Indian Family in England (opera by Giuseppe Sarti)

The plot of the play by August von Kotzebue

August von Kotzebue's play "Indians in England" was published in Russian translation in 1800, but was written by the playwright back in 1789. In accordance with the genre definitions adopted during Kotzebue's time, it belongs to the type of "sentimental comedy" ^[1]. The word "Indians" present in the title of the Russian translation of the play, from today points of view, as if it did not fit into the plot in any way, where the main characters are "Kaberdar, expelled from Mizora Nabob," and his daughter Gurli are Indians. However, then the "peoples" of the Indian Indians in the perception of Europeans differed very weakly, which did not prevent them from being in the center of the intrigue of numerous plays of that time.

Kotzebue's play presents the entire set of characters needed for the comic genre, where each is the bearer of well-defined typed devils. Among the main characters of the play is the head of a very ordinary poor bourgeois family, former merchant "Sir" John Smith, "tormented by gout," grumpily dissatisfied with his sons and wife. The tongue-in-cheek "sir" clearly underlines the absurdity and comic nature of this character. He is kind, adores his daughter and really wants to see her happy and prosperous. His spouse, hovering about her supposedly noble "German" ancestry and unknowns "noble" ancestors, infinitely reproaching her sick husband with a "piece of bread" and denying him the minor joys of life ("tobacco pipe" and "porter glass") is a convenient target for author's satire. There are noble children in this family: the selfless daughter Liddy, making "cuffs" for sale day and night in order to please her father with tobacco and porter. Virtues are not denied to son Robert, the captain of the ship, who went to the far lands in search of wealth to provide for his family. Another son Samuel, a stupid and smug small (in the words of his father "sneak"), dreams of big money and a rich bride and for this he is ready for various petty nasty things.

Exotic characters - the noble Caberdar and the naive savage Gurley spectacularly decorate the ordinary "interior" of the life of the John Smith family. The wealthy Indian Kaberdar, once forced to leave his "blooming province" ravaged by Europeans and insidious brothers, does good deeds. He saves merchants unfamiliar to him from bankruptcy, helps the family of "Sir" John. His adored daughter "Indian" Gurley is an unusual creature, a "child of nature," friendly, open, far from any ideas about the norms of behavior adopted in society. She does not know how to be cunning, is able to tell her interlocutor everything that comes to her mind, and therefore is extravagant and unpredictable.

Thus, in the development of the main intrigue, two groups of characters are involved, personifying the family-everyday, everyday and exotic, unusual. A similar combination of "everyday" and "exotic" is one of Kotzebue's characteristic dramatic techniques.

The play is saturated with a variety of love situations. The virtuous Liddy is in love with the young Indian Facir, who went with Robert in search of happiness, but the noble Caberdar offers her hand and heart. She agrees to this proposal, sacrificing feelings to debt in the name of saving the family from poverty. Samuel, having learned about Gurley's wealth, tries to look after her, but she does not accept them, considering him "boring," "not very enviable" and generally a "fool." Gurley's heart languishes and craves love, which she is unaware of.... "Often there is an unknown desire with me that I will take either a cat or a parrot, kiss them, hold them to my chest and love them so much. And yet something is missing to me. " She really wants to get married without knowing anything about family life, first for Liddy (?!), Who became her close friend, then after all for the "fool" Samuel. But at the sight of Robert returning from the sea voyage, Gurley's heart unmistakably chooses this young man as a companion, which she immediately publicly declares.

In a prosperous ending, of course, love and virtue triumph. Kaberdar, having learned about Liddy's secret love, hands her to her beloved and loving Facier, who as a result also turned out to be his own son. Robert marries Gurley, succumbing to her persuasion and assurance that she will "caress him like her cat and feed him like a parrot." Samuel as a character "negative" and comical remains "with a nose."

Elements of sentimentalist drama are represented, for example, in touching-sensitive scenes of the virtuous and constantly parting "forever" Facier and Liddy. In the scene where Facir turns out to be (suddenly!) Caberdar's son and Gurley's brother, the heroes cried, and the actors and, moreover, the audience cried with real tears. The immediate Gurley cries often, and a serious reason for this is optional. "Indian" is enough to hear from the interlocutor the word "unsparing," as "streams of tears" fill the stage and the auditorium.

The satirical beginning of the play manifests itself in ridiculing various human flaws: Samuel's prudence and haplessness, his mother's grumpiness and stupidity. Kotzebue makes extensive use of traditional comedic techniques in the form of mistakes, misunderstandings, all sorts of word matting (they are abundantly introduced into the speech of Gurley and Mama Smith).

