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IN THIS ISSUE

Composer Andre Grétry

Original Author

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont

Synopsis

Music Notes

Interview with Director/

Designer James Ortiz

Beauty and the Beast is a love story that has been told many times in many ways over the years. André Grétry’s Beauty and the Beast (Zémire et Azor) is one of the earliest operatic adaptations of the classic story. Though André Grétry is not exactly a household name in today’s opera world, in his time, he was highly acclaimed. Altogether he composed some 50 operas and his masterpiece, Zémire et Azor, earned him early fame. The opera premiered in 1771, and was widely performed throughout Europe. It impressed the teenage Marie Antoinette, who later hired Grétry as her music director at court. The opera was Mozart’s favorite as a child, and the score sounds similar to an early Mozart opera, but with Grétry’s Belgian/French flavor.

The Skylight production is directed by Obie Award-winner James Ortiz, who also serves as scenic and puppet designer. “We have created a true spectacle, a visual feast, featuring giant-size puppetry to tell this fairy tale,” said Ortiz. “At its core, Beauty and the Beast is a rollicking evening of great music, magic and heart, with moments of real poignancy and tenderness. We have infused our production with vivid sets, elaborate costumes, compelling dance, and enormous puppets to transport the audience to another world where the power of love can break a curse.”

The production is performed in English, although Air de la Fauvette, Zémire’s show-stopping coloratura aria, is sung in French accompanied by a solo flute, both imitating a birdcall. Skylight is proud to present its own new translation from the original French, done by the dynamic team of music director Shari Rhoads and director/designer James Ortiz. The new orchestration adds the percussion artistry of Skylight’s Mike Lorenz and is a perfect fit for the Cabot Theatre.

The story revolves around Sander, a wealthy merchant; his three daughters, his servant, Ali and the beastlike Azor, once a handsome king. The elder sisters, Fatme and Lisbe, are selfish, vain and spoiled by the extravagant gifts lavished on them by their father, but the youngest, Zémire (Beauty), is kind and pure of heart. When Sander loses his fortune in a storm at sea, the scene is set for this inventive re-imagining of the classic fairy tale.

“Although there are many film versions of Beauty and the Beast, there is nothing more thrilling than live theater,“ says Interim Artistic Director Ray Jivoff. “Our reinvention of this relatively unknown opera, featuring a eight foot beast puppet built by Skylight staff/artists represents quintessential ‘Skylight Style’. It is, to quote one of our taglines, ‘intimate, innovative and in English.’ It’s what Skylight does best.”

MARCH 17– MARCH 26, 2017 Music by André Ernest Modeste Grétry

Libretto by Jean François Marmontel, after the story La belle et la bête by Jeanne Marie

Le Prince de Beaumont and the play Amour pour amour by P.C. Nivelle de La Chaussée.

English translation by Colin Graham O.B.E New adaptation by James Ortiz and Shari Rhoads

This is a co-production with Opera Saratoga.

This guide is available online at skylightmusictheatre.org

André Ernest Modeste Grétry (1741 – 1813) was born in Liege, present-day Belgium. His father was a poor musician and Gretry was a choirboy at the church of St. Denis.

In 1753, he became a pupil of Jean Leclerc and later studied keyboard and composition with Nicolas Rennekin, the organist at St. Pierre de Liège, and then with Henri Moreau, music master at the collegiate church of St. Paul.

He was interested in Italian opera, and was determined to study in Italy. In 1759, he earned the money to move there by composing a mass for the Liège Cathedral. He attended the Collège de Liège in Rome for five years, studying with Giovanni Battista Casali. But, by his own assessment, he was only moderately proficient in harmony and counterpoint.

His first great success was an Italian operetta, La Vendemmiatrice, (The Mechanical Grape Harvester), which premiered in Rome. Inspired by one of Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny's operas, he devoted himself to French comic opera. In 1767, he left Rome, and moved briefly to Geneva, where he befriended Voltaire, the renowned philosopher famous for his wit, and produced an operetta. Later that year, he moved to Paris, became a French citizen and spent the rest of his career in France.

