By Ralph P. Locke

We have a recording of Déjanire, its first ever. And it’s splendid, with a superb cast, an insightful conductor, and the orchestra and chorus of the very city in which it was first performed a century earlier!

Déjanire, Saint-Saëns

Kate Aldrich, Anaïs Constans, Anna Dowsley, Julien Dran, Jérôme Boutillier.

Monte-Carlo Opera Chorus and Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Kazuki Yamada.

Bru Zane 1055 [2 CDs] 97 minutes.

Four acts in scarcely more than an hour and a half. Four main characters, one important secondary one, and a chorus that has a lot to do, as does the colorful orchestra. Most of all, the music is consistently engaging, and often shifting in musical style, keeping the listener alert and responsive. Why have we not heard this marvelous work of Saint-Saëns’s before? (Yes, this is its world-premiere recording.)

The answer seems to be the same as with most of Saint-Saëns’s dozen or so works for the stage: he was writing in a style that seemed a bit conservative at the time (the work reached the stage in 1911, a decade before his death in 1921 at age 86), when composers who were more daring — in their harmonic language and also in the extremes of their musical moods — had already gained great attention: composers like Richard Strauss and Debussy.

But important composers at the time who held to relatively traditional principles and practices still had a lot to say, and were saying it, another being Massenet, who lived until 1912 (dying at age 70, in his full powers). One of the great revelations of the past few decades has come from reviving works by what might be called “mainstream” (rather than progressive) composers, ones who don’t get much attention in academic music-history and music-theory textbooks: Czerny, Rossini (notably his serious operas), Louise Farrenc, Berwald, Alkan, Raff, Stanford, and many admirable others. And Saint-Saëns was, by common consent, one of the most skillful of them all — and certainly one of the most appealing, as people who know his piano concertos, his Third Symphony, or his one oft-performed opera Samson et Dalila readily attest.

Déjanire has a curious back-history. Saint-Saëns was fascinated with the character of Hercules, having written two symphonic poems about episodes in the hero’s life: La jeunesse d’Hercule and Le rouet d’Omphale. He was intrigued by, and well informed about, music and theater in ancient Greece and Rome. Indeed, he wrote articles about such topics (including one on ancient harps, in a major music encyclopedia). So when he was invited, in the 1890s, to compose incidental music for a new play about Hercules’s dalliance with a young woman (called, in the opera, Iole) and the resulting rage of Hercules’s wife Dejanira, he leapt at the chance.

The performances took place in summer 1898 (and summer 1899) in a recently constructed bullfight ring in the southern French town of Béziers, partly using large local forces (e.g., brass bands and men’s singing groups) and were a great success. But the ambitious project could not be easily repeated elsewhere, in a normal (indoor) theater. The solution was to salvage some of the music and incorporate it into an opera based freely on the same libretto. Most of what got kept consisted of choral numbers, sometimes serving to give information to the audience in the manner of the choral entries in the prologue to Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette,

Lucien Muratore as Hercules, in an early production (at the Paris Opéra) of the second, operatic version of Saint-Saëns’s Déjanire.

This opera was hailed by many discerning observers (including Fauré, in a published review) when, in 1911, it got its first production (13 years after the Béziers production) in Monte Carlo. The work was then picked up by theaters in several other European cities, partly because a German translation was published — but not, unfortunately, an Italian one, which would have helped in, say, England and America, as it helped Carmen, Faust, and Flotow’s Martha in those places. Thus, Déjanire disappeared from sight. But now, finally, we have a recording of it, its first ever. And it’s splendid, with a superb cast, an insightful conductor, and the orchestra and chorus of the very city in which it was first performed a century earlier!

What impresses me most of all is how beautiful the music is and how eclectic. Saint-Saëns was a great admirer of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, and one can sense this in the basic diatonic language (so unlike Liszt and Wagner, except in some of the more dramatic duets) and in the comfortable conveying of what I might call poised grandeur. The work does not indulge in the odd harmonic progressions that Berlioz enjoyed creating, but it is far from conventional in this regard, reveling in passages that use somewhat unusual scales, presumably intended to evoke the ancient world.

