In Alfred de Musset's worldly wise comedy Le Chandelier (1835), the two-timing heroine recognizes that she is truly and deeply loved by her young admirer Fortunio when he sings a ballad of his own devising, "Si vous croyez que je vais dire..." (I could never say who it is I dare to love). For a Comédie Française production in 1850, Offenbach—young, struggling, and newly hired as the orchestra director—was tapped to set this chanson, which he did the same day. The Fortunio of the moment lacked a compelling singing voice and the song was soon dropped, though the tune—a caressingly ingratiating strophic salon song—caught on to be hummed and whistled all about Paris, gaining renewed popularity with its publication in 1852. Offenbach used it prominently throughout La Chanson de Fortunio, which opened at Les Bouffes-Parisiens on January 5, 1861, though his librettists, Crémieux and Halévy, sidestepped Musset's sophistication and bittersweet cynicism by presenting Fortunio as an old man and his chanson as a distant memory. These very qualities, which loomed as inappropriate to Offenbach's manner—alternating sentimentality with gamy hilarity—appealed strongly to André Messager, whose librettists, G.A. Caillavet and Robert de Flers, remodeled Musset's play for lyric presentation. Fortunio opened at the Opéra-Comique on June 5, 1907, the year in which Messager finished his stint as music director at Covent Garden and became director of the Paris Opéra. In four extensive acts, Fortunio is a through-composed operetta in which music mirrors with discretion and melodic warmth the characters' toying infidelities while registering Fortunio's ideal love with passionate sympathy. With his friend Fauré, Messager was an ardent Wagnerite from his youth, and as a world-bestriding conductor he never ceased to champion Wagner's works; therefore it should occasion no surprise that, in a refined and suavened manner, he adapted Wagnerian procedure—as Fauré would do in his opera Pénélope (1913)—to his own purposes in gracefully shaped phrases and arioso rising into arias and concerted numbers upon a constantly glowing orchestral background. Though not without moments of overt drama, its bourgeois setting and tender attendance upon the vicissitudes of the heart evade the lurid, the sensual (but never the sensuous!), and the violent with the effect of limiting its appeal to connoisseurs. On a more intimate scale, Fortunio is a sort of French Rosenkavalier. Chez Messager, Fortunio's chanson transcends Offenbach's facile sentimentality in a simple yet deeply moving utterance recalling the best of Fauré's middle period mélodies.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi