Death and transfiguration

Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo offers listeners a chance to discover Déjanire, only a few excerpts from which were revealed by the Radio France Festival in Montpellier in 1985. This work, like nearly all Saint-Saëns’s operas, went through a complex creative process. In the present case, it was so radical as to be rare in the development of an opera, for Saint-Saëns ended up turning a play, spoken in verse and accompanied by incidental music scored for the open air, into a wholly sung tragédie lyrique designed for performing spaces of more modest dimensions. The subject, it has to be said, called more for one-on-one confrontations in the vein of Racine than for collective tableaux, apart from the final apotheosis when Hercule throws himself onto the pyre. This recording demonstrates that the transformation into an opera admirably enhances the original tragedy of Gallet, who died just after Déjanire was premiered in Béziers and so never knew this new version.