“Well, Madame, are you still so fond of men?” Napoleon asked Aimée de Coigny, a daughter of the ancien régime who was known for her many affairs. She replied, “Yes, Sire, when they are polite.” This exchange occurred many years after Aimée’s imprisonment during the Terror, the most radical phase of the French Revolution, when she was incarcerated in what had been the Saint-Lazare monastery alongside the neoclassical poet André Chénier. Chénier had embraced the early phases of the French Revolution but became disillusioned by its excesses and unwisely used his pen to criticize them, landing him in jail after he was arrested during a secret police search for another suspect. Among his subversive works, he wrote an ode to Charlotte Corday, who famously assassinated the revolutionary pamphleteer Jean-Paul Marat by stabbing him in his bathtub.
Chénier took the opportunity of his prison acquaintance with Aimée de Coigny to write what is arguably his most famous poem, “La jeune captive,” but he was far less fortunate than its ethereal subject. He went to the guillotine on July 25, 1794, just two days before the Terror regime and its leader, Maximilien Robespierre, were overthrown for their revolutionary excesses. Aimée escaped execution thanks to a bribe offered by one of their fellow prisoners, the Comte de Montrond, who became one of her many attachments and for a few years her second husband. Aimée lived until 1820, long enough to write a scintillating memoir and play a minor role in communicating the terms for the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after Napoleon’s abdication.
Chénier’s tragic fate, and the sentimentality of his depiction of Aimée, gave rise to a vastly exaggerated romantic legend embraced by creative minds as diverse as Russia’s national poet Alexander Pushkin, the avatar of French Romanticism Charles Sainte-Beuve, and the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, who imagined Chénier as long after as 1951 as an authentic homme engagé in the politics of his day and thus a true poet.
Chénier’s most famous depiction, however, appeared more than a century after his execution, in the œuvre of the Italian composer Umberto Giordano. In Giordano’s opera Andrea Chénier (1896), the poet’s shifting political convictions follow the same path, but everything else in the story is different. Aimée becomes “Maddalena,” a common name for prostitutes in nineteenth-century Italy (Verdi uses the name for a woman of that occupation in Rigoletto). They do not meet in prison in the fevered final weeks of the Terror, but rather on the eve of the Fall of the Bastille, in her mother’s salon, where Chénier delivers a poem denouncing the inequality of the Old Regime. (In real life, Aimée’s mother died in 1775, 14 years before the unpleasantness; but in the opera, we hear that she was killed by revolutionaries while trying to protect her daughter.)
Meeting again years later in revolutionary Paris, Chénier and Maddalena fall in love but are denounced by an invented character, the Coigny family’s former footman Gérard, now a revolutionary leader who has long had his eyes on Maddalena. When Gérard realizes Maddalena is in real danger, however, he has an unlikely change of heart and urges Chénier to save her. When Chénier fails and appears before the Revolutionary Tribunal, Gérard retracts his denunciation only to have the prosecutor convict him anyway. On the eve of Chénier’s execution, Maddalena bribes a guard to take the place of a woman condemned to die with him, and they are led off to the guillotine together.
The high melodrama and appealing theme of feminine self-sacrifice has proved more lasting and appealing than the true story, which offers not a hint of romance between the poet and his muse—but this is how opera thrives. Just look at all the dull contemporary operas that aspire to depict their subjects’ ‘authenticity,’ when the universal themes that hold the stage can only emerge from the realms of passion and imagination. This is likely why there are no positive operas about the French Revolution, an event managed by monsters that pretended to rationality while victimizing real people who boasted the hearts, souls, and humanity with whom any feeling person would naturally identify. Works as diverse as Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, Jules Massenet’s Thérèse (1907), Gottfried von Einem’s Danton’s Death (1947), Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957), and John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles (1991) all feature motifs of condemnation and self-sacrifice, and all feature climactic scenes at the guillotine.
Mario Martone’s production premiered at La Scala on the opening night of the 2017-2018 season, just weeks after the #MeToo movement wrought havoc on due process and credited often unsubstantiated allegations with the force of judicial fact. It shared the Terror’s frightening equivalence of accusation with guilt and denunciation with purification. Fortunately, this indulgence in hysteria did not travel well beyond the Anglosphere, but attending that premiere made it eerily palpable in Milan’s best new opening night production of the past decade.
Margherita Palli’s sets favor a stylized tradition. The Coigny household is suggested by a vast mirrored wall, recalling Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors with its 18th-century fripperies. The rough-and-tumble world of revolutionary Paris emerges in subsequent scenes, with characters clad in colorful period costumes designed by Ursula Patzak. The gavotte that ends Act I unfolds splendidly in Daniela Schiavone’s choreography and the company ballet’s elegant steps, though it did not seem right to have the abbé who brings ill tidings from the French capital join in the dancing. A parade of French revolutionary leaders carrying severed heads was also a bit ‘extra,’ as the kids now say. The massed chorus assembled for the revolutionary tribunal scene proved more impressive.
Superstar soprano Anna Netrebko sang Maddalena in the premiere run, adding it as one of her best roles at the pinnacle of her career. She has other projects in Europe despite her political persecution in English-speaking countries, and the revival went to the excellent Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva. Earlier this season, Yoncheva sang the title role in Giordano’s only other successful opera, Fedora, at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with gorgeous tonalities that she also drew on here. The voice offered a lush, creamy middle with only a few hints of strain at the heights of the challenging aria “La mamma morta.”
Her Chénier was the splendid German tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who has been busily balancing his exquisite timbre between Wagner roles and Italian parts that have similar vocal demands. He seemed to bring a lighter touch than he has in past performances, but his steady legato and forceful technique were fine reminders that numerous earlier Chéniers also proved to be successful Wagner singers. His best singing came in his duets with Yoncheva, but the tenor arias “Un dì all’azzuro spazio” and “Come un bel dì di maggio,” were virtuoso performances sans pareil.
The young Mongolian baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat sang a blustering Gérard but was capable of reducing his voice to a near whisper in the role’s piano parts. His central aria “Nemico della patria,” in which Gérard muses on the hollowness of revolutionary idealism, migrated between sentiments with magisterial effect. Standouts among the supporting cast included tenor Carlo Bosi’s impressive singing as the spy “Incredibile,” and the 82-year old mezzo-soprano Elena Zilio as the elderly Madelon, whose male offspring have mostly died in the revolutionary struggles, and who arrives to enlist her only remaining grandson in an aria (“Son la vecchia Madelon”)—a moment that would be touching were it not so depraved. The excellent young bass Adolfo Corrado, who just won the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, made a strong impression as the revolutionary prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville. Marco Armiliato led an energetic performance.
