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Strangers in a Strange Land, Part 1

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Aside from extraordinary amounts of cash changing hands at the gaming tables in Prokofiev's The Gambler, discussed in my last articles, the opera is a showcase for the interplay of characters of distinctively different national backgrounds. In fact, in this regard it is quite unusual for an opera, containing no less than four languages (beating out by two, the composer's War and Peace, in which even Napoleon sings in Russian!). In The Gambler, the Russian characters stylishly -- one could even say pretentiously -- employ French among themselves, a very telling example being the moment when the opportunistic Blanche appeals to Alexei to try to stop the elderly aunt of her current lover from gambling away his family's fortune. Alexei has just been dismissed from this family's employ, but in her desperation Blanche now intimately addresses him as a social equal: "Mon cher monsieur Alexis." The cast also includes a rich Englishman who is always respectfully called Mister Astley even amidst Alexei's volleys of Russian. Contrast this to Alexei's deliberate insolence toward a German Baron and Baroness who are prestigious fixtures at the gambling spa that forms the setting for the opera. First, Alexei addresses the Baroness in French, in so grovelingly polite a manner that it is clearly an insult. He then switches to German to jeer "Jawohl!" at the Baron, who incredulously exclaims, "Sind Sie rasend?" -- "Is he raving mad?" In reply, Alexei only repeats "Jawohl!" at the top of his lungs -- clearly making fun of the Germans' nationality. By these few thoughtful insertions of foreign text, Prokofiev thus colored his libretto with vividly meaningful splashes of cross-cultural color.

How do other operas achieve a sense of ethnic disparity among their characters? Although the numerous leading artists in Rossini's 1825 Il Viaggio a Reims steadfastly sing in Italian, they form a positive U.N. of national representatives: a Pole, a Russian, a French couple, two Romans, a German, an Englishman, a Spaniard, and a Greek. All are unexpectedly stranded at the Golden Lily, a spa hotel run by a Tyrolean woman, in the French town of Plombières, while en route to the coronation of Charles X at Reims. Their origins are repeatedly explored in a variety of ways, from such musical commentary as the dizzyingly coloratura aria for the Parisian Comtesse de Folleville, to the characters' cultural attributes as textually catalogued in Don Profondo's lengthy aria in which he fancifully describes what each traveler probably has in his or her luggage. But if we haven't figured out who's who, or from where, yet, the opera concludes with a scene in which each would-be celebrant gets his or her chance to salute Charles X -- from a distance, as they are all still stuck at the Golden Lily! -- with an anthem or song in his or her respective national style: a Polonaise for Marchesa Melibea, a yodeling song from the Tyrolean innkeeper...even "God Save the King," whose title is there quoted in English though it is sung in Italian, from Lord Sidney.

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