"An eighteenth-century French music lover would surely be surprised at the scant attention paid to Mondonville in our century. Here was a man who held some of the most prestigious musical appointments in France, a man who, in his heyday, was considered Rameau's near-equal as an opera composer and very much his superior in the realm of the motet. As Pierre-Louis Daquin, son of the composer Louis-Claude Daquin, observed: 'If I were not Rameau, there is no one I would rather be than Mondonville'
"Yet until the past few years modern performances have been rare. One reason for this neglect is that Mondonville's music does not always look especially interesting on the page. In performance, however, it comes alive in a surprisingly direct way. Now that performers have learned this lesson, we can expect to hear much more of so talented a composer.
"Mondonville's biography is for the most part a catalogue of success. Born into an impoverished but aristocratic Languedoc family and baptised on Christmas Day 1711, he spent his formative years in Narbonne and Bordeaux. In 1733 he succumbed to the inevitable lure of Paris and soon established a reputation as a composer and virtuoso violinist. Thanks to his aristocratic background, he possessed the social skills to win powerful allies at Louis XV's court, among them the king's mistress, Madame de Pompadour. She helped him acquire several coveted posts in the royal chapel and the 'chambre du roi.' He eventually succeeded Royer in 1755 as one of the directors of the Concert Spirituel, the principal concert-giving organisation in Paris, where his motets and instrumental works had long enjoyed, and would continue to enjoy, widespread popular acclaim. Indeed, during his lifetime his vocal works were performed there more often than those of any other composer.
"Surprisingly, Mondonville's operatic career began badly with the failure of 'Isbe' in 1742. By contrast, 'Le Carnaval du Parnasse,' produced seven years later, was a huge box-office hit, and was followed by a succession of operatic triumphs: 'Titan et l'Aurore' (1753), which rallied the supporters of French opera in their dispute with the devotees of Italian opera buffa during the notorious Querelle des Bouffons; 'Daphnis et Aleimadure' (1754), written in the dialect of his native Languedoc; and 'Les Fêtes de Paphos,' the present work (1758). This enjoyed twenty-nine consecutive performances and, although only the third act was ever revived, the popularity of the whole was never in doubt.
"Alongside these works for the Paris Opera Mondonville composed two one-act operas for Madame de Pompadour's Theatre des Petits Cabinets, in which his patroness indulged her passion for amateur theatricals and took many of the leading roles. These works, 'Érigone' (1747) and 'Venus et Adonis' (1752), were to provide much of the material for the present opera. Les Fetes de Paphos, though described on the title page as a ballet heroïque, is better classified as an opera-ballet. Whereas the former genre normally involved one continuous plot spread over three acts, the latter typically comprised three or four acts (they were usually known as entrées in this context), each with its self-contained plot; the subject matter of the entrées was nevertheless linked to some general theme set out in a prologue.
"Given the nature of opera-ballet, it was easy enough for Mondonville to incorporate his two one-act operas for Madame de Pompadour into the present work. Suitably modified, 'Venus et Adonis' became the first entrée and 'Érigone' (retitled 'Bacchus et Érigone') the second. To these were added a final entrée, 'L'Amour et Psyche,' and a prologue. This last, according to the libretto, was soon suppressed 'so as to avoid too long an entertainment' and has not survived.
"Each entrée had a different librettist: 'Venus et Adonis' was by Collé, a minor literary figure, while 'Bacchus et Erigone was the work of La Bruère, who had supplied Rameau with the libretto of one of his finest tragedies, 'Dardanus' (1739). Mondonville himself claimed to have written the libretto of L'Amour et Psyche, but few believed that this was so. As the Due de la Vallière wryly observed: 'I know that Mondonville boasts of being the author of the text of 'Psyche'; but if he continues to peddle this fiction, I will put it about that I myself wrote the music'. On balance, the evidence suggests that this entrée was by the Abbé de Voisenon, though why he chose to remain anonymous is a mystery.
