Our Lady of the Revolving Restaurant

Don Quichotte is, by any definition, a slight work. Written near the very end of Massenet’s life as a commission for the Monte Carlo opera, who wanted a vehicle for Feodor Chaliapin, it lacks both the urgency and melodramatic flair of the works on which Massenet had established his reputation decades earlier. The pedestrian libretto, by Massenet’s longtime collaborator Henri Caïn, comes not from Cervantes, but a stage play by Jacques le Lorrain, who died the night after the play’s Paris première and whose few published writings fell quickly into obscurity. The opera is certainly not without its charms; yet if the demand for substantial leading bass roles has kept it in the repertoire – and a good singing actor can transcend some of the libretto’s self-conscious pathos – the shameless exoticism, overt sentimentality and logistical demands…