Nephté is an opera by the French composer Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, first performed at the Académie Royale de Musique (the Paris Opéra) on 15 December 1789.
Eventually, Nephté agrees to marry Pharès but she poisons the wedding cup, killing both the usurper and herself and allowing her son to succeed to the throne as king of Egypt.
Finally, the queen, abandoned by everyone, threatened by Sinorix, little respected by her rebellious people, was forced to give her hand in marriage to the murderer of her husband.
But, faithful to her previous vows, and preserving in her heart as much love for Sinatus as horror for his murderer, she poisoned the wedding cup, and died with the usurper.
In 1661, Thomas Corneille (brother of the more famous Pierre) had presented his tragedy Camma, Reine de Galatie.
The widowed queen is not devoted to her dead husband[3] but in love with a young prince she wishes to make king in the usurper's place.
He moved the scene of the action to ancient Egypt (in "mythological times")"to introduce new costumes and new manners to the stage of the Opéra."
"[6] From the Dutch scholar Cornelius de Pauw, Hoffman took the idea that it was forbidden for women to inherit the throne of Egypt, an important plot point in the opera.
[8] Antoine Dauvergne, of the Opéra management, complained that Lemoyne and his pupil, the leading soprano Antoinette Saint-Huberty, only liked operas with "plots concerning incest, poison or assassinations".
The response of the Opéra committee to Nephté was more positive, their report describing the work as "one of the darkest and most beautiful, both in its libretto and its score.
[10] Hoffman printed one such description in the stage directions for Act 1 of Nephté: "The whole of the right-hand side of the theatre should represent an arid mountain, beneath which twelve crypts or sepulchral grottoes have been carved out of the rock.
This temple occupies only part of the background so that in the gap between it and the caves we can see in the distance some of the fertile fields which border the Nile, and one of the pyramids, whose top is lost on the horizon.
The young soprano Madame Maillard took the title role, replacing Lemoyne's protégée Antoinette Saint-Huberty.
[12] According to some sources, the premiere was so successful, Lemoyne was called onto the stage after the final curtain, the first time this had happened in the history of the Opéra.
Hoffman angrily claimed that the withdrawal of the work was to prevent him receiving the pension which would have been his due had it reached 40 performances.
On the other hand, ticket receipts had recently been falling off as the opera was losing popularity in spite of the good press it enjoyed.
It suggested this might have been remedied had Nephté's motivation been changed: instead of guessing Pharès' guilt almost from the beginning, she might have only slowly come to realise the truth, possibly after being infatuated with the usurper.
[17] In a later assessment, Jean-François de La Harpe criticised the music for being "harsh and loud, with the exception of a few pieces, as one would expect from a disciple of Gluck.
"[18] Nephté appeared when the French musical world was still divided between the supporters of two foreign composers who had made their mark on Paris in the 1770s: the German Christoph Willibald Gluck, famous for his operatic reforms, and Niccolò Piccinni, representative of the Italian school.
[19] Nephté was regarded as an opera in the Gluckian vein, with its emphasis on "majesty and sobriety" and its simple, direct plot (there are only four main characters).
The exotic subject was seemingly at a safe remove from the political situation of 1789, but the scholar Mark Darlow believes that the opera's themes of royal legitimacy and usurpation and concern for the future survival of a dynasty would have had contemporary resonance.
However, Pharès seems reluctant to search for the assassin, but at Nephté's insistence he finally agrees to swear on his brother's tomb that he will bring the criminal to justice.
Alone with her waiting women, Nephté says she can see no escape from her predicament: if she seeks revenge, her son's life will be in danger; if she does not, justice will not be done and she will be a criminal.
Scene: the Temple of Osiris (or the Sun), with an altar in the middle Nephté enters alone and calls on the gods to help her carry out her plan.