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Page 2
Midnight is an important hour in the Cinderella fairy tale, and while we never do hear it strike in Rossini's La Cenerentola, Massenet kept this detail in for his 1899 Cendrillon. In Act I, the fairy godmother explicitly tells Lucette, aka Cendrillon, that -- no matter how much fun she is having -- when midnight strikes, the girl must return home. As fairy spirits echo the critical time, Lucette swears she will obey...and then, as she departs in the carriage magically created by the fairies, the supernatural figures again caution: "Mais à minuit sois de retour en ces lieux!" - "But at midnight, you must return to your place [home]!"
Act III begins with the meek Lucette's breathless account of how she braved many night fears to return home on her own from the palace grounds: white stone statues, seen by moonlight, seemed to be ghosts pointing at her; the garden was so large that she became lost, but still she prevailed, through fields and meadows. Initially startled by the sudden chiming of the clock tower (presumably time had already passed to reach a half or full hour), she took comfort in the familiar sound, recognizing the chimes as she reached her town from the rural royal estate: "Allons! Courage! Va!" she believed they chimed: "Come! Courage! Go on!" She momentarily forgets her fear and misery to joyously imitate the bells, in a burst of coloratura. Clearly, time has become no enemy, despite its part in separating her from her beloved. Clocks loom far more ominously for Boris Godunov, in Mussorgsky's 1870 opera of that same name. It is a great virtuoso scene for the leading bass when in Act II, Scene 2, Boris, already consumed with a fear that his murdered child, Dmitri, who had been heir to the throne, would rise from the grave to torment him, cannot bear the sound of the striking of the clock, which he feels to be a hammer beating upon his brain. He sees a vision of the murdered child, attempts to chase it away, and collapses before his throne, praying to God to have mercy upon his own guilty soul as the orchestra clamors appropriately. Although the libretto only describes this scene as involving a chair serving as the throne, dramatic stagings have sometimes placed the action at the top of a staircase that braver basses bodily hurl themselves down at the finale of this aria. And you thought the dropping of a crystal ball in Times Square was exciting, huh?
The copyright of the article Just in Time, Part 1 - Page 2 in Opera is owned by . Permission to republish Just in Time, Part 1 - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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