Odyssey Opera program notes
Henry VIII is a four-act French grand opera by Saint-Saëns that was featured at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, remaining in the repertory of the Opéra de Paris from its 1883 premiere until the First World War. Recent notable revivals include a 1991 French film (Théatre Impérial de Compiègne), a 2002 Barcelona production (Gran Teatre del Liceu), and a concert version at the 2012 Bard Summerscape Festival. The score demands a large orchestra, an offstage military group (including 11 rare saxhorns and saxtrombas), eleven named roles, and mixed chorus.
SYNOPSIS
ACT I: (England, 1530) Don Gomez di Feria [promoted to adulthood for this libretto], the recently appointed Spanish Ambassador to England, confesses to Norfolk that he loves Anne Boleyn. Gomez has written of his intentions to Queen Catherine, and is troubled by the condemnation of the Duke of Buckingham. King Henry greets the crowd and courtiers, drawing Surrey aside in a beautiful soliloquy describing his troubles with his wife (Qui donc commande quand il aime). The Queen begs Henry to pardon Buckingham (Je sais le sort terrible), and Anne is presented to the King (Pour honorer encore). As a funeral march for Buckingham [actually executed in 1521] is heard in the distance, Anne describes her premonitions of death (Ô spectacle d’horreur).
ACT II: (1533) A delicate entr’acte quotes several Tudor melodies. Anne praises the court and Gomez (Ô menonge d’un doux visage) laments that he must keep his distance. The King arrives and dismisses him (De ton regard la douceur), causing Anne to reject the idea of becoming a royal Mistress. When the King revels his plan to annul his marriage, she is shocked (Je cede au penser) and dreams of being his Queen (Je vais donc enfin te connaitre). Catherine suddenly appears to Anne (Pauvre fille) and they begin to argue; both the King and the Papal Legate intervene, and Henry storms off with Anne. The following Fête populaire (Ballet-Divertissement) in seven movements adopts the form of a Baroque dance suite. The Entrée des Clans (I) and Idylle Écossaise (III) quote Scottish melodies, and the opening of the Scherzetto (VI) is based on an Irish fiddle tune. La Fête du Houblon (IV), the vibrant Danse de la Gipsy (V), and the concluding Gigue et Final (VII) are original compositions showcasing the lightness and transparency of Saint-Saëns’ orchestration.
ACT III: A day later, Henry and Anne have married secretly. [The long opening scene featuring Henry’s monologue on the power of the Papacy is rarely performed.] Henry assembles a Synod (Marche du Synod) to invalid his marriage, and Catherine testifies (Car je ne qu’une étrangère). Gomez defends Catherine, but the Synod rules against her. The Papal Legate excommunicates him, and Henry proclaims himself Head of the new Church of England.
ACT IV: (January 1536) Queen Anne is watching a danced entertainment, when Gomez enters with a message for King Henry: Catherine is dying in exile at Kimbolt Castle. An impassioned intermezzo leads us to the castle, where we hear an off-stage version of the national anthem. Anne begs Catherine for Gomez’s letter, confessing that she was the lady in question. The King and Spanish Ambassador arrive, but Catherine burns the letter, taking its secret with her to her grave. Henry remains suspicious of Anne, threatening her with the axe if she proves to have been unfaithful to him.
THE COMPOSER Camille Saint-Saëns (1835, Paris –1921, Algiers) was a short, witty, sarcastic French composer remembered mainly for his opera Samson and Delilah and the orchestral showpieces Danse macabre and Carnival of the Animals. He began as a child prodigy, picking out tunes on the piano at two and making a public début as a pianist at five. Soon after, his parents took him to a Parisian symphony concert; he enjoyed the string serenade, but cried out at the brass entrance, “Make them stop. They prevent my hearing the music.” He was removed.
Saint-Saëns was an enthusiastic admirer of ballet, and liked to dance socially. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at age fifteen, winning prizes in every class and studying under the Parisian-Jewish composer Jacques Halevy (1799-1862). Charles Gounod and Georges Bizet (who married Halévy’s daughter) were his closest friends at the Conservatoire. All three young composers publicly admired the progressive elements of Berlioz, Liszt, and especially Wagner’s music, but their compositions tended to be characterized as arch-conservative for their opposition to Debussy, late Strauss, and Stravinsky (Saint-Saëns walked out of the premiere of Le sacre du printemps).
