Just in Time, Part 1
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]!"
The fairy godmother has given Lucette glass slippers that have the the power to keep her identity concealed from her step-mother and step-sisters, who are also at the prince's ball. When midnight sounds, Lucette is loath to leave her Prince Charmant, with whom she has just sung a rapturous duet. At the sound of the first bell in the distance, she exclaims, "Ah! je frissonne!" - "Ah! I shiver!" and begins to break away from the prince's arms: "L'heure!...déjá l'heure qui sonne..." - "The hour!...already the hour is striking..." The prince cries out, "Qu'importe l'heure?" - "What does time matter?" On the strike count of twelve, the fairy godmother appears, and Lucette vanishes, leaving behind one magical slipper.
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
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