L'Africaine2

History, Myth and Music in a Theme of Exploration: Some Reflections on the Musico-Dramatic Language of Meyerbeer's L'Africaine

Part II

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By Robert Ignatius Letellier

Other articles by Robert Ignatius Letellier at this site

Note: The following article was first presented in 1991, and was published in "Meyerbeer und das europäische Musiktheater", ed. Sieghart Döhring and Arnold Jacobshagen, Laaber 1998, pp. 148-168. Details at http://www.uni-bayreuth.de/departments/FIMT/ . Published at Meyerbeer Fan Club website with the express permission of the author.

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(music to be inserted)

Similarly, in Act 4 much dramatic effect is lost by the omission of the Choeur des Sacrificateurs which reinforces the fate of the shipwrecked Portuguese who are seen being dragged away to their deaths under the poisonous manchineel trees. The supposed death of Inez can be presumed, while the departure of the crowd after the sacrificial procession leaves the stage naturally empty for the entrance of the enraptured Vasco to begin his soliloquy ("O Paradis"). How much this chorus should be part of the dramatic-thematic structure becomes powerfully apparent when after the cantabile the sacrificers return and threaten Vasco's life, his cabaletta ("Conduisez-moi vers ce navirell) encapsulated by the theme of their chorus. All of this is apposite to the overall structure of the act, and the logic of its musical integration.

The same applies to the music associated with the poison tree. The first reference occurs when Nelusko describes its fatal effects on the prisoners in Act 4. This music recurs in Act 5 when he and Selika arrange to meet on the promontory overlooking the sea where the tree grows. The luminous harmonies associated with the deadly tree, and hence with death itself, recur when Selika breathes in the fatal fragrance, and in the postlude to her death scene which brings the mysterious, ethereal sounds to their high point. Of all the recent revivals, only the San Carlo and Maggio Musicale included this postlude (San Francisco 1988 half includes it).

To omit these bars is inexplicably to disregard the tonal dramatic movement of this scene, and to ignore the harmonic unity of its dramatic imagination. It is the logical culmination of the manchineel music, appropriate to Selika's death and the natural transition to the mystical sounds of the final Choeur aérien) ("C'est ici le séjour de l'éternel amour").

Unless the full potential of Meyerbeer's musical language is utilized, how is his dramatic conception properly to be appreciated? He was a master of form and attended carefully to every bar of recitative, to the shape of each piece, to the architecture of each act. To disregard his intentions is to deprive his operas of their proper structure and cumulative strength.

2) Some Comments on the Story: Dramatic Coherence and Symbolic

Integration

Ronald Crichton's third observation which stimulates reflection is his reference to "the plot's inconsistencies and impossibilities" and "dramaturgical nonsenses'. But is this really so? Does a closer consideration of the dramatic implications of Scribe's plot allow these negative evaluations to go unchallenged?

L'Africaine is an opera of exploration but in more ways than the ostensible one of Vasco da Gama's famous voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to India. As William Mann has perceptively suggested in his introduction to the opera for the Virgin video, "his portrayal of Vasco, beginning at his enthusiastic first entrance, typifies the Romantic aspect of the fanatical explorer, a projection of Meyerbeer's own indefatigable, constantly exploratory ego". This opera that occupied the composer's creative attention for so long in some ways sums up many of the basic preoccupations of his artistic life.

In what ways then is L'Africaine an opera of exploration? The story not least considers the loyalty of one man to two women as Vasco reacts to Inez and Selika and what they both represent. Inez is his noble Portuguese betrothed, Selika an unknown slave from exotic climes whom Vasco has rescued from death at sea. She is really a queen in her own mysterious country beyond Africa. Herein lies the key to the elaboration of the exploratory theme: Inez and Selika embody ideas beyond their roles as human protagonists in a fated love story. They can even be seen as cultural symbols of the Old and New Worlds respectively. It is part of the richness of great works of art to have multiplicities of meaning, layers of implications reflecting the conscious and unconscious intentionality of the artist's creative vision. Symbolic and allegorical devices require a surface meaning acceptable and understandable in itself and yet impregnated with underlying meaning and deeper purposes that open to the emotional and intellectual explorations of the work. The characters of L'Africaine co-ordinate convincingly as actors in a human drama, but are also at a deeper level participants in a symbolic conflict. Meyerbeer was a broadly cultured man and a painstaking researcher. In creating L'Africaine, he was a reader of Camoens's great epic of the Portuguese nation, the Lusiads. His deep interest in his texts, and constant interference in their creation, as is well known, frequently put his relationship with Scribe under pressure. Many of his own ideas were incorporated into the final version of the libretto, and after Scribe's death he requested the help of the German authoress Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer for the versification of his modifications.

