DESCRIPTION:
LA DAME BLANCHE
Opéra comique en 3 actes
Composer: François-Adrien Boieldieu
Libretto : Eugène Scribe, after Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering and The Monastery
First performance : Opéra-Comique (Théâtre Feydeau), Paris, 10 December 1825

PLOT: Scotland, 1759. The White Lady is the ghost who watches over the estate of the counts of Avenel, whose last member supported the Stuarts, was condemned and fled to France. Anna, a young orphan raised by the count, pretends to be the White Lady to stop the wicked steward Gaveston from buying the estate. Georges Brown, a young soldier, turns out to be the long-lost heir; he purchases the estate and marries Anna.

Boieldieu’s DAME BLANCHE was one of the most popular operas of the nineteenth century. It was performed 1,637 times between 1825 and 1900, and received its 1,000th performance in 1864. Today, it is almost forgotten. This is a pity, because the opera is charming. Félix Clément said the ingredients of its perennial success were “an agreeable mise en scène; an amiable soldier, easily amorous and not impassioned; situations which one never takes seriously; graceful and varied episodes with a leavening of poetry and sentiment; musical knowledge without pedantry and understandable by everyone, and a perpetual melody in the voices and the orchestra.”

No. 1b – Air : « Ah ! quel plaisir d’être soldat »
Georges Brown sings of the joys of a soldier’s life: ‘With his valour, one serves both his prince and his state, and gaily rushes from love to combat.’

Georges Brown: Michel Sénéchal

Conductor : Pierre Stoll
Orchestre Symphonique & Chœur de Paris
Paris, 1961