For his first two years in Paris, he struggled with poverty and obscurity. However, with the help of Count Gustaf Creutz, the Swedish ambassador, Grétry met and began a collaboration with librettist Jean François Marmontel,

Their first work, Le Huron (1768),

which he set to music in less than six weeks, was a great success. Two other operas, Lucile and Le tableau parlant (The Talking Picture), soon followed and Grétry was established as a leading composer of comic opera.

Although he devoted himself almost entirely to the stage, Grétry soon became the music director to the new queen, Marie-Antoinette. The queen loved opéra comique, a style which replaced recitatives, the standard sung dialogue in opera, with short sections of spoken dialogue, along with arias and vocal ensembles.

Altogether he composed 50 operas. His masterpieces are Zémire et Azor (Beauty and the Beast) (1771)

and Richard Coeur-de-lion (1784). His opera-ballet La caravane du Caire, with modest turquerie exoticism, a fashion in Europe for imitating Turkish art and culture, featured harp and triangle accompaniment, and premiered in 1783. It remained in the French repertory for fifty years.

For the libretto of Zémire et Azor, classified as a “comédie-ballet mixing song and dance”, Marmontel took the tale of Beauty and the Beast from Madame Leprince de Beaumont and set it in the exotic orient, a crowd pleaser at the time. The plot mixes a variety of genres: heroism and romance are combined with the comedic, personified in the character of Ali, the comic servant.

Research/Writing by Justine Leonard for ENLIGHTEN,

Skylight Music Theatre’s Education Program

Edited by RayJivoff rayj@skylightmusictheatre.org

This project was supported in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board, with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Composer André Ernest Modeste Grétry

Vocally, the work is bursting with beautiful and charming melodies. The Italian form is heard in the arias, with vocalises, trills and triplets, La Fauvette, the opera’s best known aria, being a prime example. Even without the more familiar symphonic textures of Haydn or Mozart, the orchestration is transparent and meticulous, full of color and poetry. Nicolas Méhul, Grétry’s greatest devotee, said of Grétry, “He was more wit than composer!”

Grétry’s genuine power lay in the delineation of character and in the expression of typically French sentiment. However, the structure of his concert pieces is sometimes flimsy, and his instrumentation so feeble that the orchestral parts of some of his works had to be rewritten by other composers in order to make them acceptable to modern audiences.

During the Revolution, Grétry lost much of his property, but the successive governments of France favored the composer, regardless of political differences. He received distinctions and rewards of all kinds from the old court, and after the Revolution, Napoleon granted him the Cross of the Legion of Honour and a pension.

Grétry died at the Hermitage in Montmorency, formerly the house of Rousseau. Fifteen years after his death and following a protracted lawsuit, Grétry's heart was transferred to his birthplace in Liège and in 1842, a large bronze statue of the composer was erected . His heart remains in it, while his body is buried in Paris at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Sources include: François Filiatrault, April 1, 2015, Translation: Rebecca Anne Clark

As you enjoy Skylight’s production of this classic fairy tale, you may wonder what happened to the clock, the candelabra and Mrs. Potts, the tea pot. Disney Studios took quite a few liberties in making the popular movie. The Skylight version is an opera based on the original story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780), a French author who wrote the best-known version of Beauty and the Beast.

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont was born in Rouen in 1711. She lost her mother when she was only eleven. She and her younger sister were then mentored by two wealthy women who enrolled them in the convent school at Ernemont in Rouen. They also taught there from 1725 to 1735. She then obtained a prestigious position as a singing teacher to the children at the Court of the Duke of Lorraine at Lunéville.

Her first marriage in 1737 to the dancer Antoine Malter ended in divorce in 1746. Her second marriage, an arranged union with Grimard de Beaumont, a "dissolute libertine," was annulled after only two years.

