La Cenerentola by Gioacchino Rossini

Running two operas and one ballet behind - got to get on with it before I fly off to Tierra del Fuego for the holidays, and recollections of Cinderella and a certain french courtesan (opera and ballet adaptations of Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias coming up next) get replaced with memories of glaciers and (hopefully!) baby penguins in my head.

A mere week after attending the french ballet Cendrillon at Bastille, I went back to Garnier for the Italian opera La Cenerentola. Come to think about it, Cinderella’s story does not technically have anything to do with either Christmas or New Years, does it? Yet, I don’t know how you, the reader, feel about Christmas, but my inner Russian stubbornly maintains the belief in New Year miracles (my inner physicist, on the other hand, can’t help a smirk). So yes, where there is New Years, there are miracles, and that includes Cinderella. Could be that this was the logic behind l’Opéra de Paris’ programming, or could be that they intentionally like to pair operas with corresponding ballets: having watched La Traviata and La Dame aux Camélias on two subsequent Tuesdays gives some credibility to the latter theory.

I’ve got a plane to catch in a few hours, so lets dive right into the first act. The first act made me want to climb onto the stage and punch the title character in the face. Didn’t see that coming, did you? Well, neither did I. Sure there is always some variation between the different versions of this fairy-tale, but normally they all at least have one thing in common: Cinderella is depicted as a hard working self-respecting young woman and yeah, she marries a prince later, but that’s hardly the point. I am sure in any case she would have done well enough for herself, especially if she was lucky to live in a society with enough social mobil… where were we?

Unlike the Cinderella that we know and love, Rossini’s Cenerentola is a whiny little b*tch, pardon my unoperatic language. She mostly whines a lot, sings [about a king marrying a commoner #lifegoals] when other people ask her not to (for all we know, it could be 4 am), and alludes to some hidden “virtue” she supposedly has. Yickes. This goes on for much of the first act, the latter being partially salvaged by Cenerentola’s not being the sole main character in the story. The prince and his valet undergo a classic switch, and both get a significant amount of stage time.

Another redeeming quality of La Cenerentola was the casting: Florian Sempey as the valet/prince/valet and Lawrence Brownlee as the prince/valet/prince. I have already encountered the duo in Don Pasquale a few months back, where the two played Dottor Malatesta and Ernesto respectively, and both there and in La Cenerentola, they could not have been a better fit for the roles. Florian’s Dandini is hillarious, and Lawrence’s Ramiro comes out quite three-dimensional unlike the girl. I am not dissing whoever sang Cinderella’s part by the way, my problem is with the story (or rather, the lyrics that make the story roll).

The second act was quite a bit better than the first one: (a) it was shorter, (b) Cinderella had less stage time in it than she did in the first act, and (c) the whole thing just seemed more dynamic somehow. Thanks to Florian and Lawrence’s performance and the second act, La Cenerentola ends up with

My final highly subjective verdict: 5/10 (why not, but don’t go out of your way to attend)

XOXO

Olga