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La jolie fille de Perth: opéra en 4 actes et 5 tableaux by George Bizet (review)

2024; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2024.a919064

1534-150X

Ralph P. Locke,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Reviewed by: La jolie fille de Perth: opéra en 4 actes et 5 tableaux by George Bizet Ralph P. Locke George Bizet. La jolie fille de Perth: opéra en 4 actes et 5 tableaux. Critical edition by Hugh Macdonald. Norwich, England: Fishergate Music, 2022. (Bizet's Other Operas; v. 3, pts. 1 and 2) [1 score (2 volumes [vi, 644 p.]). Preface and critical report in English. Paperback. ISMN 979-0-9002-4544-1. $297.] I have previously reviewed here the first two volumes in Fishergate's remarkable and much-needed series of critical editions of what Hugh Macdonald (Fishergate's founder and editor) calls, with a touch of rueful wit, "Bizet's Other Operas." What that phrase means is simple: the series offers all of Bizet's performable operas except for Carmen and Les pêcheurs de perles, the only two Bizet operas for which there exist relatively reliable scores and parts. There are several reliable editions now of Carmen, including one, by Richard Langham Smith and Clair Rowden, published by Edition Peters. Another is forthcoming, prepared by Hervé Lacombe and Paul Prévost. A true critical edition of Les pêcheurs de perles will remain impossible until the composer's manuscript, now in private hands, becomes available to the scholarly community. Bärenreiter distributes the most reliable current score, edited by, yes, Hugh Macdonald. In my reviews of Bizet's strongest one-act opera, Djamileh (Notes 78, no. 1 [September 2021]: 122–26) and of his very first opera, Don Procopio (Notes 79, no. 1 [September 2022]: 96–101), I described the intent and policies of the "Bizet's Other Operas" series. Volume 3, devoted to La jolie fille de Perth (1872), fully matches the high standard set in those first two publications. Because La jolie fille is a four-act work, volume 3 extends to two thick volumes, labeled 3a and 3b. As with the previous two releases, the musical notes and sung text are set out clearly and printed large enough to make reading a pleasure rather than a chore. (La jolie fille, like Les pêcheurs de perles, contains no spoken dialogue.) The introduction and appendices—for example, list of variants and editor's revisions—tell the reader, or future singer, conductor, or stage designer/director, everything they would likely want to know, directly and concisely. [End Page 572] Why should we care about La jolie fille de Perth? Well, because it is, aside from Pêcheurs and Carmen, the only evening-length opera that Bizet fully completed. I mean no offense to Djamileh, which I adore and which was revived by, among others, Gustav Mahler (in Vienna). But that delicious work lasts only a bit more than an hour. As for Don Procopio, it's very early and derivative, designed intentionally to please the Prix de Rome committee, though it is charming and, in some spots, quite fresh-sounding. Since it didn't get staged in Bizet's lifetime, he never had occasion to compose the recitatives for it that set up the next step in the plot. (Charles Malherbe provided recitatives decades later, but he also made unnecessary changes that change the character of the work.) Similarly, Bizet's full-length Ivan IV never got definitively scheduled for performing, so Bizet stopped working on it after having composed nearly the whole score. Ivan IV will be the last of "Bizet's Other Operas" to be issued, preceded by volume 4, containing two one-acters, each of which involves a physician: La maison du docteur and Le docteur Miracle. La jolie fille de Perth more or less begs us for a place in today's performing repertory. After all, it is a work of Bizet's maturity, first performed in 1867, which is to say more or less halfway between Les pêcheurs and the two final operas: Djamileh and Carmen. (Bizet died shockingly young, at age 36, exactly three months after the Carmen premiere.) Not surprisingly, it is full of shapely melodies, sometimes surprising harmonic turns, and glistening orchestration, as concertgoers and record collectors know from the four marvelous and highly contrasting orchestral movements that are often played as a suite...