I wondered - why does this Cinderella look so sad in this original graphic from Charles Perrault's volume of fairy tales published in France in 1697 (an engraving by Gustave Doré illustrates the Cinderella tale and captures Louis XIV's France. (Oxford University Press)), when by marrying the prince all her problems will supposedly be over. Or perhaps just beginning??? I mean, this prince is not exactly my dream of a young hunky dude...
I did a little research into the Cinderalla tale and was surprised what a long history it has, likely many hundreds of years older than before it was first written down into a form that later became known as a "fairy tale" --
I found this information at the website for the San Jose, California Opera Company:
Cinderella Is Older Than She Looks
Rossini’s captivating comedy La Cenerentola opens November 14th
By Larry Hancock
Once upon a time, a long time ago, about 1300 B.C., actually, so, a very, very long time ago, in Egypt, narratives were written that modern scholars have labeled the first fairy tales. Fairy tales have also been found in ancient India and ancient China, and just about every other place where we find a history of human habitation. We also find Cinderella, one of the most recurrent fairy tale themes, in many of these cultures. The oldest of these is thought to be of Greco-Egyptian origin and was recorded by Strabo in the first century B.C. There are now so many versions of the Cinderella story that they can’t possibly be so much as listed here, but if you are interested in doing a little research of your own, Google Cinderella; the movie results alone should keep you busy for quite some time.
Among the earliest European versions of this story is "La gatta cenerentola" (The cinder cat), which was published in Naples in 1634 as part of Giambattista Basile’s collection of tales, though there is one even earlier Italian version, published by G.F. Straparola in 1550. It is reported that Basile’s version served as a basis for both Charles Perrault’s (Stories and Tales of Past Times, or Tales of Mother Goose, 1697) and the Grimm brothers’ (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812) versions. There are still more European variants, and among them is one from the Gothic Era by Chaucer (!) and yet another 17th-century version by Baronne d’Aulnoy, published in her 1697 collection (d’Aulnoy, by the way, was the first to use the term fairy tale, conte de fées).
Cinderella, as Americans have come to know the story best, is Walt Disney’s variation of the Perrault; Perrault was the one who added a pumpkin and a fairy godmother (I believe Disney introduced the singing mice). No doubt Disney chose the Perrault over the Grimm to avoid the mutilation of the stepsisters’ feet as they trimmed away the bits that wouldn’t fit into the gold slipper (the glass slipper was Perrault’s idea), and the attack of angry birds that rendered those naughty girls blind as well as lame (one wonders if Hitchcock found inspiration here).
Our version found its beginning in Rome, two days before the Christmas of 1816, when Rossini, at a very late hour (in more than one sense), was offered the opportunity to compose a Cinderella for Teatro del Valle. He accepted immediately, stretched out in his bed, and went to sleep. The impresario, librettist, and composer had been working late into the night in Rossini’s bedroom trying to think of a subject for a new opera that had been scheduled to open the day after Christmas (I should mention here that, though the opera was completed in a miraculously short time, they didn’t make that deadline).
The librettist, Jacopo Ferretti, hurried home and stayed up the rest of the night drinking a reportedly excellent mocha coffee while creating the scenario, which he presented to Rossini in the morning. Ferretti’s work was made easier by the fact that two years earlier an opera on this subject had premiered at La Scala, libretto by Felice Romani and music by Stefano Pavesi. Rossini was in Milan at the time, and Ferretti knew Romani’s libretto. It was Romani who introduced Dandini and Alidoro to the Cinderella story (retained by Ferretti), but Ferretti who came up with bracelets to replace the glass slippers (Rome shuddered at the idea of naked feet on stage, so, no glass slippers). Ferretti’s libretto is an unapologetic plagiarism, but, clearly, time was of the essence—the opera season had to close on February 18, when Lent would begin.
Before Rossini started composing he insisted on one thing (for which opera producers have been ever grateful): there was to be no technical "magic" on stage. He distrusted the theatre’s capacity to pull off reliable magic tricks. Rossini would later have a terrible experience producing his Moses in Egypt (also known as Moses and Pharaoh or The Passage Through the Red Sea). I’m sure you can see where this is going: he later obscured the parting of the waters with a ballet so that audiences could stop laughing hysterically at this very dramatic moment. We are grateful that we have not had to figure out a way to turn a pumpkin into a carriage, and we absolutely cringe at the thought of turning mice into horses.
When I said the opera was completed in miraculous time, I should have said it was composed in 24 days. Each morning, the librettist handed over whatever he had completed the day before and Rossini set it to music. There was a little outside help from about day twenty, when Rossini solicited the assistance of Luca Agolini to compose an aria for Alidoro and another for Clorinda as well as the introduction to Act II. At the last minute, Rossini decided to use his overture from La Gazzetta, an earlier Rossini opera that was unknown to Rome and whose shelf life had clearly expired. The famous buffo duet between Magnifico and Dandini was composed the night before the opening.
