Die beyden Füchse and Wagen gewinnt: Rival Viennese Productions of Méhul’s Une Folie (1803) (original) (raw)

Among the several opéras comiques that the Hoftheater and the Theater an der Wien vied to perform in almost simultaneous productions, Méhul’s Une Folie was the lightest, most purely comic drama. This presentation will begin with a brief summary of Bouilly’s libretto – a retelling of the old story in which a handsome young man overcomes obstacles separating him from a charming young woman, guarded by an aged ward who wants to marry her himself – and a survey of some of the score’s musical highlights. I will present some early nineteenth-century costume designs, a fan depicting characters from the opera, and Gustaf Nyblaeus’s watercolor of a production of Une Folie in Stockholm as evidence of how it might have been staged in Paris. After a few remarks about the opera’s reception in Paris the scene will shift to Vienna, and the translations of Bouilly’s libretto for the Theater an der Wien (Die beyden Füchse by Seyfried) and the Hoftheater (Wagen gewinnt by Treitschke). Although Wagen gewinnt was ready first, the libretto printed, and the premiere announced for May 12, 1803, the illness of one of the singers and the subsequent death of another led to the production being cancelled. Less than two weeks later, on May 24, Die beyden Füchse triumphed in the Theater an der Wien. Indeed, even if Wagen gewinnt had come to the stage, the Viennese might well have preferred Die beyden Füchse, not only because of Seyfried’s libretto (which effectively transformed the Picardy dialect spoken by a young man from the country –a major source of comedy in Bouilly’s libretto – into Swabian dialect) but also because the cast in the Theater an der Wien included some of Vienna’s best singer-actors. Inseparable from the success of Une Folie – in Vienna and elsewhere –was the popularity of the romance "Je suis encore dans mon printemps“ (in Seyfried’s version, "In des Tyrannen Eisenmacht“). I will speculate on just what made this music so popular, surveying some of the forms – sets of variations, appearances in quodlibets and potpourris, and insertion in other operas – in which Méhul’s romance pervaded Europe’s musical culture during the early nineteenth century.