Adam, Le Châlet, postscript

First, I have put together a PDF essay that gathers all the posts in this series on Adolphe Adam's Le Châlet. It's been published on the Texas Scholar Works platform: link. My home page there: link.

Second, as a footnote of sorts, here is a detailed table of contents for the most complete vocal score, the Tallandier edition from about 1900. This version of a TOC adds scene labels from the score, with my brief descriptions.

[0] Overture

 SCÈNE 1                                                                                              
1 Introduction et Chorus "Déjà dans la plaine"

SCÈNE 2
Daniel appears as the chorus is leaving the stage
2 Air "Elle est à moi! C'est ma compagne"

SCÈNE 3
Daniel reads the letter, monologue
SCÈNE 4
Daniel and Bettly, dialogue
3 Couplets "Dans ce modeste et simple asile"
Daniel and Bettly, further dialogue
Bettly leaves

SCÈNE 5
Daniel, alone, hears martial music; monologue over it
SCÈNE 6
Max and his company of soldiers appear
4 Air "Arrêtons-nous ici!"

SCÈNE 7
Max and Daniel, dialogue
SCÈNE 8
5 Ensemble "Par cet étroit sentier"
SCÈNE 9
Bettly enters; Max and Bettly (recitative, not dialogue)

6 Couplets with chorus "Dans le service de l'Autriche"

(cont.) Ensemble "Malgré moi je frissonne"

SCÈNE 10
Bettly, alone, monologue
SCÈNE 11
Daniel and Bettly, dialogue
7 Duo "Prêt à quitter ceux que l'on aime"

SCÈNE 12
Max, Bettly, and Daniel, dialogue
SCÈNE 13
8 Duo "Il faut me céder ta maitresse"

SCÈNE 14
Daniel and Bettly, dialogue
9 Romance "Adieu vous que j'ai tant chérie"

SCÈNE 15
Max enters; dialogue with Daniel and Bettly
SCÈNE 16
Daniel leaves; Max and Bettly, dialogue
SCÈNE 17 / SCÈNE 18 (when chorus enters)
10 Trio et Finale "Soutiens mon bras"

Adam, Le Châlet, part 8: trio and finale (conclusion)

Two rising cadence gestures occur in the finale, one buried in the midst of several in a row (the typical manner of the operatic finale), the other much more prominent, closing a cadenza by Max and heralding the arrival of the chorus.

In section 3, Max has signed the marriage contract, which is legal and complete since he is Bettly's brother, which fact he reveals to her and Daniel. The reconciliation of the three is settled in the Allegro mosso ensemble passage that ends the section.

The other rising cadence figure:

Adam, Le Châlet, part 8: trio and finale

Karin Pendle writes about the chorus in  Le Châlet that "the groups of soldiers and villagers, often found in Scribe’s libretti, are a dramatic force: the villagers set the plot in motion; the soldiers . . . are a means to disturb Bettly’s peaceful existence. In addition, they enhance the musical content of the piece, particularly in the introduction and finale, providing good contrast to the solo voices" (87).

Although Pendle's comment is certainly correct as a general characterization, the great bulk of the finale is in fact a trio—the chorus (both soldiers and villagers) enters only in the last minute or two for a few celebratory hurrahs. Before that, Max has the predominant role as he carries out the final deception that will bring Daniel and Bettly together. The musical style is a fluid combination of clearly defined themes and a declamatory patter that resembles recitative.  (Note: The French edition labels the final number "Trio and Finale." As before, I am using the German edition of 1835 for my examples.)

The finale can easily be divided into four sections. In the first, Bettly insists that she and Daniel are married, while putting asides to Daniel that she is only trying to save him from a duel with Max. The three characters go back and forth until closing the section with an ensemble passage. At the beginning, Daniel is still very worried about the prospect of the duel (see below). The principal tune is carried in the orchestra; Daniel's melody sounds more like a descant against it; its double-neighbor figure about C5 is circled. An interesting feature is the symmetry in the registral frames (boxed): the orchestra's third above/sixth below is mirrored by Daniel's third below/sixth above.

In the second section, Max presses the point, saying they don't seem to act like husband and wife, and Bettly produces the incomplete marriage contract that villagers had sent Daniel earlier as a joke. The basic design is like section 1, with interaction between the characters and a closing ensemble passage (that is the same as in section 1). As the musical example shows, the tonal design in section 2 is initially unstable and modulatory, mirroring the heightened tension for Daniel and Bettly as Max pushes them.

The third section begins in the same circumstances (see below), but Max quickly announces that he has surreptiously signed the contract and reveals that he is Bettly's brother. Again the overall design is that of interactions followed by an ensemble passage.

For the fourth section, then, the chorus of soldiers and villagers enters for a final toast to the new couple.

In tomorrow's post, I will discuss the two rising cadences, the first in the ensemble passage of section three, the other in Max's contribution to the opening of section 4.

Source
Pendle, Karin. "The Transformation of a Libretto: Goethe's 'Jery und Bätely'." Music & Letters 55n1 (1974): 77-88.

Adam, Le Châlet, part 7 (n9: romance: Daniel and Bettly)

The last of the three successive duos is in couplets, two verses total.  The design is a small binary form, where Daniel sings during A and the opening of B, then Bettly sings the majority of B. In the second verse, the two sing the final phrase together.

The A section is a clear 8-measure period with modulating consequent. The prominent Eb4s finally give way to D4 as the fifth of the cadence harmony, G minor.

