When one sets off to the opera to attend what is usually called a ‘double bill’, one will, most of the time, expect to see two operas clearly contrasting in character. More unusual is to find two extremely different works, hardly sharing anything between themselves, presented in a reading that digs deep for any possible echoes. This Bizet double bill, presented by students of the Royal College of Music, is undoubtedly in the last category: a rather peculiar dittico.
Djamileh, an opéra-comique on a libretto by Louis Gallet after Alfred de Musset’s oriental tale Namouna, is often classed as one of Bizet’s most original scores. Premièred in Paris in 1872, it dates from the composer’s maturity (Carmen would follow only three years later). The exotic setting – the opulent palace of a sultan in Cairo – is lovingly developed through orchestral and harmonic means, and constitutes the most intriguing element of Bizet’s work: the première came only five months after Verdi’s equally Egyptian, but overtly monumental, Aida.
Le Docteur Miracle, a much earlier work, is an operetta that won a very young Bizet first prize at a comic-opera competition advertised by Offenbach in 1856. When we listen to it with the wandering melodies and slippery harmonies of Djamileh still in mind, Bizet’s juvenilia, with its Rossinian sonorities and rhythmic clarity, inevitably makes us take a large leap backwards in nineteenth-century music history.
In Alessandro Talevi’s production, the curtain opens on a gloomy, smoky room (a distinctly unglamorous regal palace) in which sultan Haroun entertains himself with his slave girls. The dense vapours and dim lights, which enshroud Djamileh almost throughout, convey very well the sense of a dream in which all characters are living. Slave-girl Djamileh refuses to see that Haroun, with whom she is deeply in love, does not care for her; Haroun, for his part, eventually realises that, at base, he too is emotionally involved with the girl; to complicate matters further, his servant, Splendiano, lives with the illusion that Djamileh will soon be his. One of the most gripping moments comes when Splendiano confronts the heroine with the cruel truth: the lights suddenly get brighter, and, in one of the few moments of spoken dialogue, Djamileh accepts the sad reality (and decides a plan, which involves disguising herself as a sensual dancer and so making the sultan fall in love with her). One only wishes the production had played more with this idea of dream versus reality, and that – as a result – the lighting changes had been more numerous.