François Lays
This association with the Emperor caused him trouble when the Bourbon monarchy was restored and Lays's final years were darkened by disputes over his pension, mounting debts, the death of his only son and his wife's illness.
One of the Opéra's most popular artistes, he enjoyed his greatest success singing comic roles, such as Anacreon in Grétry's Anacréon chez Polycrate (1797) and the bailiff in Lebrun's Le rossignol (1816).
His family intended him for a career in the Church at the Sanctuary of Notre-Dame-de-Garaison (Monléon-Magnoac), where he stayed until he was 17, receiving a solid musical education as a chorister and developing a remarkable baritenor voice.
In Toulouse, Lays formed a lifelong friendship with the young lawyer Bertrand Barère, the future French Revolutionary politician and member of the Committee of Public Safety.
[4] Lays was immediately enrolled in the company as one of the lower male voices (known in France at the time as basse-tailles) and began a rapid ascent up the Opéra career ladder.
The institution at the time was seething with discontent: the artistes resented the fact their wages were only a third of those of the actors of the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne; moreover, their pay was only partly fixed and permanent, the rest being linked to how frequently they appeared on stage and the size of their roles.
The rebellious Lays soon became embroiled in a heated confrontation with the management, behaving almost like a modern union agitator, with the support of two singers who had joined the company around the same time, the haute-contre Jean-Joseph Rousseau [it][12] and the bass Auguste-Athanase Chéron (1760–1829).
[13] He was provisionally released on the 30th because he was indispensable for filling the haute-contre role of Cynire in a revival of Gluck's Echo et Narcisse[14] in the small hall of the Menus-Plaisirs which acted as a substitute for the theatre which had burned down.
His enormous popularity with the public, with an encore of the main aria and several curtain-calls, made it practically impossible to send him back to prison, although he was forced to sign a solemn undertaking that he would not leave Paris without the express permission of his superiors.
[11] In Girondin Bordeaux, his political alignment with the Montagnards provoked such public hostility that he was forced to slip out of the city without even being able to complete his debut performance at the local theatre.
After his release on 3 July, Lays had to undergo the ritual humiliation the public was imposing on the "Terrorist actors": they were forced to sing the anti-Jacobin hymn "Le Réveil du Peuple", which had just been set to music by a tenor from the Théâtre Feydeau, Pierre Gaveaux, and which seemed destined to replace the Marseillaise as the main Republican anthem.
Antoine Trial, a colleague of Gaveaux from the Opéra-Comique who was then in his sixties, had been forced to sing the new hymn kneeling on stage to boos, whistles and jeers from the audience, and had never recovered from the experience, eventually taking his own life with poison.
At the end, the leading tenor Étienne Lainez returned onto the proscenium to sing, as usual, Le Réveil du Peuple, but he was shouted down and forced to take refuge in the wings.
[33] If the quality of his voice was universally admired, his lack of physical elegance, his short and stocky build and the southern accent he never completely managed to lose predisposed Lays to comic rather than dramatic roles, particularly middle-aged buffo characters, in which, "singing of love and good wine, he proved to be sublime".
Nevertheless, the pair remained on friendly terms and between 1801 and 1802, Lays – who had often performed in Josephine's salons – became chief singer of the Chapel Napoleon had established at the Tuileries under the directorship of Giovanni Paisiello.
The ensuing celebrations culminated at the Hôtel de Ville on 16 December with Lays and Chéron singing the cantata Trasibule, specially written for the occasion by Henri-Montan Berton.
Not wanting to hurt the French public's feelings, Alexander requested a staging of Spontini's La vestale instead, an opera in which Lays always assumed the role of Cinna.
At the end of the performance, the angry audience forced Lays – still dressed in his Roman toga – to return to the stage and recite some popular verses thanking the tsar for restoring the Bourbons.
Lays took one of his favourite stock parts, "a bailiff in his fifties, a lover of good food and beautiful young women, naive and credulous, convinced of his own powers of seduction.
In 1817, the restored Intendant of the Menus-Plaisirs du Roi, Papillon de la Ferté[44] abolished all additional emoluments granted by Napoleon, leaving the singer to survive on his meagre salary from the school of music and the minimum pay from the Opéra, at the very time when his son, stricken with tuberculosis, required expensive medical treatment and his four daughters needed money for their dowries.
Lays then applied to the royal administration, insisting he should be granted some of the potential economic benefits provided by law, but, after the new opera's premiere, his demands received a blanket rejection.
[47] Quéruel relates that Lays was finally reinstated only on 9 January 1821, but this assertion cannot be accurate because the singer's name often appeared on the theatre bills in the meantime, for example the whole period between July 1819 and June 1820.
Lays went on a tour of the Low Countries and also put on several performances of Anacréon chez Polycrate[49] at the same Brussels Théâtre de la Monnaie to which he had tried to escape forty years earlier.
It was now obvious that the singer had been targeted in high places: the Minister of the Maison du Roi, General Jacques Alexandre Law de Lauriston, who was ultimately in charge of the theatre, had discovered he had not previously authorised the leave of absence granted to Lays and, regarding it as null and void, intended to sue him for damages for missing performances at the Opéra.
In Le rossignol, Lays once more played his favourite character of the bailiff, while the principal female role of Philis was taken by Laure Cinti-Damoreau,[54] a pupil of Rossini, soon to become the leading lady in the composer's French operas.
La Rochefoucauld had an aversion to Lays both as an inveterate supporter of the Revolution, and, in particular, for the ironic remarks the singer had made about his morality campaign, which included lengthening ballerinas' skirts and providing ancient statues with fig leaves.
In 1826, La Rochefoucauld had the opportunity to demonstrate his dislike when Lays, realising that life in Paris was beyond his financial means, decided to leave his post as professor and retire to the provinces to be near his married eldest daughter.
No longer able to live in the capital in the manner to which he is accustomed, his intention is to retire to somewhere in the provinces where he and his family will be able to live more comfortably.A week later, having received no reply, Cherubini tried again: Permit me to bring to your attention the services he has rendered to musical and dramatic art, and the regrettable situation in which he finds himself after such long services as well as having to provide for a large family.No response having come from the administration, Quéruel claims that Cherubini made the courageous decision to use his discretionary powers and take personal responsibility for authorising a special performance whose takings would be divided equally between the Académie and Lays.
Most of his ornamentation was old-fashioned and tasteless; in spite of these faults, the beauty of his voice made almost everyone who heard him into an admirer, and it was scarcely possible for an opera to succeed unless Lays had a role in it.Spire Pitou draws readers' attention to this last point in his work on the Paris Opéra.
He performed before the days of planes and fast trains, of course, but even making allowances for this lack of temptation to interrupt his activities in Paris to visit foreign opera houses for large fees, modern critics must credit Lays with a singleness of purpose that merits recognition.The number of 68 characters listed by Pitou is incomplete.
