HÉROLD : ZAMPA

HÉROLD'S ZAMPA

Radio New Zealand Concert network
Sunday 27th of July 2008 at 3 - 5.40 pm

PREVIEW
INTRODUCTION
SYNOPSIS

HÉROLD: Zampa, an opera in three acts
Zampa.......................... Richard Troxell
Alphonse de Monza...... Bernard Richter
Camille.......................... Patricia Petitbon
Ritta.............................. Doris Lamprecht
Dandolo........................ Vincent Ordonneau
Les Arts Florissants/William Christie
(recorded in the Opéra Comique, Paris by Radio France)

This is the famous opera you can only buy the overture of! Bill Christie has done it again for us, rescuing a rarity that was very popular in France in its own century, the nineteenth.

Ferdinand Hérold (1791-1833) composed 22 operas, and then died of 'consumption' (and that does not mean 'overeating').

Zampa (1831) is said to borrow ideas from Molière's play Dom Juan and Da Ponte's libretto for Mozart's Don Giovanni. There is the aristocratic libertine, the abandoned woman, and the statue that intervenes in the action and finally drags the villain down to Hell. The Pirate-king might have been borrowed from Gilbert's Pirates of Penzance (1879). No? Well what about Bellini's Il Pirata (1827)? Could we mention Pygmalion as giving a hint of an idea to the librettist Anne-Honoré-Joseph Duveyrier de Mélésville?

The subtitle of Zampa is La Fiancée de marbre (The marble betrothed), referring to the active statue of the wronged lady, Alice Manfredi.

Zampa was the name taken by the wastrel Count of Monza, after he fled from Italy and became a corsair. He has captured the wealthy merchant Lugano, who had sheltered Alice till she died, and is holding him hostage, and he wants to take Lugano's beautiful daughter Camille from his younger brother Alphonse. Zampa is not a tragic hero, and the statue is the heroine who gets all our sympathy.