With the arrival of June, however, it's time for a brief pause in the Adam Le Châlet series. I will pick this up again in a week or two. Four numbers remain: three duos—Daniel and Bettly (in n7: "Prêt à quitter ceux que l'on aime"), then Max and Daniel (in n8: "Il faut me céder ta maitresse"), and Daniel and Bettly (in n9: "Adieu vous que j'ai tant chérie")—and the finale (n10). Rising cadence figures occur in all but the first of these.
The goal of this spring's project is to reaffirm and document my claim, developed through a series of score searches begun nearly thirty years ago, that Le Châlet is a milestone in the history of rising cadence gestures and, as such (combined with its popularity), may have been a primary influence on other composers as rising cadence gestures proliferated in operetta, opera bouffe, and eventually the American musical. The authors of the Grove Music Online article note, after all, that some of the contributions of early composers for the Opéra-Comique (that is, in the 1830s), including those of Adam, "held the stage in Paris for over 50 years."
At some point in the future, I will add some more or less immediate context for my Le Châlet narrative through posts on La Dame Blanche (1825; by Boieldieu, Adam's mentor); Adam's three-act opera Le Postillon de Lonjumeau (1836); and Donizetti's La fille du régiment (1840). All three of these operas just named were also produced at the Opéra-Comique and were very successful. Some background for La fille—and more comparison with Le Châlet—will come from a post on Donizetti's Betly (Naples, 1836; two-act version 1837), which uses the same Goethe Singspiel as its source.
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Quote from Grove Music Online: article “Opera comique,” §5. M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet with Richard Langham Smith.
