MARSOLLIER & DALAYRAC: A WORKING FRIENDSHIP

Abstract

IN May 1786 audiences at the Theatre Italien in Paris were treated to the first performance of Nina, a comedie m^le'e d'ariettes which took the city by storm and was soon to rank among the most successful ope6ras comiques of the period. Soon women were having their hair done a la Nina, wearing cloaks a la Nina and going again and again with their escorts to be both entertained and moved by the touching tale of a sensitive young girl whose lost sanity is restored through the patient and loving ministrations of her fiance, her penitent father and her devoted friends. Nina also marked the beginning of a collaboration between the librettist Benoilt-Joseph Marsollier (1750-1817) and the composer Nicolas Dalayrac (1753-1809) which spanned nearly 25 years and included some twenty works, most of them popular successes. The years of the Marsollier-Dalayrac collaboration were also years of profound political changes in France which strongly affected the Parisian theatres.' Yet despite conditions that were often unsettled, even unstable, and despite the theatre riots and the attendant demands of the Parisian public for topical, patriotic works, certain islands of calm and stability remained. Marsollier and Dalayrac inhabited such an island. Although their works occasionally show evidence of revolutionary tastes and ideals, they show even more clearly the survival of traditions and conventions reaching back to the early days of Gretry and forward to the last years of Napoleon's reign and to the Bourbon Restoration. Most of the twenty pieces produced by Marsollier and Dalayrac are one-act works, whose subjects reflect the popular vogues of the day. Sentimental comedy heads the list, as in Nina (1 786) and Les Deux Petits Savoyards (1789), both one-act works, and Adele et Dorsan (1795), which is in two acts. Some pieces, such as Les Detenus (1795) and La Maison isole'e (1797), combine modern rescue themes with traces of the kind of sensibilite' popular since the time of Monsigny and Gretry. Other works are comedies of manners; Adolphe et Clara (1799), La Le(on (1797) and Elise-Hortense (1809) are examples. Marsollier's best rescue operas are the three-act works Camille (1791) and Lhe'6man (1801). Deux mots (one act, 1806) combines elements of a rescue plot with pure adventure, while La Pauvre Femme (one act,