If Edouard Dupuy (?1770-1822) hadn’t written an opera somebody would have had to write an opera about him. Of obscure parentage and unknown date of birth he was trained in Paris (by, among others, Dussek), making a career as composer, violinist, singer and conductor. He was expelled from Prussia for neglect of his duties (other sources say for riding into church on horseback), from Sweden for revolutionary sympathies and from Denmark for a not very clandestine relationship with the wife of the Crown Prince. His amatory adventures were so notorious that his most recent biography is entitled The Don Juan of the North (Copenhagen: 1952), a reference also to his most famous operatic role, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, though he also sang as a tenor, creating the leading role in his own Youth and Folly (“Ungdom og Galskab”). The libretto is a Danish version of Bouilly’s Une folie, already set by Mehul, and the story goes that after the translation had been prepared, with the intention of Dupuy singing in the Danish premiere of Mehul’s work, he refused and the aggrieved translator suggested that he set it himself. He did so, relocating the plot in Copenhagen and adding several numbers including a couple of comedy turns in broad Jutland dialect. The opera was evidently a success at its premiere in 1806 and it remained in the Danish repertory for many years.
The plot is simple – debonair Hussar Captain outwits tyrannical guardian of girl he loves – only slightly complicated by the need to provide roles for a couple of the Copenhagen company’s popular comedians. The style is somewhere between Mozart (minor Mozart usually, but with an occasional hint of the real thing, especially in ensembles) and the French contemporaries of Beethoven, with a glint of Rossini every now and then. The music for the two principals is often charmingly lyrical, showing off the tenor’s high notes (his Act 1 polacca rises to D) and the soprano’s florid coloratura. The comic roles, especially the servant Johan, are engaging, and throughout the opera both the vocal writing and the scoring are accomplished. Dupuy had a talent for obstinately memorable tunes: it’s no surprise that Vilhelmine’s Act 1 romance was a favourite in Danish drawing-rooms for many years, or that the march-tempo drinking song in Act 2 was sung by generations of students. A thoroughly likeable piece, in short, and in such numbers as the Act 1 finale and the trio and quartet in Act 2, the work of a shrewd musical dramatist. Oh, and even the Jutland jokes are quite funny.
The performance could hardly show the work off in a better light. Mai-Mai has a pretty, slightly pale soprano but the agility of a soubrette in coloratura. In Dupuy’s own role of Captain Rose Gronlund is an accomplished lyric tenor and Paevatalu’s Mozartian baritone is well suited to the Figaro- or Leporello-like Johan. Cold barks a little as the heavy father; Harbo and Elming enjoy themselves a good deal in the slighter roles of Poul and Mikkel Madsen, and Schonwandt conducts with a real feeling for period style. The opera is sensibly performed without spoken dialogue and therefore plays for not much more than 80 minutes.
The fill-up is a Flute Concerto with some pretty ideas in it it, and a lot of showy passagework for the (very fine) soloist, but it is hopelessly overextended. The opera, though, is a charming discovery, performed with infectious enthusiasm and wit.'