Adam, Le Châlet, part 1

Adolphe Adam was a major figure in the opéra comique, the French popular theater with eighteenth century origins that already by the 1830s was becoming a large and somewhat amorphous category. Born in 1803, Adam had decided in his teens that he wanted to compose music for the stage, and he was lucky in that, studying in Paris, he found a mentor in Boieldieu. His practical training included acting as an assistant for the first production of Boieldieu's best known work, La dame blanche (1825, in the Opéra-Comique).

By 1834, Adam himself had several productions at the Opéra-Comique, but his first great success came late in that year with Le Châlet, a one-act piece that achieved a thousand performances over the course of the next forty years. To be fair, although this certainly was a remarkable achievement, it was not that uncommon in this period. As the authors of the Grove Music Online article on the opéra comique put it:

These four decades [1830-1870] saw the premières of some of the most popular operas ever produced, and they remained in virtually continuous repertory in Paris and throughout the world wherever French opera was staged until World War II. Many had more than 1000 performances at the Opéra-Comique alone and were the staples of regional theaters in Germany and Austria as well as francophone countries.

In other words, the opéra comique (and the venue of the Opéra-Comique itself) were the nineteenth-century French analogue to Broadway in the twentieth-century United States.

A couple decades ago, as part of a search for precedents for the unusual concentration of rising line figures in Offenbach's Orfée aux Enfers (1858), I was impressed by Le Châlet, and it became the central character in my historical narrative of the adoption of ascending cadence gestures in the nineteenth century musical stage and in French music more generally. Whether that story is correct I don't know, but the continuing improvement in ready availability of scores thanks to the scanning projects of major libraries and to IMSLP should make it possible to study the question in a much more effective way than I could in the mid-1990s.

In the meantime, Le Châlet remains a striking early source of operatic rising cadences. Clearly, the line of influence that we followed from the dance movements of Haydn to the social dances of Schubert cannot be continued to Adam's opera, even if it did premiere just six years after Schubert's death. The most likely source is in Rossini, where rising cadences are very rare, but the marked tendency toward dramatic endings to arias encouraged figures emphasizing upper registers. It was only a matter of time (and not much of that really, just a decade or two) before the upper register became fixed as an ending position in cadences.

Le Châlet has a simple design, with solos and duets surrounded by a frame of ensembles (nos. 1, 5-6, and 10 in the list below):

 1 Introduction et Chorus "Déjà dans la plaine"
2 Air "Elle est à moi! C'est ma compagne"
3 Couplets "Dans ce modeste et simple asile"
4 Air "Arrêtons-nous ici!"
5 Ensemble "Par cet étroit sentier"
6 Couplets with chorus "Dans le service de l'Autriche"
(cont.) Ensemble "Malgré moi je frissonne"
7 Duo "Prêt à quitter ceux que l'on aime"
8 Duo "Il faut me céder ta maitresse"
9 Romance "Adieu vous que j'ai tant chérie"
10 Trio et Finale "Soutiens mon bras"

This list follows the Tallandier edition (c1900), which also includes text for the dialogue sections: IMSLP link for Le Châlet.

The story is equally simple. The setting is rural Switzerland. A farmer, Daniel, is in love with Bettly, who is attracted to him but refuses marriage. Bettly's brother, Max, a Swiss soldier, appears with his company and joins with Daniel in a series of ruses that eventually bring Bettly around. At the end, a marriage contract is signed (even that originates in a ruse, but Bettly accepts it when the deception is revealed).

In subsequent posts in this series, I will examine design and expression in the several numbers of Le Châlet, beginning with the relatively lengthy Overture, which is not included in the list above.

Sources for biographical and background information:

"Adolphe Adam." Grove Music Online. Elizabeth Forbes.

“Opera comique,” §5. Grove Music Online. M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet with Richard Langham Smith.

"Aria." Grove Music Online. Andrew Clements (with Tim Carter, Thomas Walker, Daniel Heartz, Dennis Libby).

"Adolphe Adam." Wikipedia.