"With one disastrous exception (his resetting of the libretto of Lully's 'Thésée' was booed off the stage in 1765), Mondonville never cultivated the more serious genres of French opera. He was at his best in the less demanding pastorale and opéra-ballet. One contemporary, Louis de Cahusac, neatly characterised the difference between this latter genre and the tragédie en musique, the loftiest sub-species of French opera at that time: if the tragédie was like a vast canvas by Raphael or Michelangelo, the opera-ballet was made up of pretty Watteaus — delightful miniatures that demanded precision of design, graceful brush-strokes and a brilliant palette of colours. At the start of the eighteenth century, when the opera-ballét first established itself as a leading genre, works of this kind involved modern, everyday characters and situations. By Mondonville's time, however, librettists had reverted to the stock personages of ancient myth and legend. Thus 'Les Fêtes de Paphos' centres on the amorous exploits of three Classical deities. As the preface to the libretto puts it (with some geographical licence): 'Reunited on the island of Paphos, Venus, Bacchus and Cupid decide to enliven their leisure in such a pleasant location by celebrating their first loves, and this gives rise to the [plots of the] following three acts and the title 'Les Fêtes de Paphos.'
"The choice of Paphos — not, of course, an island but a town on the west coast of Cyprus — was appropriate. It was here that Venus, or more properly Aphrodite, was believed to have been born, rising naked from the sea (aphro means 'foam') on an oyster shell. Here, too, was the centre of one of the most powerful cults of Aphrodite in the ancient world.
"Yet 'Les Fêtes de Paphos,' unlike many of Rameau's operas, makes no use of local colour. (That may well have to do with the circumstances of its creation and desire to recycle existing material.) Indeed, nowhere does the libretto refer to Paphos. Rather, it is the amorous intrigues that unite the three entrées, each plot leading up to a celebration of the loves of the central characters. In the first, the god Mars sees to it that Adonis, his youthful rival for Venus's affections, is killed by a monster. When the goddess metamorphoses Adonis into an anemone, Mars tries to destroy the flower, but Venus implores Jupiter to intervene, and the youth is restored to life. In the second, Bacchus is at first indifferent to the charms of the nymph Érigone, but succumbs during a celebration in his honour ordained by Jupiter. In the final entrée Venus tries unsuccessfully to thwart the love of Psyche and Cupid by various means, among them torment by the fury Tisiphone, a shipwreck and the transformation of the nymph into an ugly hag.
"Such a libretto was ideally suited to Mondonville's talents. The plots may be conventional, but they provide exactly the range of contrasting moods and situations that the composer relished. This is particularly so of the final entrée which, with its storm scenes, its descent into Hades and other twists and turns, is almost too full of incident.
"When 'Les Fêtes de Paphos' appeared, French opera had been in existence for some seventy-five years. For much of that period it had been slow to evolve: the repertory was still dominated by the works of Lully (who had founded it virtually single-handed in the 1670s) many decades after his death in 1687. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, tastes were rapidly changing. Mondonville, with his thorough command of the latest idioms, both native and foreign, was more aware of this than most. Outwardly, the overall structure and internal organisation of 'Les Fêtes de Paphos' conform to tradition. But the musical substance reflects the extent to which the French operatic style had recently developed, whether in response to Rameau's innovations of the 1730s and 1740s or to the inroads of foreign musical styles, Italian and German especially.
"The extent to which this is so is immediately apparent in the overture. As D'Alembert put it, a shade simplistically, 'for over sixty years there was only one overture at the Opéra' — the quintessential ouverture à la françoise, with its pompous, sharply dotted first movement and faster, fugal second. Mondonville follows Rameau's lead in abandoning this tradition. His overture is a lively single movement which exploits the newly-fashionable crescendos, the symphonic contrasts of loud and soft, and virtuosic instrumental figurations. While he does not follow Rameau in connecting the overture thematically with the ensuing opera, the style of orchestral writing sets the tone for much of what follows. The movement acquired a life of its own in Mondonville's day when Balbastre arranged it for organ, in which form it proved immensely successful at the Concert Spirituel for years to come.
"Yet although Mondonville's inclination was towards up-to-date foreign idioms, he was aware of the need to court his more conservative listeners. He must have observed that audiences usually took time to warm to the operas of Rameau, so often the subject of heated debate. One of Mondonville's talents widely conceded even by his enemies was an uncanny knack of knowing how to please a wide cross-section of the public — no mean achievement, given the volatility of contemporary audiences. Thus, in 'Les Fêtes de Paphos,' as in his other works, brilliant coloratura movements such as the Act Two duo 'Amour lance tes traits' (a smash hit in Mondonville's day) coexist with popular vaudeville-style melodies like Adonis's air 'Tout doit céder a ma valeta' in Act One; dramatic orchestral movements that would not sound out of place in the latest German symphony are juxtaposed with simple French-style airs that could almost have been written by Lully's immediate successors half a century earlier.
