La Marjolaine
La Marjolaine is an opéra bouffe in three acts, with music by Charles Lecocq and words by Eugène Leterrier and Albert Vanloo, the third collaboration by the three.
The piece is set in 16th century Flanders; it depicts a deceitful, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to damage a virtuous woman's reputation.
He was a prolific composer, and among his substantial output his successes such as La fille de Madame Angot and Giroflé-Girofla were interspersed with works that failed to attract the public.
Koning and Lecocq delayed the production until their star soprano, Jeanne Granier, returned to Paris from St Petersburg, where she had been playing a season.
[5] It was generally expected that La Marjolaine would re-open the theatre in September,[6] but instead Kosiki was given another staging, bringing its total performances to more than a hundred.
Act 1 The Place de la Hôtel-de-Ville, Brussels Marjolaine, a simple country girl, once loved and was loved by Frickel, a handsome young clockmaker, but tiring of his three-year absence mending the old clock in Bruges she accepted a proposal of marriage from Palamède, Baron Van der Boom, a rich and elderly bachelor.
Act 3 A villa at Boitsfort, near Brussels The Baron, reduced to poverty by his lost bet, is living alone, with only a dead fowl called George to keep him company.
This little muse of opera buffa, svelte and clear, laughing with silvery directness but without crudity, boldly continues its way towards opera-comique, and it is M. Lecocq who leads her by the hand.
[12]The Paris correspondent of The Era wrote that Lecocq's style moved more and more to that of true opéra comique; he found the libretto very funny but "spicy, not to say smutty, in the extreme".
[13] His London confrère, reviewing the British premiere, found the piece less risqué, but thought Lecocq's score curiously unequal, the first act much superior to the other two.
[9] The Pall Mall Gazette took a different view of the originality of the plot, finding echoes not only of Cymbeline, but of Fra Diavolo, Linda di Chamounix, and Le Réveillon, the play on which Die Fledermaus was based.
