Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)

Musical theatre is so expensive; it rarely encourages taking risks. But in the days before film and TV, a musical show was expected to provide something outside the daily experience of its audiences: something affecting, perhaps mildly shocking; something exotic, perhaps titillating. You can almost measure the expected audience, and the likely success, by the way the original characters and storylines were modified, domesticated to the ‘house’ concerned. Some things that could be put in a book, read in private and kept away from respectable people would need watering down and sugaring for the musical stage. 

Take Carmen, for example – the gypsy who allures the narrator of Mérimée's novella, when he meets her outside the ramparts of Cordoba, is immediately revealed as a thief. An outlaw’s moll, she is frank about her sexual inconstancy, and her sorcery is no figure of speech, but something she believes and practises. In Bizet’s opera Carmen, she is still recognisable, and Bizet insisted she should be played and sung by Galli-Marié, who in her personal life shared some of Carmen’s experience. But this was too much for the first audiences, in 1875 – audiences liked to use the Opéra-Comique for pleasant socialising and discreet match-making – Carmen was too much to be put in front of marriageable daughters, let alone their young men. Nevertheless, Bizet had made a breakthrough, as the success of Carmen after his death proved. His directness of dramatic and musical treatment was to encourage a whole new type of opera. 

Many of these points are relevant to Offenbach’s La Périchole. The writings of Prosper Mérimée seem to have been a particularly fruitful source for theatres wishing to put actresses on the stage in roles illustrating aspects of the eternal feminine, but outside the audience’s likely experience. Carmen was either pure invention, or based on a real person Mérimée met on his travels in Spain. The original of ‘La Périchole’ was a real historical personage. In the collection of plays Mérimée wrote in 1829 under the pseudonym ‘Clara Gazul’, one, Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, is based on the life of Micaela Villegas, a Peruvian actress of the mid-18^th  century. She became the mistress of the Viceroy, had a child by him, and eventually retired to a Carmelite nunnery. Half-Indian, she was once abused by the Viceroy, enraged by her capriciousness, as ‘Perra chola’, meaning ‘native bitch!’ This nickname stuck during her subsequent career on the stage. 

Real life vs. invention

But the Périchole of Meilhac and Halévy, who made the libretto for Offenbach, is a long way after this original, and the operetta has little connection with its source in Mérimée beyond the names of the main characters, Périchole and Piquillo. Meilhac and Halévy's version was largely of their own invention. Whereas Bizet was by their side to remind them what attracted him to Carmen in the first place, Offenbach wanted them to create a vehicle to show off the talent of Hortense Schneider, whose magnetism had first begun to thrill Paris audiences in 1855 at Offenbach’s Bouffes-Parisiens. She went on to become a major star as Helen of Troy and the Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, all to music by Offenbach. She was his mistress, too, at first, but went on to millionaires and politicians, and foreign royalty so numerous that she was nicknamed after a busy thoroughfare, the 'Passage des Princes'.  

The temperament Meilhac and Halévy wrote into the part of Périchole was well to the fore in rehearsals. First Schneider insisted that her rival Mlle Silly (Orestes in La Belle Hélène) should never appear in the same show with her. At rehearsals she refused to sing her words aloud and when Offenbach threatened to have her replaced, threw her score into the auditorium. But La Périchole wasn’t only about Schneider – it had other grounds for success. Proof of this came when Meilhac and Halévy tried to follow up La Périchole's success with La Diva, the equivalent of a Hollywood ‘bio-pic', which flopped. 

And satire...

Satire played a big part in operetta, and there was plenty of it in La Périchole. The Latin American setting brought to mind the Mexican political adventure of Emperor Napoleon III, who after French troops captured Mexico City in 1863 had imposed Archduke Maximilian of Austria on Mexico as Emperor. In 1867  Napoleon withdrew his support, French troops left the country, and Maximilian was executed – the whole episode was embarrassing for France and its regime. 

This American allusion was partly cover for more pointed satire in La Périchole. The philandering Viceroy, who slums it among lower-class women under a disguise (‘incognito’), was easily recognised as the Emperor Napoleon III himself, particularly when he schemes to have Périchole marry a courtier and become a lady-in-waiting. It was Prosper Mérimée, by now a kind of ‘official’ literary figure in the Napoleonic entourage, who observed with sardonic detachment that the best way for a dignitary to pay court to the emperor was to marry a pretty woman and then lose interest in her. 

Then there was the Empress. Eugénie de Montijo, whom Napoleon had married in 1853, was Spanish, and had become notorious for advancing her Spanish favourites at court. This puts the sting in Périchole and Piquillo’s refrain about the Indian(native) girl seduced by the Spanish conquistador. In a year, they sing, a child will be born, and ‘Il grandira, car il est Espagnol’ - he will grow up, for he is Spanish (‘grandir’ also means to thrive, prosper). The jealousy of the court ladies for Périchole, and the satirical portrayal of the court of Peru, must have struck responsive chords. 

Just as targeted is the only pure parody of other operas in La Périchole (such opera-parody being an important feature of Offenbach operetta). It comes in the scene of presentation at court: ‘What a degrading thing to marry the mistress of the king; the motive must be obvious !’ To the audience, the sub-text of those words and music taken from Donizetti’s then very well-known La Favorite must have been obvious. 

