L'Enfant et les Sortilèges
Synopsis
- Reading time
- 5 min.
Read the full synopsis of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges by Maurice Ravel, and learn how the opera came into being.
PART ONE
In the house
A Child in its bedroom at homework time slowly gives in to bad behaviour, ranging from laziness to aggressiveness. Its Mother, without seeking to grasp the reasons for this bad mood, responds to the insolent Child’s stubborn silence and stuck-out tongue with a cascade of reproaches, scoldings and punishments, inviting it to reflect.
The Mother’s authoritarianism unleashes the Child’s destructive anger, which it directs against objects, furniture and animals; the expression of rejection and the intoxicating spiral of violence leave it feeling ‘free and naughty’. But spells are cast in turn: as the Child’s surroundings come to life and start to speak, they pile on the guilt-inducing attacks against it.
The Child goes from being simply astonished at the grotesque movements of an Armchair and a Wing Chair – that complain about the Child although without paying it too much attention – to being rather concerned at the panic and lamentations of the Clock, then fearful when it is threatened by Fire.
As they voice their nostalgia at being separated, the rustic characters from the torn wallpaper trigger a feeling of sadness in the Child and make it aware of its loneliness. The Princess brings everything to a head when she makes the Child see that she is its first love, but that it cannot be her valiant saviour since it has torn up the storybook; the disappearance of the Princess so devastates the Child that, like a poet, it compares her to the ‘heart of the rose’.
Arithmetic, in the guise of a grumpy Little Old Man assisted by a chorus of Numbers, takes advantage of the Child’s languidness to drive it to the brink of madness by swamping it with made-up calculations. It is the Male Cat who, turning away to meow lovingly under the stars, removes the Child from its confinement and leads it to a place where it will be the plaything of other spells.
Composition history 1: Colette and Ravel
Nothing seemed to suggest in 1900, in the Parisian salon of Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, that the composer Maurice Ravel and the writer Colette, aged 25 and 27 respectively, would write an opera together. He was on the shy side, while she found him rather distant, although she readily admitted to an ‘attachment to which the slight unease of surprise and the sensual and mischievous appeal of a new art added certain charms’ … Fourteen years later, when the director of the Opéra de Paris commissioned her to write the libretto for a ‘fairy ballet’, Colette wrote a prose poem titled Ballet pour ma fille in about eight days. When Rouché suggested asking Ravel to write the music, the author was quick to express her enthusiasm. The composer accepted, but was called up to the Verdun front in 1916 …
PART TWO
In the garden
The Child is thrilled to return to the garden but its inhabitants, however, also have cause to complain: after all, the Child has carved the Tree and deprived the Dragonfly and Bat of their companion, etc. For its part, the Squirrel, whom the Child locked up and scratched with its school pen (a symbol of homework), gives the Tree Frog, who lacks all common sense, a lesson in caution and addresses a libertarian speech to the Child.
Moved, the Child realizes how cruel it has been and the consequences its cruelty has had: the Male and Female Cat love each other, the garden animals play without the Child. ‘Maman!’, the Child suddenly cries out in distress, triggering panic among the animals and a desire for revenge. They in turn resort to violence and, as they jostle to ‘punish’ the Child, injure a young Squirrel, much to their shame.
The Child then earns the wounded Squirrel’s forgiveness by helping it. Unable to treat the wounds they have inflicted on the Child, the Animals join forces to bring it back to its home; they in turn call out ‘Maman!’ and grant the Child a consoling chorus proclaiming it to be good, wise and gentle …
Composition history 2: ‘Dear Madam’
‘The war took Ravel away, imposed a hermetic silence on his name, and I lost the habit of thinking about L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, Colette recalled years later. By the end of World War I, the project was in limbo. Suffering from dysentery and then peritonitis during the conflict, Ravel was sent to convalesce in 1916, before being demobilized in 1917, a few months after his mother’s death. Overwhelmed by grief, he withdrew into silence and isolation. Two years later, he wrote to Colette:
‘Dear Madam,
At the same time as you were expressing your regret at my silence to Rouché, I was thinking, from the depths of my snowy environs, of asking you whether you still wanted such an unreliable collaborator. My state of health is my only excuse: for a long time, I really did fear that I would no longer be able to do anything. I suppose I’m getting better: the desire to work seems to be returning. It is not possible here, but as soon as I return, at the beginning of April, I intend to get started, beginning with our opera …’
The work premiered on 21 March 1925 at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. Ravel and Colette were then 50 and 52 years old …
This synopsis is drawn from a programme published by La Monnaie in 2001 on the occasion of a co-production with the Opéra national de Lyon. It is reissued here with their kind permission.
