(++++) A CONSTELLATION OF SUPERLATIVES

Offenbach: La Vie parisienne. Anne-Catherine Gillet, Véronique Gens, Sandrine Buendia, Elena Galitskaya, Louise Pingeot, Marie Kalinine, Marie Gautrot, Caroline Meng, Artavazd Sargsyan, Marc Mauillon, Jérôme Boutillier, Pierre Derhet, Philippe Estèphe, Carl Ghazarossian; Chœur de l’Opéra national du Capitole du Toulouse and Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse conducted by Romain Dumas. Bru Zane. $42.99 (2 CDs).

     It is almost impossible to explain just how good this latest Bru Zane release is. Stating that it is by far the best recorded version of Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne does not say enough, since it may just be the best performance – not just recording – of this work, certainly so in modern times. And just to complicate matters further, this actually appears to be the only performance of this version of La Vie parisienne – or rather set of performances, since the recording is based on stagings from 2021 through 2024 at theaters in Rouen, Tours, Paris and elsewhere.

     It’s complicated. As heard here, La Vie parisienne is a very extended work: two hours and 40 minutes of music, which means a theatrical performance with intermissions would run well over three hours. Until this production, La Vie parisienne had never been given this way, ever: the fourth and fifth acts were significantly truncated before the original 1866 première, characters were dropped altogether or rearranged, numbers were eliminated or significantly altered, and the whole dramatic arc of the piece was changed in significant ways. This is one reason that, even today, the superb music permeating La Vie parisienne seems to be at the service of a particularly weak and un-engaging story.

     But that is complicated. La Vie parisienne is a genuine slice-of-life story of Paris at the height of the Second Empire, before the Franco-Prussian War brought that age to a screeching halt and, not coincidentally, nearly did the same to Offenbach’s career. The entire story of La Vie parisienne requires a level of familiarity with the Paris of the 1860s, the types of people and entertainments common then and there, the largely nonjudgmental attitude toward the demimonde, the unending pursuit of questionable pleasures by young men and women of certain classes – and the attraction of the whole lifestyle to travelers throughout Europe and even from overseas. The libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy is complex and witty, and louche in ways that the censors did not always notice and excise, as when a young woman sings of a supposed coachman’s skill at “giving you a tumble” and comments that he “gave me a tumble one day, and I won’t forget it.” Furthermore, the libretto abounds in clever references to contemporary political events, social circumstances and theatrical realities that were highly familiar to audiences of the time but that are now almost hopelessly obscure.

     Also, the actors presenting the original La Vie parisienne were in fact more actors than singers, and Offenbach had to make numerous musical changes to accommodate the less-than-stellar vocal capabilities of some of them. But the singers, including all the very numerous soloists and the chorus on this recording, are singers, and quite capable of delivering first-rate renditions of the original, nonsimplified versions of Offenbach’s music. At the same time, the performers here act well enough to make it clear why the published version of the libretto described La Vie parisienne as a “play with songs in five acts,” not an operetta or opera or anything else of the sort. There is a lot of dialogue, and it is absolutely crucial to an understanding of the very complex plot and the intricately interrelated relationships among the large cast of characters.

     That La Vie parisienne has continued to entertain non-French audiences for more than a century and a half, amusing people worldwide for whom its underlying assumptions are thoroughly unknown, is testimony to the tremendous entertainment value of Offenbach’s music, which is never better than it is here. But, again, it’s complicated: La Vie parisienne includes three short interpolations from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, one of which has some dramatic import, and it reuses some of Offenbach’s own material from other works, yet it never has the slightest flavor of pastiche or of flagging creativity.

     What the scholars and musicians associated with Bru Zane have done so magnificently here is to recover all (or at least most) of the excised material that never reached the stage in the first performance. They have filled in gaps in various musical numbers; orchestrated some items that have survived without instrumentation being indicated; returned to Offenbach’s preferred more-difficult vocal material (when it could be found) instead of using the now-standard simplified music; brought the fourth and fifth acts back to their original design and length to the extent possible; and engaged an exemplary set of soloists, a very fine chorus, an orchestra that plays with abandon and seems to have no trouble with some mighty challenging tempos, and a conductor – Romain Dumas – whose pores seem to be permeated with Offenbachiana, so unerringly does he pace the work and so skillfully does he hold it together.

     It is not possible to do absolutely everything to restore, re-complete and present in toto for a modern audience the original version of La Vie parisienne, for various reasons – for example, several sections turn on Ludovic and Halévy’s intent to show the amusing contrast between a woman’s Bordeaux accent and a man’s German one, which then carries over into matters of food preference as explicated by the chorus and sung partly in German. And it has to be said that the fourth act, which is given over largely to talk that is intended to unravel a host of instances of disguise, miscommunication and outright knavery, is weaker than the rest of the production. (This act was actually dropped when La Vie parisienne was revived in 1873.) But my goodness, what a wealth of musical delight there is in this theatrical extravaganza, and how much more of it there is in this Bru Zane offering than in any other recording! This two-CD set represents a genuine Offenbach rediscovery, made all the more surprising by the fact that La Vie parisienne has long seemed to be a work that was very well-known. The reality is that it has never been known quite this way before, and all devotees of Offenbach’s music owe it to themselves to experience and re-experience this absolutely marvelous release as soon as they possibly can.