L’Enfant et Les Sortilèges, which premièred in Monte Carlo in 1925, is an opera for children. The mind boggles at the difficulty of staging the spells; and that is one of the reasons why it is not performed more often.
A child is punished by his mother for being naughty and throws a tantrum, mutilating everything in sight—animals, birds, insects, trees, plants, books, wallpaper—all of which are played and sung by humans.
Maurice Ravel and Colette’s Fantaisie Lyrique, directed by Jun Aguni and conducted by Ryusuke Numajiri, is a series of music hall turns and revue sketches, offering operetta, ballet, mime and choir singing.
An armchair and bergère (Louis XV chair) do a stately dance. A grandfather clock, having had its pendulum broken, no longer knows what time it is. An 18th century princess steps out of the torn pages of a children’s fairy tale, distraught, her love story no longer having an end.
A large teapot and small Chinese teacup are broken. I felt they could, at any moment, join Lumière (the very French Maurice Chevalier candlestick) in Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and sing “Be Our Guest”.
A poked fire leaps out of the fireplace to become a fiery red dragon-like monster, with dancing flames. The numbers in a maths book, full of impossible maths exercises, attack the child. Two cats meow and have sex. Three frogs dance in the Broadway musical manner.
The ungrateful, lazy, bored 6 to 7-year-old boy is played by an adult woman, Chloé Briot, wearing a boy’s short trousers. Why not cast a boy to do the acting?
Jun Aguni’s productions of Maurice Ravel and Colette’s L’Enfant et les Sortilegès and Puccini’s Suor Angelica were performed as a double-bill by Tokyo’s National Theatre and both operas can be watched together free on the OperaVision channel.