Program Note

Program Note Callum John Blackmore

In the 1770s, Paris was gripped by pastoral fever. Pastoralism began to permeate every facet of artistic life in the city, from literature, to painting, fashion, architecture, interior design, and (above all) opera. This aestheticization of the countryside was the result of mounting anxieties over the state of French politics – anxieties that would later spill over into the French Revolution. Louis XV had led France into numerous expensive military conflicts which had left the royal finances in dire straits. The economy of pre-Revolutionary France was largely agrarian: over 80% of the French population lived in the countryside and agriculture provided over two thirds of the nation’s GDP. At the same time, France was experiencing a rapid period of urban expansion as famine, rioting, dwindling land supply, and growing commercial opportunities prompted many peasants to seek work as urban laborers.

The Parisian literati saw this urban drift as bad news for the French economy. Many Enlightenment thinkers feared the economic and moral costs of urbanization – the cramped living conditions, the alienation from nature, the arable land left uncultivated – and proposed that a full-scale return to rural living was the only way to vouchsafe France from socio-economic ruin. Included among them were the Baron d’Holbach (the host of a glitzy Parisian salon), who declared that the cultivation of the land was “the true basis of the state,” and the physiocrats, an iconoclastic group of economists who believed that a free trade in agricultural goods would entice laborers back to the countryside. This radical agenda would penetrate the very highest circles of French society: Marie Antoinette, eager to align herself with the growing pastoral movement, ordered the construction of a model farm (replete with dairy, watermill, and barnyard) just outside of Versailles, where the queen-consort and her aristocratic companions would play as shepherdesses. Even as Paris became one of the cultural capitals of European Enlightenment, its salons were abuzz with talk of rural exodus.

The Comédie-Italienne (a Parisian theater that specialized in opéra-comique, or opera with spoken dialogue) had become a hotbed of operatic pastoralism in the 1760s, renowned for pairing folksy, sentimentalized depictions of rustic life with progressive political messages. Opera Lafayette has recorded a number of these pastoral works, including the 1762 Le roi et le fermier and the 1769 Le déserteur. In the latter work (a moving opera about an innocent rustic tricked into deserting the army), librettist Michel-Jean Sedaine combines idealized rural imagery with a hardhitting, high-stakes plot (the eponymous deserter is almost put to death) to infuse the opera with tension, pathos, and political bite.

Marmontel was a pastoralist par excellence. He was knowledgeable about agricultural economics, having attended the salons of d’Holbach and the physiocrats, and was a preeminent literary theorist of the eclogue, a traditional form of pastoral poetry. And it was Marmontel who was first to collaborate with the young Belgian composer, André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, freshly arrived in Paris from his apprenticeship in Rome. Their first two opéras-comiques, Le huron (1768) and Lucile (1769), explored many of the themes that would later be crystalized in their 1770 Silvain: love across traditional social boundaries; the countryside as a site of abundance, freedom, and modernity; and the ultimate triumph of familial bonds and simple virtue within this rustic setting.

In Silvain, Marmontel depicts a rustic idyll threatened by authoritarian forces. He paints the French peasantry as brow-beaten by the restrictions imposed on them by absentee landowners, their livelihoods curtailed by harsh feudal laws governing the use of rural land. In the opera, Silvain, a disinherited noble, and his wife, Hélène, suddenly discover that the neighboring woodlands – which the family rely on for food and firewood – have fallen into the ownership of Dolmon, to be policed by his ruthless son, Dolmon fils. The latter accuses Silvain of illegal poaching and places him under arrest, even as Silvain asserts his right to forage freely on Dolman’s land. It was this aspect of the plot – based on a now-obscure facet of rural property law – that resonated most strongly with Enlightenment audiences. For the Parisian commentariat, Marmontel’s libretto spoke to anxieties around the productivity of the agricultural sector and the role of outdated feudal regulations in limiting this output and driving workers to the city. One critic praised the opera for its depiction of a “good, virtuous, and sensitive peasantry,” noting that the opera had “instantly fixed in the sights of the nobility the principles of natural law.” In other words, Silvain was not merely entertainment, it was a form of political education, schooling rural landowners in the most effective way to cultivate their agricultural holdings.

Although the drama is contained in a single act, Silvain is an opera of two halves. The first half is a fly-on-the-wall peek into the daily life of an ordinary peasant household – a family hastening to marshal their modest resources in preparation for a village wedding. The second half is a grand emotional catharsis as Silvain and Hélène’s life is torn apart by Dolmon fils, as Hélène and her daughters plead with Dolmon père for Silvain’s acquittance, as Dolmon père recognizes Silvain as his estranged son, and, finally, as Dolmon père, so moved by Hélène’s noble bearing, gives his blessing to Silvain’s (socially unequal) marriage.

