Customer Reviews

Cadmus & Hermione: tragédie lyrique de Lully et Quinalut

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Cadmus & Hermione, Lully and Quinault's first collaboration is given extraordinary treatment in this glorious, historically precise production led from the podium by the remarkable young French conductor, Vincente Dumestre with mise en scene by Benjamin Lazar. The idea behind this production, a result of the overwhelming reception that greeted their "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" two years ago, was to recreate, as exact as possible, the spectacle as it would have been seen in Paris's Jeu de Bequet in 1673, with all stage lighting provided solely by candles, replicas of the stage machinery, costumes, body language, pronunciation and dance. The result is a triumph both musically and visually. The sort of experience that few will ever have a chance to enjoy first hand. There are times when you feel that what you are witnessing is a tableau vivant or better yet, a baroque painting that has sprung to life. The all-French cast could hardly be improved upon, with sublime singing from everyone involved. Needless to state that Dumestre's own band, Le Poeme Harmonique is sheer perfection. Period sensibilities definitely extend beyond just the visual. This appealed to me from both a musical and historical perspective and if you, like me, are fond of the French baroque, this is an absolute must have. Gorgeous from beginning to end. For a brief glimpse, please visit cadmus.fr.

I received this DVD from Amazon France this morning; and I had the most delightful 2 hours watching it. If "Le bourgeois gentilhomme" was stunning, this piece is oppulent, ravishing, elegant.

The metteur en scene has outdone himself with the stage, the theatre machinery. the radiant costumes. And the music and singing are without flaw. The previous reviewer has said it all.

Although this opera is called a "tragedie lyrique", the story is gripping, but not really tragic. Noble Cadmus has his comic sidekicks (his three somewhat inept companions); and Pallas Athene and Amour see to it that there is a splendid happy end.

There are some shortcomings, not of the piece, but of the DVD (European release) - not sufficient, however, to deduct any points.

Although the DVD comes with a small booklet on the background of the opera, there is no track list

There is no bonus material at all. Everything you want to learn about Le Poeme Harmonique and French baroque staging, you will have to get from Le bourgeois gentilhomme

During the curtain call, the ensemble is obscured by those tiresome scrolling credits. I would have liked to learn the names of the singers individually and also shared in the enthusiasm of the audience. Surely, there was space on the disc for 2 more minutes.

That said, the production is a marvel. Incidentally, if you have a multi-region player, check out this DVD on amazon.fr for considerable savings.

I can only add to the the chorus of praise for this outstanding production. It unbelievably good. I am a great fan of Baroque Opera and this presentation is a dream come true. The music of Lully is done on period instruments, the sets, costumes, stage machinery, dances and dance steps true to the era, singers who can sing such music naturally, even the lighting by candles and all this conducted by someone who is akin to the spirit of the composer. This is truly heaven-sent. I always approach productions of Baroque and Bel Canto opera DVDs with great trepidation as so often the directors, curse them, will present Romeo and Juliet in a Brooklyn brothel or worse, or some other Eurotrash clap-trap e.g just look over what's been done to Handel's masterpieces. Here at last is what can be done by dilligent and respectful production personel and musicians. I am simply awe struck by the masterful presentation

Cadmus and Hermione is the first French Opera by Quinault and Lully.Lully, born in Italy and close friend to Louis the XIVth and "intendant" à la Cour is known to be first French Opera composer.
Louis enjoyed Dance,Music and Lyrics together and probably encouraged Lully in this way.
Vincent Dumestre already performed "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" by Lully and Moliere but unfortunately the DVD is very poor quality because badly filmed.This is a pity because the work of Vincent Dumestre is Extraordinary.
I must admit Cadmus and Hermione DVD is far better.
By the way both performance on stage are very professionnal.

I can't really add anything to what the other reviewers have said, except to echo their praise! If you liked Lazar's production of "Sant'Alessio", also available on DVD, then you'll love this one.

A little warning about the subtitles: they might not work on older DVD players. I couldn't get any subtitles, in any language, to display on a circa 2000 player, but they worked fine on brand-new equipment. I know someone else has had the same problem, so I don't think it was simply a defect of my own copy.