Those familiar with the Lusiads will know it as one of the Renaissance imitations of the ancient Homeric epic, and that it depicts the spiritual destiny of the Portuguese in rich symbolism and elaborate literary device allegory not least among them. The Lusiads is also about loyalty in the context of a great confrontation of an old world with a new one, of west with east, of Christianity with paganism, as Vasco da Gama brings Portugal to India. All this is to be found In one form or another in L'Africaine. The clash of loyalties central to Vasco's problems emerge from the meeting of old and new worlds. All that is culturally his own is challenged by new and intoxicating forces from an unknown world. His identity as a devout, late medieval Portuguese nobleman is threatened by his new responses as an enterprising, ambitious and independent Renaissance man as the explorers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries so demonstrably were. Seen in this context, Inez becomes the embodiment of the values and traditions of Medieval Christian civilization, including those of romantic love. She represents the Old World at its best. Selika comes to represent the opposite, all the enticing and beautiful qualities of a new world which is full of new challenges and dangers and also vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Each of these two worlds have their ramifications in the other characters of the opera. Don Pedro stands for the old Portuguese world as well, but for very different aspects f rom those of Inez. He is the ambitious and treacherous side of the Portuguese mercantile spirit, a chivalry in decadence, but still masquerading as the authentic representative-of the ancient knightly code of honour. Hence he is determined to marry Inez and propagate the traditional but corrupt link between the good and the bad elements in Portuguese culture.

Nelusko, similarly, provides the "savage" dimension to the exotic ethos. Wild and passionate, he is devoted to a noble if primitive code of honour, but is also prepared to exercise treachery and cunning in its protection as when he tries to assassinate Vasco as he sleeps.

The attitudes of Don Pedro and Nelusko are in their turn echoed by other lesser figures who belong to the particular worlds of these two characters, representatives in fact of established religion. The hostility of Don Pedro and Nelusko is given actual expression by the Grand Inquisitor in the Portuguese world, and the High Priest in the Oriental one. The first orders Vasco to be imprisoned when in his outrage at the prejudice and blindness of the Royal Council, Vasco insults them. The latter represents the religious zeal of an exotic people fanatically opposed to the intrusion of an alien group, who demand that their queen swear an oath against the invaders, lead the shipwrecked Portuguese to their deaths and would kill Vasco were it not for the intervention of Selika. To save Vasco she must pretend that he is already her husband one of their own people by adoption. The effect is of a rejection of his natural personality as he finds himself imprisoned in a strange culture, this being dramatically symbolized in the bridal cup he is required to drink by the High Priest as a pledge of his love for Selika and his identification as one of them. The potion clouds his senses, and temporarily induces a new persona so that he is plunged intoxicatedly into the sensuous rapture of the tropical paradise, far from the stage of world history and his search for enduring fame as an explorer.

His love scene with Selika in Act 4 is thus ironically a type of subconscious impulse to peaceful oblivion. The voice of his Portuguese destiny, represented as always by Inez and the farewell to the Tagus, intrudes disturbingly into this paradise prison of ravished senses. In the same way, it is Inez at the end of Act 2 who, at the sacrifice of her own private destiny with Vasco, offers herself to Don Pedro in order to secure the freedom of her beloved so that he can realize his destiny, what Vasco consistently calls his "immortality' (both in addressing the Royal Council in Act I and the sacrificers in Act 4). Inez becomes a messenger of destiny, who helps to free Vasco from the pernicious forces that try to keep him from his high calling, whether through rancour and envy in Portugal or emotional temptation and death in the tropics. If Don Pedro is a type of Cyclops to Vasco's Odysseus, then Selika becomes a type of Calypso with Inez a Penelope always beckoning him on to his true calling.

