This month New York opera-goers are offered a rare and exciting opportunity to hear Emmanuel Chabrier's beloved opéra bouffe L'Etoile in its new Baerenreiter critical edition at New York City Opera in six performances to take place at the David H. Koch Theater on March 18, 20, 26, 28 and April 1. Emmanuel Plasson leads the orchestra in this new production by Mark Lamos in which La Belle Époque meets Broadway spectacle. Chabrier, with librettists Eugène Leterrier and Albert Vanloo, spins an amusing tale set in a mythic French kingdom about love, fate and mistaken identity. Editor of Baerenreiter's L'Etoile Critical Edition, Hugh Macdonald, writes:

The score is abundantly tuneful and orchestrated with great subtlety and taste. Chabrier was, strictly speaking, an amateur since he did not attend the Paris Conservatoire unlike many of his contemporaries, but he had studied music with various individual teachers and had a formidable natural gift and a sharp ear.

The vocal score of L'Étoile was published by Enoch et Cie in 1877, but the full score has not been published until now. In order to prepare the work for a new publication I have had to reconcile the Enoch vocal score with the autograph orchestral score, held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The printed vocal score made a number of significant changes, including a redistribution of the three female voices (Laoula, Aloès and Lazuli) and the insertion of expression marks, metronome marks, pauses, and other details which are not found in the autograph.

It is ironic to be treating such a charmingly light work with the serious attention we usually reserve for Bach's cantatas or Beethoven's quartets, but Chabrier was much more than a facile tunesmith; he was a master of the delicate and difficult art of musical comedy, a domain in which he can reasonably be compared with Offenbach, Rossini and even Mozart.

Go to www.nycopera.com for more information on the production.

Learn more on the critical edition of L'Etoile at www.takte-online.de, Baerenreiter's online music journal.

Emmanuel Chabrier
L'Etoile (1877)
opéra bouffe in three acts
libretto (Fr) by Eugène Leterrier and Albert Vanloo
edited by Hugh Macdonald
for 7 sopranos, 2 mezzo sopranos, 4 tenors, baritone, bass
2(pic).1.2.1–2.2cornets.1.0–timp.perc–str
full evening