... that is to say, an acquired taste. French Baroque opera is distinctly different from Italian -- including that most famous of Italians, il Caro Sassone, resident in London -- or German. Being an ardent fan of Handel or Hasse will not guarantee that you'll 'cotton' to Jean-Baptiste Lully. The Italian opera structure of recitativo > da capo aria never dominated French opera. Thus the vocal acrobatics associated with the great castrati are NOT to be heard in Lully or his successors in Paris. Librettists in Lully's France had reason to write proudly, since clear, expressive articulation of the WORDS was the paramount virtue; thus there were few melismata, but many strophic repetitions. If you speak French, you can't NOT understand. The music involves very little counterpoint; in comparison with Handel or Scarlatti, French Baroque will inevitably sound fluffy, mannered, shallow... and yet it has its beauties.

If you know the operas of Monteverdi, perhaps you'll recognize the derivation of the French style from the "ritornelli" of that supreme composer and his contemporaries. I wonder if the usual historical perception of Lully -- that he adopted the French taste -- has any logic. Listening to Cadmus et Hermione, I'm inclined to think Lully outright invented the French taste based on his curiously provincial musical education and his inclination toward the musical manner of an earlier generation of Italian composers. I've combed the French repertoire of the first half of the 17th Century, and found very little there that prepared the world for Lully. Love him or hate him, he was a major innovator.

Here's a brief biography of Lully, culled from another source: "Lully was born in Florence, Italy. Lully had little education, musical or otherwise, but he had a very natural talent to play the guitar and violin and to dance. In 1646, he was discovered by Roger de Lorraine, the chevalier de Guise, and taken to France, where he entered the services of Mademoiselle de Montpensier (la Grande Mademoiselle) as a scullery-boy and Italian-language teacher. With the help of this princess, his musical talents were cultivated. He studied the theory of music under Nicolas Métru. It has been said that a scurrilous song on his patroness (the doggerel he set to music refers to a "sigh" she produced while at stool) resulted in his dismissal. It is far more likely that he did not want to moulder out in the provinces with the exiled princess. He came into Louis XIV's service in late 1652, early 1653 as a dancer. He composed some music for the Ballet de la Nuit, which pleased the king immensely. He was appointed as the composer of instrumental music to the king and conducted the royal string orchestra of the French court, Les Vingt-quatre Violons du Roi or the Grande Bande. He tired of the lack of discipline of the Grande Bande and, with the King's permission, formed his own Petits Violons. Lully composed many ballets for the King during the 1650s and 1660s, in which the King and Lully himself danced. He also had tremendous success composing the music for the comedies of Molière, including Le Mariage Forcé (1664), L'Amour Médecin (1665), and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670). It was when he met Molière that together they created the Comédie-Ballet. Louis XIV's interest in ballet waned as he aged, and his dancing ability declined (his last performance was in 1670) and so Lully pursued opera. He bought the privilege for opera from Pierre Perrin and, with the backing of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the king, created a new privilege which essentially gave Lully complete control of all music performed in France until his death.
He was known to be a libertine. Although his life is full of meteoric heights, his love affairs with men and women also brought him down in scandal several times at the great displeasure of Louis XIV. Despite these scandals, he always managed to get back into the good graces of Louis XIV, who found Lully essential for his musical entertainments and who thought of Lully as one of his few true friends. On January 8, 1687, Lully was conducting a Te Deum in honor of Louis XIV's recent recovery from illness. He was beating time by banging a long staff (a precursor to the bâton) against the floor, as was the common practice at the time, when he struck his toe, creating an abscess. The wound turned gangrenous, but Lully refused to have his toe amputated and the gangrene spread, resulting in his death on 22 March."

Just as Monteverdi's operas always began with a 'philosophical' prologue, featuring divine personages, Lully's Cadmus et Hermione commences with a fulsome tribute in music and dance to Apollo, the Sun God, rather obviously alluding to Louis XIV, the Sun King. There's nothing subtle about the flattery here, but the music is deliciously coy and sensual.

Although C&H is announced to be a "trágedie lyrique", no modern audience will detect anything tragic in it. It's a heroic love story with a happy ending, enlivened by comic scenes of cowardice, indelicate boasting, and bizarre stage-business. The 'harmony' achieved between the mortal lovers is paralleled on Olympus by the reconciliation of the immortals Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Pallas, all of whom have appeared on or above stage, tampering with human affairs as usual. Such Harmony is, I think, the philosophical 'burden' of all the musical frivolity.

This production by the French company Le Poéme Harmonique represents the apotheosis of historical authenticity. All the sets, the stage machinery, the costumes, and even the lighting are as authentic as the 'original' instruments of the orchestra. Lit only by candles, yet filmed digitally! What a strange, cognitively disparate concept! It takes a while for one's eyes to accept the warm yellow tinge that suffuses the 42-inch LCD screen, but it's certainly worth the effort. In the end, the visual splendors and the ingenuity of the stage machinery and 'flat' sets turn out to be a testimonial to the artistry of pre-modern times.