Significantly both forms of imprisonment originate in the chief religious protagonists of either culture either from the Grand Inquisitor who has Vasco put in a cell, or from the High Priest who enchains his senses by administering a narcotic to subjugate his consciousness. Thus in a recurrent motif of grand opéra, the representatives of religion are painted in black colours as the enemies of noble idealism. Verdi would develop the theme further: the Marquis of Posa's enlightened humanism is crushed by the terror of the Inquisition; the pure ingenuousness of Radames and Aida is entombed by the Priests of Ra. The theme is central to the concerns of both Les Huguenots and Le Prophète. In the first, the dedication of Marcel and Nevers, each a representative of a pure ideal, are done to death by the forces of religious-political fanaticism; in the second, John of Leyden, a genuinely pious man, is manipulated by the Anabaptists for their own chiliastic-theocratic ends. The deaths of John, Berthe and Fidès like those of Raoul, Valentine and Marcel (and of Masaniello and Fenella in La Muette de Portici, or of Eleazar and

Rachel in La Juive, for that matter), disturbingly dramatizes the fate of the pure of heart at the hands of a cynical or fanatical expediency.

This theme is developed at length in L'Africaine. Virtually every appearance of Vasco is in the context of such a conflict and no more dramatically than in the Sc:Lhne des Eveques, the Royal Council that constitutes the body of Act 1. Here Vasco idealistically presents his plans for discovering the new route to India round Africa for the greater glory of Portugal (and of himself) to the assembled religious and political dignitaries of the realm.

From the beginning his fiery words are received with dismay, outrage and consistent opposition. The Church sees him as a dangerous free-thinker and flouter of traditional authority; his rivals wish to pre-empt his discoveries and take his glory for themselves. Only Don Alvar in the whole of the Council provides an honourable voice of encouragement and support. (In this his role is analogous to that of Nevers in Les Huguenots who in the Blessing of the Daggers makes a similarly lonely and heroic stand against the massed fanaticism of his own peers and coreligionists.) Vasco becomes the voice of a new age in the assembly of a moribund world view and its blind or unscrupulous adherents who instinctively oppose the new and disturbing challenge.

This heroic theme is sustained in the other appearances of Vasco in Acts 2, 3 and 4. In Act 2 when, threatened by his inability to solve the mystery of the route around Africa, Vasco has drawn his conceptual map of the coast of Africa on the prison wall, it is Selika who with tragic irony, and fatefully for herself., reveals to Vasco the presence of Madagascar off the coast, and hence the north-east route through the Mozambique Channel. Vasco's rapturous reaction to Selika is not a declaration of love as she mistakenly believes (and many careless commentators on the opera with her). but the expression of his overwhelming gratitude which re-kindles his dream of discovery and immortality.

Similarly, in Act 3 Vasco confronts Don Pedro on board the latter's own ship in mid-ocean in order to warn him against Nelusko's treachery and so to save his Portuguese compatriots (with Inez among them). But Don Pedro, the blind embodiment of prejudice and personal malice, accuses Vasco of selfish intention, and very nearly ends the explorer's life there and then, before the completion of his mission.

In Act 4, at the very moment when Vasco has realized his dream in his enraptured greeting to his new-found paradise in the east, tie is surrounded by the native inhabitants who intend to kill him. His agonized and melodically haunting pleas are not so much for his life as for the survival of his heroic achievement.

