L’Uomo Femina, Agnès Jaoui, Le Poème Harmonique, Opéra de Dijon

L’Uomo Femina, Dijon auditorium, November 9, 2024

Today, we only really know the sonatas for harpsichord and a few concertos of the Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi. With nearly a hundred works in his catalog, he nevertheless dominated the Venetian lyric scene in the mid-18th century. Vincent Dumestre and the Poème harmonique are creating an event in Dijon by exhuming one of his missing scores and entrusting Agnès Jaoui with the visualization of a mischievously wokist opera ahead of its time.

The temptation of an island

Rediscovered during the interwar period, the figure of Antonio Vivaldi dominates the Venetian history of the seventeenth century to the point of having relegated to a thick shadow most of the composers who contributed to making the Serenissima one of the most active musical centers of the 18th century.

Away from the crowds that rush daily between the Rialto Bridge and St. Mark’s Square, a stroll through the alleys of Burano, among the colorful fishermen’s houses and the lacemakers’ workshops, nevertheless allows you to (re)discover the figure of Baldassare Galuppi: in the center of a charming triangular campo, very close to the church of San Martino vescovo where he was baptized in 1706, a bronze bust perpetuates his memory and recalls that in his time the glory of Buranello totally eclipsed that of the red-haired priest!

From 1729 to 1771 – the date of the creation of L’inimico delle donne – Galuppi effectively dominated the Venetian opera scene and composed several operas each year for the San Moisè Theatre or for the stage of the San Samuele. Of this prolific buffa production that delighted the masked aristocrats of the carnival in its time, only a few titles have survived, rarely performed, and it took the French musicologist Jean-François Lattarico a detective’s flair and a bit of insolent luck to exhume in the Ajuda Library in Lisbon, in the early 2000s, the score of L’Uomo Femina created in 1762 and then disappeared for almost 250 years.

Informed of this rediscovery in 2014 and immediately seduced by the idea of ​​giving it a new performance, Vincent Dumestre devoted nearly a decade to the meticulous study of this score, restoring the few lost arias based on Galuppi’s well-known melodies.

With perfect musicological rigor, the version of L’Uomo Femina now recreated in Dijon by the Poème harmonique gives us a chance to hear music that – although composed by a 56-year-old musician – flows with the insolence of youth and turns its back on the fixed architecture of Handelian grand opera seria where arias da cappo invariably follow one another without the singers ever joining their voices, or very rarely. Here, Buranello alternates arias with arias with a more developed melody, or even with ensembles that have all or part of the six performers who make up the cast of L’Uomo Femina sing. A thousand leagues from Griselda, which is nevertheless contemporary, Galuppi’s music takes other paths than those of old Vivaldi to announce the vigor of Haydn and anticipate, already, Mozartian classicism.

However, it must be admitted: the excitement of hearing a forgotten score again for the first time since the 18th century leads to a half-hearted pleasure, so wise and clean does Baldassare Galuppi’s music seem compared to that of his contemporaries. The work nevertheless opens with a spirited sinfonia whose swaying strings create the sound illusion of a rising wind and a rumbling storm before bursting into a tempest. Without reaching the heights of Gluck or Bellini, whose Iphigénie en Tauride and Il Pirata begin with two magnificent orchestral hurricanes, Buranello demonstrates a science of lively and theatrical writing that makes one’s mouth water.

Alas, the music calms down as soon as calm returns to the orchestra, without the fault of Vincent Dumestre or the Poème harmonique, which we can clearly see are 200% committed to this enterprise of exhuming a forgotten opera. In a pit whose floor has been raised to allow the music to unfold in the immense space of the Dijon auditorium – one can also question the relevance of the venue: why not have programmed L’Uomo Femina in the setting of the Grand Théâtre rather than in the Robert Poujade auditorium? – the Maestro directs his troops as close as possible to the musicians, without a baton, with broad arm movements that embrace them all to better draw them along with him.

From Galuppi, Vincent Dumestre seems to have made his own the bouncy tempi, the changes of rhythm and the swings of atmosphere that make the scenes of popular comedy and the more dramatic moments follow one another. Obeying the slightest inflection of their conductor’s wrist, the musicians of Poème harmonique have also managed to find a typically Venetian orchestral sound: the strings are silky, the wind sections (horns, oboes and flutes) are deliciously acidulous and the continuo formed by Alon Sariel’s mandolin, Victorien Disse’s theorbo and Benoît Hartoin’s harpsichord slips a shimmering musical carpet under the singers’ voices.

Despite these qualities of interpretation, Baldassare Galuppi’s music does not really impress the ear. Never developed to their conclusion, rarely touched by the grace of emotion that his rival Vivaldi mastered much better, the melodies of L’Uomo Femina never rise above a pleasant musical entertainment and the spectator, delighted to have spent a pleasant evening, remains nevertheless incapable of humming the slightest melody in the Dijon night that catches him as he leaves the theatre.

You are not born a woman, you become one

If it is not entirely music, then where does the interest come from in replaying L’Uomo Femina in 2024 after three centuries of disenchantment? In the era of Me Too, #BalanceTonPorc and the terrible Pélicot affair, Pietro Chiari’s libretto appears astonishingly modern and questions gender stereotypes, female desire and the obsolescence of patriarchy.

The dystopian society told by L’Uomo Femina is set on an unknown island in the Mediterranean whose government has been ensured since time immemorial by women. The men live there under their domination, prisoners of the harem, mainly preoccupied with their grooming and kept away from the government. This is where Cretidea reigns, an island Messalina who has chosen the futile Gelsomino as her favourite. But this matriarchal order is suddenly disrupted by the arrival of the shipwrecked Roberto and Giannino, saved from the waters by Cassandra and Ramira.

