French opera: Le domino noir - $25

Bénédicte Jourdois returns to Lamp to lead Daniel-François-Esprit Auber’s Le domino noir with the assistance of Isabelle David (pianist, soprano). The opera is considered to be Auber’s most popular work and was performed more than 1,200 times at the Opéra-Comique by 1909. Clément considered it the composer’s “wittiest score, the one in which he most abandoned himself to his charming imagination and melodic grace”. More recently, Robert Letellier, called it “a work of great musical abundance and of ingenious and inexhaustible invention”.

Like Boieldieu’s Dame blanche (1825), the hero has a mysterious benefactress – a pretty girl (or supernatural agent?), with whom he falls in love, but does not discover her identity until the end. The action takes place on a hectic Christmas Eve night in Madrid. A young Spanish diplomat, Horace de Massarena, met a beautiful young woman at the Queen’s ball; although he was smitten by her, he did not learn who she was. He encounters her again the next year, but, like Cinderella, at the stroke of midnight, she flees into the night once more. Horace meets her again that morning – at a friend’s supper-party, and at a convent. The girl says she is Horace’s good fairy, an angel; or is she a demon, sprite, or sylph?