To be effective in such a production, both singing and acting styles must be as 'authentic' and deliberate as the staging. No singer can just let her/his voice carry the role; every facial expression, ever hand gesture, every posture must also be theatrical, Baroque, stylish. The Comedie Française has perpetuated this highly codified, mannered technique of acting, in its productions of Moliere and Corneille; if you've seen such productions, you'll recognize that Le Poéme Harmonique has learned its lessons there. The 'aesthetic' of this French opera-theater is in fact a total Harmony of the elements of words, music, and stagecraft.

Obviously, as in any kind of opera of any era, the production is only as good as the singing. On this DVD, the singing is spectacular, within the canon of French Baroque taste, bien entendu! Above all, Claire Lefilliâtre sings the role of Hermione with technical control of her ornamentation and musical diction that sets a new standard of perfection for other singers. Ornamentation is the soul of French Baroque. It's not ad libitum. It was precisely notated. It has to sound effortlessly elegant, without overwhelming the melodic rhetoric. It has, in effect, to enhance the words, not obfuscate them. Claire Lefilliâtre achieves exactly that. André Morsch delivers the role of Cadmus with lush timbres, but the stage-stealing male star of this production is Arnaud Marzorati, in the comic roles of Pan and Arbas, the boastful cowardly subaltern of Cadmus. As Pan in the prologue, Marzorati sings, dances, and plays the bagpipes.

Ballet was another central ingredient in the French 'taste' established by Lully, himself a superb dancer. In this production there are proficient dancers galore, but the singers must also dance. Sing, act, dance! Quite a challenge, n'est pas?

The orchestra pit is visible on screen at times, a mere foot or two from the stage candles. You'll see 36 musicians down there. The strings include both the violin family and gambas. There are oboes, recorders, bagpipes, bassoons, theorbos, harpsichords, percussion, and a rare delight, the "trompette", which is not what you may think. You'll hear its peculiar timbre in the climactic scenes of Act V. I'll let you guess what the "trompette" might look like.

This is a glorious production in every detail. It's not the only way to bring French opera to a modern audience; there are also radically modern multi-media productions of Lully and Rameau operas that I find very satisfying. All I can give you by way of advice is that you'll either love or loathe this DVD; if you loathe it, you can easily resell it.

I loved Le Poème Harmonique's DVD of "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" and it is a favourite of mine. So I couldn't wait to get their new recording of "Cadmus et Hermione". I paid $50 (Australian) for it and it was worth every cent.
The work is performed in 17th century costumes and candle light. The colours are rich and the protagonists all look superb. The entire production looks fantastic - like something out of one's imagination or a dream. The whole thing is as close to perfect as anyone could ever wish for.

The cast is excellent, André Morsch makes a very effective Cadmus and Claire Fefilliâtre is a beautiful looking and beautiful sounding Hermione. All the cast are excellent, in fact, and I have never seen so many pretty girls in any opera production before!
The orchestra of Le Poème Harmonique includes:
8 dessus de violon
3 hautes-contre de violon
3 quintes de violon
5 basses de violon
2 violes de gambe
4 hautbois, flûtes
1 cornemuse
3 bassons
2 clavecins
2 théorbes
1 percussions
1 trompette

Lots of beautiful, colourful and sexy orchestral music comes from this ensemble. Maestro Dumestre gives us magic and lots of it!
I only hope Vincent Dumestre and his colleagues bring us many more similar productions of Lully's operas, which still remain, even today, largely unexplored.

William Christie's Les Arts Florissants recent production of Lully's "Armide" is due to be released on DVD soon. I look forward to that one!

However, do not waste a moment getting hold of "Cadmus et Hermione"! It is simply wonderful. Amazing and wonderful, and five stars aren't nearly enough!

THIS IS A ROYALLE PROFUNDITY!
It is a must buy if you want to feel that your sitting in Versailles in the box royalle! here you are it is so elegant and so full of elegant dance and absolutly Royalle ! you must have this one. You know after this experience that you have spent some time in the 17th century and the grande Baroque of the Lullian time. it is a must have the cast is stellar and the costumes appropriate to the time and the color is so brilliante' it takes you back BY CANDLELIGHT too!!! this is so grande get out your bottle of wine french of course and pour it out and sip and watch from your gilded theater room and enjoy thier utter most pouring forth of entertainment royalle!