What place is Cretidea prepared to make on its island for these two individuals who come from a world antagonistic to its own? Can two men accustomed to Western machismo accept being reduced to simple objects of desire under the lustful gaze of three powerful women? These are all questions – and many others – that the three acts of L’Uomo Femina brazenly pose in a tone of modernity that could almost lead conspiracy theorists to believe that this opera is a fake and that it was composed on purpose by AI to try to justify a posteriori the wokeness of our time.

The excellent idea of ​​this show is to have entrusted the staging to Agnès Jaoui, a woman of theatre and convictions, who had until then only ventured into the lyrical universe to imagine the spatialization of Tosca for the 2019 tour of Opéra en plein air. Another personality that she could have easily made L’Uomo Femina drift towards something scabrous, even vulgar, in the style of a caricatured Cage aux folles. But none of that in the Dijon production: the benevolent gaze of Agnès Jaoui on all the characters – men and women – and the elegance of Alban Ho Van’s scenography give the show a chic and poetry that is a bit old-fashioned but devilishly effective.

Whether it is the projections of classical paintings to illustrate the storm of the opening, the gardens of the Cretidea Palace – in the style of those of Topkapi – or the antique costumes of Pierre-Jean Larroque, of an assumed tapestry richness, everything in this show makes sense and flatters the eye to better let the ear savor Galuppi’s music and to allow the mind to be challenged by the audacity of the situations imagined by the librettist Pietro Chiari.

A woman of the theater accustomed to the constraints of the closed setting, Agnès Jaoui regulates the movement of the six main characters with a watchmaking rigor, even allowing herself the coquetry of adding on stage a few extras – handsome men of the seraglio, female hoplites in armor displaying breasts like shells… – who never blur the readability of her subject. On the contrary, the crowd effects she creates allow her to create striking scenes, such as at the end of the first act when she mischievously reconstructs a deconstructed version of Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii.

In the war of the sexes waged between men and women in the kingdom of Cretidea, the director refuses to take the side of one against the other. The work she carried out with the costume designer and hairdresser Julie Poulain made it possible to make each of the characters endearing, whether it is the favorite Gelsomino with the allure of an extroverted drag queen, the valet Giannino, a cross-dresser in spite of himself who gets caught up in the game of transidentity or Cassandra, a powerful woman who discovers in her heart the overwhelming fragility of romantic feelings.

A twist worthy of a Molière comedy and a final chorus with a very didactic text complete the process of making L’Uomo Femina an effective entertainment, bold enough to be in tune with the times and subtle enough not to fall into overly sententious wokism.

Husbands, wives, lovers

On stage, the young cast brought together by the Dijon Opera and Maestro Dumestre perfectly serves the purpose of a score that is both original and militant.

The three ladies who reign over the island of the Amazons are all three perfectly cast. Coming from the 2017 Jardin des Voix and already heard last season in Dijon in Armide, Eva Zaïcik lends Cretidea her beautiful mezzo timbre with warm colors. The aplomb of her interpretation and the natural authority of her singing make her a credible sovereign even in her weaknesses. Of baroque singing, she masters the grammar in a proven way and finds in Galuppi’s music the touch of fantasy that seems to suit her own personality.

In the more discreet role of Ramira, Lucile Richardot impresses with the depth of a timbre that flirts with the alto range. On stage, she confirmed in Dijon the excellent impression we had made with her recording of Scarlatti’s chamber cantatas with harpsichordist Philippe Grisvard last year: her voice is opulent, her low notes perfectly timbred and her agility in the virtuoso passages particularly astonishing!

Victoire Bunel advantageously completes this female trio: a little lighter than that of her partners, her mezzo timbre accommodates a character of a thwarted lover but wise enough to accept the blows of fate. In the dramatic passages as in the more buff scenes, the emission relies on a controlled breath while her talents as an actress allow her to color her voice with always subtle nuances.

Harassed by Pietro Chiari’s libretto, the men in the cast are perfectly served by Galuppi’s music and are on a par with their female counterparts, starting with Anas Séguin who willingly lends himself to the staging that Agnès Jaoui has imagined for him. An eccentric favorite with a wig and high talents, this strapping fellow with a virile baritone timbre has no equal when it comes to embodying L’Uomo Femina, which gives its title to the score. Without overplaying femininity, this artist at the beginning of his promising career succeeds in giving the character of Gelsomino a physical and vocal ambiguity that is the essence of his performance, greeted at the final curtain with warm applause.

Victor Sicard and François Rougier finally form the traditional master-servant tandem that we find in so many 18th-century plays and operas! A clear-sounding baritone, the first is a Roberto all in one block, camped in a rigid and old-fashioned masculinity and reluctant to let the feminine side that lies dormant in him express itself. His singing is committed, clean, and augurs a promising career if he continues to be as demanding and rigorous in the choice of roles he tackles. In a more comic vein, the second is priceless in his character of a deconstructed valet ready to accommodate the new masculine codes in force at Cretidea. His vocality as a tenor of character allows him to instill in his singing a comic dimension that contributes to making his character one of the most endearing in the show.

If L’Uomo Femina cannot be considered the musicological rediscovery of the decade, the show co-signed by Vincent Dumestre and Agnès Jaoui nevertheless contributes to the (re)discovery of Baldassare Galuppi’s talent as a lyrical composer and a work whose modernity will delight as many spectators as it will annoy others. In Caen (November 15 and 16) then in Versailles (December 13 and 15), this production will undoubtedly meet with as enthusiastic a reception as in Dijon and will perhaps convince other opera houses to give Buranello’s Venetian fantasies another chance.