Discover Ravel's Opera L'Heure espagnole
Ravel’s one-act musical comedy, where an amorous clockmaker’s wife has fun while her husband is out.
Introduction | Synopsis | Characters
Introduction
Although sung in French, L’heure espagnole is set in Spain and imbued with Spanish dance rhythms. Its title refers to ‘Spanish time’, meaning the way that they keep time in Spain, i.e. not very accurately. Ravel uses horological devices throughout the work: ticking clocks and sounding chimes, three metronomes tick-tock through the prelude. The winding up of the clock becomes a neat allegory for sexual drive – the mechanism that drives the plot.
Ravel is not popularly associated with opera, being more known for his piano and orchestral compositions. He only wrote two operatic works: this, from a popular play of the time by Franc-Nohain, and the surreal two-act lyric fantasy L’enfant et les sortilèges, to a libretto by French novelist Colette.
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Synopsis
Setting: Originally set in 18th-century Toledo, but updated in the current Royal Opera production to modern dress
Muscular mule driver Ramiro takes his watch to the clockmaker’s shop to get it fixed. It is Thursday, and the clockmaker is about to go out to wind all the town’s clocks.
Ramiro waits in the shop, to the annoyance of the clockmaker’s wife Concepción who wants him out of the way as she is expecting her lover, the poet Gonzalve. To get rid of Ramiro she asks him to carry one of the clocks upstairs.
As Ramiro struggles with the clock, her lover Gonzalve comes in. To Concepción’s annoyance, he seems more interested in spouting verse than love making.
Ramiro comes back, and Concepción sends him off on another chore, hiding her lover in a grandfather clock. Then the stout banker Don Inigo comes calling to woo Concepción. Left unattended, Inigo decides to play an amusing joke by hiding in a clock.
There then follows much comic to-ing and fro-ing as Concepción’s lover Ramiro and her plump admirer Inigo hide in different clocks and the poor muleteer Ramiro has to keep carrying them up and downstairs.
Ramiro’s willingness to help and his muscular prowess start to impress Concepción and she soon suggests they both go upstairs 'without a clock'.
The watchmaker Torquemada returns to find two men hiding in his clocks and his wife upstairs with the mule driver. The two men explain that they were checking the clocks’ mechanisms and agree to buy them. His wife, suddenly much more content than previously, explains how Ramiro helped move the clocks for her.
As the opera comes to its close, Ramiro sets up further assignations with Concepción. The story ends on an old Italian saying: 'through pure efficiency, the mule driver always gets his way.'
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Characters
Torquemada: The absent-minded clockmaker, who sets off to wind the town’s clocks, leaving his amorous young wife unattended.
Tenor
Concepción: Torquemada’s highly-sexed wife, whose antics are the subject of the opera.
Soprano
Ramiro: The muleteer, who pops into the clockmaker’s shop to get his watch mended and ends up impressing the clockmaker’s wife with his lifting skills.
Baritone
Gonzalve: The student poet, who would rather spout verse than make love to Concepción – much to her frustration.
Tenor
Inigo: The portly banker who makes a beeline for the clockshop when he knows that the clockmaker is out, but ends up stuck in a series of clocks.
Baritone
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