April 19, 20 & 21, 2024
Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York University (NYU)
New York, NY – USA
Nadia BOULANGER & Raoul PUGNO: La ville morte
Neal Goren, conductor; Robin Guarino, director; Nadia Boulanger & Raoul Pugno, composers; Gabrielle D’Annunzio, librettist. Cast: Melisa Harvey (Hébé), Laurie Rubin (Anne), Joshua Dennis (Léonard), Jorell Williams (Alexandre). Creative: Andromach Chalfant, scenic design; Candice Donnelly, costume design; Jessica Drayton, lighting & projection design.
Ben Gambuzza | 24 APR 2024
It is only in the last five years that the public has started to recognize Nadia Boulanger as a composer of note and not just the twentieth century’s greatest music teacher.
In 2020, the University of Rochester Press published the almost 500-page-long Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music, the first-ever collection of her writings, lectures, and broadcasts. The next year, the Bard Music Festival dedicated its programming (and a book of essays) to “Nadia Boulanger and Her World.” It was the first time that the festival’s founder, Leon Botstein, had decided to focus on a woman composer. The festival had programmed thirty years of male-headlined programs since its establishment in 1990.
Over the last four years, her compositions have appeared on at least twenty albums, including several on major labels like Sony, Warner Classics, and Deutsche Grammophon. Even Daniel Barenboim stuck his toes in with the composer’s Trois Pièces for Cello and Piano, which he released with Astrig Siranossian on Dear Mademoiselle: A Tribute to Nadia Boulanger in 2020. Before this revival, Naxos had been pretty much alone in releasing her music. But even they released only six albums featuring her works between 1993 and 2019. Now, Lux aeterna, Cantique, and the Trois Pièces, especially, have become favorites to record.
It’s unlikely that her achievement as a composer will ever eclipse her status as a pedagogue. She just taught too many greats: Stravinsky, Copland, Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Philip Glass, Quincy Jones. (She doesn’t seem to have taught many, if any, women; she believed women’s purpose to be motherhood, even though she herself never had children.) But we owe it to ourselves to keep her music alive. With its wafts of Debussy—whose “style” she once called “magnificent”—and its alternations between vast whole-tone landscapes and muscular, cadence-driven climaxes, it’s just too good to ignore. We owe it to her, too; her composing career was rudely derailed.
Before World War I, Nadia was on track to be a successful composer. At 16, she completed her studies at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1908, she won the Second Grand Prix in the Prix de Rome competition, whose previous laureates had included Berlioz, Bizet, and Debussy. By 1913, when her sister, Lili, became the first woman to win the First Grand Prix at the same competition, Nadia’s music was being programmed all over Paris. Toward the end of the year, plans were underway to premiere her only opera, La ville morte (“The Dead City”), at the Opéra-Comique.
Taking an 1899 play by the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio as its libretto, the four-act opera tells the story of two couples who are driven mad by their mutual infidelity. It takes place in Mycenae. Léonard, an archaeologist on a dig there, is married to Hébé. His sister, Anne, who is blind, is married to Alexandre. Alexandre, Léonard’s friend, is actually in love with Hébé. Alexandre confesses his love to her, but, alas, she and Anne are passionately in love. Léonard eventually realizes that Hébé loves Alexandre back. All the while, Léonard is tormented by his incestuous feeling toward his sister, Anne. Plus, he’s jealous of Hébé and Alexandre. So, Léonard kills Hébé. Anne touches Hébé’s corpse and regains her sight.
Got all that?
But the premiere never happened. Raoul Pugno, her married lover with whom she wrote the opera, died in January 1914. The director of the Opéra was replaced with a new one who had no interest in the work. The War shut down opera houses. The duo’s publisher, Henri Heugel, died in 1916. And in March 1918, Lili died, affecting Nadia deeply. Lili was “the light of my life.” Nadia was alone.
Although she revised and kept trying to get La ville morte performed until at least 1923, when she completed the orchestration of Act 1, she was depressed and needed to make money. She put her composition days behind her and focused on teaching and performing, both as an organist and conductor. La ville morte remained unorchestrated, unperformed, and forgotten, victim to what one scholar[1] has called a “strange fate.”
Melissa Harvey as Hébé and Jorell Williams as Alexandre in Catapult Opera’s production of “La ville morte.” Left background: Laurie Rubin as Anne. (credit: Marcus Shields)
Now, composers Joseph Stillwell and Stefan Cwik have orchestrated it under the guidance of David Conte, one of Boulanger’s last students. Catapult Opera commissioned the effort and presented the American premiere last weekend at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. It ran for three nights; I attended the Saturday evening performance.