"It is in his dance music that Mondonville came closest to tradition. When Berlioz remarked that the French would provide an excuse for a ballet 'even in a representation of the Last Judgment', he was commenting on a centuries-old national obsession. Dance had been an essential element of French opera from its foundation in the 1670s. And of all the sub-species current in Mondonville's day, opera-ballet gave it most prominence. In 'Les Fêtes de Paphos' there are no fewer than thirty ballet movements. Here the musical style, though more obviously French, is often enlivened by borrowings from foreign idioms. The final 'pas de trois' of 'L'Amour et Psyché' is what was known as a ballet figure, in which the dancers mimed an action (in this case the attempted abduction of the nymph Flora by Boreas, god of the North Wind) which was related to the main plot but independent of it.
"One idiosyncracy of Mondonville's writing may be heard in the recitative. Ever since Lully had established it in the previous century, French recitative had altered little. In the hands of Rameau the vocal leaps may have become bolder and the harmonies richer, but the essential melodic contours and flexible rhythms remained unchanged. Mondonville's declamation differs from that of his fellow composers in only one important respect. Virtually all the continuo-accompanied recitative is in triple time; scarcely anywhere do we find the fluctuating metres with which French composers sought to capture the subtle inflexions of spoken declamation. Yet if Mondonville's declamation, here and in other operas, lacks the flexibility and nuance of traditional French recitative, it does acquire a more consistently song-like character, which may well be easier on the modern ear. Had be been alive today, Mondonville would doubtless have enjoyed a hugely successful career in film or television music. To be sure, his operas never plumb the emotional depths of Rameau's, but that should not blind (or deafen) us to their considerable artistic merits or to the skill and invention which they reveal. In the words of one contemporary, 'Nothing may astound you, yet everything pleases.'" (Graham Sadler. From the liner notes.)
Performers: Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, Véronique Gens, Peter Harvey, Olivier Lallouette, Agnès Mellon, Sandrine Piau
