Félix Fourdrain - Les Contes de Perrault, at the Théâtre de l’Athénée-Louis Jouvet in Paris

Théâtre de l’Athénée-Louis Jouvet, Paris, Tuesday April 15 2025

Conductor: Dylan Corlay. Production: Valérie Lesort. Sets and Costumes: Vanessa Sannino. Lighting: Pascal Laajili.Video: Vanessa Sannino, Julie Boissy, Joris Thouvenin. Choreography: Rémi Boissy. Puppets and Masks: Carole Allemand, Louise Digard, Einat Landais, Jérémie Legroux. Cendrillon, Le petit Poucet, Chaperon Rouge: Anaïs Merlin. La fée Morgane: Julie Mathevet. Olibrius: Romain Dayez. Le Prince Charmant: Enguerrand de Hys. Madame de Houspignoles: Lara Neumann. Le Chat Botté: Camille Brault. Aurore: Eléonore Gagey. Javotte: Hortense Venot. Croquemitaine, Meunier, Huissier: Richard Delestre. La Pinchonniere, Barbe-Bleue: Philippe Brocard. La reine Guillaumette: Lucile Komitès. Le roi Guillaume: Geoffroy Buffière. Chorus and Orchestra: Les Frivolités Parisiennes.

Photos: © Fabrice Robin

Quand vous sentez des brûlures,

Des lourdeurs et du pyrosis,

De la gêne, des boursouflures,

Agissez vite, sans sursis

(...)

Prenez du bi,

Prenez du car,

Prenez du bicarbonate de soude,

Et vous m’en direz des nouvelles,

Car jamais un estomac ne boude

Au bibi, au bibi, au bibi, au bibi,

Au bicarbonate de soude.*

As Félix Fourdrain (1880-1923) is not a household name, I’ll start my post with a few paragraphs, easily skipped if you aren’t interested, about the man and his work. For these, I’m indebted to the programme notes issued by the Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing in anticipation of performances there later this month, and to Wikipedia. The website musicologie.org also offers some biographical notes, and a full list of Fourdrain’s works.

Like Saint-Saëns, Messager, Hervé and Lecocq, Fourdrain initially studied the organ, emerging from Widor’s classes (not Massenet’s, as is sometimes stated, though Massenet encouraged him in his career) at the Paris Conservatoire with a premier prix. But, also like them, he was irresistibly drawn to the theatre, and already by the time he was 27, his La Légende du Point d’Argentan premiered at the Opéra Comique. Arthur Bernède, one of its librettists, would soon pair up with Paul de Choudens (who also wrote for Mascagni and Leoncavallo, inter alia) to pen the texts for several of Fourdrain’s later stage works.

If the composer is now largely forgotten, along with even his most popular operetta, Les Maris de Ginette, it may simply be because he died of pneumonia at 43. In his day, he was successful enough. He published (usually through the Choudens family’s business: they were the publishers of Faust, Carmen and Les Contes… d’Hoffmann) vocal works of various kinds: operettas, operas, many songs, the odd instrumental piece, patriotic works during WWI and, as in the case of Les Contes de Perrault, Féeries.

The Féerie, so Professor Wiki tells us, was a genre ‘known for fantasy plots and spectacular visuals, including lavish scenery and mechanically worked stage effects. Féeries blended music, dancing, pantomime, and acrobatics, as well as magical transformations created by designers and stage technicians (...) and an extensive use of supernatural elements.’ Offenbach himself produced five, from Le Roi Carotte to Le Voyage dans la Lune. As the managers of the Gaîté Lyrique, where Les Contes was premiered at the end of 1913 (with Yvonne Printemps as Prince Charming, apparently) were soon to take over the Opéra Comique, they wanted to go out with a bang and a splash, so Fourdrain’s féerie was staged especially lavishly.

Just as he hated La Belle Hélène, Zola looked down on féeries, and Reynaldo Hahn, while acknowledging Fourdrain’s talent in setting Bernède and Choudens’ text, complained, with something of a sniff, that the work as a whole failed to respect the style of Perrault’s tales. But in Gil Blas, a daily paper of the period, Isidore de Lara - a less fastidious composer and critic than Hahn - enthused that the score ‘sparkles with youth, gaiety and lively rhythms (and) displays a marked sense of the comic and the fantastically picturesque (...) The orchestration (...) is the work of a man well-versed in his craft (with) an individual touch.’

Les Contes de Perrault is in four acts. The tales it strings tortuously together into a single plot can be guessed from its characters’ names: Cinderella, Hop-o’-My Thumb, Red Riding Hood, Prince Charming, Puss-in-Boots, Bluebeard, and so on. In short, Cinderella, having met Prince Charming (the former Hop-o’-My Thumb, ennobled, like all his family, by the good fairy), escapes Bluebeard and his guest, the ogre, and hides in a donkey skin until put to sleep by the demon Olibrius for 100 years and awakened at last as Sleeping Beauty. You get the idea…

The score, meanwhile, is unmistakably of its time, combining wistful salon waltzes, lively polkas and madcap gallops with more languorous echoes of Massenet - Cendrillon of course, and the magical mood of Esclarmonde. However much Hahn may have sniffed at it, it bears his stamp as well, and, fairy tales obligent, there’s lots of Rimsky-Korsakov’s twinkling orchestration in there too. Not to mention the music hall, as in the daft couplets quoted at the top of this post, wherein - to Hahn’s dismay - Bluebeard recommends bicarb to the dyspeptic ogre (too many plump children at one sitting). So, a kaleidoscopic, topsy-turvy score. But you can’t help, as you hear it, foreseeing the catastrophe on the horizon. With that hindsight, it has constant bittersweet undertones.

