Deliciously not Disney: Grétry's Zémire et Azor at the Opéra Comique

Advice to opera composers: if you want your works to be famous in posterity, avoid writing them at the same time as Mozart. André Gretry was exceptionally successful in his day, surviving the French Revolution in spite of being Marie-Antoinette’s favourite composer, but of the nearly 70 operas that he wrote, only Richard Cœur de Lion and Zémire et Azor are regularly performed, and those only rarely. But on the evidence of last night’s performance of Zémire et Azor at Opéra Comique in Paris, that’s a pity. It’s a feel-good fairytale of great charm, with a knockout of a soprano aria to liven things up.

The plot is mostly Beauty and the Beast, mashed up with an Arabian Nights-like backstory of the merchant Sander (the father of Beauty, aka Zémire) who has lost his fortune when his last ship sinks. The genre is a comédie-ballet, part spoken, part danced but mostly sung, popular at the French court since the days of the Sun King. Director Michel Fau has huge fun bookending the piece with dance, coming on stage himself as “La fée” (the evil spirit who has transform Azor into the Beast) in full drag queen regalia, heavy makeup, voluminous black dress and headgear reminiscent of Thai classical dance. Two dancers (the brilliant Alexandre Lacoste and Antoine Lafon) cavort and leap as his fawning dogs (or “genies”, as the programme call them). When Fau, who is not a small man, is lifted at high speed to the heavens while Sander’s servant Ali tumbles into view from the side of the stage, the mood is set.

Opéra-Comique’s new Director, Louis Langrée, conducted Les Ambassadeurs – La Grande Écurie, an ensemble formed through the merger of two period bands. The playing was a miracle of lightness, airy, with verve and movement, accented but never overblown. The strings danced, lifted and skipped merrily. The natural horns, two in the pit and two off-stage, filled the music with the character of its era; the woodwind phrases were beautifully turned and finely nuanced, with particular plaudits to the flutes, both traverse and end-blown, of Amélie Michel and François Nicolet.

The singing and acting were of uniformly high quality. Pride of place goes, as it should, to Julie Roset as Zémire, who sang with the sweetest of soprano timbre with effortless rise to the top of her range. When Zémire has got over her disgust at Azor’s appearance, she agrees to sing something for him; the result is “La Fauvette” (the warbler), where soprano and flutes echo each other in mimicking birdsong, which Roset sang to perfection – a true showstopper. We’ll readily forgive the range of the opera stretching a couple of semitones too low for comfort for her.

It can’t be easy to put across combination of raging beast, noble hero and dejected woe-is-me prisoner of his fate that is Azor, but Philippe Talbot made an excellent fist of it, with a pleasant tenor which was at its best in his Act 3 “Ah! Quel torment d’être sensible”. Marc Mauillon was an engaging Zander, noble and expressive in “La pauvre enfant”, in which he bemoans the fatherless future of his daughters when, as he expects, the Beast has devoured him. Sahy Ratia’s slave Ali was thoroughly entertaining – more than a little overacted, but that’s probably what the part demands.

The costumes, the first foray into opera by fashion designer Hubert Barrère and his longtime collaborator Citronelle Dufay, are magnificent, from Zémire’s enormous and richly decorated farthingale in Acts 3 and 4 to Beast-Azor’s hideous-yet-noble black lizard to the over-the-top opulence of ugly sister-equivalents Lisbé and Fatmé. The sets, also by Barrère, are simple and effective, with a real coup de théâtre when Azor shows Zémire her father and sisters by having them come to life in a painting on the wall. I only have two complaints about this staging: firstly, the lighting was on the dingy side and those lovely costumes could have done with something considerably brighter; secondly, there were prolonged spells with an absence of stage movement.

As for the work, charming as Zémire et Azor may be, there are good reasons why it never reached the fame of Mozart’s operas. Firstly, the piece isn’t particularly dramatic; it’s a fairytale we all know and the libretto errs too far on the side of reinforcing its moral message that virtue trumps ugliness, with little ability to build tension. Secondly, the music is unmemorable – delicious to listen to in the moment, but leaving little lasting impression.

None the less, this was a delightfully escapist evening of opera that was easy on the eye and quite beautifully sung and played. And one that will add the Liège-born André Grétry to my list of famous Belgians.