I repeat, THE NIGHT BEFORE THE OPENING.
With the opera composed, it’s time to worry about the singers, who had to memorize, master, and perform roles, famous for their technical difficulty, in about a week. Opening night told the tale: it was an unhappy occasion. The singers did not complete the Herculean task, were exhausted by the attempt, and the first four performances made that evident. So, though the opening was soundly rejected, after a week, the opera was a resounding success and it achieved more than twenty performances before Lent put an end to it. The opera proved to travel well, and quickly, and it has aged nicely. We are excited to bring this delicious concoction back to San José.
For those readers who do not yet know La Cenerentola, much of the above must seem mysterious; who in the world might Dandini, Magnifico, Alidoro, and Clorinda be? It’s time to relate the tale as we find it in Ferretti and Rossini’s 1817 version:
Rossini’s La Cenerentola begins in the crumbling mansion of the baron, Don Magnifico, where his two daughters from a previous marriage, Clorinda and Tisbe, are admiring themselves, enormously and erroneously. Angelina, disparagingly called Cinderella, enters with the breakfast tray. Shortly, Alidoro (Goldenwings) enters disguised as a religious pilgrim and asks for food. The girls, shrieking, send him away, but Cinderella hides him and gives him bread and coffee.
Out of nowhere, a group of courtiers arrive with the news that the crown prince, Don Ramiro, is on his way to this very house to escort all the daughters to his nearby country estate where he will choose one of them to be his bride. Clorinda and Tisbe lose their minds, and their shouting awakens their late-sleeping father, Don Magnifico, who was having a significant dream. When he discovers that the prince is coming to marry one of his daughters, he finds much of that dream coming true right before his eyes. He directs his two daughters to get beautifully dressed and commands Cinderella to bring him his coffee.
With the room empty, Prince Ramiro sneaks in, disguised as a valet. He tells us that his father has commanded him to marry or he will no longer be the heir apparent. He is not pleased at having to marry someone of his father’s choosing and is out searching for a bride he might actually love. Cinderella enters and the two discover one another in a meaningful, promising way just before Ramiro’s valet, Dandini, enters, disporting himself as a crown prince—at least he gives it a good try. He meets the father and two of the daughters and invites everyone to the palace. They assemble to depart when Cinderella asks to go with them. This causes Magnifico to scold her in stunning fashion, but she persists until Alidoro, returning, this time without the disguise, opens a register of births in the region, asks where the third daughter might be. Magnifico tearfully announces that the girl died long ago. Cinderella is stunned to hear that she died and hadn’t even noticed, and everyone but she and Alidoro leave. Alidoro promises that he will take her to the palace, himself.
At the palace, Dandini appoints Magnifico as Wine Steward and sends him off to taste all the vintages in the palace so that he can better observe the two daughters. An unknown lady has just arrived, and she turns out to look astonishingly like Cinderella, though much better dressed. Before the night is over, the prince is captivated with her and proposes marriage, but Cinderella tells him that he does not know her and that she will not marry him unless he searches for her. If upon finding her in her usual condition he still wants her, she will then consent. She takes off one of her matching bracelets, gives it to him, and tells him she will still be wearing the other one when he finds her. She leaves him standing there in amazement.
Ramiro puts an end to the gathering, having found and then lost his intended bride, and he gathers the troops to search for his departed love. Dandini is put in the awkward position of telling Magnifico that he is no prince, but merely a valet. Everyone departs in some degree of excitement or annoyance.
Back at the baron’s mansion, Cinderella has put on her rags to greet her family, while outside a storm rages. Ramiro, Dandini, and Alidoro arrive out of the rain, and, Ramiro notices that the serving girl he met that morning is wearing a very familiar bracelet. He makes his claim and takes his prize back to the palace. The rest of the Magnifico family is stunned.
At the palace, Magnifico and his daughters join the assembly to witness the elevation of Cinderella. This is the point at which Magnifico should find himself clapped in chains and thrown into prison for the theft of Cinderella’s dowry. The girls don’t have sense enough to keep an eye out for vagrant birds, and Clorinda is not adjusting at all well to Cinderella’s new situation. But, surprisingly for this family, all is well, as the subtitle of this opera is "The Triumph of
Goodness." Cinderella tells them that they are the only family she has, that she loves them, that she has always loved them, and she clasps them in her arms. The opera ends with a bravura aria that rattles off notes like machine gun bullets. Everyone, for the most part, is happy, and especially Ramiro, who gets his true love and his father’s crown. Cinderella, I suppose, is happy also. She certainly sounds happy...
