Rossini: Le Comte Ory (Metropolitan Opera, Virgin Classics, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’d had some TV watching planned for my husband Charles and I last night, including the Father Brown and Frances Drake mystery shows on PBS and the first go-round of the 32nd annual National Memorial Day Concert (though under the iron rule of our Viral Dictator the concert, for the second year in a row, was held virtually in various locations instead of with an audience on the Capitol Mall), but Charles had another idea. He’d run across an announcement on Twitter that the Metropolitan Opera was doing a free preview of its streaming-on-demand service with a 10-year-old video of Rossini’s comic opera Le Comte Ory (“Count Ory”). Rossini’s opera actually began ini 1825 as Il Viaggio à Reims, an occasional piece he was commissioned by the French government to write to celebrate the coronation of Charles X as the new king of France during the Restoration following all that nasty business of revolution and Napoleon. The piece duly got premiered as part of the coronation festivities and then was laid away and forgotten (at least until the 1980’s, when the performance materials were rediscovered and the score was reconstructed and recorded) – but not by Rossini, an inveterate recycler of his own stuff, who saw a pile of perfectly good music sitting around and figured he could use it to compose a new opera based on another plot. Big-time French librettist Eugène Scribe and someone with the indigestible name Charles-Gaspard Delestre-Poirison gave Rossini a text based on a spoken play they’d premiered in 1817.

Le Comte Orytakes place around the year 1200 in and around the castle of Formoutiers. Most of the men in the area have marched off to join the latest of the Crusades, but the Count Ory (Juan Diego Florez) and 24 of his knights have stayed behind and are interested in seducing the wives the Crusaders have left behind. Count Ory is particularly hot for the mistress of the castle, Countess Adèle (Diana Damrau), who – it’s carefully established in the libretto – is waiting not for a husband but a brother, so she’s still at least technically single. In the first act Ory disguises himself as a hermit, a holy man – and he fools just about everyone else in the cast in this imposture, offering himself as a spiritual advisor who can help the women solve their romantic problems through God’s word. He manages to bluff his way into the castle, where Adèle is trying to keep Ory’s knights from having access to the women she’s set out to protect, but he’s been followed by his page boy Isolier (Joyce DiDonato in a “trouser role” – opera-speak for a woman performer playing a male character), who suggests that Ory and his knights can enter the castle if they disguise themselves as nuns. In Act II they’ve done exactly that – though in Bartlett Sher’s Met production, at least, a lot of Ory’s knights have kept their facial hair (and even Ory himself has a five o’clock shadow), doing what people in the Gay community used to call “slag drag” (i.e., cross-dressing but maintaining male appearance otherwise in order to toy with the whole notion of gender and its signifiers). The women – even Adèle, who successfully “outed” Ory in his hermit guise in Act I – take in the “nuns” and offer them a meal consisting exclusively of fruit and milk. But Ory’s second-in-command, Raimbaud (Stéphane Dégout), knows of a secret passage in the castle that leads to its wine cellar and so he and Ory’s other knights help themselves to the wine collection of Adèle’s brother.

Then the characters receive word that the latest batch of Crusaders has returned victorious from the Holy Land, which means that if Ory and his knights are going to get laid they’re going to have to do it quickly because within two days all the women’s husbands will return. The finale occurs in Adèle’s bedroom, in which Ory enters, takes off at least some of his clothes and gets into bed with her – not realizing that his page Isolier is already in there – and what ends up happening is a bizarre three-way in which Adèle uses her voice to convince Ory that the person he’s making love to is her, when he’s really holding and kissing Isolier’s hand. The opera ends with Adèle and the hot, horny young page boy kicking Ory out of bed and him accepting defeat with some degree of grace. (Referencing Mozart’s Don Giovanni and its similar situation of a super-seducer getting his comeuppance, I joked, “At least a statue didn’t come to life and drag him to hell.”) The Wikipedia page on Le Comte Ory notes that though it’s a “comic opera” in the sense that the story is intended to be funny, it isn’t one in the genre sense the French of the time meant by the term. Instead of having its musical numbers connected by spoken dialogue, it’s through-composed with sung recitatives accompanied by orchestra – and it premiered at the Paris Opéra instead of the Opéra-Comique. (The distinctions became even blurrier later in the 19th century when the Opéra-Comique started presenting serious works with tragic endings, like Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Bizet’s Carmen.)

