Charpentier is known as a sort of successor to Lully, but really, he was only twelve years younger. They'd be considered contemporaries if Lully hadn't done such a number on himself with his conductor's battle axe. He, Charpentier, wrote an opera called Les arts florissants, from which the baroque music collective gets its name. Good choice, that.
I feel like Médée is his most famous work, though it's not really very readily available: there's a concert performance on DVD that's very out-of-print; the only other choice that I know of is this youtube video with French subtitles. I'd been putting off watching it for a while because, honestly, trying to come to grips with said subtitles for two and a half hours just seemed like it would be exhausting. And it is, a little. I mean, I already knew the story, but I was struggling, and at a certain point I decided not to stress the meaning too much. I could probably more or less understand about half of it, but it wasn't too easy.
I think you know the basic story: Jason and Medea are fugitives with their two kids; they take refuge in Corinth. But Jason is sick of Medea; he wants instead to marry King Creon's daughter Créuse (whose name seems to vary in different versions of the story). She's already engaged to the prince of Argos, Oronte, but Creon's cool with her marrying Jason instead. Medea is to be banished and her children taken from her, so she uses her magic to drive Creon insane and kill him, gives Créuse a poisoned robe to kill her, and murders the kids into the bargain. She is nothing if not thorough. Jason's sad, but he's a huge douchebag, so that's really the least of our concerns.
This is really good. And that is your penetrating insight! But really, I mean, if you know the milieu, you know basically what Charpentier's music sounds like, but my impression is that it's more sophisticated than Lully. Whatever that means. There's one part with an Italian singer, singing in Italian in an Italian style, that you definitely wouldn't have seen from Lully. Less dancing here, but what there is is pretty nice. This particular production youtube is modern-dress, but with some cool and slightly disturbing effects, such as smoke rising from Créuse's body as she's dying and Medea making her climactic appearance holding the blood-soaked, lifeless corpses of her children. And there's an appropriately apocalyptic fire effect at the end. My only real objection to the production is that it shears off the prologue. NOW how am I supposed to know whether Louis XIV is great or not?!? Tell me THAT, huh?!?
Have I already seen an opera called Médée? Well, sort of. I've seen Luigi Cherubini's opera of that name from a hundred years later, but I saw it in the commonly-used Italian translation, so it's just called plain ol' Medea. Bummer. Which one is better? Well...I liked the Cherubini, but I can't say I remember it THAT well. I seem to recall that Creon's daughter had a much smaller role. I probably liked the production of Cherubini that I saw more than this production, but, I mean, it's no secret that baroque opera is my favorite opera, so I'd probably put this ahead of that for that reason. I really want to see more Charpentier, but he's much less-performed than either Lully or Rameau.
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