1.1. Ouverture
1.2. Acte I, Scène I: Marche
1.3. Acte I, Scène I: 'Vous Qu'à Mes Pas Enchaîne La Victoire'
1.4. Acte I, Scène I: Prélude Fanfare. 'Ce Bruit Annonce Sa Présence'
1.5. Acte I, Scène II: Deux Menuets
1.6. Acte I, Scène II: 'Qu'il Est Doux Après La Victoire'
1.7. Acte I, Scène II: Tambourin
1.8. Acte I, Scène II: 'Délivrons Les Forêts'
1.9. Acte I, Scène III: 'Adonis, Se Peut-il Que Malgré Ma Tendresse'
1.10. Acte I, Scène III: 'Tout Doit Céder À Ma Valeur'
1.11. Acte I, Scène IV: 'Adonis... Adonis... Vainement Je L'appelle!'
1.12. Acte I, Scène IV: 'Fuyons Ce Monstre!'
1.13. Acte I, Scène V/VI: 'Cher Objet De Ma Flamme'
1.14. Acte I, Scène VI: 'Laissons De Mon Amour'
1.15. Acte I, Scène VII: 'Mars Près De Vous S'avance'
1.16. Acte I, Scène VII: 'Tonnerre - Contre Une Injuste Violence'
1.17. Acte I, Scène VIII: 'O Ciel ! En Croirai-je Mes Yeux?'
1.18. Acte I, Scène IX: 'Que Je Plains Les Mortels!'
1.19. Acte I, Scène X: Air Pour La Suite De Vénus
1.20. Acte I, Scène X: 'O Vous Qui De Vénus Accompagnez Les Pas'
1.21. Acte I, Scène X: Deux Menuets
1.22. Acte I, Scène X: 'Lorsque Vénus Vint À Paraître'
1.23. Acte I, Scène X: Deux Gavottes
1.24. Acte I, Scène X: 'Pour Rendre Hommage'
1.25. Acte I, Scène X: Air Pour Les Plaisirs
1.26. Acte I, Scène X: 'Règne À Jamais Sur Nos Coeurs'
1.27. Acte I, Scène X: Contre Danse
1.28. Acte I, Scène X: Entr'acte Tambourin
2.1. Acte II, Scène I: 'Dieu Des Amans Recoi Les Voeux'
2.2. Acte II, Scène II: 'Belle Nymphe, Espérez Le Sort Le Plusheureux'
2.3. Acte II, Scène III: Air Pour Les Sylvains
2.4. Acte II, Scène III: Air Pour Les Corybantes, Ou Prestres De Bacchus
2.5. Acte II, Scène III: 'Cher Bacchus, C'est Assez Répandre Les Allarmes'
2.6. Acte II, Scène III: Air Pour Les Bacchantes Et Les Sylvains
2.7. Acte II, Scène III: 'La Victoire Vole À Ta Voix'
2.8. Acte II, Scène IV: 'Tout Conspire À Combler Vos Voeux'
2.9. Acte II, Scène IV: 'Cette Langueur Étrange'
2.10. Acte II, Scène V: 'L'Amour Suit Cet Objet Charmant'
2.11. Acte II, Scène V: 'Dieux! Quel Charme Inconnu Me Ravit Etm'enflamme?'
2.12. Acte II, Scène V: 'De La Gloire Terrible Suspendez Les Travaux'/Air: Erigone
2.13. Acte II, Scène V: 'Quel Trouble Votre Aspect M'inspire!'
2.14. Acte II, Scène V: 'Amour Lance Tes Traits, Épuise Ton Carquois'
2.15. Acte II, Scène VI: 'Chantez Dans Vos Fêtes Charmantes'
2.16. Acte II, Scène VI: Loure
2.17. Acte II, Scène VI: Gigue
2.18. Acte II, Scène VI: Musette/'Dieu Des Coeurs'
2.19. Acte II, Scène VI: Rondeau En Chaconne
2.20. Acte II, Scène VI: 'Cessez, Guerriers, Cessez De Lancer Letonnerre'
2.21. Acte II, Scène VI: Tambourin
2.22. Acte II, Scène VI: Entr'acte Rondeau En Chaconne
3.1. Acte III, Scène I: Ritournelle
3.2. Acte III, Scène I: 'O Vénus, N'as-tu Pas Épuisé Ta Vengeance?'
3.3. Acte III, Scène II: Prélude
3.4. Acte III, Scène II: 'De Tes Attraits, L'Amour Va Perdre La Mémoire'
3.5. Acte III, Scène II: Gavotte
3.6. Acte III, Scène II: 'Mais L'Amour Va Paraître, Il Faut Suivre Mes Pas'
3.7. Acte III, Scène III: 'On Vous Dérobe En Vain À Mon Impatience'/Récitatif Et Ariette: L'Amour
3.8. Acte III, Scène IV: 'Crains Sans Cesse, Crains Un Affreux Trépas'
3.9. Acte III, Scène IV: 'Tempeste - Justes Dieux, Prenez Ma Deffence'
3.10. Acte III, Scène V: 'Vents Furieux, Rentrez Dans Le Silence- L'Amour, Psyché, Tisiphone
3.11. Acte III, Scène VI: 'Non! Non! Non! N'espère Pas Que Ton Tourment Finisse'
3.12. Acte III, Scène VI: Air Pour Les Démons
3.13. Acte III, Scène VI: 'Amour, C'est Toi Seul Que J'implore'
3.14. Acte III, Scène VI: 'J'ai Perdu Mes Attraits, Et L'Amour Va Paraître'
3.15. Acte III, Scène VII: 'Je Viens Enfin Terminer Vos Allarmes'
3.16. Acte III, Scène VIII: 'Quel Changement! Quel Palais Enchanté'
3.17. Acte III, Scène VIII: Air Pour Les Zéphyrs
3.18. Acte III, Scène VIII: Air Pour Les Grâces - Mon Bonheur Estextrême'
3.19. Acte III, Scène VIII: Deux Menuets
3.20. Acte III, Scène VIII: 'Pour Vous L'aimable Aurore Fait Éclore - L'Amour A Psyché'
3.21. Acte III, Scène VIII: Pas De Trois: Flore Seule - Zéphyr Et Flore - Borée, Suite Des Zéphyrs, Plaintes De Flore - Borée Enlevé Flore - Zéphyr Cherche Flore - Regrets De Zéphyr - Les Zéphyrs Ramènent Flore