Libretto

The entertaining plays of Kotzebue and his playwrights contemporaries, which made it possible to laugh and cry, were especially liked by the audience, and the opera on the plot of "Indians in England," and even with the music of Giuseppe Sarti, undoubtedly aroused enthusiasm and enthusiasm among the audience. I could not help but attract music lovers and the "exotic" element of the plot. As you know, opera literature often used "oriental" motifs that are well known to the St. Petersburg public from the middle of the 18th century. Operas appeared on the stage with ballets "consisting of people of different peoples," "Chinese celebrations," etc. For example, the opera series of F. Araya "Alexander in India" staged on April 28, 1756 to the next anniversary of the coronation of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna was accompanied by a ballet that included a stage with several Indians returning "from crossing the Idast River." In addition, the French comic opera, beloved by the St. Petersburg public since the second half of the 18th century, was often inlaid with oriental motifs.

The literary basis of Sarti's comic opera "La Famille Indienne en Angleterre," apparently written in 1799, was the "French" version of Kotzebue's play, made by the Marquis de Castelnau. Judging by various sources, this opera was repeatedly performed at the Russian court by a French troupe. One of the main female roles (Gurley) was played by the prima donna of the troupe Madame Chevalier - a very influential person surrounded by Paul I. It was her Kotzebue who considered the main culprit of the failures that plagued the German troupe led by him, despite the fact that the emperor's love for French opera was well known. Indeed, German actors were rarely invited to play at court. All attempts by Kotzebue to change the situation did not lead to anything, and it seemed to him (perhaps not unreasonably) that they prevented that's the intrigue of Chevalier. Nevertheless, he sought and obtained the favor of the French prima donna. "She did me an honour," he wrote in his memoirs, "to perform the role of Gurley in my pies' Indians in England ', which a certain Marquis of Castelnau, in his cruel kindness, turned into a comic opera, not devoid of interest, because the famous bandmaster Sarti wrote very good music for her."

Muzyka Sarti

Sarty's music for Indian Family in England was quite rightly praised by Kotzebue. It is known that the playwright and composer met. So, at the beginning of 1801, Paul I, wishing to hear The Creation of the World by J. Haydn in French, ordered a translation of Kotzebue. "One cannot imagine," Kotzebue wrote, "what kind of labour it was; one should only remember how difficult it is to make a translation, while applying it at the same time to ready-made music; extremely, reaching almost pettiness, the accuracy of our good old man Sarty, made work even more difficult. He had to apply my words to music and constantly interpreted me about long and short syllables rarely observed in French. However, my work was approaching the end, and during the post it was supposed to perform this work. But the sovereign did not live to fasting. "

How good Sarti's music is for The Indians can be concluded not only on the basis of the playwright's review, fragments from Elizaveta Alekseevna's album, but also of the surviving manuscript of the opera score from the collection of "books by Count Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev." The score contains all the vocal numbers of the opera and the overture, except for the spoken dialogues characteristic of the French comic opera.

The opera consists of three acts and is quite consistent with the genre canons of opéra comique. It presents detailed arias (for example, arias of Caberdar and Robert from the second act), ensembles quite dynamized musically and dramatically (quartet of Sir John, his wife, Liddy and Samuel, duet of Gurley and Samuel from the first act), detailed finals, completing each act (for example, a quintet in the first act, a sextet with a choir in the second). As for the overture, it was written by Sarti according to the laws of development of this genre, which developed at the end of the 18th century.

Sarti's overture is an orchestral introduction in the form of a single-movement Allegro, referred to by the composer in the score as "sinfonia" (symphony). Sarti builds the composition of the "symphony" on the basis of the sonata principle with the presence of the main and side parts, the development section, but with the missing reprise.

The most popular fragments of the opera included in the album of Elizabeth Alekseevna are quite indicative in style. In the album, in the arrangements for voice and harpsichord, Kozlovsky recorded numbers mainly related to the image of the main character Gurli. These are Gurley's aria "Lorsque je passé dans la rue" from the first act, Gurley and Liddy's duet "S'aimer est le bien suprême," Gurley's aria "Pauvre Gurli Robert te refuse" from the second act, Gurley's aria "I will frolic with cuteness" from the third act.

The prevalence of these arias in wide circles of music lovers is evidenced not only by Elizabeth's album, but also by other sources. Handwritten copies of fragments of the opera have been preserved, identical to the specified score from the Sheremetev library. The three fragments are the same numbers from the "Elizabethan" album, but in the score version. Gourlay's two album arias "Lorsque je passé dans la rue" and "I Will Frolic with Cute" were published in their collection of popular arias and duets from French operas by I. D. Gerstenberg and F. A. Dietmar. The song "I will frolic with cute" was also released at the beginning of the 19th century as a separate publication.

