Who was Daniel Auber (1782-1871)? Well, he was a very popular composer of almost fifty operas who has more or less completely disappeared from the public consciousness. Besides this one, there are a few other DVDs of his work (including yet another Manon Lescaut), but these are all extremely out-of-print and--a bigger problem--lack subtitles. Seriously, why would you do that? We all know that operatic singing can be hard to understand even if you speak the language, and even if you don't care about that, you are really cutting yourself off from the international market. WHATEVER. There's this one, from the same series as the Halévy and Thomas. But this one has been uploaded to a streaming site by some helpful Russian person, so I figured I'd catch it.
It's the sixteenth century, and it's Venice versus the Ottoman Empire. The commander of their fleet, Lorédan, has a ward named Rafaela. What does "ward" mean in this context, and why would you bring a non-combatant woman with you to fight the Turks? Unclear. He also has a slave girl named Haydée. He also has--wait for it--a secret! The secret is that in years past, he cheated at dice to win a fortune from a noble named Donato whom he won a fortune from and who them killed himself. This fills Lorédan with remorse. His villainous second-in-command, Malipieri, learns about it when he sings about it in his sleep, and also has a letter admitting what he did. As you do. this super-keen young guy, Andréa, who is Donato's son, wants to serve under him so he can win the favor of Rafaela. He does this, and they defeat the Turks, but Malipieri knows The Secret, and he's going to tell it to everyone so that Lorédan--who is going to become Doge--will be disgraced. Haydée has a secret too: she's in love with Lorédan. He frees her, but she still wants to be with him. To make amends for his past crimes, he says, okay, Andrea and Rafaela, you can get married, but only if you agree to take my fortune. Malipieri is going to reveal the truth, but Haydée begs him not to. He agrees only on the condition that she marry him. She agrees--no greater love than this!--but then Andréa comes in, having killed Malipieri. So everyone's happy.
Wait, what? you might think. Yep. Andréa provides absolutely no reason or justification for having killed the guy, but everyone's cool with it. There are definitely a lot of plotting problems like this in the opera. So Lorédan just mentions the one time that he wants to give away his fortune: okay, so is this actually going to happen? Andréa and Rafaela don't, I don't know, wonder why he would do this thing? And are we supposed to think Lorédan has redeemed himself, or what? I mean, obviously we're meant to like him, but he never redeems himself in any official way. I dunno.
Well, regardless, you can see why Auber was popular. The music here is very crowd-pleasing, especially in the latter half, with many excellent arias and duets. And this performance may be the best I've seen so far from this series. Anne-Sophie--who m I liked in Noé--is back here as Rafaela, and is still very good. So is Bruno Comparetti as Lorédan also, and I just want to note that I couldn't shake the feeling that he looks eerily like Lin-Manuel Miranda. Maybe it's just the facial hair. Anyway, I would love to see more of Auber.
There's this person on imdb who goes by the name "TheLittleSongbird" who's written reviews of all these obscure operas. I keep wanting to look through all their opera write-ups, but it's totally impossible, because they've written over SEVENTEEN THOUSAND reviews(!!!), seemingly of every movie or TV episode or cartoon short they see, which is a lot, and as such the list is totally unmanageable. But I wanted to give them a shout-out nonetheless. Very impressive.
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