Stradella (opera)

Stradella is a Grand Opera in five acts by Louis Niedermeyer to a libretto by Emile Deschamps and Émilien Pacini. Based on a highly romanticized version of the life of the composer Alessandro Stradella (1639–1682), it was premiered at the Paris Opéra on 3 March 1837.

The storyline of the opera is fashioned from the fanciful legend told by Pierre Bourdelot in his 1715 Histoire de la musique. Interest in Stradella in Paris had been growing in 1830s Paris, after the musician François-Joseph Fétis had included an aria, (supposedly by Stradella but actually by Fétis himself), in an 1833 concert; the melody soon became extremely popular. In July 1836 the Revue et gazette musicale^[], run by Maurice Schlesinger, had serialised a work by Jules Janin, Stradella, or the Poet and the Musician, as 'advance publicity' (Schlesinger was to publish Niedermeyer's score in 1837). Moreover, a vaudeville with music by Flotow on the same subject opened in Paris a month before Niedermeyer's opera.

The opera was Niedermeyer's first venture in the Grand Opera vein. The leading roles were taken by two of the Opera's strongest singers, Adolphe Nourrit and Cornélie Falcon, both then at the height of their careers. However for both of them it represented some of their last appearances in Paris singing full operatic roles.

Falcon lost her voice catastrophically during the second performance of Stradella at the Opéra in March 1837. When Nourrit as Stradella asked her "Demain nous partirons – voulez-vous?", Falcon was unable to sing her line "Je suis prête", fainted, and was carried offstage by Nourrit.Hector Berlioz, who was present, describes "raucous sounds like those of a child with croup, guttural, whistling notes that quickly faded like those of a flute filled with water". Her career never recovered from this disaster, and after 1840 she never performed publicly again. Nourrit gave a farewell performance in April 1837 after the first performances of Stradella, and later that year travelled to Italy, where he committed suicide in 1839.

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