Opéra fantastique in four acts by camille Saint-saëns to a libretto by jules Barbier and michel Carré; Paris, Théâtre Lyrique, 23 February 1877.
Saint-Saëns’ first opera was a significant link between Gounod’s Faust and Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, in all three of which the same librettists, Barbier and Carré, explored the hero’s dependence on a sinister older man enforced by a diabolic pact. In Le timbre d’argent Conrad (tenor), an artist, has a fatal appetite for gold, and is also entranced by his own portrait of Circe, personified in real life by the ballerina Fiametta. Dr Spiridion (bass) gives Conrad a silver bell: when he strikes it he will get all the gold he could desire, but at the price of someone’s death. Conrad is a strikingly Hoffmannesque figure, while Spiridion-Polycastre-Pippo is clearly an extension of Lindorf-Coppélius-Dapertutto-Dr Miracle.
Composed in 1864–5 for the Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, the opera was kept from the stage first by the theatre’s bankruptcy, then by the Franco-Prussian War, and was not played until 1877. In the meantime Saint-Saëns had recomposed the dialogue to form a grand opera version, which was not played until 1913. The music is enormously fluent and versatile, but the mimed part of Fiametta presents some difficulties on stage, and the conclusion (that the events have all taken place in Conrad’s feverish imagination) is a little weak. There are some bold scenic ideas, including a theatre seen from the back of the stage and some fanciful transformations. It seems no coincidence that the opera’s 18 performances in 1877 exactly coincided with Offenbach’s first concentrated labours on Les contes d’Hoffmann.
HUGH MACDONALD