Auber’s operas were tremendously successful in the nineteenth century, but have hardly been performed in the twentieth at all. Le domino noir clocked up 1,200 performances in Paris alone, after its 1837 premiere, and was soon seen in London and in New Orleans. This spiffing new recording – the only previous one was a much-abridged affair from French radio – is the surest blow yet to be struck for a revival of Auber’s popularity in our time. The music is tuneful, danceable, constantly surprising in its form, and full of interesting orchestration.
The story is a variation on the usual masked-ball romantic comedy: couple meet and fall in love without ever quite seeing each other, or finding out each other’s names. The twist to the plot is the fact that the heroine, Angele, is a novice at the convent of the Annonciades, about to take her final vows. Since she is out on the town at a masked ball, we must assume that she already knows that the life of a nun is not really her destiny. The opening scene, when Angele and her friend discuss their escapade while the hero is (supposedly) asleep on a sofa, is a delight, as it develops into a trio, “La trouble et la frayeur”. As Angele, Sumi Jo sounds even more confident than she did in the recital of French arias (“Carnival!”, Decca, 9/94) which she and Bonynge recorded at the same time as this.
The Second Act takes place later the same night, when Angele finds herself locked out of the convent, and takes refuge with the servants in a house, where it turns out the hero and his chums repair for an after-the-ball supper. During the 1860s a visiting company starring the soprano Desire Artot planned a production of Le domino noir in Moscow, and Artot persuaded Tchaikovsky to compose recitatives to replace some of the spoken dialogue. Bonynge has used four of these in this act; I do not think even the most accomplished Tchaikovsky scholar would recognize the master’s hand, but they certainly help this act to go with a bang.
As the young man in pursuit of the beautiful masked stranger, Bruce Ford sings with a good deal of elegance, he takes the high notes in full voice, rather than the head tone which I imagine was customary in the 1830s. Both he and Sumi Jo deal pretty well with the French language – most of the rest of the cast consists of distinguished French singers: Isabelle Vernet as Angele’s confidante, Martine Olmeda splendid as the housekeeper, Jacinthe, and the veteran Jules Bastin as Gil Perez, porter at the convent.
Act 2 ends with a splendid build-up as all the disguises make more complications, I suppose Rossini was the main influence on Auber’s style for such a comic piece, but he has an originality all his own which in turn was to have an enormous influence, not only on the successors in the Paris comic-opera business, Offenbach and Herve, but also on Verdi. One of Auber’s most successful tragic operas was another masked ball – Gustave III, the libretto of which, also by Scribe, later served for Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. As a fill-up on the second disc we get the ball scene from that opera, which is a ballet in itself.
Richard Bonynge conducts with his usual flair, keeping everything going at a sparkling pace and encouraging some really imaginative singing. Gilles Cachemaille has a cameo as one of those satirical English milords who were so much a part of nineteenth-century Parisian comedy. I hope this will be the beginning of an Auber series – he and Scribe produced 50 operas together. No wonder the streets on either side of the Paris Opera are named for them. '