Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Messager: Les P'tites Michus

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

You could say that Andre Messager (1853-1929) was the successor in French comic opera to Offenbach. Messager wrote a lot of operettas going into the early twentieth century. Many of his works were popular in both France and England, and some of his operettas made it to the American lyric stage, too. He wrote Mirette (1894) at the request of D'Oyly Carte for premiere at London's Savoy Theatre.

Then there's the tuneful and witty Les P'tites Michu. It premiered with overnight success at the Bouffe Parisiens in 1897. It went on to London in 1905 and made its way to Australia, New Zealand and the US in 1906-09. The comedy of this operetta centers upon the two little girls named Michu. They look like they could be actual birth twins, but then again they might not be, and one of them might be of noble blood. (Gilbert and Sullivan made use of this same sort of plot device.) The girls' birth circumstances affect their marriage arrangements later in life, with laughable results leading up to a double wedding.

Les P'tites Michu was recorded at the Théatre Graslin in the French provincial city of Nantes in May of 2018. Pierre Dumoussaud conducts the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire and the Choeur d'Angers Nantes Opera, with singing cast. The French language dialogue is heard as it would have been delivered onstage at the Graslin. The French record company Palazzetto Bru Zone released "The Little Michus" in 2018 in a deluxe book-style package for the two compact discs.