The Meyerbeer Libretti

Opéra Comique 1 L'Étoile du Nord
2. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84718-968-4
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 333 Seiten

Giacomo Meyerbeer, one of the most important and influential opera composers of the nineteenth century, enjoyed a fame during his lifetime hardly rivalled by any of his contemporaries. This ten volume set provides in one collection all the operatic texts set by Meyerbeer in his career. The texts offer the most complete versions available. Each libretto is translated into modern English by Richard Arsenty; and each work is introduced by Robert Letellier. In this comprehensive edition of Meyerbeer's libretti, the original text and its translation are placed on facing pages for ease of use.

The ninth volume presents the first of Meyerbeer’s opéras comiques. For L'Étoile du Nord (1854), Scribe rewrote the text of Meyerbeer’s occasional piece for Berlin, Ein Feldlager in Schlesien, based on the capture of Frederick the Great by the Croats. Now Scribe successfully wove fact and fiction into a romantic story which relates to its predecessor only in certain respects. The libretto followed a typical pattern in which four traditions about Tsar Peter the Great were interwoven, despite spatial and temporal differences: his sojourns incognito as a shipwright in Saardam and Deptford (1697-98), the rebellion of the Strelitzy (1698), his courting and marriage to the Lithuanian peasant girl Catherine (1712), who later became the Empress Catherine I (1725). There is the same determining polarity between pastoral and the military worlds as in the earlier opera. True order and enlightened rule come through the proper integration of these two worlds, a process which takes place through patterns of loss and rescue, isolation and integration, disguise and true identity. The basic situation of Feldlager is also reflected musically in L’Étoile du Nord: the unpretentious first and third acts reflect the gemütliche world of the Singspiel, while the grandiose Camp Scene in act 2 requires vast choral and orchestral forces and concerted forms of the grand tradition. In spite of the difficulties of the growing political crisis between France and Russia, soon to explode in the Crimean War, and Meyerbeer's personal anxiety over his mother's health, the première of L'Étoile du Nord on 16 February 1854 was another triumph for composer and librettist. Within a year the opera had been given 100 times in Paris. Within four years it was seen in over 60 European cities, and was spreading all over the world.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Arsenty, Richard

Letellier, Robert

Über Autor(innen)

Richard Arsenty, a native of the U.S. midwest, received degrees from the University of Illinois in Biology Education and Library Science. After teaching for seven years at the high school, college and university levels, he took advantage of a unique opportunity and went to work as a libretto translator for MRF Records in New Jersey. Eight years later he decided to return to academia, accepting a position as Science Reference Librarian at Purchase College near New York City. At the end of 2002, after sixteen years of service to the college, he took an early retirement and returned to Illinois where his family is located. Richard has translated more than 160 libretti for organizations such as Opera Orchestra of New York, The New York City Opera, The Waterloo Festival, Hungaraton Records, Orfeo Records and Opera Rara. His translations include all of Meyerbeer’s operas (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2004), Nerone (Boito), Das Liebesverbot (Wagner), La Juive (Halévy), Marino Faliero (Donizetti), Salammbô (Reyer), Jérusalem (Verdi), Crispino e la Comare (Ricci) and many others.

Robert Ignatius Letellier was born in Natal, and educated in Grahamstown, Cambridge, Salzburg, Rome and Jerusalem. He is a member of Trinity College (Cambridge), the Salzburg Centre for Research in the Early English Novel (University of Salzburg), the Maryvale Institute (Birmingham), and the Institute for Continuing Education at Madingley Hall (Cambridge). His publications include books and articles on the late-seventeenth-, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novel (particularly the Gothic Novel and Sir Walter Scott), the Bible, and European culture, with emphasis on the Romantic opera and ballet. He has specialized in the work of Giacomo Meyerbeer (a four-volume English edition of his diaries, a collection of critical and biographical studies, a guide to research, and two readings of the operas, as well as compiling and introducing editions of the complete libretti and non-operatic texts). He has also written on the ballets of Ludwig Minkus.