Leonore Ou L'amour Conjugal - DVD

Léonore, ou L'Amour conjugal, with a text by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly and music by Pierre Gaveaux, is one of the most famous pieces of lyric theatre that virtually no contemporary audiences have ever witnessed. This opéra comique, which premiered at the Parisian Theatre Feydeau in 1798, is emblematic of a persistently neglected category of dramatic repertory-the dialogue opera of the French revolutionary period. It also, of course, provided the source material for an object of widespread renown and sustained scholarly fascination Fidelio, the sole surviving (and much revised) opera of Ludwig van Beethoven. Bouilly and Gaveaux's Léonore is thus a work with a uniquely bifurcated historical identity. On the one hand, it's plot and musical idiom are tied closely to the time and place of it's creation; it betrays a clear debt to the conventions of Classical-era opéra comique and to the specific political circumstances of the late 1790s. On the other hand, the opera's abstract and broadly generalisable themes-of the strength of conjugal devotion and the necessity for rebellion against unjust persecution-would prove eminently adaptable, exerting an enduring hold on the popular imagination in France and throughout 19th-century Europe. Filmed on 23 February 2017 at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater, John Jay College, New York.

Starring Donata D'Annunzio Lombardi, Anna Caterina Cornacchini, Enrico Maria Marabelli.

This is the third L’Orfeo I’ve seen on DVD, and it’s a real success. In style it fits among the theatrical productions that use over 20 singers and over 20 players, even adding some supernumeraries to fill the stage. Yet as a performance it should stand comparison with the intimate versions that we have heard on CD recently, since Pier Luigi Pizzi, the stage director who also designed the sets and costumes, replicated the venue of the first production in the Mantua residence. This may suggest that adhering to the minimal personnel of the alternative interpretation (a dozen singers and a dozen players, more or less) is not really necessary, or simply that Pizzi imagines a pretty big palace. But he imagines well, for this is the best stage set, the best costumes, the best lighting, and the best camerawork of the three versions I’ve seen. It is simply the best theatrical production of an opera that I’ve ever seen on DVD (not that I’ve seen very many). All three were made in live performances (the Harnoncourt video of 1979 was pantomimed in a studio 10 months after the performance was recorded), but the audience manifests itself only twice at the ends of the two halves. Christie’s was a single performance of May 19, 2008, at the Teatro Real in Madrid, while Jean Claude Malgoire’s was made at Tourcoing in October 2004 (also for Dynamic) and Stephen Stubbs’s was made in Amsterdam in July 1997 for Opus Arte.