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Sad Cinderella
I wondered - why does this Cinderella look so sad in this original graphic from Charles Perrault's volume of fairy tales published in France in 1697 (an engraving by Gustave Doré illustrates the Cinderella tale and captures Louis XIV's France. (Oxford University Press)), when by marrying the prince all her problems will supposedly be over. Or perhaps just beginning??? I mean, this prince is not exactly my dream of a young hunky dude...
I did a little research into the Cinderalla tale and was surprised what a long history it has, likely many hundreds of years older than before it was first written down into a form that later became known as a "fairy tale" --
I found this information at the website for the San Jose, California Opera Company:
Cinderella Is Older Than She Looks
Rossini’s captivating comedy La Cenerentola opens November 14th
By Larry Hancock
Once upon a time, a long time ago, about 1300 B.C., actually, so, a very, very long time ago, in Egypt, narratives were written that modern scholars have labeled the first fairy tales. Fairy tales have also been found in ancient India and ancient China, and just about every other place where we find a history of human habitation. We also find Cinderella, one of the most recurrent fairy tale themes, in many of these cultures. The oldest of these is thought to be of Greco-Egyptian origin and was recorded by Strabo in the first century B.C. There are now so many versions of the Cinderella story that they can’t possibly be so much as listed here, but if you are interested in doing a little research of your own, Google Cinderella; the movie results alone should keep you busy for quite some time.
Among the earliest European versions of this story is "La gatta cenerentola" (The cinder cat), which was published in Naples in 1634 as part of Giambattista Basile’s collection of tales, though there is one even earlier Italian version, published by G.F. Straparola in 1550. It is reported that Basile’s version served as a basis for both Charles Perrault’s (Stories and Tales of Past Times, or Tales of Mother Goose, 1697) and the Grimm brothers’ (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812) versions. There are still more European variants, and among them is one from the Gothic Era by Chaucer (!) and yet another 17th-century version by Baronne d’Aulnoy, published in her 1697 collection (d’Aulnoy, by the way, was the first to use the term fairy tale, conte de fées).
Cinderella, as Americans have come to know the story best, is Walt Disney’s variation of the Perrault; Perrault was the one who added a pumpkin and a fairy godmother (I believe Disney introduced the singing mice). No doubt Disney chose the Perrault over the Grimm to avoid the mutilation of the stepsisters’ feet as they trimmed away the bits that wouldn’t fit into the gold slipper (the glass slipper was Perrault’s idea), and the attack of angry birds that rendered those naughty girls blind as well as lame (one wonders if Hitchcock found inspiration here).
Our version found its beginning in Rome, two days before the Christmas of 1816, when Rossini, at a very late hour (in more than one sense), was offered the opportunity to compose a Cinderella for Teatro del Valle. He accepted immediately, stretched out in his bed, and went to sleep. The impresario, librettist, and composer had been working late into the night in Rossini’s bedroom trying to think of a subject for a new opera that had been scheduled to open the day after Christmas (I should mention here that, though the opera was completed in a miraculously short time, they didn’t make that deadline).
The librettist, Jacopo Ferretti, hurried home and stayed up the rest of the night drinking a reportedly excellent mocha coffee while creating the scenario, which he presented to Rossini in the morning. Ferretti’s work was made easier by the fact that two years earlier an opera on this subject had premiered at La Scala, libretto by Felice Romani and music by Stefano Pavesi. Rossini was in Milan at the time, and Ferretti knew Romani’s libretto. It was Romani who introduced Dandini and Alidoro to the Cinderella story (retained by Ferretti), but Ferretti who came up with bracelets to replace the glass slippers (Rome shuddered at the idea of naked feet on stage, so, no glass slippers). Ferretti’s libretto is an unapologetic plagiarism, but, clearly, time was of the essence—the opera season had to close on February 18, when Lent would begin.
Before Rossini started composing he insisted on one thing (for which opera producers have been ever grateful): there was to be no technical "magic" on stage. He distrusted the theatre’s capacity to pull off reliable magic tricks. Rossini would later have a terrible experience producing his Moses in Egypt (also known as Moses and Pharaoh or The Passage Through the Red Sea). I’m sure you can see where this is going: he later obscured the parting of the waters with a ballet so that audiences could stop laughing hysterically at this very dramatic moment. We are grateful that we have not had to figure out a way to turn a pumpkin into a carriage, and we absolutely cringe at the thought of turning mice into horses.
When I said the opera was completed in miraculous time, I should have said it was composed in 24 days. Each morning, the librettist handed over whatever he had completed the day before and Rossini set it to music. There was a little outside help from about day twenty, when Rossini solicited the assistance of Luca Agolini to compose an aria for Alidoro and another for Clorinda as well as the introduction to Act II. At the last minute, Rossini decided to use his overture from La Gazzetta, an earlier Rossini opera that was unknown to Rome and whose shelf life had clearly expired. The famous buffo duet between Magnifico and Dandini was composed the night before the opening.
