Opera no 132
Rabaud: Mârouf
Soloists
French radio orchestra
Pierre-Michael LeConte
This was fun! Henri Rabaud is completely forgotten now but around the turn of the last century he was an important figure in French musical life and this opera, in particularly, was widely performed. Its name has a distant resonance because it was one of those piece from which excerpts were often recorded in the early days of the gramophone.
Ir is a good example of the fascination that French composers had with all things oriental. In fact, daring from 1914, is is probably one of the last examples. The operas is based on a tale from the thousand and one nights and is full of exotic touches. The start is unexpected - a solo song from the poor shoemaker Mâouf who pretends to be a rich man in order to marry the sultan’s daughter. So long as you don’t take it too seriously the opera works very well - it is full of colour and nice ‘oriental’ touches. Some of it does now seem almost ‘Disneyfied’ - the cliches of oriental French opera found their way in to the vocabulary of film composers and now it is them, rather than the original operas, that are the point of reference music in this idiom. This won’t be the last of the operas with oriental tinges which I will cover in this part of the project.