It is in the second half of the opera that Grétry pulls out all the stops. The ensembles (a particular specialty of Grétry’s) are utterly gripping, they are the

opera’s driving engine, endowing the work with a sense of dramatic propulsion. The opera’s theatrical highpoint is the septet between Silvain, the guards who have come to arrest him, Silvain’s future son-in-law (who jumps furiously to his defense), and Silvain’s wife and daughters (who try desperately to diffuse the situation). It is an ensemble of staggering complexity, of vivid musical contrasts, of cascading, interlocking vocal interjections, of chaos, panic, sorrow, and noise. Another highlight is the trio that precedes the opera’s denouement, in which Silvain’s daughters, Pauline and Lucette, entreat Dolmon père to stay with them awhile and to experience the love and warmth of a kindhearted rustic family. With spritely, capering phrases, Pauline and Lucette paint a rosy picture of rural living; meanwhile, the orchestra itself seems to bristle with arcadian bliss, surging forth in ecstatic arpeggios beneath the voices.

Grétry and Marmontel had a particular knack for writing strong operatic heroines. Hélène, the heroine of Silvain, is one of their best. In her tour-de-force aria, Hélène finds herself alone in the house, realizing that she must face down Dolmon père without her husband at her side: initially trembling with fear, she prays to God for strength (a lilting andante, austere and restrained) and finds an eleventh-hour burst of courage (a rousing allegro with oboe obbligato). This scene is interesting because it begins with a type of music rarely heard in opéra-comique: recitative. Because the Comédie-Italienne (where Silvain premiered) was restricted entirely to opera with spoken dialogue, it was generally forbidden from performing operas whose numbers were connected by recitative: these operas were the exclusive domain of the Paris Opéra, the flagship opera company of the French monarchy, which specialized not in comedy but in tragedy. Yet Grétry incorporates recitative into his otherwise comic opera to lend Hélène’s music a dramatic weight ordinarily reserved for operatic tragedy, heightening the stakes in Marmontel’s plot through musical style alone.

Opera Lafayette’s production of Silvain draws inspiration from the opera’s connections to the Americas. Silvain was the first documented opera to be performed in New Orleans, opening at the Théâtre de la Rue Saint-Pierre in 1796. In the company of this theater were a number of players formerly of the opera houses of French colonial Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), who had fled to New Orleans during the Haitian Revolution.

Silvain was revived at least 28 times in Saint-Domingue prior to the Revolution: The opera’s firm endorsement of uninhibited agricultural production, paired with its utopian depiction of rural life and staunch moral message, clearly resonated with colonial audiences. In Saint-Domingue, the relationship between plantationowners (many of whom were based in France), and their enslaved workforce was

constantly being legally, physically, and psychologically negotiated: Grétry’s opera thus offered colonists a quixotic vision of rural laborers, working willingly and harmoniously in the fields, their tensions with their overlords eventually resolved, their toil productive and unimpaired by unnecessary government regulation. Given the widespread practice of naming enslaved Africans after opera characters, it is perhaps no coincidence that countless African men who were enslaved on Saint-Domingue were given the name “Silvain”: plantation-owners seem to have perversely attempted to “act out” the romanticized pastoral labor relations of Grétry’s opera, to have imagined an altogether violent and coercive relationship as one of pastoral benevolence.

Marmontel ends the libretto to Silvain with the opera’s central maxim: “simple virtue holds more weight than good birth.” To some conservative pundits, this was an attack on strict hierarchies that governed pre-Revolutionary French society; to others, these words were intended to engender a new, more productive relationship between peasants, landowners, and the land itself; and, in Saint-Domingue, this adage papered over the brutality of the slave economy, allowing plantation owners to reimagine the colonies as a pastoral arcadia.

Opera Lafayette’s new production of Silvain will help us find new meaning in these words, allowing us to hear Grétry’s opera with fresh ears. The company’s path-breaking new staging, which will be directed by Tania Hernandez Velasco, transposes the opera to Colorado’s San Luis Valley, whose inhabitants have, since the nineteenth century, grappled with many of the same issues faced by Silvain and his family: the loss of access to ancestral lands, the abuse of power, the growing alienation of the ordinary folk from the natural environment, and the erosion of hard-won rights and liberties. By reimagining the opera through the lens of this ongoing conflict, Opera Lafayette’s Silvain recaptures the radical spirit of Marmontel’s text, showing that this opera – contrived from the anxieties of a nation on the brink of revolution – might still resonate with us today.