Of course, we have little sense of how ancient Greek music sounded (and people knew even less, a century ago). So Saint-Saëns, reasonably enough, has frequent recourse to a few modes familiar from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, such as Dorian, Aeolian, and Mixolydian, all of which are notable for their lowered seventh degree (which makes standard-practice dominant-tonic cadences impossible). There’s an even more intriguing passage in the minor with a sixth degree that oscillates between being major and minor (CD1, track 3). This recalls a recurring feature of much late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian music (as Richard Taruskin has pointed out).

Other resemblances may or may not be coincidental. There are some passages in which the orchestra busily invokes some kind of onstage action or a sudden eruption of feeling. I was reminded of how Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov often engages in the same kinds of mimesis. One lovely recurring motive (heard in the Act 2 prelude) seems to me a close cousin to material from Berlioz’s gentle La mort d’Ophélie. Certain clear diatonic passages bring Wagner’s Die Meistersinger to mind. And several duets seem to move the work in the direction of middle-period Verdi or Tannhäuser. Indeed, the cast required for the work is a near match to that of Don Carlos: a tenor and soprano who can sing firmly and beautifully, without becoming overemphatic; a mezzo-soprano (or soprano with a rich low register) who can launch zingers; and a bass-baritone capable of great lyricism. (Plus, in this case, a nursemaid-cum-sorceress, Phénice, who has a lot to do and sing and inadvertently causes the final disaster.) One can gain a sense of the varied fascinations on offer from this brief trailer:

Fortunately, Bru Zane (Center for French Romantic Music) has, as so often, cast perfectly. Deep-toned soprano Kate Aldrich gets to emote most plausibly (and with only a few touches of wobble) as Dejanira, the wife whom Hercules spurns for a younger woman. High-flying Anaïs Constans is that “other woman,” and her singing is so close to perfection that one can understand Hercules’s attraction.

As for Hercules, his role is, perhaps surprisingly, written for tenor rather than brawny bass, but this, I find, makes his amorous side, and his dreamy self-delusions, seem more plausible. We empathize with him all the more when Dejanira, at the opera’s end, inadvertently murders Hercules by giving him a nuptial tunic doused in an ointment that catches on fire. (Dejanira had misunderstood an oracle: she seems to have honestly believed that the gift would rekindle his love for her.)

The low-male role of Philoctetes (who loves Iole) is taken very effectively and securely by Jérôme Boutillier. In the substantial “nursemaid”/sorceress role of Phénice, described in the score as being for contralto, we are privileged to hear Anna Dowsley, an Australian who is new to me and who, though she calls herself a mezzo, handles all the challenges here superbly. Everybody, including the non-natives, sings the French text persuasively, and the orchestra, under Kazuki Yamada (music director of this orchestra), supports their work, both moment by moment and over long arches. Yamada seems to be a busy guy: I see he is also in charge of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

The staging of the first version of Déjanire (1898), done as a play with choral and orchestral commentary, at the outdoor arena (a recently built bullfight ring) in Béziers.

Déjanire is now the sixth little-known Saint-Saëns opera to reach us thanks to the folks at Bru Zane. I hope there are more to come, and I recommend it to anybody who loves French Romantic music or good opera.

I also urge interested listeners to read Hugh Macdonald’s book Saint-Saëns and the Stage for a much richer discussion of the work’s musico-dramatic features than is offered in the (informative, as far as it goes) booklet that comes with this 2-CD set. The essays and the libretto are sometimes stiffly translated: for example, “motivated by the interest of representing a Mediterranean entity” should perhaps be something like “motivated by the desire to portray a Mediterranean region.”

Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich). The present review first appeared in American Record Guide and is included here by kind permission.