Ironically, it is only because of the love of Selika that Vasco is able to fulfil his high destiny symbolically in union with Inez when the Queen allows them to depart in Vasco's ship for Portugal. Selika's attachment to Vasco proves deadly to her. She is irresistibly drawn to love him and twice in the opera she saves him from the mortal hostility shown to him by her own culture: in Act 2 when she defends him from Nelusko's murderous intentions, and in Act 4 when she rescues him from death at the hands of her people by claiming him to be her husband. Vasco, it must be emphasized, never evinces anything but a kindly, even paternalistic, attitude to Selika. He does not, as many critics have complained, display a woefully, if not repellent, vacillation between Selika and Inez. Vie consistently loves Inez in whom is personified all his chivalrous and Renaissance aspiration. Both his duets with Selika are the outcome of forms of intoxication be it his rapture at the disclosure she makes about the African route, or the consequences of the love-potion which induces a paradisal oblivion in a context in which he believes Inez to be dead anyway. Inez is on both occasions sufficient reason for calling him back to the active dynamic of his heroic enterprise. In each case he is pulled from Selika's embrace by her sobering intrusion: in Act 2 when she enters the prison at the end of the duet to announce the freedom she has just purchased for him by agreeing to marry Don Pedro, and in Act 4 when the nuptial celebrations are broken in upon by her distant singing of Vasco's farewell to the Tagus. The Portuguese couple are seen together only once when Vasco finds Inez alive in the Ctueen's garden and they share a moment of joyful reunion before Selika comes upon them and has Vasco taken away. She releases both of them, leaving herself with only the sad option of death. Indeed, Selika has a tragic premonition of death the moment she first sets eyes on Inez. The eerie chromatic harmonies of the few brief bars of this scene are cold with mortal presentiment and a master stroke of characterization central to an understanding of Selika's personality.

Death comes because of her inability to accept Vasco's origins and calling, his very alienness which is perceived by Nelusko. By eventual and fatalistic acceptance of the truth that Vasco can never be hers, and by actions of compassion, she sacrifices herself for his love. Her only meeting with Inez is not so much a confrontation, but rather the final stage of her own inner development. Moved by her selfless love for Vasco and her sympathy for Inez, she is able to make the heroic resolve to save them both even at the cost of her own life which is freely given. The moment of her spiritual resolution is reached in the sudden blossoming of one of Meyerbeer's most exquisite and moving melodies. Dramatically and musically, it is a special and beautiful moment.

In the operatic worlds created by Scribe and Meyerbeer, the highest expression of spiritual idealism are just such sublime resolutions that lead to freely offered self-sacrifice. Raoul, Valentine and Marcel give themselves to death as martyrs for love, tolerance and compassion; John of Leyden deliberately expiates the nexus of crimes in which he has only half-wittingly become enmeshed by choosing to die and is freely joined by his Mother. His drinking song is an ironic observation on his traitorous guests, and really the exultant theme of his death in loving communion with Fidès. But the ideal is given no purer expression than in L'Africaine where Selika's decision is made entirely of herself with no external pressures forcing her action. The love she realizes with Vasco in the Act 4 duet is a chimera, a delusory paradise. a "doux transport" induced by circumstance and drugs. She realizes only too well that Vasco cannot love her voluntarily and this is the motivation of her self-immolation. By seeking death under the manchineel tree, she turns to the nature of her own world to seek the paradisal oblivion prefigured in the love potion and promised by the blossoms of poisonous fragrance. Vasco and Inez must flee the cloying rapture of the new paradise if they are to realize their heroic destiny. Selika must tragically confront the ultimate loneliness, and in her love-death embraces the mortal instincts so readily incipient in her tropical world of tempest, fierce rituals, sacrifice, soporific drugs and poisonous trees. Thus she is drawn into a mystical fusion of nature and spirit, interestingly similar to the indigenous animist religion of Madagascar. This is the meaning of the final Choeur aérien in which the voices of her dying hallucinations become the reality of objective observation, rather in the manner of a morality play, as the limits of the real world break down and merge into myth. The advent of the Portuguese has brought destruction to this new world which has absorbed its native Selika and taken her back to itself, a proto-victim of the heroic endeavour of colonialism.

L'Africaine is thus richly textured and thematically counterpointed. Every main theme has a series of variants and echoes. The love, compassion and self-sacrifice of Selika. which is dramatically central to the story, finds resonance in the actions of other characters. Love for Vasco is similarly Inez's chief motivation. While Selika dominates the last two acts, it is Inez who is the chief protagonist in the first two. Her Ballad of the Tagus is not only the expression of the heroic calling of the Portuguese hero, but also a personal love song to Vasco.

