Miss Helyett (opera)

It depicts the complications ensuing when the excessively puritanical heroine believes herself duty-bound to marry an unknown man who, in rescuing her from a serious fall in the Pyrenees, has been unable to avoid seeing the exposed lower half of her body.

The most recent revival in Paris was in 1921, and the piece remained popular in the French provinces during the next two decades, but fell out of the repertoire after that.

By 1890 Audran was a well-established composer of opérette and opéra comique, with 18 full-length pieces to his credit, including the very popular La mascotte (1880).

She is the eleventh, youngest, and only unmarried daughter of a nonconformist pastor, Smithson, with whom she is revisiting Bagnères after a two-year interval.

A passer-by rescued her, but, mortified by being seen with her lower half exposed, she covered her face with her cloak, and so could not see him before he left after extricating her.

[5] The Académie Nationale de l’Opérette notes that there were frequent revivals in the French provinces in the mid-20th century, but that the work has since disappeared from the repertoire.

The main characters were renamed, and the locale moved from the Pyrenees to the Alps, but the plot was largely unchanged, except for Helyett's reason for insisting on marrying her rescuer: for the benefit of Victorian British audiences, Paul's sight of the heroine's lower half is omitted and his mere physical contact, hauling her from the ravine, is taken as sufficient reason for her to consider herself compromised.

Productions followed in Austria (Vienna, 1891 and 1893), Germany (Berlin, 1891), and Australia (in Burnand's "Miss Decima" version, Sydney, 1896).

[9] A second film based on the work was made in 1933 starring Josette Day as Miss Helyett, Jim Gérald as her father (a professor rather than a clergyman in this adaptation) and Roger Bourdin as Paul.

[9][10] Reviewing the Paris production The Era found the music "light and pretty, though not as lively as might be desired", and thought the plot flimsy but told in humorous style.

[11] Reviewing the English version, The Standard commented that the original French piece was "one of the most gratuitously coarse and offensive plays ever presented" and that Burnand's bowdlerisation of the crux of the plot had produced a piece "equally inoffensive and meaningless"; there was praise for the score: "some extremely bright and pretty music".