ALESSANDRO BRATUS - MICHELA NICCOLAI

The mirror and the reality: Gustave Charpentier’s Louise

Abstract

On February 2^nd 1900, Gustave Charpentier’s Louise, an ambitious attempt to revolutionize from the inside the aesthetic and ethic rules of the opera, is performed at Opéra Comique Theatre in Paris. It is considered, by the major part of musical historiography, the first example of socialist opera, whose purposes are to approach the weakest social classes to the artistic Beauty and to open new autonomous spaces in the life of working-men, victims of the estrangement produced inevitably by any industrial system.
On stage it is shown a subject dragged from the daily life of the city working class. The dramatic action, in fact, develops «In Paris, nowadays», as the title page of first printed edition of vocal score says (La scène à Paris, de nous jours). The hard core of the play is a Parisian working-men family, whose peaceful life got into a scrape on account of the love of their daughter Louise for a young poet of Montmartre, Julien. First of all, it is a middle-class tragedy, which is ideally connected with the theatrical trend opened by Strindberg and pursued by Ibsen, telling the heavy clash between the social get aggregated convention and the individual get scattered will, towards the community. The freedom, the thread of what the opera says is looked like a utopian perspective; the heroine pursues her illusions, without realising the impossibility of reaching that in real life.
The narrative technique used connects again to literary contemporary period tendencies, in particular to the works of the writer, scholar and librettist Émile Zola. In collaboration with the composer Alfred Bruneau, Zola had readapted some of his novels for musical thèatre, to invent the true «naturalist opera». From a musical point of wiev, the model is surely to ascribe at the leitmotivic form used by Richard Wagner, employing in symphonic format reminisciencing motives, which «tells» the events. Jane Fulcher has underlined the use of this technique to reach the highest step of authorial impassiveness in telling, respecting the rules of the naturalist tale.
Charpentier’s attempt incorporates itself in a perspective of research of musical realism, which is a carrying knotty problem in the aestethic debate about opera in the second half of 19^th Century and early 20^th Century. One points out similar positions, in the first way, with Mussorgskji’s Boris Godunov and, in the second way, with Puccini’s Bohème. In the first case, it is shared the angle of people’s music for the people, ascribing an active function to working men masses. In the second case, we have an identical division of narrative plot in tableaux, not acts, which confer more importance to the environment, than to the play itself. A great difference between the quoted operas and Louise is the chronological distance between their authors and the historic milieu, they make reference to, projected in the past for Boris and Bohème, contemporary to Charpentier and the problems of his time, in Louise.

(AB-MN)