatic entertainment.
After a fierce, angular and arresting prelude, the first voice we hear is the light, supple baritone of Michael Arivony as the peace-making hermit Raphaël – essentially the “Friar Lawrence” role – then bright-voiced tenor Julien Henric, both singers mercifully free of the modern besetting sin of the beat or wobble which has afflicted too many singers in some previous Bru Zane issues. Indeed, I am pleased to report that every voice here gives pleasure, including those who make up the small, energised chorus – from Tokyo! The prayer for peace makes an effectively moving set pieces, but what should be the climactic point of Act 1, in which the old, half-blind matriarch Nunciata – the “ancestor” representing the voice of traditional, ancestral law – utters the single word and note she is given – “Non!” – rejecting the offer of reconciliation between the two warring clans – is strangely anti-climactic, needing a much more venomous and resonant delivery than Jennifer Holloway gives it; it goes for little. The ensuing love duet for Tébaldo and Margarita, however, is alternately charming and impassioned – rather old-fashioned for its era, perhaps, but so neatly scored and crafted and there is more than a hint of Wagner’s “Forest Murmurs” about the hermit’s addressing of his bees which opens and closes the act.
Act II opens with a passionate outburst for Vanina, sung by the vibrant, smoky-voiced mezzo Gaëlle Arquez, and a funeral procession – a highly theatrical juxtaposition. Jennifer Holloway, singing in excellent French, then takes centre-stage and deploys her big, fruity soprano fearlessly to depict her grief on the death of her grandson and to curse her enemies. She has a Wagnerian/Straussian heft and beauty of tone and her tour de force here as Nunciata more than compensates for the lack of impact in that first act interjection. She sounds so much better here than in the live Der fliegende Holländer on Naxos I recently reviewed. As a prelude to the Act III is a strange little bucolic interlude which is musically diverting but adds nothing to the drama, a scene in which Margarita strolls along a mountain path, picking flowers and trilling a wordless melisma on “Ah!”. The remainder however, is taut and dramatically highly effective, its musical highpoints being the trio for the lovers and the hermit and the quartet before the fatal, accidental shooting of Vanina by her grandmother.
Kazuki Yamada’s association with the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra began in 2011 and has fostered his attachment to French music. His direction is fluid and delicate, as befits this diaphanous score and the orchestral playing is correspondingly fleet and elegant.
The sound is impeccable. My only reservation concerning this beautifully performed and presented recording derives from the quality and nature of the music itself. Compared with Samson et Dalila, first conceived as an oratorio by the composer when he was in his early thirties, it is very evident that by the time he came to compose L’Ancêtre as a seventy-year-old, Saint-Saëns had moved into a much freer, through-composed style, still tonal, of course, but mostly eschewing set-piece arias and whereby snippets and snatches of melody flit by in a somewhat loose manner. It is highly atmospheric and particularly apt in bringing out the import and clarity of the text, but not especially memorable from a melodic point of view; in fact, it reminds me very much of the work of another contemporary composer and admirer, Gabriel Fauré, whose Pénélope (1913), for example, it resembles in style, while being more dramatic and eschewing specific leitmotifs in favour of a broader, more thematically-based approach. On a second listening, however, I certainly found more to engage me, an appreciation evidently enhanced by familiarity.
As usual, the format here is a lavishly illustrated bilingual book with essays, illustrations, a synopsis and a full libretto, more easily negotiated by the provision of two ribbon bookmarks. The essays are historical and lightly musicological in content; one quotation in particular from the composer’s writings contained in Marie-Gabrielle Soret’s “The Late Operas of Camille Saint-Saëns” made me smile: ”And there are people who are always tormenting me to do operas. I’ve done all too many, by the immortal gods!!!…And when they are not performed, it’s terrible; and when they are performed, it’s even worse!” Also included is Fauré’s article about the premiere as published in Le Figaro. He redundantly prefaces his critique of the music by spending half the article first recounting the plot and my editorial pen would have curtailed or deleted it altogether, but there follows an encomium for each of the three acts and the artists’ delivery of them – hardly surprising given the calibre of that original cast of Félia Litvinne, Geraldine Farrar, Marie Charbonnel, Charles Rousselière and Maurice Renaud – famous names. This new recording might not have quite that star quality but its cast and execution have no weaknesses and provide the best possible advocacy of a work which, I would suggest, does not deserve it neglect.
Ralph Moore
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