In 1748, she left France to become a governess in London. She wrote several fairy tales, including Beauty and the Beast, and published an anthology for young people, a pioneering work called Le Magasin des enfants in 1756.

Industrious and high-minded, Beaumont wrote a stream of pedagogical articles, often translating them from French into English for her upper class female students. She composed her stories with her pupils in mind, and invited their input. The results appeared in English collections such as the Young Ladies' Magazine or Dialogues between a Discreet Governess and Several Young Ladies of the First Rank under Her Education, published in 1760. Describing her teaching methods, she defended her girls' capacity to think for themselves. She made her stories openly moralistic, showing rewards and punishments, and frequently concluded them with overtly Christian messages. She was one of the first to include folk tales as moral and educational tools in her writing.

“Pride, anger, gluttony, and idleness are sometimes conquered, but the conversion of a malicious and envious mind is a kind of miracle.” -Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont Sources include From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994).

Author Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780)

Act One Prologue Underscored by the overture, a montage establishes the cycle of the traveling merchant Sander's many years of joyful homecomings and tearful goodbyes with his family. To make up for being away so long, Sander returns each time with bigger and more expensive gifts for his three daughters. The elder daughters Fatme and Lisbe, accept greedily, while the youngest, Zémire, continually refuses these meaningless things. After several years, Zémire finally expresses the one thing she would like her father to bring her: a single rose. Sander promises her this present, and he and his servant Ali board their merchant ship to yet again buy and sell his wares in distant countries. Caught in turbulent and stormy seas, Sander’s ship sinks, along with all his fortunes, and the two men are washed ashore in a foreign land. Seeking shelter, they travel through a frightening forest until arriving at the gate of a mysterious palace. They enter. Scene One Ali tries to convince his master to leave (The storm has passed and gone). Sander, upset over losing his family’s fortune in the shipwreck, refuses to run away (No storm on Earth can frighten me). Suddenly, the spirits bring on a banquet table, laden with food and wine. Ali salutes their unseen host (There was never a spirit so fine!). When Sander plucks a rose from the palace garden to give to Zémire, the beast Azor appears. This is his palace. He tells Sander that he must pay with his life for stealing the rose. Sander explains that he stole it out of love (How could a daughter ever know that a single rose). Azor insists that a price must be paid and commands Sander to bring Zémire to him, (No matter where you are). A wind spirit carries Sander and Ali off the island and back home.

Scene Two Back at the Sander estate, the three sisters wish for their father to return home (The lark on high awakes the morning). Sander and Ali return and the girls are overjoyed to see them. They are disappointed that the only present he offers is the single rose for Zémire. She sings a song of hope to both the rose and her family (Sweetest of roses, what do I see?). When Ali tells her what has happened, Zémire agrees to sacrifice her life for her father and convinces Ali to secretly take her to Azor’s palace (Then I shall go and tell the monster).

Back on the island Azor sings mournfully to his own reflection (Oh, what despair!). Ali brings Zémire to the palace and runs off, terrified by the voice of Azor. When Zémire meets Azor, she faints at the sight of him.