The image of Gurley's "Indian" in the context of the history of the development of French comic opera is quite traditional. The main task of the authors was to create situations that could draw attention to the process of awakening a tender feeling of love from a naive, inexperienced, young creature. In the opening scenes with Liddy and in a duet with Samuel, Gurley does not yet understand what is happening to her. She, having learned that you can love not only "dear father" and that there is such a thing as "marriage" in the world, naively and with some bewilderment tries to tell Liddy about her very vague and exciting feelings. The underdevelopment of her feeling and lack of understanding of well-known truths are both touching and comical, which was reflected in a number of spicy scenes that amuse the viewer. So, Gurley was going to marry Liddy as her "sister," but after learning that marriage with a woman is impossible, ready to choose the servant of her father Mussafari as her husband. Gurley dreams of marriage, but not knows that "you need to love your husband" and that you will have to live not with your father, but with your chosen one in another house ("I will tell you, dear Liddy: Gurley does not know what marriage is"). In the process of developing the plot in front of the audience, her feeling develops, she becomes clearer and bolder, and Robert's appearance immediately tells her heart about what love is. The lyrical-comedic image of Gurley, gracefully balancing on the verge of childish naivety and skillful coquetry, plus her exotic appearance, certainly attracted the attention of the public, entertaining her, on the one hand, and on the other, with her simple-minded sincerity, responding in many hearts with a sensitive note.

Gurley's aria "Lorsque je passé dans la rue" (Andante, G-dur, 6/8) is the heroine's first, one might say, "exit" aria. In the album, it is designated as "ariette" ("ariette"), and in the manuscript of the opera score as "couplets" ("couplets"). There is no contradiction between these genre definitions. "Arietta," or "verses," is a solo song in the folk spirit characteristic of French comic opera. Arietta is written in the pastoral genre in a typical three-lobed size for Sarti (6/8), at a moderate pace (andante), in the pastoral key of G-dur. The smooth calm movement of the melody is combined with the traditional swaying movement for this genre in the part of a string group. The arietta also gives a special pastoral flavor to the solo of the English horn (Corno Inglese), echoing the voice in the third and in the sextus. Such Tertosextic vocal studies were very characteristic of French pesenromances, which appeared as "arias" in opera literature of the 18th century. One of the voices could be voiced by an oboe or flute, as, for example, accompanied by Lisa's romance "On dit pour nous faire peur que lamour est un dieu trompeur" ("They say to scare us - you can't trust the cupid") from the opera P.-A. Monsigny "Teacher of Law"). So Sarti reflected this tradition in his score, and also enriched the French chant with some "Italianisms." The ariettes are inlaid in the melody melismatic decorations typical of ornamentation of Italian arias, there are also islets of Italian cantilena in the chants of individual words. The form of the arietta, as it should be in such cases, is couplet with a simple two-part unprotected structure typical of the verse.

In this unpretentious idyllic song, a simple-minded and charming person Gurley appears before us, throughout the aria there is an image of the young heroine's light lyrical dreams. It is sometimes colored in melancholic tones. So, in the second part of the arietta, a minor fragment (e-moll) appears, where a state of light, unaccountable sadness that briefly visited the heroine of the opera is transmitted.

The arrangement was made by Kozlovsky for a vocal female duo (two sopranos) and was intended for home music. The lower voice completely imitates the score part of the English horn. It is quite possible that Elizaveta Alekseevna and her friend Countess V.N. Golovin sang this one among the duets they performed. The arrangement was made in the spirit of "clavier songs" common at the end of the century, which involved recording vocal and instrumental parts on two musical lines. This made it possible for a music lover to sing the melody he liked, accompanying himself on the instrument, or just play it without caring about having a partner.

Gurley and Liddy duet "S'aimer est le bien suprême" (Largetto, A-dur, C) - the next stage in the development of the image of the main character. There are no individual characteristics in this scene, the heroines are united by one feeling - the desire to love and be loved. As befits in the buffoon opera, and in many cases in Sarti, the aria is written in two-part form, where the fast part is slow. At first, Gurley and Liddy indulge in a tenderly dreamy mood, voices sweetly sounding in a third in a joyful and upbeat A major, which enhances the commonality of their emotional state. Then excitement takes hold of them, and, more and more inspired, girlfriends are already in a different more expressive emotional mood expresses their attitude to the topic of love. The leading role in the duo belongs to Gurley, where she, not devoid of the previous grace, but more cordial and at the same time more expansive, demonstrates the ability to actively express her own feeling. But in general, this duo, where innocent young people sing about love, is full of hope for the future.

The arrangement of this duet, demonstrating the unanimity of the heroines, was made by Kozlovsky in full accordance with the original, but in a number of episodes he adds coloraturas of varying degrees of complexity, flowering the main melodies quite in the Italian spirit.