From 1857-1876, he worked as Head Organist at the famed Madeleine Church in Paris. Franz Liszt remarked, “His organ playing was not merely of the first rank, but incomparable...no orchestra is capable of creating a similar impression.” Notable works from this period include piano concertos (one inspiring Ravel’s jazzy G Major Piano Concerto) and Samson et Dalila, which Liszt sponsored in Weimar. By the age of forty, Saint-Saëns was a world traveler, conducting and playing his own works. His wit and compositional approach fascinated Tchaikovsky, who shared his love of dance. At one 1875 event in Moscow, Nikolai Rubinstein played Pygmalion and Galatea, while Saint-Saëns danced Galatea and Tchaikovsky (aged 35) “appeared as Pygmalion” (no witness reports survive). By the 1880s, Saint-Saëns had turned to orchestral showpieces and opera. After playing most of Mozart’s piano concertos, he edited Mozart’s sonatas, and became almost pathologically restless, incorporating exotic themes and melodies (e.g. the Africa Fantasy and “Egyptian” Piano Concerto). He composed the first film score in 1908.
THE GENESIS OF HENRY VIII
In 1879, Saint-Saëns’ proposed as a new version of his overtly political Etienne Marcel and a new work based in Merovingian Gaul to the Paris Opéra. The new conservatoire-trained general manager Vaucorbeil countered with an offer to collaborate with the wealthy patron (and his recent competitor for the job of Opéra director) Léonce Détroyat (1829-1898), as edited by poet Paul-Armand Silvestre (1837-1901). Saint-Saëns tried to win over his librettists to an historical French subject. After four operas with limited success, the next would make or break his career in the theatre, and Saint-Saëns still keenly remembered how his college friend Bizet suffered due to the harsh critical response to Carmen.
Eventually Détroyat (a republican military officer and ardent loyalist) persuaded Saint-Saëns to develop a play he had already drafted, a Henry VIII based on Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La Cisma de Inglaterra (The schism in England); they had initially offered it to Charles Gounod and Victorin Joncières. In March 1880, the Jesuit order was banned and by the summer, the Archbishop of Paris sought to break the seal on the Jesuit Chapel in the rue de Sèvres and remove the Host to St. Sulpice. Leading ministers pressed for the re-establishment of divorce, and politicians began to call for restrictions on Church influence in education. Silvestre had been reading his edits of the libretto to high-ranking politicians, and Saint-Saëns (a devout Catholic and prominent church organist) called the stressful situation “a Calvary which I would not mount again even to have a piece performed at the Opéra.” Henry VIII was perfectly timed politically: divorce became legal in France in 1884.
Calderón’s Spanish play required substantial changes due to its complex court intrigues. Cardinal Volseo (Woolsey) was eliminated, as was a court jester-narrator added by the librettists to the first draft: Saint-Saëns felt it was too similar to Verdi’s Rigoletto. The large Synod scene in Act III expanded the plea of Queen Catalina (Catherine) to her husband and the subsequent church council ruling in favor of King Henry. Saint-Saëns supported this approach, as long as it was not too similar to the council chamber scene in Act I of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine. Gounod had actually suggested this expansion, and Henry’s repudiation became an epoch-defining action, with a mob lending popular weight to the event at “C’en est donc fait!”.
Vaucorbeil and the rehearsal director François-Joseph Regnier also helped to reshape the opera. There were so many changes to Calderón’s original story that Joncières noted (in his 12 March 1883 La Liberté review of the premiere) that he “hardly recognized the work.” As the main plot is shaped by the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s jealousy drives the story to its Act IV conclusion. Calderón had introduced the idea of an incriminating letter from Anne to Henry (delivered by the Spanish ambassador to Catherine in Act I), and the letter (with its leitmotif) was brought back in Act IV, when Henry tries unsuccessfully to wrest it from Catherine’s hands. A fifth act was proposed and then cut; it would have featured a funeral march for Anne and the presentation of Jane Seymour as the new queen (“Dès demain vous aurez une novelle reine”). Since this was a production destined for the Paris Opéra, Calderón’s play also required the addition of a thirty-minute ballet divertissement.
