Le diable à quatre (opera)
Opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck
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Le diable à quatre (The Devil to Pay) is an opéra comique in three acts by Christoph Willibald Gluck. The French-language libretto is by Michel-Jean Sedaine and Pierre Baurans, after a translation by Claude-Pierre Patu of the 1731 ballad opera by Charles Coffey entitled The Devil to Pay, or The Wives Metamorphos’d.[1] It was first performed at Laxenburg on May 28, 1759. The work was a popular success. Joseph Haydn used a melody from it, "Je n’aimais pas le tabac beaucoup (I didn’t like tobacco much)" in the first movement of his symphony Le soir.[2][3]
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Klaus Hortschansky has noted that Le diable à quatre is one of Gluck's few stageworks where the composer neither used musical material from prior works nor recycled material from it into future works.[4] Bruce Brown has discussed Gluck's authorship of the music in detail,[5] and has also edited the work for the Gluck Sämtliche Werke.[6]
(The same libretto was set to music arranged by Andre Danican Philidor and Jean-Louis Laruette and first staged with the above title on 19 August 1756 in Paris.)
Roles
| Role | Voice type | Premiere Cast, (Conductor:) |
|---|---|---|
| The Marquise | soprano | |
| The Marquis | tenor | |
| Margot | soprano | |
| Jacques, a cobbler, Margot's husband | baritone | |
| An astrologer | tenor | |
Synopsis
The story concerns an ill-natured Marquise. An astrologer, to whom she had refused shelter at her chateau, transforms her into the wife of a surly cobbler named Jacques and transforms the cobbler's sweet-natured wife into the Marquise. After the Marquise learns her lesson, the astrologer reverses the spell.[7]