Word: merteuil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...single-mindedness that characterizes them both, and also by Gregoire's increasing involvement in the court. This also means involvement with the unofficial reigning queen of the court, the widow de Blayac (Fanny Ardant). The widow de Blayac is almost a spiritual twin of Dangerous Liaisons' calculating Marquise de Merteuil. Both of them rule with Machiavellian minds and Voltairian wits. She is the master player that Gregoire has to confront from whom he learns to play the game of seduction as well as the game...
...most despicable (and most entertaining) characters in the play are La Marquise de Merteuil (Lucia Brawley '99) and Le Vicomte de Valmont (Bryan Leach '00). These two connivers, who are obviously meant for each other, spend much of the show trading quips. Their relationship is based on a twisted love: rather than acting on their mutual feelings, they compete against each other. Merteuil and Valmont make a wager that involves deceiving and seducing most of the other members of the cast. The problem is that they cannot avoid becoming entangled in their own web, and their game becomes dangerous...
...comes the composer-librettist team of Conrad Susa and Philip Littell, who have seized upon Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 18th century epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses as a fitting subject for an opera. It is an inspired choice: in the machinating Marquise de Merteuil and the voluptuary Vicomte de Valmont the composer has two soulless soul mates whose knowledge of the ways of love make The Art of War look like a kindergarten training manual. What Susa and Littell have created in The Dangerous Liaisons, now getting its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera, is nothing short...
...serious one, is that Susa never quite delivers the musical climax that the material demands. It is quite canny to stage simultaneously the death of Valmont and his inamorata, Madame de Tourvel, aptly illustrating their bond beyond the grave. But here, and in the final scene, when Merteuil is snubbed, shunned and ruined by the pox, the music needs to be bolder, richer; the composer must make clear exactly how he feels about what has happened to his characters as, say, Berg does at the end of Wozzeck...
Love letters may be back in fashion--in a different form. The Abelards and Heloises, the Vicomtes de Valmont and the Marquises de Merteuil of today communicate via e-mail, the technology of the '90s, not via the post, known affectionately as snail mail...