 The B section begins with a passage of standing on the dominant, during which Daniel recovers the Eb, then drops to D4 again for the dominant triad (4th measure below). Bettly picks up the passage with a brief minor-mode shift, then puts the focus firmly back on Eb, as Eb5, with a double-neighbor figure (for "allons, allons").

In the second verse, the B section's close, then, brings the voice (Bettly's) back to Eb5 (circled in the example below); and the orchestra drives it home with a repetition of the double-neighbor figure.

Pause; restatement of goals and priorities

Beginning with some comments in early April on the cadenza perfetta or clausula vera (link) I began one more parsing of the history of rising cadence gestures. Almost daily posts since then have covered the territory from early 17th century Venice to mid-17th century London and late-18th and early-19th century Vienna. Most recently the turn was to Paris in the mid-1830s.

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.

-------
Quote from Grove Music Online: article “Opera comique,” §5. M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet with Richard Langham Smith.

Adam, Le Châlet, part 5 (ns5 & 6: ensemble-aria-ensemble)

Max finishes the aria (n4) in which he affirms his pleasure at returning to the Swiss valley that was his home (and is still for his sister Bettly). Implausibly, Daniel doesn't recognize Max, who, implausibly, doesn't reveal himself, and in fact is later not recognized by Bettly, either (sigh). And with this the plot descends irretrievably into farce—but all eventually ends well after Max pretends to be drunk, inciting Daniel to protect Bettly's honor, whereon she is impressed by Daniel's action and signs the marriage certificate, which she openly calls a ruse because it's not valid without her brother's signature, but of course unbeknownst to her he is there . . . . you see where this is going.

The central ensemble scenes are concerned with the complications created by Max's insistence that his company will stay for a fortnight and by his consequent demand for food and, especially, drink for the evening. Number 5 is a straightforward drinking song, with chorus; at the end, Max promises his own song and n6 opens with it (in the form of couplets); the remainder of n6 is a combination of Max and Bettly's back and forth with the chorus's continuation of the general topic of eating and drinking. (She is increasingly agitated; during the dialogue scene that follows n6, Daniel appears and attempts to defend her.)

The theme of the drinking song allows a good bit of enthusiastic noise with a figure that focuses on ^8, descending from it and returning to it--see below. All we're missing is a "huzzah" or two.  (Here again I am using the German edition of 1835 for examples.)

In a considerably expanded version, one can hear elements of this theme in the final section of n6, including the turn to the submediant vi—see notes in the (several pages of) score below.

Adam, Le Châlet, part 4 (n4: Max's aria)

After Daniel's aria (n2), there follows extended and animated dialogue between Daniel and Bettly, during which (a) he reads a letter in which Bettly says she will marry him; (b) Bettly reveals that the letter is a hoax perpetrated by other young people in the village; (c) that in any case she will not marry him. The third number of Le Châlet,"Dans ce modeste et simple asile," explains why: she is satisfied with her life as it is, doesn't want to give up her freedom, and (rough summary!!) thinks a man would be a nuisance anyway. After Bettly's couplets (n3) finish, another extended round of dialogue has Bettly admitting that Daniel has some fine qualities, but she stands by her decision. Daniel reads from another letter she has received (she cannot read herself, btw), this time from her brother Max, who is to pass through the area with his company of soldiers. Max advises Bettly to marry someone, and in the course of conversation Daniel is obliged to admit that he asked Max for help.

This is where things stand when a group of soldiers approaches, to the martial music of the Allegro theme from the overture. Max enters the chalet with his company and sings "Arrêtons-nous ici!"   (As with the previous post on Daniel's aria, I am drawing the musical examples from the German edition of 1835.)

The design is recitative-Andante in 6/8 (the cavatina)-Moderato in 4/4 (the cabaletta), this last being the bulk of the movement. "Arrêtons-nous ici!" opens the recitative, "Vallons de l'Helvétie" the Andante, and "Chant de nos montagnes" the Moderato.

The theme of the Andante is an 8-bar period with modulating consequent, but as it turns out this theme is also the presentation unit of a 16-measure sentence. The continuation, which is expanded from 8 to 11 bars, contains the first point of interest. Max's energetic exclamations of love for the "Vaterland" bring repeated surges to Eb4 (circled), the space defined being Bb3-Eb4. As the continuation unit moves on, the lower end of the space is expanded downward to G3 (see the arrow in the second system). This persists to the cadence, readily generating another ^7-^2-^1 figure (which we saw in the cabaletta of Daniel's aria in yesterday's post) -- with a firm descent ^3-^2-^1 and an ascending rising line variant complete except in its final note: ^6-^5-^7-(^8).

In the Moderato, a ^3-^5 frame is quite strong in the principal period and expands briefly upward but, in the cadence, again firmly downward, the end result (that is to say, the final interval) being the fifth space ^1-^5.

After a short B-section (14 bars total, with an "old-fashioned" emphasis in V and on ^b3),* a full reprise draws in the figure of the cavatina as a way of intensifying (and expanding) the approach to the cadence -- see circled notes below. All this makes the implication of ^8 above the final tonic all the more convincing.

* I say "old-fashioned" because one can find the mode-shift device already in Baroque-era da capo arias, and the combination of an unstable and therefore dramatically intensified V with lowered ^3 even before Glück's "Che faro" (section C in a five-part rondo).

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.