Questioning the frenchness of Le comte Ory

Abstract

To talk about the Frenchness of Le comte Ory might sounds like provocation. Being basically a rifacimento of his Viaggio a Reims, Rossini’s penultimate stage work belongs to the corpus of Italo-French operas. Yet there are three reasons for looking at Le comte Ory as an authentic French opera. Firstly, in the newly composed parts of the work, Rossini avoided the traditional features of the closed numbers typical of the Italian tradition by inserting recitatives inside the numbers and by merging closed numbers and subsequent recitatives, especially at the end of Act II. Secondly, the French lines written by Scribe to fit the already composed music follow poetic patterns from the Middle Ages, of which the prosodic features were closer to Italian than Classical French. Last, the very choice of the legend of Ory is typical of the troubadour style that had been fashionable in Paris since the last decades of the 18th century, and it turns out that this particular legend was extremely popular back then, as witnessed by the variety of local variants that were published in the 19th century.