I repeat, THE NIGHT BEFORE THE OPENING.
With the opera composed, it’s time to worry about the singers, who had to memorize, master, and perform roles, famous for their technical difficulty, in about a week. Opening night told the tale: it was an unhappy occasion. The singers did not complete the Herculean task, were exhausted by the attempt, and the first four performances made that evident. So, though the opening was soundly rejected, after a week, the opera was a resounding success and it achieved more than twenty performances before Lent put an end to it. The opera proved to travel well, and quickly, and it has aged nicely. We are excited to bring this delicious concoction back to San José.
For those readers who do not yet know La Cenerentola, much of the above must seem mysterious; who in the world might Dandini, Magnifico, Alidoro, and Clorinda be? It’s time to relate the tale as we find it in Ferretti and Rossini’s 1817 version:
Rossini’s La Cenerentola begins in the crumbling mansion of the baron, Don Magnifico, where his two daughters from a previous marriage, Clorinda and Tisbe, are admiring themselves, enormously and erroneously. Angelina, disparagingly called Cinderella, enters with the breakfast tray. Shortly, Alidoro (Goldenwings) enters disguised as a religious pilgrim and asks for food. The girls, shrieking, send him away, but Cinderella hides him and gives him bread and coffee.
Out of nowhere, a group of courtiers arrive with the news that the crown prince, Don Ramiro, is on his way to this very house to escort all the daughters to his nearby country estate where he will choose one of them to be his bride. Clorinda and Tisbe lose their minds, and their shouting awakens their late-sleeping father, Don Magnifico, who was having a significant dream. When he discovers that the prince is coming to marry one of his daughters, he finds much of that dream coming true right before his eyes. He directs his two daughters to get beautifully dressed and commands Cinderella to bring him his coffee.
With the room empty, Prince Ramiro sneaks in, disguised as a valet. He tells us that his father has commanded him to marry or he will no longer be the heir apparent. He is not pleased at having to marry someone of his father’s choosing and is out searching for a bride he might actually love. Cinderella enters and the two discover one another in a meaningful, promising way just before Ramiro’s valet, Dandini, enters, disporting himself as a crown prince—at least he gives it a good try. He meets the father and two of the daughters and invites everyone to the palace. They assemble to depart when Cinderella asks to go with them. This causes Magnifico to scold her in stunning fashion, but she persists until Alidoro, returning, this time without the disguise, opens a register of births in the region, asks where the third daughter might be. Magnifico tearfully announces that the girl died long ago. Cinderella is stunned to hear that she died and hadn’t even noticed, and everyone but she and Alidoro leave. Alidoro promises that he will take her to the palace, himself.
At the palace, Dandini appoints Magnifico as Wine Steward and sends him off to taste all the vintages in the palace so that he can better observe the two daughters. An unknown lady has just arrived, and she turns out to look astonishingly like Cinderella, though much better dressed. Before the night is over, the prince is captivated with her and proposes marriage, but Cinderella tells him that he does not know her and that she will not marry him unless he searches for her. If upon finding her in her usual condition he still wants her, she will then consent. She takes off one of her matching bracelets, gives it to him, and tells him she will still be wearing the other one when he finds her. She leaves him standing there in amazement.
Ramiro puts an end to the gathering, having found and then lost his intended bride, and he gathers the troops to search for his departed love. Dandini is put in the awkward position of telling Magnifico that he is no prince, but merely a valet. Everyone departs in some degree of excitement or annoyance.
Back at the baron’s mansion, Cinderella has put on her rags to greet her family, while outside a storm rages. Ramiro, Dandini, and Alidoro arrive out of the rain, and, Ramiro notices that the serving girl he met that morning is wearing a very familiar bracelet. He makes his claim and takes his prize back to the palace. The rest of the Magnifico family is stunned.
At the palace, Magnifico and his daughters join the assembly to witness the elevation of Cinderella. This is the point at which Magnifico should find himself clapped in chains and thrown into prison for the theft of Cinderella’s dowry. The girls don’t have sense enough to keep an eye out for vagrant birds, and Clorinda is not adjusting at all well to Cinderella’s new situation. But, surprisingly for this family, all is well, as the subtitle of this opera is "The Triumph of
Goodness." Cinderella tells them that they are the only family she has, that she loves them, that she has always loved them, and she clasps them in her arms. The opera ends with a bravura aria that rattles off notes like machine gun bullets. Everyone, for the most part, is happy, and especially Ramiro, who gets his true love and his father’s crown. Cinderella, I suppose, is happy also. She certainly sounds happy...
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