Bringing Louise back to life

Elsa Dreisig sings Charpentier's protagonist in Christof Loy's vivid staging

Fantasy lovers: Elsa Dreisig (Louise), Adam Smith (Julien) Picture © Monika Rittershaus

This review first appeared on Oper! Magazin’s website in Jan Geisbusch’s German translation. It is republished here by kind permission of the editor, Dr. Ulrich Ruhnke

Premiered in February 1900 at the Opéra-Comique, Gustave Charpentier’s Louise had clocked up more than 100 performances there by the mid-1950s, after which it more or less vanished from the international repertory. Charpentier’s style has gone out of fashion more rapidly than that of Massenet, his teacher, and while in some respects Louise owes a debt to the older composer, its subject matter is grittier than anything Massenet would have attempted.

Charpentier’s setting - working class Paris (specifically Montmartre, where he made his home) - is also the fabled ‘Bohemia’ of Henri Murger’s La Vie de Bohème, which the Italian verismo composers Puccini and Leoncavallo adapted for their early hits. Louise is more long-winded, which partly explains its continued rarity. Apart from the title character’s oft-programmed aria ‘Depuis le jour’, Charpentier’s tunes do not leap off the page and immediately into the hearts of most listeners.

All this made me curious to see what sort of impact the piece would have at Aix-en-Provence. The festival’s new production is staged by Christof Loy, who first directed Louise 20 years ago (at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Dusseldorf). Despite its reputation for offering a realistic ‘slice of life’, Loy and his designer Étienne Pluss set Louise in what, at first sight, seems be a mental hospital but, by the end, is revealed as an abortion clinic. That is certainly a challenge for anyone expecting to see Louise in her family home with her doting father and less sympathetic mother. But it is the psychology of the opera - particularly the protagonist’s dysfunctional relationship with her parents rather than her romantic attachment to the ‘Bohemian’ poet Julien - that attracts Loy to the piece. Indeed, his interpretation moves the suffocating atmosphere of Louise’s home into the clinic, where her parents’ traditional moral values, and especially the overweening protectiveness of her father, come across as controlling and creepy.