L'arbre enchanté

L’arbre enchanté, ou Le tuteur dupé ("The Magic Tree, or, the Tutor Duped"), Wq 42, is an opéra comique in one act by Christoph Willibald Gluck, his fifth work in that genre. It was written for the nameday of Emperor Francis Stephan, premiering the evening of October 3 1759 at the Schönbrunn palace in Vienna, and was revived at the Palace of Versailles on February 27, 1775 with an added ariette, "Pres de l'objet qui m'inflamme", borrowed from Le cadi dupé.

The libretto is an adaptation^[1] of Jean-Joseph Vadé's fr:Jean-Joseph Vadé Le Poirier ("The Peartree", 1752) after Boccaccio, a story retold by Jean de La Fontaine and slightly varied in Chaucer's tale of May and Januarie, where it is instead the pair of lovers who climb the tree.

A Count Zinzendorf relates that Gluck sang the part of an ailing singer from the wings in 1761.^[2]

Roles

Footnotes

1. ^ It might appear [1] that Louis Hurtaut Dancourt and Pierre-Louis Moline played roles in the Vienna production, perhaps as dramaturges. But Dancourt arrived in Vienna in 1762, and Bruce Alan Brown in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera credits Moline only with the recasting of the spoken dialogue in verse for the Paris version.
2. ^ Bruce Alan Brown and Julian Rushton: "Gluck" in Grove Music Online

External links

• vocal score and parts to the Paris version at IMSLP
• Vadé's works at UNT (click on bottom link and scroll about a third of the way down to Le Poirier)
• data on Le Poirier at césar
• Le Poirier remis 1772 par M. Anseaume avec de nouveaux airs de M. de Saint-Amant