Les cent vierges
Les cent vierges (The Hundred Maidens) is an opérette in three acts, with music by Charles Lecocq and a libretto by Clairville, Henri Chivot and Alfred Duru.
The work was rewritten many years after the deaths of its authors and composer, and staged in a version by Albert Willemetz and André Mouëzy-Éon in Paris in 1942 and 1946.
Les cent vierges was the first of the three pieces he wrote for the house, before moving back to Paris in 1874, all great box-office successes.
In Brussels the piece was a hit from the outset; the first Paris run was a modest success, and it was not until its first revival in 1875 that the opera became highly popular with the Parisian public.
[3] Captain Thompson of the Royal Navy tells of Green Island, a distant English possession where there are a hundred male settlers, but no women.
The husbands leave to take care of the luggage, while the two women decide to visit one of the vessels at the quay – the one on which the maidens are to be carried.
[6] The Brussels company took the production to London in June 1873, with the original cast, except that Pauline Luigini replaced Gentien as Gabrielle.
[7] Two English adaptations were staged in London in 1874 under the titles To the Green Isles Direct and The Island of Bachelors, the latter a Gaiety Theatre production with Arthur Cecil as Anatole, Constance Loseby as Gabrielle and Nellie Farren as Eglantine.
The story remained broadly the same, but introduced a new character, a young painter, Marcel, who is in love with Gabrielle and eventually gets her when Anatole decides that marriage is not for him.
[10] Reviewing the Brussels production, the critic in The Athenaeum praised the "melodious and vivacious" music, and forecast success for the piece when it opened in Paris, where laughing at the English was always popular.
[n 1] Another critic from the same paper described the music of the first act as "quite Offenbachish", but thought Lecocq was reaching for a more elevated style in some of the numbers.
[12] In the first volume of his Operetta (2015), Robert Letellier describes the piece as "very much of its day: scabrous situations, scenes of exaggerated burlesque, an absence of all verisimilitude, and all acceptable feeling".
