17th century France played a crucial role in the development of the European fairy tale. During the last half of that century, the oral traditions of the folk began to bubble up into the literary salons of the haute bourgeoisie and the aristocracy orbiting around Louis the XIV\u2019s court. While writers like Marie Catherine d\u2019Aulnoy, Catherine Bernard, Marie-Jeanne Lh\u00e9ritier, and Charles Perrault (among others) used folk and fairy tales to challenge aesthetic norms and comment on contemporary politics, particularly gender politics, they also found in these ancient tales insight into the universal fears and desires that unite us as humans. As we\u2019ll see, details in any particular version of a fairy tale may change over time and space, but there are certain tales\u2014like \u201cLittle Red Riding Hood,\u201d for instance\u2014that, so old and ubiquitous, have spoken and continue to
\nspeak to cultures across our little globe. Little Red\u2014or \u201cThe False Grandmother,\u201d or \u201cLittle Red Cap,\u201d or \u201cThe True History of Little Goldenhood,\u201d or et cetera, et cetera\u2014concerns the crossing of thresholds that have existed since the invention of houses: the threshold between the often tedious safety of the home and the seductive danger of the wilderness; the thresholds between human and animal; between life and death; birth and childhood; childhood and adulthood, and again between adulthood and old age. An early French version of Little Red\u2014most probably the version Charles Perrault grew up hearing in the 1630s features a werewolf called a bzou. He kills the grandmother, puts \u201csome of her flesh in the pantry and a bottle of her blood on the shelf,\u201d and, when our heroine arrives, orders her to eat from the pantry and drink from the bottle. While she eats, a little cat exclaims, \u201cFor shame! The slut is eating her grandmother\u2019s flesh and drinking her grandmother\u2019s blood.\u201d And yet, despite this admonition, our heroine undergoes a kind of transformation after her cannibalistic communion: she internalizes the wisdom of the grandmother and builds on it, for\u2014in this early version- Little Red doesn\u2019t die; she escapes the wolf as her grandmother couldn\u2019t, using both wit and a childish, scatological playfulness. (Before the bzou can eat her, she tells him that she has to relieve herself. Of course, she\u2019s lying. The werewolf suggests she \u201cdo it in the bed\u201d\u2014that is, in a bedpan\u2014but Red insists that she has to \u201cdo it outside.\u201d The bzou lets her go, calling after her, \u201cAre you doing a load? Are you doing a load?\u201d while she sneaks away to safety). Among those 17th century French literati working in the fairy tale form, Charles Perrault is undoubtedly the most famous, his collection of literary fairy tales\u2014 Histoires ou contes du temps pass\u00e9\u2014published just as the 1600s wound to a close. Perrault and his crew of contemporaries sought to class up the more vulgar impulses of the oral tradition (Perrault\u2019s Red Riding Hood doesn\u2019t eat her grandmother\u2019s flesh, drink her blood, or escape by an appeal to her bowels. Red is eaten by the wolf, sure, but the horror is undermined by the jokey moral appended to the tale: \u201cNow, as then, \u2018tis simple truth\u2014Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!\u201d). Perrault and his colleagues sought to replace what they saw as the arid classicism of writers like Jean Racine with modern forms that grew from French soil; instead of looking back to the well-manicured gardens of Greece and Rome, they aimed to experiment, to make new, to find inspiration in the wilds of the French countryside. And make new they did, their experiments with the literary fairy tale becoming so famous, so ubiquitous, that they remain the bedrock on which even 21st century under-standings of the form are built. Of course, commenters on Rossini\u2019s La cenerentola inevitably summon Charles Perrault, as it\u2019s Perrault\u2019s reworking of that ancient story\u2014Cinderella, let\u2019s call it\u2014that serves as the rough architecture of Rossini\u2019s collaboration with librettist Jacopo Ferretti. While Perrault\u2019s version is perhaps the most famous of Cinderella stories, it certainly isn\u2019t the oldest to see print, even in France (in 1558,four-teen years after he murdered himself with a sword, Bonaventure des P\u00e9riers achieved posthumous renown for his collection of stories Nouvelles r\u00e9cr\u00e9a-tions et joyeux devis, which contained the delightfully titled Cinderella tale, \u201cOf a Young Girl Nicknamed Ass Hide and How She Got Married with the Help of Little Ants\u201d). More famously, we have Neapolitan poet Giambattista Basile\u2019s \u201cCenerentola,\u201d also published posthumously, a tale featured prominently in his Pentamerone (a two- volume collection of stories released in 1634 and 1636). Rossini had, prior to writing La cenerentola, regularly frequented Basile\u2019s Naples, and thus it\u2019s hard to imagine that Rossini\u2014or Ferretti, for that matter\u2014was ignorant of Basile\u2019s Cinderella. Furthermore, Basile\u2014neglected for some time after his death\u2014saw in the 1800s a resurgence of interest predica-ted on a European fascination with folk and fairy tales, a fascination that grew directly out of those French experiments in the late 1600s. Basile was not only well known in Italy at the time, but throughout Europe. In the 1822 edition of their fairy-tale collection Kinder und Hausm\u00e4rchen, the Grimm Brothers extoll the virtues of Basile\u2019s work, calling it \u201cthe best and richest [collection of folk tales] that had been found by any nation.