Where have I been all these years? A listed Francophile managing to miss the utter delight of Bizet’s la jolie fille de Perth! Not averse to Carmen, tickled by the dusky oriental charms of The Pearl Fishers, diverted by the precocious brio of the 18-year-old’s sole symphony, enchanted and moved by the music for l’Arlésienne; yet incurious enough not to have explored such a likely route towards pleasure as this full-length opera written in 1866, three years after the first, some eight before the last, of his famous repertory pieces.
That its so-called plot is lost beyond recall from start to finish should be no disadvantage for an operatic culture which can swallow middle-period Verdi without demur. I remember Scott’s original novel as one of the Northern Wizard’s best, concretely localised in Scotland’s prettiest town and his own convincingly invented past; its characters less cardboard than often, its story less dependent on improvisation and coincidence. But one would read it in vain to make sense of the unresisting imbecility offered to Bizet, with its chaos of misapprehensions and disguises, its ham and cod that passeth understanding, its lame-duck verses. Nor is there any discernible nub of emotional truth allowing one to become genuinely involved, as with Rigoletto and his daughter Acuzena and her mixed-up babies in Trovatore, the Duke caught between lover and husband in Ballo, even the hapless goings-on in la forza del destino.
For sheer preposterousness, the close, in which the heroine, literally maddened by her absurd context, is shocked back to sanity via a pre-Freudian reconstruction of an earlier trauma (one of several), takes the prize. This is the climax of a succession of incredibilities that begins with some of the principal characters’ names — Simon Glover, a glover; Henry Smith, a smith; Mab, Queen of the Gipsies — then proceeds from implausibility to implausibility as though there were no tomorrow.
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