Aria "Pauvre Gurli Robert te refuse" (Lento, Es-dur, 6/8) - vivid evidence of further musical development Gurley's image. In a large expanded two-part aria, written in the key of "love" (Es-dur), a heroine appears before us, who is either in easy sadness and bright dreams, then in anger and rage, but in any case singing love. In the context of all drama, opera is an aria, certainly climactic. It most clearly presents the process of self-expression of a person, an open outpouring of feelings and moods. Sarti does not resort to any standard form in this case, but creates a free composition based on the principle of contrast. The first slow part is a sensitive "aria" in "gallant style" with characteristic shades of mournfully melancholic mood experienced by the rejected Gurley. Typical signs of style are manifested in descending sextic intonations, in decisive upward movement along the sounds of a tonic triad, and in complex layering of minor consonants in the middle section.

In the second part of the "monologue" (Allegro, Es-dur, C), a sharp change in the emotional state of the heroine arises. Gurley angrily and furiously protests, not wanting to put up with the refusal of his "cruel-hearted" chosen one. The raging of warlike feelings is expressed in decisive ascending quarto-screw moves-swings, in the repetition of the same phrases, in an even meter close to the march.

The aria is completed by a new section, contrasting in material, where the feeling of tender and touching is still asserted love, to which the heroine is so inclined. And the serene key of B-dur (with a return, of course, in the main Es-dur in conclusion), and the light color of the melody with elements of dance indicate a joyful light state, in which Gurley is staying, having calmed down her "passions" and reconciled with herself. However, this aria-ending fragment is not devoid of a motive of sorrow (es-moll'n episode). Fear of losing your beloved young person after all does not leave.

Aria Gurley "I Will Frolic with a Cute Kiss" (Andante, G-dur, C) is nothing more than a verse song in the spirit of "Russian songs" of the XVIII - early XIX centuries. In the drama of the finale, she performs the function of an insert number, her genus "vaudeville." As far as this aria is really inset, it is difficult to judge. The text is most likely anonymous and, perhaps borrowed from any collection of songs that were published at the end of the 18th century and diverged in the lists, and Sarti could also write a melody in the "folk spirit." In any case, the source confirming the fact of borrowing the melody has not yet been found.

"Inserted," in fact, Gurley's song does not accidentally appear in the last act, accompanying the release of the main character. Such a compositional solution fit well into the "vaudeville" French theatrical tradition. As you know, from the end of the 17th century, popular, "neutral" vaudeville melodies, or solo verses specially written for this occasion by composers, were inserted into the finals of "comedies with vaudeville." Verses could be performed by one or more characters accompanied by a choir. The music of the verses of the final vaudeville should have been catchy and not only not inferior in brightness and memorability to the previously sounded melodies, but also superior to them.

The public should have liked the last "author's" vaudeville, which would give the author hope for her further favor and location. Subsequently, the tradition of final verses with the choir, inherited from "comedies with vaudeville," was also entrenched in the comic opera, built mainly on the author's material. Enough pay attention to the finale of the opera J.-J. Russo "The Village Sorcerer," which was translated as the achievements of the early Italian buffa operas on French soil, and the experience of the French "comedy with vaudeville," and considered the first French comic opera.

So Sarti, following the vaudeville tradition, as well as the tradition of the Russian comic opera of the 18th century, which consisted entirely of such "vaudeville," inserts "Russian" verses into the final act in order to delight the audience with a melody in the national spirit. The fact that this melody became popular and went beyond the opera tells us its two mentioned publications. Similar vaudeville songs, both French and Russian, were often distributed in different strata of society. So, in Pushkin's "Count Nulin" there are the following lines:

"Yeah! Do you want to listen/Lovely vaudeville ?/And the count sings. "

Nulin, wanting to impress the heroine of the poem, Natalya Pavlovna, first with stories about Parisian fashion and various new products, resorts to seducing a lady with the help of a popular French vaudeville song, which remained unknown to us. The lyrics of the song "I will frolic with cute" are extremely simple. It is written in the spirit of "common songs" and resembles in a simplified version songs stylized as folklore by I.I. Dmitriyeva, and in particular his famous song "Groaning this dove":

With Dmitriev's "Dove," the song "I will frolic with cute" is connected by a single rhythmic (choreic) structure, folklore motifs, in particular the image of the "dove" ("I learn with a dove that love only gives life"). Also, the use of words with a diminutive suffix (for example, "cute") comes from the folklore tradition. But the keys of the two songs are certainly different. Unlike the "tearful" "Dove," the playful song "I will frolic with cute" did without motives of longing and separation.

Notes