\u201d While there\u2019s not much evidence to suggest Rossini and Ferretti knew the Grimms\u2019 work, the Grimms interest in Cinderella was, again, a symptom of a continent-wide fascination. The first, two-volume edition of the Grimm Brother\u2019s fairy tales had been published in 1812 (volume one) and 1815 (volume two), and by the release of the third edition it was already a best seller. Called \u201cAschenputtel\u201d (in essence: an unkempt, ash-covered girl), the Grimm\u2019s version of Cinderella is much more violent than many of its contemporaries. (From the very first edition, Aschenputtel\u2019s evil sisters, in order to fit their lumpy feet into Aschenputtel\u2019s golden slipper, lop off bits of their toes and heel, their crude surgeries exposed by magi-cal pigeons that point out to the prince the blood seeping from the seemingly well-fitting slipper. Yet the story grows darker still in the later editions of Kinder, the Grimms employing at the story\u2019s end the same pigeons to peck out the sisters\u2019 eyes, leaving them blind \u201cfor all their days.\u201d) \u201cAschenputtel\u201d was first published only five years before the debut of Rossini\u2019s La cenerentola. Likewise, Cin-derella was immensely popular in En-gland during the first decades of 19th century. In 1803 and 1804, the Drury Lane Theatre in London produced several musical productions of Cinderella called pantomimes. Their playbills suggest Perrault\u2019s influence, the December 1803 pantomime titled, \u201cCinderella; Or, The Glass Slipper\u201d (the glass slipper, folklorists agree, one of Perrault\u2019s signature innovations). Similarly, an 1804 Drury Lane production of Cinderella pro-claims, \u201cThe New Grand Allegorical Pantomime Spectacle of Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper, having been again received throughout with the most un-bounded and universal applause, [\u2026] will be repeated every evening till further notice.\u201d The musical pantomime was performed for fifty-one nights. Cinderella was in the air. Thus it is no surprise that Rossini and Jacopo Ferretti turned to Cinderella when tasked to compose a new opera to be staged on St. Stephen\u2019s Day at the Teatro Valle in Rome. Rossini was vexed to learn that his original idea\u2014an opera based on the exploits of Fran\u00e7oise de Foix, legendary mistress of Francis I of France\u2014was deemed too salacious by papal censors (Ferretti himself would later write that Francesca di Foix \u2014as they were calling it\u2014was \u201cone of the least moral comedies of the French theatre in an epoch in which it was beginning to be known as an infamous school of libertinism\u201d). Two days before Christmas, Rossini aban-doned Francesca, Ferretti suggesting instead the subject of Cinderella. Rossini immediately agreed. Ferretti reports that by \u2026 Christmas Rossini had finished the Introduzione. The cavatina of Don Magnifico on Saint Stephen\u2019s day (December 26); the duet for the tenor and soprano on San Giovanni (December 27). In short: I wrote the verses in 22 days and Rossini the music in 24. This is quick work, even for Rossini, and while Ferretti\u2019s libretto leans rather heavily on Charles- Guillaume Etienne\u2019s verses for Nicol\u00f2 Isouard\u2019s opera Cendrillian (1810), both Rossini and Ferretti were able to riff so wonderfully on the story by virtue of its ubiquity. Ferretti attests to his know-ledge of the various versions of the tale in a note to the original publication of his libretto, alluding even to the \u201ctalking cat\u201d of the early French version that inspired Perrault: If Cinderella does not appear in the company of a wizard who works fantastic miracles or a talking cat, and does not lose a slipper at the ball (but instead gives away a bracelet) [\u2026] it should not be conside-red a crimenalesae [\u2026] but rather a necessity of staging at the Teatro Valle and a gesture of respect for the delicacy of Roman taste which does not permit on the stage what might please in a fairy-tale beside the fire.
\nSo. If, as you attend to Rossini\u2019s La cenerentola, you find yourself preferring an evil step-mother\u2019s scheming to Don Magnifico\u2019s buffo comedy; if you\u2019re bothered that Alidoro the philosopher works behind the scenes instead of a fairy godmother or magical pigeons; if you ache for slender feet slipping into glass (or golden!) slippers and chafe at the thought of matching bracelets; then attend carefully to Angelina\u2019s canzone in the first scene, try to remember how varied fairy tales can be as she sings softly of a king who\u2019s grown weary of a lonely, single life, listen to her sing of the one nobody knew, the modest, simple, ash-faced girl who was kind and true, focus less on La cenerentola\u2019s diffe-rences from the tales you know and consider instead the ways it reflects and illuminates a tale as old and varied as the people who\u2019ve told it. Consider the human heart that beats beneath these fairy-made garments and wonder at what that heart might tell us about ourselves.<\/p>\n
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Joseph Thomas is an English and Comparative Literature professor at San Diego State University and the Director of the National Center for the Study of Children\u2019s Literature.
\nHe is also the author of Strong Measures (Make Now Press, 2007) and Poetry\u2019s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children\u2019s Poetry (Wayne State UP, 2007).<\/p>\n
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Maria Callas – “Nacqui all’affano e al pianto” Angelina Final Rond\u00f2 – “La Cenerentola” – “La Cenerentola, ossia La bont\u00e0 in trionfo” (“Cinderella, or Goodness Triumphant”) (1817).
\nLIVE in Paris 06\/05\/1963 Concert at Th\u00e9\u00e2tre des Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es. M.\u00b0 Georges Pr\u00eatre conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique de la Radio-Television Fran\u00e7aise.<\/p>\n
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