I agree with all the wonderful things that have been written about this item, its musical values, mise-en-scene, execution, vocal and dramatic qualities. Plaudits to all. HOWEVER, I have yet to be able to display subtitles, in any language. Apparently there is a glitch somewhere that others have experienced as well, as one gathers from reading reviews. Somebody wrote that perhaps it only happens with older machines. Not so. I have a brand new blu ray, 2009 Oppo, and though the menus do indeed translate to various languages, no subtitles display in ANY language. The item is rare and I don't want to part with it, so I am trying to discover what it is that's causing this situation with the seller, the blu-ray manufacturer (which is splendid, flexible, and with which I have had no issues) and if I can get a hold of a contact at the manufacturer of the dvd, with them as well. I'm in process, but I am posting this in the event somebody has already found a solution they would like to share directly with me: [...]. Any help would be warmly appreciated. If I come up with a solution, I shall post it. Obviously not all others have had problems with subtitles. My French is rather serviceable, but I prefer the effortlessness of subtitles, which, in any event, we have paid for.

My initial three-star review shall be augmented to five once this issue is settled.

This production is so excellent that in order to appreciate fully its splendor it is necessary to look into history regarding the time it was premiered and at the composer's place in music, mainly in France. I would like to quote some great text from an important source:

""A very special sort of opera that would reign in France, one tailored to accommodate national prejudices, court traditions, and royal prerogatives. As the French court was the exemplary aristocratic establishment, so the French national opera was the courtiest court opera that ever was-- and hence the one most committed to the politics of affirmation. Like every other aspect of French administrative culture, it was wholly centralized. Its primary purpose was to furnish propaganda for the state and for the divine right of the king, and only secondarily to provide entertainment for the nobility and bourgeoisie. Indeed, no operatic spectacle could be shown to the French public that had not been prescreened, and approved, at court. At the same time, French opera aimed far higher than the "musical tale" of the Italians, which was essentially a pastoral play. The French form aspired to the status of a full-fledged tragédie en musique later tragédie lyrique, which meant that the values of the spoken drama, France's greatest cultural treasure, were as tar as possible to be preserved in spite of the music.

To reconcile the claims of court pageantry with those of dramatic gravity was no mean trick. Only a very special genius could bring it off - and it happened to be Giovanni Battista Lulli, a Florentine boy who had been brought over in 1646, at the age of thirteen, to serve as garcon de chambreto Madame de Montpensier, a Parisian lady who wanted to practice her Italian. She also supported his training in courtly dancing and violin playing. When his patroness, a Frondist, was exiled in 1652, Lulli secured release from her employ and found work as a dancer and a mime at the royal court, where he danced alongside, and made friends with, the teenaged king. Upon the death of his violin teacher the next year, Lulli assumed his position as court composer of instrumental music. His rise to supreme power was steady and unstoppable, for Lulli was a veritable musical Mazarin, an Italian-born French political manipulator of genius. With the founding in 1669 of the Académie Royale de Musique, Louis XIV's opera establishment (which the king shortly deeded over to his by then naturalized friend who, Like Mazarin, had Frenchified his name), Jean-Baptiste Lully became himself a musical Sun King, the absolute autocrat of French music, which he re-created in his own image. He died in 1687 (with his boots on, as it were, following a mishap with a time-beating cane), having produced thirteen tragedies lyriques.

The pattern that he set with them became the standard to which any composer aspiring to a court performance had to conform. Two generations of French musicians thus became Lully's dynastic heirs. His works would dominate the repertory for half a century after his death, in response not to market forces or to public demand but by royal decree, giving Lully a vicarious reign comparable in length of years to his patron's, and extending through most of the reign of the next king, Louis XV. His style did not merely define an art form; it defined a national identity. La musique, he might have said, c'est moi.

The ultimate "representation of power," the Lullian tragedie lyrique was from first to last a sumptuously outfitted--but, in another sense, quite thinly clad--metaphor for the grandeur and the authority of the court that it adorned. The monumental mythological or heroic-historical plots, some at first chosen by the king himself, celebrated the implacable universal order and the supremacy of divine or divinely appointed rulers.
A metaphor from first to last. First, following a marchlike overture whose stilted rhythms became a universal code for pomp, there had to be a panegyric prologue of a full act's duration. Here mythological beings were summoned to extol the French king's magnificent person and his deeds of war and peace with choral pageantry and with suites of dances modeled on the actual ballet de cour, an elaborate ritual, in which the king himself took part, that symbolized the social hierarchy.