The finale to Act 2 is motivated and dominated entirely by Inez! her themes flower one after the other in pages that are amongst Meyerbeer is finest lyric inspirations. Her long melody of parting is an anguished farewell to Vasco, having sacrificed her hoped-for happiness to set him free. Like Selika later in the tropics, she has offered herself for Vasco's sake so that he will be free to realize his heroic destiny. Her lament is central to the chief thematic consequences of the story as later re-enacted more fatefully by Selika. The two women, opposing each other in the archetypal blond-dark polarity, yet unified at a deeper level as halves of the single anima, are thus linked in their actions of self-sacrificing love. In Act 3 their voices are united for a brief moment in their shared anguish and concern for the man they both love. Rightly, Inez comes to share Selika's theme noble resolve in their Act 5 duet in which the two women confront each other individually for the first and only time: Selika's natural antipathy for her rival is transformed by compassion and empathy into forgiveness. It is thus most appropriate that in an opera about sacrificial love and parting, Vasco's goodbye and Inez's tragic farewell should dominate the short lyrical overture. Both are, however, themes of Portuguese heroism: at the end it is Selika who faces death while Vasco and Inez sail away into new life which she has made possible. What, indeed, should the opera properly be called: Vasco da Gama or L'Africaine?

While Inez and Selika both love Vasco, and Vasco loves Inez, the other important character of the opera, Nelusko, is also part of this general situation of love requited and lost. His motivation is an unswerving devotion to his Queen, and it is in his great scene in Act 2 ("Pour l'honneur de notre souveraine") that he first expresses all his love for Selika. His hatred for Vasco which bursts out in the second part of his aria is similarly determined by his love for her. Not only is this jealousy, but also an instinctive understanding of the dangers that Vasco's alien temperament and ambition pose for Selika's integrity as a woman and monarch of a distant people. Her unquestioning and self-sacrificing love for Vasco is evident from their first appearance in Act 1 where the explorer is able to wring a sad and defenseless response from her loving heart, breaking down her proud reserve before the council of her captors. Nelusko must interpose with savage firmness to remind her of status and duty as leader of her people. His words of defiance to Don Pedro further tragically and prophetically depict the misfortune and slavery of his people as a consequence of the Portuguese arrival in his world; does the origin of a man sold as a slave matter any more than the origin of beasts of burden?

Nelusko thus becomes the custodian of his own primitive but noble culture, especially as it is uniquely embodied in Selika. His personal love for her is ultimately stronger than his public allegiance though, since in Act 4 Selika asks him to perjure himself in order to save Vasco by swearing that she and Vasco are married. Nelusko obeys even though it costs his integrity and is against his instinctive detestation. The gauge of his agonized indecision can be measured in the introductory bars of his cavatina "L'avoir tant adorée" which are given to two cor anglais, and recall the torment of Eleazar in La Juive, similarly faced with a tearing decision between personal love and religious loyalty.

It is the measure of Nelusko's love that he forces himself to do what Selika asks him to do although this is grievous to him. In this way he enters the company of Selika and Inez in their gestures of self-sacrifice. But this action is only the rehearsal for even greater- offering: in the departure of Vasco and Inez, Nelusko sees at last the freedom of his Queen from alien influences and the possibility of realizing his love for her, unaware that this will actually lead to his own death. When he finds Selika dying under the manchineel tree his love means that he cannot live without her and he must offer his own life with hers so that in death they can be together. The few brief bars of their duet on the promontory (which it must be recalled were moved there from Act 3 by Fétis) are suffused in the gentlest pathos, and bring to a high point in terms of a cleansing romantic melancholy this unfulfilled relationship of loyalty, love and sacrifice so much woven into the texture of the opera, and which quietly but eloquently underscores the more tragic relationship between Selika and Vasco. Certainly in the last two acts of the opera Nelusko undergoes a convincing development in character echoing that of Selika herself.