I’ll just come out and say it: If Nadia Boulanger had written the opera by herself, it probably would have been better. We’ll never know who wrote what (handwriting on a manuscript doesn’t necessarily indicate authorship), but you could tell that it was a collaborative effort between a musically conservative man of an older generation—Pugno was 35 years older than Boulanger—and an on-the-cusp modernist. What’s more, the dismissal with which Pugno frequently met Boulanger’s ideas (as Jeanice Brooks and Kimberly Francis have revealed)[2] felt apparent. The development is uneven, the episodes are belabored, and the orchestra parts are frustratingly busy (this last one may be the fault of the orchestration). It is a serious, largely unhumorous work, in text as in music. It’s surprising. There is always something a little funny about madness.
Before the performance started, another critic, who had seen the Athens production[3] in January, told me that the music looks back and points ahead. He’s right on the first count. Like Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), it is fabric-like, coloring the action on stage with saturated, whole-tone sequences and chromatic surprises. Its harmonies are often nonfunctional. It is very beautiful. But too much beauty results in monotony. And that happens a lot in La ville.
On the one hand, it is down-right hard to write an opera using a musical vocabulary that expressly rejects the conclusiveness and motivic reliance (not to mention tunefulness) of the Germanic tradition—excepting Wagner. One can’t, so to speak, live on bread (whole tone scales) alone. On the other hand, the predictable call-and-response that often happens in the strings, the feeble attempts at melody, and the seeming inability for the composers to focus on one line without cluttering it with ornamentation, are problems not beyond Pugno’s and Boulanger’s abilities to have remedied.
If there is one episode destined to last, though, it is Hébé’s final aria, which was not in the original play; D’Annunzio wrote it especially for the composing duo. As Léonard accosts her over her suspected impurity, Hébé assures him again and again that she is still a virgin. Melissa Harvey sang with such convincing frustration that she became the standout after almost three whole acts of passivity, as required by her role. When she assured him for the final time, it was like a lightning bolt had struck the stage and a true climax had been reached.
Joshua Dennis played the tortured Léonard with compelling neuroticism. His voice trembled but delivered—delivered, in fact, because it trembled. When Léonard joins Alexandre in a chamber filled with gold that he’s dug up, Dennis’s build-up to his eventual confession of incestuous feelings had my eyes glued to his paranoid movements and my ears glued to his stilted attempts to utter the truth, while the orchestra alternated between foreboding pizzicato and frantic, slicing explosions. Laurie Rubin, who played Anne, and is actually blind, was often overwhelmed by the orchestra. Jorell Williams, who played Alexandre, matched Dennis not in charisma but in dynamic variation. He also provided some much-needed levity—and cringe—in his confession to Hébé, complete with standing wobbly on an examination table.
Joshua Dennis as Léonard in Catapult Opera’s production of “La ville morte.” In the background: Harvey and Rubin (as Hébé and Anne). (credit: Marcus Shields)
All said and done, La ville morte points ahead perhaps only in one respect: a man goes mad at the end instead of a woman. What’s more, there is seemingly no attempt to feminize Léonard and reinforce the stereotype that only women can be hysterical. To my knowledge, this is the first male mad scene—or, at the very least, first climactic male mad scene—in the history of opera. Berg’s Wozzeck (1925), Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945), and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1951), would follow, ignorant of their predecessor. It was about time, too. Freud had applied hysteria equally to men and women in his “Aetiology of Hysteria” paper of 1896. Opera was just slow to catch up.
Whether Pugno approved of this gender role reversal, we’ll never know. Boulanger, who identified with Hébé and even sang her role in private performances of La ville, was probably happy that it was Léonard who went mad. It might have been one of the few satisfactions she got from the opera, which, along with all her other works, she called “useless.” How she would have written it if Pugno hadn’t suppressed her ideas, only she knows. Like Hébé, she is “alone with her truth at the top of her tower.” ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Catapult Opera: catapultopera.org
- [1] Abstract: “The Strange Fate of Boulanger and Pugno’s La ville morte“ Alexandra Laederich | Nadia Boulanger and Her World Jeanice Brooks (ed.) | Oxford Academic
- [2] Abstract: “Serious Ambitions: Nadia Boulanger and the Composition of La ville morte.” Jeanice Brooks, Kimberly Francis | Nadia Boulanger and Her World, Jeanice Brooks (ed.) | Oxford Academic
- [3] La ville morte, Greek National Opera: nationalopera.gr/en/alternative-stage/es-opera/item/5596-i-nekri-poli
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