Throughout the spectacle that followed, dancing, ceremonial movement accompanied by the grandest and most disciplined orchestra in Europe, would furnish a lavish symbolic counterpoint to the words, at times enlarging on the dramatic action, at times contrasting with it. The contemporary relevance of the allegory proclaimed at the first and affirmed at the last, was what really counted in a tragédie lyrique. To drive it home the players wore "modern dress," adapted from contemporary court regalia, just as the dances they danced were the sarabands, the gavottes, and the passepieds of the contemporary ballroom. The theatrical pageant was not merely reminiscent of a social dance; it wasa social dance enacted by professional proxies. The whole drama was conceived as a sublimated court ritual. Royal and noble spectators were looking not for transcendence but for validation. They did not value the kind of verisimilitude that makes the imaginary seem real. They wanted just the opposite: to see the real--that is, themselves--projected in to the fabulous and the archetypal.

Along with this peerless feast of symbolic movement and rich sonority went an unparalleled courtly intolerance of virtuoso singing, abjured not only for the usual negative reasons--uppity singers symbolized a polity in disarray--but for more positive reasons having to do with the theatrical traditions of France. Here verisimilitude of a very particular sort--fidelity to articulate language, which is the first thing that goes in florid, legato, "operatic" singing--suddenly loomed very large. The lead performers in French court opera remained nominally acteurs, and the voice of the castrato went unheard.

Rarely were French singing actors called upon to contend with the full orchestra. Their interminable scenes and confrontations were played against a bare figured bass in a stately, richly nuanced recitative whose supple rhythms in mixed meters caught the lofty cadence of French theatrical declamation. Lully for whom French was a second language, was said to have modeled this style directly on the closely observed delivery--the contours, the tempos, the rhythms, and the inflections--of La Champmeslé, Racine's handpicked tragedienne. There were no roulades and no cadenzas, but there were an infinity of "graces": tiny conventional embellishments--shakes, slides, swells-- that worked in harness with the bass harmony to punctuate the lines and to enhance their rhetorical projection. And there were all kinds of subtly graded transitions in and out of minuscule, simply structured "airs," set in plain couplets to dance rhythms, that animated the prosody while placing minimum barriers in the way of understanding.

This, in its way, was the perfect opera for opera haters: an eyeful of spectacle, one ear full of opulent instrumental timbre, the other ear full of high rhetorical declamation. Vocal melody was far from the first ingredient or the most potent one, and the singers were held forcibly in check. Vocal virtuosity was admitted only in a decorative capacity on a par with orchestral color and stage machinery--never as a metaphor of emotion run amok!--and had to emanate from the lips of anonymous coryphées: members of the populace, shades, athletes, planets. The dazzling general impression took absolute precedence over the particular participants. The concert of myriad forces in perfect harness under the aegis of a mastermind was the real message, whatever the story. While even Saint-Evremond had to admit that "no man can perform better than Lully upon an ill-conceived subject," he turned it into a barb: "I don't question but that in operas at the Palace-Royal, Lully is 1oo times more thought of than Theseus or Cadmus," his heroes. But that was all right, since the king was even more thought of than Lully. ""

We can see that this production perfectly abides by the rules prescribed to the opera by French culture at the time. The costumes and mise-en-scène so meticulously done in the period style, we can easily imagine ourselves in Versailles attending a performance, with the Sun King and the court present. The text/libretto is so incredibly smart and moralizing; it is an example of the typical baroque mindset - rational, a wry humor, deep feelings alongside sophistication and wisdom.

The singing is flawless; the acting is beautiful - the gestures, the ballet - such a perfection, and of course, it has a healthy dose of fun - the whole dragon affair is so entertaining, and surely inspires many smiles.

Of course, the allegory here is for the France confrontation with Holland in 1672; it seems as the defeated dragon is an allegory of Prince William III of Orange, who had been forced to raise the siege of Charleroi on 22 December. Needless to say, Louis is represented by Apollo, his traditional allegorical divinity, and the references to the bright sun in whose rays people warm are to Sun King himself.

The music is often so reminiscent of Monteverdi; to me the resemblance was the most striking in the duet of Cadmus and Hermione Act II, Scene IV "Je vais partir, belle Hermione" - toward the end when Hermione asks Cadmus to stay: "Vous fuyez?", the music reminds of a similar part of the Poppea and Nerone duet, where Poppea asks Nerone when he would come again: "Tornerai?".

My only wish would be that a libretto is included in DVD package, as it is commonly done in CDs.

Overall, it is the highest quality production and I highly recommend it to baroque opera lovers.