FROM AROUND THE WORLD: GRANGE PARK.(Cosi Fan Tutte; I Capuleti e i Montecchi; Fortunio)(Review)

Now in its fourth season, England's latest country-house venture, Grange Park Opera, situated near the Hampshire cathedral city of Winchester, raised its standards this year, offering a clever, musically strong staging (by soprano Janis Kelly) of Cosi Fan Tutte and a production of Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi that more than passed muster vocally. Most ambitious of all, perhaps, was Messager's Fortunio (seen July 1), which seems to have been the British premiere of this four-act comedie lyrique, unveiled at Paris's Opera-Comique in 1907.

Andre Messager (1853-1929) was a close associate of Debussy, of whose Pelleas et Melisande he conducted the first performance, also at the Opera-Comique, in 1902. For several years he was musical director of that theater; he also held an administrative role at Covent Garden from 1901-07 before moving on to the Paris Opera itself. His substantial catalogue of stage works runs the gamut from weighty seriousness through light operetta, and several of his examples of the latter genre -- Les P'tites Michu, Monsieur Beaucaire and Veronique -- are not entirely forgotten today, at least in France. His ballet Les Deux Pigeons, too, used to be a regular feature of the Royal Ballet's repertory.

Fortunio is based on the play Le Chandelier by Alfred de Musset, which had earlier provided Offenbach with the subject for his La Chanson de Fortunio of 1861. Fortunio -- the "chandelier" (or decoy) of Musset's title -- is a naive young man who falls head-over-heels in love with Jacqueline, the young wife of Maitre Andre, the elderly head of a Parisian law firm. She selects him, in fact, to act as the decoy to help cover the traces of her relationship with her real lover, the military officer Clavaroche, but so winning is Fortunio's boyish sincerity that she ends up falling in love with him herself. At the close of this very Gallic amorous escapade, both Clavaroche and Jacqueline's husband enter her bedroom in the hope of discovering the worst, but they are unlucky. As they leave, ...