THE MUSIC Saint-Saëns’ progressive use of leitmotifs surpassed Massenet’s and Chausson’s use of this technique, but he did not develop them over time in the manner of Wagner. Some leitmotifs threatened (dotted rhythms), and others mocked (when Catherine sings some of Henry’s music back to Anne). The most self-indulgent characters (like Henry) are represented by multiple leitmotifs, combined and layered by Saint-Saëns to express duplicity. However, Saint-Saëns still organized the larger structure of the opera around conservative set pieces such as superfluous choruses (opening Act II), a large concertato passage in the Synod scene (Act III), duets in Act II and IV that end with cabalettas, and ternary arias.
Saint-Saens poured his frustrated feelings toward his own wife Marie into the childless and abandoned character of Catherine: their strained marriage had resulted in a permanent separation by 1881. The yearning melody embodying Henry’s lustful desires is a master-stroke, both by its shape and its lack of satisfactory completion: it speaks of desire for freedom from a failed marriage and the call of an alternative longing.
During the same period, Saint-Saëns also wrote the music and texts for the intimate a cappella choruses Calme des Nuits and Les Fleurs des Arbres. He composed church anthems (two settings of the O Salutaris) and a Deus Abraham motet, which he dedicated to the soloists of Henry VIII. He researched old Tudor music and movement (especially mime) from Anne Boleyn’s time at court and incorporated several English, Scottish, and Irish folk melodies into his score. For the mob chorus ending Act III and heard in the Prelude, he quoted “The Carmen’s Whistle” from William Byrd’s Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, hand-copied in the British Royal Library. When asked by Queen Victoria in 1898 about the British melodies, the composer replied that he had found them “buried under a tangle of arabesques.”
FRENCH ACT III BALLETS Despite the Revolution of 1830, the Paris Opéra remained under government control, specializing in five-act French grand opera. Words, music, religious processions, crowds, executions, sunrises, revolutions, sunsets, and ballet were combined to maximum spectacular effect. The official Commission de Surveillance demanded “grandeur,” but restricted Opéra scenarios to those “drawn from mythology or history; principal subjects are kings or heroes.”
The Opéra was particularly notorious for collaborative pressures such as asking composers to truncate five-act operas to four (due to a second act ballet requirement) and four-act operas to three (to pair with a ballet from the repertory). Saint-Saëns’ Henry VIII was subjected to both of these requests (the first for the premiere in 1886, the second in 1889). These practical, market-driven concerns trumped Wagnerian (and Berliozian) support of artistic coherence. Although Parisian grand operas preferred an Act III ballet, Wagner’s Rienzi was the first to use a ballet-pantomime in Act II as a crucial dramatic sequence, and Saint-Saëns followed this example. When the Opéra’s new general manager Vaucorbeil, who had studied under Cherubini and even taught the Conservatoire’s Vocal Ensemble, first approached Saint-Saens, it was for a one-act ballet. The composer refused, replying, “an opera must come first.” Gounod, whose opera Tribute of Zamora had suffered dozens of rewrites due to Vaucorbeil’s “suggestions,” offered the following warning: “Even Saint-Saëns has the right to enjoy a failure at the Opéra.”
In October 1882, the Maître de Ballet produced a scenario portraying the loyalty of Henry’s subjects. Although it was anomalous to include Scotland in Henry’s dominions, Saint-Saëns plucked melodies from a collection of Irish and Scottish airs belonging to Mme. Détroyat. He completed the Act II ballet in time for the first stage rehearsal (2 December) and titled it Fête populaire. The ballet follows the arrival of the Papal Legate: Henry casually notes that the court will hear the visitor the following day, and proposes that Anne amuse herself through dance: “Soyons tout a plaisir!” In early versions of the opera, a complex septet also preceded the ballet (with Catherine as a mezzo soprano), but when Rosine Bloch became unavailable Saint-Saens enlarged the role and made Queen Catherine a higher soprano than Anne. Eventually, Saint-Saëns cut the whole septet number in rehearsal, noting that Gabrielle Krauss, who premiered the role of Catherine, preferred to save her voice for the later, more spectacular numbers.
Throughout April 1883, the première danseuse, Mlle. Sobra, had a sprained foot and was missing from the ballet, a serious matter at the Opéra. Saint-Saëns left Paris immediately after the premiere, traveling south: the ballet from Henry VIII and his Danse Macabre were played at the inauguration of the Nice Casino, and he eventually returned to Paris to sit on the Prix de Rome jury that awarded Claude Debussy first prize.
©2019 Laura Stanfield Prichard
