Fairies in Opera, Part 4 - Worlds Apart©
Mar 9, 2002
As with the numerous mermaids myths (soon to be the subject of another article series), some fairy stories examine what befalls fairies who, away from their usual supernatural environment, are pursued by mortals.
One such work, alas all but totally obscure in our own time despite the co-authoring of its libretto by the famed Scribe, is Auber's 1839 Le Lac des Fées. If the title resembles Le Lac des Cygnes -- the 1877 ballet, Swan Lake -- this is not quite an accident, as both the opera and the ballet derive from German legend. In the opera, a group of students comes upon a lake in which, right before their eyes, swans magically become fairies. Albert, one of the students, swipes and takes home the veil of Zeïla, a fairy who has caught his fancy. This is not simply an embarrassing situation, like frat boys in a panty raid: Without her veil, Zeïla cannot rejoin her fairy world; the veil controls her immortality and transmutability (think Peter Pan and his shadow). But she is a practical creature and, now appearing to be human, manages to find work at a local inn, where Albert continues to court her. Rodolphe, a rich rake, initially attracted to Marguerite, Zeïla's employer, begins make advances toward Zeïda. Marguerite restores the missing veil to Zeïda, who abandons both Albert and Rodolphe in favor of returning to fairyland.
In Rutland Boughton's 1914 The Immortal Hour, whose librettist, Fiona Macleod (alter-ego of William Sharp), was a noted scholar of Druid legendry, the immortality situation is somewhat reversed. The fairy Etain has wandered away from the Land of the Ever-Young and into the shadow of Dalua, who is sort of the Mephistopheles of a bad fairydom. His dark powers literally overtake her, and she forget who she is. Dalua predicts that it is now her fate to be loved by a mortal king who rather like the elderly Faust yearns only for an "Immortal Hour": "one [woman] more beautiful than any mortal maid, so fair that he shall know a joy beyond all mortal joy." Such a desire may only end in death: "Love at peace." Etain indeed meets this king, Eochaidh, who tells her that she is the woman of his dreams. For a year, they live blissfully as king and queen. But then a stranger comes to the court during their anniversary celebration, and when he serenades the royal couple with a song about being from the Land of the Young, Etain recognizes him as Midir, a fairy prince of Love to whom she had previously been bound. Unseen fairy voices now sing to her of her homeland, as Midir continues to paint a verbal picture of her lost life. Etain's amnesia vanishes, as does she, whisked with Midir to their true kingdom, as Eochaidh pleads, "My dreams! My dreams! Give me my dreams!" Darkness overtakes the palace and the king, deprived of what had indeed been the love of an immortal, falls down dead, swept into Dalua's shadow.
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