INTERMISSION

Act Two

Scene One We see the stage exactly as we left it at the end of Act 1, but Zémire’s clothes have been magically transformed to a richly made ball gown. Azor proves to be a kind host, (From the moment I saw you). Azor offers her anything she could desire and Zémire tells him, “Things don’t buy happiness.” Azor is touched by this and since her name “Zémire” means “song,” asks her to sing. She complies, singing La Fauvette, in French. Here is the full translation: Dawn is breaking, One bird is on the wing. The skylark proclaims the morning, Her serenade the day adorning. To banish sleep her echoes sing. Her children all surround her. Around her they flutter in the air. But at night they are resting And under her wings are nesting. They are safe in her care, Children take care, Here is a man who steals you away. So mourning, mourning my children, Oh desperate day, she mourns. Think of the mother in her despair. Scene Two Azor shows Zémire her family in the magic mirror and allows her to visit her home so long as she promises to return. Zémire sees that, though they are now wealthy, her sisters remain unsatisfied and her father is in despair (Trio: Why did you leave me alone with this grief?). After a stay with her family, Zémire returns to Azor despite her family’s objections (Ah, I tremble at his destiny). Azor is in despair and near death, believing that Zémire has abandoned him (The sun sinks in the west). Zémire arrives and proclaims her love for him (Azor! Azor! No answer when I call you). The magic spell on Azor is lifted now that he has found love. He is transformed into a king and the whole company sings of the enduring power of love (Ah love, Ah love!).

Beauty and the Beast Synopsis

Costumes designed by Shima Orans

During a stormy Milwaukee evening in June 2016, James Ortiz and I sat in the Broadway Theatre Center Salon surrounded by manuscripts, laptops and coffee, furiously working on a relatively unknown opera, Zémire et Azor, beginning the work of building a show. The materials included the piano/vocal score, the French text by Jean François Marmontel, Colin Graham's English translation, and the massive imagination of James Ortiz. My first task was to translate the French text into English. Then James and I painstakingly worked through each line to find a balance between the meaning of the text and an English equivalent that captured the sense of the line and at the same time fit the rhythm of the musical line. For example, Sander the father says, “Allons, ma famille m'attend.” Which literally means: “Let's go, my family awaits me” or perhaps “Come on, my family is waiting for me.” Or “Ali, my daughters await me!” After some discussion, our final version was “My daughters are waiting for me.” And that was just one line! After we worked through the existing dialogue, we began to study the story line, and we discovered that the typical 18th century opera plot had far too many holes in it for a modern audience. James and I likened our writing sessions to the comedy writer's room on the old Dick Van Dyke Show: long hours, pacing, crazy ideas flying back and forth, a certain amount of gnashing of teeth, but leavened by frequent gales of laughter. James returned to New York City and finished the adaption of the show, which is the version you will see at Skylight. The libretto for the musical numbers was originally translated by Colin Graham (1931-2007), an English stage director long associated with many of Benjamin Britten's opera premieres and artistic director of Opera Theater St. Louis.

Mr. Graham set the libretto to a type of French poetry versification called "octosyllable," which was used by Marmontel in the original Zémire et Azor French manuscript. This is comprised of 8 syllables with one primary pulse at the end. This is very different from the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare’s plays, which is comprised of one stressed syllable and one unaccented syllable in five “feet”, 10 syllables in all (da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM).

Graham was clever in his setting of the text, but I found that there were many more quatrains, (a stanza of four lines, especially one having alternate rhymes) than there was music. So I set out to take the best of Graham's libretto and set it anew to the music. It has been an exciting undertaking, and has given me fresh appreciation of Graham’s efforts in working within the limits of octosyllable verse. James and I were interested in adding magic effects to the dialogue, so we went to Milwaukee percussion legend Mike Lorenz for his input. We decided to use only acoustic effects for storms and “enchantments.” This includes metal “thunder sheets”, a hand-cranked wind machine, a Turkish tambourine, wind chimes and an old vaudeville instrument called a Deagan aluminum harp, played by Mike with resined gloves sliding along vertical bars. The sound is magical indeed - listen for it! Another vaudeville trick is a “Lion's Roar,” a snare drum with a hole in the top. A knotted rope is drawn through the hole and voila, a lion's roar! The whole story of the production of this opera began with some crazy ideas back in June, and has resulted in a stunning and memorable collaboration between a talented group of designers, singers and musicians that will beguile you with a tale of adventure, trials and tribulation, and finally, true love. On a personal note, I find the music wonderfully reminiscent of an early Mozart opera and yet it has a French style of its own. One can recognize uncanny resemblances of germs of ideas that re-appear in Mozart's great rescue opera, The Magic Flute. I speak for all the musicians when I say that we love this seldom heard opera, and are proud to be bringing it to life with James Ortiz's brilliant vision for the Skylight audience!