As I’ve mentioned before, the 'Frivolités Parisiennes' troupe came together in 2012 to dust off and produce - sometimes with the Palazzetto Bru Zane - French light opera of the 19th and 20th centuries: opéra-comique, opéra bouffe, opérette, vaudevilles, period French musicals and the like. I first encountered them performing Hervé’s totally batty Mam’zelle Nitouche in 2019, one of the highlights of the ongoing revival of these half-forgotten French works, to which they are making such an entertaining contribution. Any production of theirs is, in my opinion, worth investigating.

Director Valérie Lesort’s La Périchole, at the Opéra Comique in 2022, was spectacularly colourful and full of gags, but steadfastly unfunny. Admittedly, La Périchole isn’t Offenbach’s funniest work. But Les Contes is a different kettle of fish, and her production, this time, is clever, expertly managed, and a great success. Its vivid colours and contrasts, fretted sets, shadow-plays, cardboard cut-outs and stiff, flat costumes (characters enter and exit sideways, crab-like) recall the pop-up books we had as children - or still have today: I keep a couple of beauties beside my sofa.

How the magic is worked is made evident. Extras in simple white Pierrot outfits shift things around without hiding, and puppeteers work their wonders in full sight: a writhing red snake (symbolising the evil Olibrius) attacks a blue bird (Morgane, the good fairy), bluebirds and butterflies dress Cinderella for the ball, clouds on sticks unfold into sheep, the ogre and bluebeard end up as giant fowl, roasted on spits, and the sails on Puss-in-Boots’ miller’s mill are just like the ones on the paper windmill I’m waving aloft, as a blond-haired toddler in shorts, in a tiny, black-and-white holiday photo from Bournemouth…

The success of this kind of work relies on the high-voltage energy its protagonists put into it - and very exhausting it must be to keep up. But keep it up they all do, pantomime style, in the British sense of the word, i.e. an arch, grimacing, nod-nod, wink-wink, vaudeville-type show aimed at one level for kids and at another for adults. You can’t account for individual performances in the same way as for, say, Don Carlos, as singing is only occasionally the point. Indeed, the buffo roles, stars of the show, tend to eclipse the young soprano, Anaïs Merlin (new to me), whose Cinderella is nevertheless on stage practically from start to finish. Her ringing soprano suits the feisty character assigned to Cinders in this reading, more than it would a more simpering or submissive one.

Those scene-stealing buffo roles are Croquemitaine the ogre, Bluebeard, and the wicked and wickedly camp Olibrius, played by a willowy giant of a man in a devilish costume, black and bristling with red snakes, whose booming baritone comes with an unexpectedly delicate falsetto top: Romain Dayez (also new to me). The ogre, his massive jaw and paunch both bouncing up-and-down comically on elastic cords, is played with pure music-hall gusto by Richard Delestre, while Bluebeard is the sonorous operatic baritone Philippe Brocard I first encountered in Maurice Yvain’s Gosse de Riche, another Frivolités show.

Also in Gosse de Riche, and a spirited lead in several of these revivals over the past few years, was Lara Neumann; but Madame de Houspignoles, Cinderella’s mum, is more of a pantomime-dame part, giving her plenty of eye-rolling, face-pulling action, but less to sing.

Others in the cast come from wider-ranging operatic backgrounds. La Fée Morgane is a coloratura role - albeit less demanding than Massenet’s fairy - ably performed by Julie Mathevet, whom I’ve already seen as Eine Fünfzehnjährige in Lulu, in both Paris and Brussels, and as Zerlina. Similarly, the last time I heard our Prince Charming, incisive tenor Enguerrand de Hys - after some Offenbach and then Poulenc - was as Surrey in La Monnaie’s Henry VIII.

The supporting roles were stoutly defended, with unfailing verve, and a good time was had by all, as provincial reporters used to write in the local paper after any festive event. These days, with the world in the state it’s in, people need this kind of inconsequential escapism. The audience roared as if Callas had just sung Lucia, and we all left feeling confident we’d have lots of children and live happily ever after.

(Music starts in the following clip after 40 seconds)

------------------------------

*When you feel heartburn,

Heaviness and acid,

Discomfort and swelling,

Act fast, without delay

(...)

Take some bi,

Take some car,

Take some bicarbonate of soda,

And tell me all about it,

For no stomach ever resists

Bibi, bibi, bibi, bibi,

Bicarbonate of soda.