Plot-wise, Ory harkens back to such comic-opera precedents as Rossini’s own The Barber of Seville (based on a play by french author Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais) and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (also based on a Beaumarchais play – indeed, on the author’s sequel to The Barber of Seville) and Don Giovanni. The title character is a man who’s proud of his ability to seduce just about any woman he wants – though, as in Don Giovanni, none of his attempts we actually see are successful – and, as in The Marriage of Figaro, the horny aristocrat is undone by a plot including his own servant (Isolier comes off as a kind of mashup of Figaro and Cherubino from Mozart’s opera). It hadn’t occurred to me before but Ory is essentially The Barber of Seville in reverse – instead of the nice young Count whom we want to see get together with the nice young woman despite the “useless precautions” (the subtitle of both play and opera) of the men around her who are trying to keep them apart, while in Ory our sympathies are with the woman who wants nothing to do with the scapegrace Count and the people who are helping her keep him away. There are also intimations of operas yet to come, including Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor – the knights who wriggle their way out of the war so they can stay behind and drink and whore – and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (the aristocratic woman fooling around with the hot young page boy – again played by a woman in drag! – though in Rosenkavalier she graciously gives him up to an age-peer girlfriend).

The Met production pulled one trick I could have done without – we got glimpses of the stage machinery, including the thunder sheet and the lanterns, that would have been used in an early 19th century production (a bit of business pioneered in opera by Ingmar Bergman in his 1970’s film of The Magic Flute, and before that in Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of Shakespeare’s Henry V, but Bartlett Sher didn’t have the movie infrastructure or the budget to pull it off), but aside from that it was a joyous and colorful production. The highlight of the Met’s Ory was the stunning singing of the three leads – the moment Juan Diego Florez opened his mouth it became clear why he’s the go-to Rossini tenor these days. His sound was loud and heroic, which was probably not what Rossini wanted (he wrote the part for the soft-voiced tenor Adolphe Nourrit, and when Rossini heard Rubini, the first tenor in history ever to sing a full-throated high “C” from the chest, he hated the sound and said it was like a capon being strangled) but worked for a modern audience. We’re used to hearing loud, forceful tenors in later operas and it’s great that we have a singer like Florez who, like the late Luciano Pavarotti, can boom out those big high notes while still retaining the flexibility needed to sing Rossini’s coloratura and having a sufficiently high-lying voice to handle the role as written and not have to take it down a key or two (as often happened in other Rossini productions).

Diana Damrau was a bit too heavy-set to come across as passion’s plaything, but she sang excellently – as did Joyce DiDonato, even though she wore her hair long and was unconvincing (to say the least!) in FTM drag. There’s one other character, Ragonde (Suzanne Resmark), who’s essentially the house mistress of Adèle’s women’s shelter but whose function as the morals enforcer was somewhat belied by her costuming, which showed off so much of her breasts (including her upper tan line) she looked like a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen. It’s the weirdest mismatch of character and costume since Trisha Yearwood wore one of those preposterous dresses with a hole in the top between the breasts and the waist to play the Virgin Mary in that God-awful adaptation of the Passion Play set in New Orleans and telecast by Fox a few years ago. Le Comte Ory is not one of Rossini’s better-known works, probably because for all the tuneful music there aren’t any spectacular arias on the level of “Ecco ridente,” “Largo al factotum” or “Una voce poco fa” from Barber or “Nacqui all’affano” from La Cenerentola (Rossini’s “take” on the Cinderella story) – though at least its relative neglect has had one positive outcome: no one bothered to translate it from the original French to Italian, and so we got a performance of a French opera (though written by an Italian composer) in French. (Oh, how I wish more companies would perform Verdi’s French operas, The Sicilian Vespers and Don Carlos, in the original French instead of the awkward Italian translations that have become standard! Verdi was trilingual in Italian, French and German and he was perfectly capable of composing to French texts.) Le Comte Ory was a lot of fun and would be a nice antidote to anyone who thinks of opera as a long, dreary spectacle which always has to end with a bloodbath on stage.