But there is more to La Périchole than a success of the moment, with topical allusions, dashed off and then forgotten; in fact, at its original production on October 5, 1868 the operetta was only a half-success. This was to do with its structure and its tone; the original version, in two acts, had little significant action after Piquillo is arrested and consigned to a dungeon for uncooperative husbands. To seduce Périchole the Viceroy disguises himself as a jewel seller; she continues to refuse him yet manages to win her freedom and her husband’s. Offenbach’s correspondence blames Meilhac’s laziness for the failure to develop the scenario sufficiently. The first act’s almost tragic scenes overbalanced what followed, and audiences went home feeling they hadn’t had enough fun. 

A three-Act version

Six years later, and after the important watershed of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, Offenbach was trying to revive his fortunes in a new France – the Second Empire had been swept away. Hortense Schneider was still available and still a drawcard. Offenbach managed to persuade his old collaborators Meilhac and Halévy to enlarge La Périchole into a three-act version. By that time they were becoming more interested in drama than in the frivolities of operetta (they were about to work on Carmen), but they obliged. Already during the show’s first run they had developed a third act out of the finale of the second. They dropped the Trio of the Jewels and substituted the ‘couplets de l'aveu’ (Tu n’es pas beau... mais.. je t’adore, brigand – You're not good looking.. but... I adore you, you rogue). In 1874, with the Théâtre des Variétés supplying a new prison setting, the third act took its final form, with the addition of such numbers as the monologue of the old prisoner, the trio of the handsome gaoler, the prison trio, the escape, and many others. In this better balanced form La Périchole provided Hortense Schneider with her final triumph. 

La Périchole had become a better piece, but what kind of a piece was it? Perhaps the fact that its two versions span the crisis of 1870-1 has encouraged writers on Offenbach to regard it as a transitional piece. In 1858 Offenbach was known to be frustrated with operetta and trying to establish himself at the Opéra-Comique – he was working on another work to be performed there, Vert-Vert(another failure, or at any rate a non-success.) Reading history backwards, Offenbach biographer Kracauer sees La Périchole as the beginning of Offenbach’s final evolution towards a higher genre, culminating 12  years later in The Tales of Hoffmann. 

A. Jannin's frontispiece to the 1868 vocal score. Public Domain

It is true that there are things in La Périchole announcing a tone unexpected in opéra-bouffe, especially Périchole’s ‘Air de la lettre’, and Piquillo’s despair when he reads it and attempt to hang himself. The text of the letter is a rhyming paraphrase of Manon Lescaut’s letter to Des Grieux (in Prévost’s novel about Manon), leaving him under somewhat similar circumstances, for a better option (Massenet’s musical version of this, ‘Adieu, notre petite table’, came many years later in 1884, and Meilhac had a hand in that, too!). Peter Gammond calls the Air de la lettre possibly the finest aria that Offenbach ever wrote ‘... it has an artful simplicity, a directness, a warmth that combine to make it almost Mozartian in its classical tenderness’.  A grandson of the composer, Jacques Brindejont-Offenbach, calls it operetta’s Card Song (Carmen ) or Air des larmes(Massenet’s Werther ). 

Peter Gammond interprets the shift in tone in La Périchole towards romantic or sentimental comedy to an ‘obvious’ need to move toward a romantic, less pointed story, lightening the whiplash of unadorned wit by adding more human interest. Operetta and opéra-comique were coming closer together; it is no accident that the numbers for the star were becoming more ‘excerptable’ – they relied less on their situation in the comedy than on their characterisation of the heroine. This is why I, like many other people, first got to know La Périchole from famous recordings: of the ariette ‘Ah! quel dîner je viens de faire (How well I dined just now)’, where Périchole, well fed and dined for the first time in ages, lurches and hiccups, but without losing her refinement – a scene superbly played by Schneider, and sung on record by Jennie Tourel. Then there was Maggie Teyte’s record of the ‘Couplets de l’aveu’, which incidentally demonstrates how well Offenbach’s writing can respond to really good singing. 

The sentimental side of La Périchole, however, shouldn’t be exaggerated – hilarity, absurdity, and wit are mostly the order of the day, in such scenes as the marriage and the presentation at court. Many of the devices are the same as in Offenbach’s earlier opéras-bouffes: the Rondo of the ‘Maris ré-cal-ci-trants', for example, where the splitting of the words into syllables for comic effect is the same as in the entry of the Kings of Greece from La Belle  Hélène. 

The character of Périchole, whose cunning, energy and passion outwit all the men, isn’t just a vehicle for a singing actress with a comic gift. She is a memorable creation worthy of the Mérimée of Carmen, yet never too shocking for a well-heeled audience. At least half the audience will love her when she exclaims ‘My God! How stupid men are’. Offenbach, Meilhac and Halévy got La Périchole right, eventually, and durable it has proved. To produce it with respect for its original context might be expecting too much of an audience, especially given how hard it is to catch the wit of Meilhac and Halévy in translation.  One can only hope that whoever gets their  hands on La Périchole will see that any adaptation preserves its balance of satire, high spirits, and sentiment.

First published in Opera Australia, 1993