Thoughts on the translation and reorchestration for Skylight’s production by music director Shari Rhoads

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James Ortiz is one of the rising talents in American theatre. Ortiz was born in Albany, New York and grew up in Richardson, Texas. The youngest of three boys, he was the “artsy one.” While his brothers were out playing sports, he was reading, painting, always building something. Those interests led him to a multi-disciplined career as an actor, writer, designer and puppeteer. As director, scenic and puppet designer of our production, he gives us some insights:

Which characters are puppets?

The beast, which in this opera is named Azor, is the biggest puppet in the show, literally and figuratively. When he is fully standing he is probably eight feet tall, but when he rears up he’s certainly taller than that. But, in terms of Azor, the thing I am most proud of is that despite his enormous size, he still manages to be quite subtle. The puppeteers have managed to imbue him with a rich emotional life that is at times bombastic and filled with rage, and alternately delicate, self-conscious and deeply sad. It’s been wonderful for all of us to track his journey in rehearsal.

But, back to the puppets in this show, there is also a wind spirit puppet. In the original French play, there’s a moment when Azor “magicks” a cloud to send some people home and we thought, “What if we do something more interesting than that?”

In the opera there are a lot of spirits all over the stage, very much like the island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is populated by eerie, magical beings. And it made us think, “What if we have an old-fashioned, puffy-cheeked wind god that would whisk our characters home? Well, that’s a fun idea!” So I started doing research and we decided to do an old baroque, bizarre wind god. He comes in for only a quick moment, but it’s sure to be a memorable one.

The wind spirit is the second largest puppet in the show. He has a serpentine form, very like a Chinese dragon, a sort of a long, snaky thing. From head to toe, he is around nine

feet as well. So, to recap, we have Azor the beast, the wind god, and finally, we have a little white puppy that makes an appearance early in the show.

Is the puppy a character you added?

The puppy does not exist in any other version of the story. But in our opera, the addition of the puppy puppet in the overture helps us with some of the exposition that we skim through. A dumb-show, or wordless bit of storytelling accompanies the overture in this production to help us tell some of the story you’ll need before we begin this magical journey.

A big part of the plot is that the father character loves to spend money on his daughters, maybe too much in fact, so we use this added bit of staging to illustrate his extravagant gift-giving. Each time he returns with something bigger and more expensive, and this montage culminates in him buying his three girls a frilly, loud, yappy puppy. It kinda brings a bit of comedy to the beginning of the show.

How does the wind spirit fit into the

story?

The wind spirit appears in the first act when the father and the servant Ali are shipwrecked and marooned on the

An inspiration for director/designer James Ortiz were the etchings of fictitious ruins by Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi (1720–1778).

An interview with director/designer James Ortiz

Scenic design by James Ortiz

(Interview continued)

shores of a strange, enchanted country. They don’t know how they got there and they don’t know how to get back home. They look for shelter, find their way into an abandoned palace and in doing so, encounter its master, the beast Azor, who after a shocking series of events magically sends them back to their home on the back of a wind spirit. It’s a bit of a deus ex machina. It’s like the ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz.

Where did you get your ideas for

the designs?

The design for the Beast was the most nerve-wracking. We all know what this beast should and shouldn’t be, I think because we all have the image in our minds from the Disney movie, but we couldn’t do that. I was also inspired by the 1946 French film by Jean Cocteau called La Belle et la Bête. It’s a beautiful, black and white French version of the story; even the Disney movie is a sort of aberration of it in a lot of ways.