There is another aspect of Nelusko's character though; the face of the savage fanatic. His first words are an exhortation to Selika to remain true to vows of her gods and people and not to answer the questions put to her. He immediately appears as custodian of the values of their exotic culture and religion. Similarly, when Selika toils his plan to murder Vasco in prison, his anguished response is couched in a prayer to their gods and reinforces his role of custodian. His hatred of Vasco is not only motivated by personal jealousy, but has a deeper symbolic implication. In Vasco he sees a profound threat to his own people who will suffer from the intrusion of the alien European civilization. His personal aversion to Vasco is carried over into a general detestation of the Portuguese and the disruption with which they threaten to destroy the tropics. Hence he artfully plays on Don Pedro's political and commercial ambitions by offering to serve as steersman and so open the route to the east to him. This gives Nelusko his central position in Act 3, an act he dominates both figuratively and literally as pilot. His position at the helm is one that should visually dominate the stage since his action controls it dramatically. All on board Don Pedro's caravel are fellow travellers in a ship of death with their murderer at the helm. He steers them into storm, reef and death at the hands of his fellow countrymen.His famous Ballad of Adamastor is the centrepiece of the act and makes his role very clear in symbolic terms. It is also the most obvious clue to the spirit of the Lusiads which undoubtedly coloured Meyerbeer's responses to the libretto and his dramatic intentions for the opera. Nelusko tells the sailors the legend of the giant of the tempest to whom they are all held in thrall. Their fate in the face of vast and uncontrollable elements can be only a graveless death. The sailors who initially encourage Nelusko to sing his ballad find themselves overcome with superstitious dread and slip away in terror. His legend dramatically juxtaposes the pagan elemental deity, Adamastor with the Christian St Dominic whom the sailors evoke at the beginning of the act in their morning prayer, so intensifying the dramatic symbolism of opposites in conflict which is the chief impulse of the plot.

Nelusko's evil intentions are discerned only by those Portuguese who are pure in heart. Hence the noble Don Alvaro warns Don Pedro early in the act of his suspicions of Nelusko's treachery, only to have his fears contemptuously dismissed. But typical of the pattern of resonances in this story, Don Alvaro's action presages one of greater import when Vasco arrives on his hired ship to warn of danger. In spite of his hatred of Don Pedro, he has come to try to save the lives of his fellow Portuguese, but all in vain. Don Pedro's malice towards Vasco is interrupted by the fruition of Nelusko's treachery when the tempest bursts suddenly on the ships with all the unexpectedness of a tropical squall. Out of the fury and the wreckage come the savage natives clambering aboard at Nelusko's behest and initiating a carnage of the Portuguese. Nelusko seems to share in this unleashed fury, just as his people are an extension of the wild nature of their tropical home, emerging as they do from the waves and foam of the storm. In this light Nelusko's behaviour is not so much treachery as the expression of a righteous anger, an elemental indignation at foreign intrusion. The destruction of the Portuguese becomes a sacrifice, a religious propitiation of dark and savage gods whose cult Nelusko has embodied until they are actually confronted in the rituals of Act 4. Nelusko becomes larger than life, a personification of the wild aspect of an exotic people, exulting on the one hand in the sacrificial death of an enemy, while on the other continuing the Rousseauesque tradition of the noble savage who with his Queen succumbs symbolically to the effects of a foreign, Occidental invasion of his unspoiled Eden.

A close analysis of aspects of the plot, then, suggests that dramaturgically L'Africaine functions with surprising consistency and a symbolic unity that is hardly contradictory, impossible or nonsensical. Careful reading, attention to both the literary and musical language of the text, with an eye to the modal mix of epic, historical and mythical elements, reveals a complex and sustained musico-dramatical conception that can only increase admiration for the composer and the poet, and sharpen perception of what William Mann calls "the delights of Meyerbeer's operas, so rich in invention, so musically adventurous".

NOTES

1. See Patrick Schmidt in The Tenth Muse. A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (London, 1971) pp.210-11, for a cogent assessment of Scribe's significance:

"Scribe's contributions to the libretto, both in terms of the works themselves and in terms of his approach to the writing of them, are some of the most far-reaching in operatic history....Rarely has a single librettist been so consistent in controlling history...."

2. It is clear from the as yet unpublished Tagebücher that Meyerbeer's own choice of title was Vasco de Gama. From the time of the revision of the libretto in 1852 until the year of his death, he refers cponsistently to Vasco, hardly ever to Africaine: "Den Plan von 'Vasco durchlesen, um meine Bemerkungen darüber für Scribe niederzuschreiben...." [Tgb. May 16, 1852.]

Meyerbeer's other researches for the revision revela beyond all doubt the Indian emphasis of the work: the characters of Selika and Nelusko, and the actual locale intended for Acts 4 and 5. The confusion caused by the retention of the old title has notoriously been a source of adverse criticism against the dramatic logic and artistic integrity of both librettist and composer. The diaries confirm the composer's intentions and thorough preparatory researches beyond all doubt:

June 16, 1852:

"Auf der Bibliothek....und....einige Bücher über Indien mitnahm, um Recherchen über indische Details für 'Vasco' zu machen.... Abends das grosse Kupferwerk 'L'inde francaise' ganz durchgesehen."

