MEYERBEER : L'AFRICAINE

Radio New Zealand Concert network
Sunday 31st of August 2010  6.03 - 9.05 pm

INTRODUCTION 
LIBRETTO (French)
LIBRETTO (English and Italian!)
O Paradis (Gregory Kunde)

MEYERBEER: L'Africaine, an opera in five acts
Sélika..................................... Veronica Simeoni
Vasco da Gama..................... Gregory Kunde
Inès........................................ Jessica Pratt
Nélusko................................. Angelo Veccia
Don Pédro............................. Luca dall'Amico
Don Diégo............................. Davide Riberti
Anna...................................... Anna Bordignon
Don Alvaro........................... Emanuele Giannino
Grand Inquisitor of Lisbon... Mattia Denti
High Priest of Brahma.......... Ruben Amoretti
Teatro La Fenice Chorus & Orch/Emmanuel Villaume  
(recorded in Teatro La Fenice, Venice by Italian Radio)

Do you like your opera rare (full-blooded)?

A grand opera rarity (a French rareté) is raring (videlicet rearing or
roaring) to go, on the radio this evening, at 6 pm.

All operas by the Jewish composer Meyerbeer are rarely (sic) seen or heard,
but throughout my lifetime tenors have been stepping up to the microphone
and belting out a bleeding gobbet from one of them: "O Paradiso" or "O
Paradis" (viz. "O Paradise" en anglais), singing about some new world he had
discovered. The character is the Portuguese explorer named Vasco da Gama,
who, like all European explorators found something that was not lost: viz.
India. He achieved this by sailing around the southern cape of Africa. But
India was not the new land he is referring to: it is an undiscovered island.

This opera (libretto by his scribe Scribe) was given the title *Vasco da
Gama* by its composer (viz. Giacomo Meyerbeer, remember); but F-J Fétis
entitled it *L'Africaine" (videlicet, viz., it may be seen, "the African
woman", L'Africana en italien). But the lady in question (viz. Sélika) is
the Queen of this fabulous island, which is neither Africa nor India; but it
has a high priest of the Hindu god Brahma, so she is not African! (But in the early gestation of the story she did have a connection with the Niger.)

Sélika desires Vasco, but he loves Inès (one of his own kind, actually an
Australian super-soprano, Jessica Pratt) and they are to be sacrificed to
the god Brahma (who only has one temple of his own in India, they say).
 
And then...?