So we all know what the Beast is supposed to be, but there’s no reason to simply do that. Instead, I was inspired by a couple of things. Our story, and most importantly the music, is quite hopeful, bright and effervescent. There certainly is some darkness in the original fairy tale, but this is a world without irony, so more than anything else, we needed to set it in a period where we still had a great deal of hope and openness and none

of the cynicism associated with some periods. Of course, the world needed to feel gilded and very ‘long ago and far away.’

Eventually I ended up in a world that was vaguely Elizabethan. Those silhouettes still have all the gildedness that is supported by the music, but there’s still something behind it all, something raw and enlightened and moving forward to become something greater. But in the creation of Azor, I was certainly pulling from references from all over history, anywhere from the 1400s to the 1700s in France, England, Spain and Italy.

I live in New York City, so I went to the Metropolitan Museum and visited the armory collection and looked at the ornate, ceremonial armor for those countries, and I think I found the texture of Azor there. Metaphorically, he is a character that is shielded and hiding and armored-up at all times, so we needed to embrace that visually.

I was also looking at a lot of ‘old world monsters,’ as I call them, sea monsters on old mariner maps and biblical demons from all of those aforementioned periods...those creatures were always a mashup– a bull with scales, a chicken with goat horns, a bird with a frog’s head, and I fell in love with an artist I discovered on Instagram, MissMonsterMel. She makes these traditional old world mashup monsters, and she sculpts all the feathers and hair as if they are growing in a filigree pattern, which I thought was amazing–organic gilding like I saw on all the armor.

So our Azor is a mixture of animals, old world monsters blended organically with the ornate patterning you’d see on a ceremonial suit of armor. We arrived at something that is semi-organic, not quite man-made, hopefully feeling a little alien and distant and a bit odd. I think the opera itself is a mixture of a lot of bizarre things that don’t immediately go together, and I felt like it was a great opportunity to do that with the Beast and let him be the mascot of this idea of the entire show.

What materials were used in

building the puppets?

The biggest concern with puppet making is usually weight. You have to be really considerate of that because it’s the puppeteers who are supporting this thing. You need to think about where the weight bearing is. The bigger the puppet the more you have to figure that out. So the Beast is made out of very light-weight but thick, strong foam. It’s similar to the foam you’d find on your mousepad, but thicker and more durable. It’s a sort of wonder material. I use it all the time.

Sketch of the wind puppet by James Ortiz

Early sketch of the white puppy puppet by James Ortiz

(Interview continued)

The process begins with a miniature sculpture, and figuring out a way to make patterns off of that, like a dressmaker would make dress patterns. You make that flat and do the math to blow it up to the scale you think it will be. It’s like putting a weird jigsaw puzzle together. Everything is labeled and organized.

There’s a bit of aluminum inside just to help hold the structure. The great thing about aluminum is that it’s tough but very light, so you can line parts of his insides where the foam wants to buckle. It keeps him pretty lightweight. For the most part he’s a light guy made out of a lot of different thicknesses and weights of foam, sanded, painted and textured so you can’t see the seams. But it feels like one cohesive being. Lisa Schlenker and the entire props crew at Skylight have been extraordinary and if you can believe it, we made him from start to finish in only two weeks, which is completely insane to do with something of this scale.

How are the puppets operated?

The puppet work in this production is a real feat and intriguing for the audience to watch. Azor is operated by four people. The wind is operated by two people. It’s a fun opportunity for performers to do some cool stuff.

For the most part, the puppeteers’ time is devoted to doing a lot of breath work, because breathing is how puppeteers communicate with each other and it is what makes the viewer believe that he is alive. As you watch, can you see the character breathing?

The puppeteers have to exaggerate their breath and sync up with each other so it’s all one breath. That’s how they communicate. There are times when some singers are operating the wind spirit but those are moments when they are not singing. The puppeteers in this show only come in to sing at the finale, but as you can see, it’s an extraordinary team effort to make these seemingly simple characters come to life, and I completely credit this cast for that.

Early sketches of Azor, the Beast puppet by James Ortiz