San Francisco Classical Voice

Charpentier's Louise celebrates her one-hundredth birthday this season, and the San Francisco Opera's new production gives us a chance to see how she's held up over the past century. Debussy called this opera "so bad it's touching," and certainly it has its weaknesses. The characters are as much ideological types as complete human beings. The libretto is often didactic. An arpeggiated motif, heard through the entire opera, sounds over-exposed by Act II. But the Wagnerian harmonies are rich and varied, and the orchestra, under Patrick Summers' direction, sounded radiant. The story and its political baggage are compelling; the lavish production and excellent cast offered many delights. It worked for me both as entertaining theater and as a novel experiment: romantic opera with a socialist-feminist agenda.

The story begins firmly grounded in realism. Louise, a working-class girl, loves Julien, the poet next door. (You can tell he's a poet by his floppy cravat and checked trousers.) Louise's mother, played with splendid shrewishness by Felicity Palmer, interrupts their love scene. Palmer recently played Klytemnestra at La Scala, and at times it seems she's still playing her here.

Louise's father arrives and delivers some platitudes about familial affection as the workingman's haven in a cold, exploitative world: some are rich, some labor to make others rich, but the family consoles us. He seems resigned to his own less than idyllic ménage, with a bad-tempered wife smacking their restless daughter now and again. He reads Julien's request for permission to marry Louise, but after long consideration denies his consent.

Charpentier's sensual music for this scene suggests a dimension of sexual possessiveness in paternal authority (which the production did not explore): the Father is not ready to give away his virgin daughter just yet. Faced with her mother's hostility and her father's more tender refusal, Louise agrees not to see Julien anymore.

The Act II street scene turns our attention outward, offering a parade of Parisian types: street people, vendors, delivery men, artists in extravagant capes, girls gossiping on their way to work. But this naturalistic scene also has a fantastical effect, for the nameless figures of the streets symbolize the conflicts established in Act I. The glamorous and sinister "Noctambule," a pimp in evening dress, embodies all that parents fear and young girls desire about the city. The old Rag-Picker (Kevin Langan), who tells a pathetic story about losing his daughter to the Noctambule, stands for Louise's father and all the fathers of restless daughters.

The scene in the seamstresses' shop was the comic high point, with its sassy grisettes and bustling activity. It looked like a painting come to life, and SFO was justifiably proud of its beautiful production; a program note even points out that each seamstress has her own prop! Poor Louise sits off to one side, ignoring her friends' chatter. When Julien serenades her, she runs out of the shop and into his arms.

In Act III the opera abruptly turns into a kind of manifesto on feminine sexuality. Judging from the aria "Depuis le jour," sex and freedom have endowed Louise with a big, voluptuous Puccinian voice, and here we really heard Renée Fleming for the first time. (Jerry Hadley, alas, made an unlikely instrument for Louise's transfiguration, and there was little chemistry between him and Fleming.) Julien leads Louise through a little catechism about free love and the egotism of parental affection. After the almost embarrassingly ecstatic conclusion of their duet, the lovers head back inside, clearly to have more sex. I wished the production had engaged with the mixture of exhilaration and absurdity in Charpentier's sexual-revolutionary rhetoric.

The lavish divertissement that follows, in which a throng of Bohemians arrive to crown Louise "The Muse of Montmartre," seemed almost like a dream sequence. I could imagine Louise telling Julien in the morning, "... and you were there, with all your friends, and there were dancing girls, and soldiers were dancing too, and there was a jester-king with feathers on his head, and they all sang to me and draped me with flowers and said that I inspired all the artists! and then my mother showed up!"

Even on Montmartre, Mom can break up a party. The revellers silently disperse as she delivers the bad news: Louise's father is ill. He has tried to accept his daughter's desertion, to pretend she's dead and get on with his life, but the effort is killing him. Will Louise come home and make peace? Here director Mansouri emphasized an important nuance, which is that the mother addresses not Louise but Julien. Even now, mom doesn't regard Louise as free: she sees Julien as Louise's master, albeit an illegitimate one.

Back home, some weeks later, Louise has of course not been allowed to go back to Montmartre, and her parents' behavior proves all Julien's claims about the egotism of parental affection. The reconstitution of his family, albeit by force, has restored Dad's health, and in his lovely but repressive lullaby, he entreats Louise to be his little girl again. But Louise has been changed irrevocably by her experience of freedom and real, erotic love. Declaiming the hymn to free love from the Act III love duet, she lets down her golden hair and stands vibrating in a Salome-ic ecstasy. (At this point Fleming really came into her own, and the love music was more compelling here than it had been before.) The Father, appalled at this display of untrammeled feminine sexuality in his living room, commands her to leave, threatening her with a chair when she hesitates. Unbound tresses streaming behind her, Louise runs out. Dad is left staring out into the night, cursing the very name of "Paris!"

San Francisco's production was more picturesque than thoughtful. The directors and designers opted for hyper-authenticity, with production notes listing the sources of every period detail, but I would have liked them to engage more directly with the opera's timeless socialist-feminist-utopian aspects. One might argue that the theme of family conflict is out-of-date: in the modern world, Louise would simply thumb her nose at her repressive parents and their objections to her rock star boyfriend. But then, that's just what she does. Sex and the city still stand for risk, individualism, liberation, and change. Many a modern Louise still struggles with the conflicting claims of parents and new relationships, old values and new, familiarity and adventure. For her next outing, I hope to see Louise in some new outfits.

(Heather Hadlock is Assistant Professor of Music History at Stanford University)

©1999 Heather Hadlock, all rights reserved