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Lili Boulanger Faust et Hélène With score
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Composer: Marie-Juliette Olga Lili Boulanger (21 August 1893 -- 15 March 1918) • Orchestra: BBC Philharmonic • Conductor: Yan Pascal Tortelier • Performers: Ann Murray (mezzo-soprano), Bonaventura Bottone (tenor), Jason Howard (baritone) • [Cantata] Faust et Hélène, written in 1913 • Lili Boulanger was the first woman to win the Paris Conservatoire's coveted Prix de Rome, in 1913, with the cantata Faust et Hélène, as she was passing her 20th birthday. Doubtless, there was an element of gallantry at work among her judges -- for la Boulanger was both very attractive and physically frail -- and, after the Ravel affair (the refusal of the Prix de Rome to Maurice Ravel five times between 1900 and 1905 provoked a major scandal), a political need to be perceived as fair came into play. The sardonic account of his Prix de Rome trials in Berlioz's Memoirs -- he took First Prize only on his fifth attempt in 1830 -- might make hilarious reading but did nothing to change a system designed to reward faceless mediocrity and spurn genius. Faust et Hélène breathes genius in every bar, and a rare sophistication in handling the lush, shimmering tropes of post-Romanticism, an idiom situated somewhere between Massenet's most voluptuous utterances and a potent premonition of Schreker's empurpled sensuality. The text, by one Eugène Adénis (whose other signal achievement was providing doggerel for a song arrangement of Chabrier's España), is ostensibly adapted from Goethe's Faust, Part II, though studded with baneful clichés and more palpably beholden to Barbier and Carré, the librettists of Gounod's Faust. Faust, a tenor, awakens to demand of Mephisto, a bass, the revival of Helen of Troy, whom he fulsomely hymns. Mephisto attempts to dissuade him ( Anything but that...to possess the beauty That appeared but once upon the earth And caused so many rivers of blood to flow from adultery's spring Is to tempt the wrath of God ) but Faust is adamant and music of a suitably enigmatic sort spurs and accompanies her appearance. Helen, a soprano, is at first reluctant to be awakened, but Faust's insistence prompts a brief but soaringly passionate love duet interrupted at its clamorous height by Mephisto's warning that the specters of the legions whose death Helen caused have come to reclaim her as the phantasmagoria suddenly ends. Adénis' stick figures nevertheless distantly recall the central mystery of Goethe's play. As Berlioz had in setting a similarly bombastic text in his Prix de Rome cantata, Cléopâtre, Boulanger responds to the larger, grander associations of the familiar names, breathing into them the vibrant, potent life of a girl's inflamed imagination -- embracing yet transcending operatic stereotypes -- to lend them a few moments of hectic existence powerfully looming in the mind's eye, the mind's ear. • [allmusic.com] • Original Audio: • Lili Boulanger: Faust et Hélène (1913)
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