June 27, 1852

"....Aus meiner Wohnung die Kupferstiche aus der indischen Reise von Fürsten Soltikoff geholt."

His findings were carefully passed on to Scribe, as the entry for June 30, 1852 indicates:

"Ich habe Scribe die Lithographien von dem Werke des Fürsten Soltikoff über Indien gegeben."

3. Ronald Crichton, "Sketches for a Portrait of Meyerbeer" Opera, 12:41 (Dec. 1990) 1419-25

4. Crichton, 1425.

5. Crichton, ibid.

6. William Mann. Introduction to the video of the San Francisco performance of L'Africaine (Virgin Classics Opera, 1990), p.7. Mann provides a most succinct and stimulating essay on the opera.

7. Robert Donnington in "The Operatic Tradition" (The History

of Music. The Romantic Era, Oxford 1989) pp. 217 focuses attention on the unconscious effects of images and symbols in the completed work of art:

".... and while of course we do not and should not try to understand it [the artefact] in these terms directly, we do to the feel of it psychologically, which is indeed the very secret of so much great art."

8. Meyerbeer records in his diary as early as 1850:

"....Die 'Louisiade' des Camoens in der französischen übersetzung zu lessen...." [Tgb. Oktober 21, 1850]

9. Peter Conrad, A Song of Love and Death. The Meaning of Opera (London, 1989) p.132 sees Vasco's impulse to heroism as an extension of an imperial colonialism: "His country is his employer certifying his worth and augmented by the booty he brings it. As an organization man, he can't exist without it...."

10. Conrad, ibid.. also reflecting on the clash of cultures, puts the matter more politically: "But the epic mission of empire demands a rigorous inhumanity...- Vasco sailng back to Lisbon as Selika, shamed by the use he has made of her, dies...."

11. The manchineel tree is a central vector in the modal merging of history and myth which characterizes the movement of plot in this opera. With the sea, it is the dominant image of the second half of the story, the symbolic counterpart of the Tagus which represents the western, Portugese world view. The sea is the transition between the two worlds, the field of heroic enterprise for the Portuguese and the wild and unpredictable custodian of the new tropical world which is dominated by the poison tree. This tree is actual and mythical inhabiting both the factual world of history and the fabulous realm of legend. Hence it the appropriate medium for the attainment of the spiritual realities of Selika's paradise. The tree has a botanical reality: the Concise Oxford Dictionary says of it:

"MANCHINEEL, n. W. Ind. tree (Hippomane mancinella) with poisonous and caustic milky sap and acrid apple-like fruit [ f.F. mancinelle f. Sp. manzanilla dim. of manzana apple.]"

The entry in Baker's Dictionary of Fact and Fable captures theis mixture of history and mythology surrounding the traditional understanding of this tree:

"UPAS TREE. The Javanese tree Antiaris toxicaria, the milky juice of which contains a virulent poison and is used for tipping arrows.

Fable has it that a putrid stream rises from it, and that whatever the vapour touches dies. Foersch, a Dutch physician, wrote in 1783, 'Not a tree, nor a blade of grass is to be found in the valley or surrounding mountains. Not a beast or bird, reptile or living thing, lives in the vicinity.' He adds that on 'one occasion 1,600 refugees encamped within 14 miles of it, and all but 300 died within two months'. This 'traveller's tale' has given rise to the figurative use of upas for a corrupting or pernicious influence."

The extent to which the mythology of the poison tree is present in Western literature is indicated in its presence in some of the major novels of the early nineteenth century. In Jean-Paul Richter's Titan one reads that "auf dem Manchinellen-Giftbaum werden die Regentropfen giftig, die von seinen Blättern rollen." (Titan, 20 Jopelperiode. 87 Zykel) Charles Robert Maturin also used the imagery in Melmoth the Wanderer:

"I stand a blasted tree, - I am stuck to the root, -- I wither alone, -- but you are the Upas, under whose poisonous droppings all things living have perished..." (Melmoth the Wanderer, II, ch. x).

12. Mann, p.8.