Pauline then sat down at the piano, and as she began to play, the curtain drew back, revealing the oleander trees to be in pots, enormous flowers made of paper, and the outlines of what looked like a little house, inside of which sat Krakamiche, the last of the sorcerers, who was received with much applause, for he was Turgenev, smiling to the audience before resuming the aggrieved face of a sorcerer on the wane. He opened his mouth to sing, and I heard a delicate soprano voice appear, to the laughter of the crowd, for it could not be his, high as his voice was—another was singing for him somewhere in the wings.
The tenor who sings for him could not be here, Giulia whispered to me.
Stella, the sorcerer’s beautiful daughter, was played by Maxine, who clearly relished the major role and was beautiful in her modest costume as the unmarried noble daughter supporting her father during the decline of his powers.
An opéra-bouffe-féerie, Le Dernier Sorcier told the story of an aging sorcerer living in a small hut in the woods with his daughter, Stella, who has enchanted a young Prince, Lelio. The Prince, having seen her while hunting in the woods and fallen in love with her, cannot find her to woo her and despairs, but luckily for him, he is overheard by the Queen of the Fairies, the ruler of the woods. She is plotting to make some mischief at the old wizard’s expense, seeing him as an interloper she has longed to be rid of. She knows of the beautiful Stella and offers the Prince a magical rose, which allows the bearer to be unseen, though only at night.
Giulia continued her asides to me, explaining who it was I saw as they appeared, the delicate girl in the costume of the Queen of the Fairies—a rose wreath in her hair, a diamond star flashing at its center—was Pauline’s daughter Claudie, and the girl acting as the head fairy, Verveine, was her other daughter Marianne. Krakamiche’s no-good, troublesome servant was played by Paul, Pauline’s son—he would sing an aria, to my delight. Prince Lelio was Natalya, who made a surprisingly handsome young prince. This left Firéne absent, but only she could be singing as the voice for Turgenev’s Krakamiche, it seemed to me.
The diminutive Queen, having helped the handsome young Prince in his pursuit of his love, plans some mischief. She sends a delegation of her most loyal fairies, disguised as Cochinese, claiming to bear a gift for the wizard—a magical grass that will restore the sorcerer’s youth and powers. When it instead causes him to dance a waltz that leaves him weak and humiliated, he vows revenge. The second act opens with him hunting through a book of Merlin’s spells for a spell that is a protection from all other magic, the most powerful spell of all. The beautiful Stella tries to get the sorcerer to be content with his decline, saying he has all he needs there in their modest house; but as he won’t hear it and instead keeps searching feverishly, she begins to sing to herself. After two verses, Prince Lelio, made invisible by the rose’s magic and hidden near her, sings the third verse in response, causing her to startle and then, when he drops the rose and is revealed to her, to smile. But this only convinces the sorcerer that his spell has succeeded and his powers are restored. He tries another, summoning a monster to rid his hut of this intruding prince, but instead a goat comes up from the earth and runs from the hut.
This, of course, was Pegasus the pointer, horns hanging from his neck as he struggled to rid himself of them.
In despair, the sorcerer collapses: his daughter and the Prince comfort him. In the final scenes, Stella and Prince Lelio marry and bring the sorcerer out of the woods to live in the Prince’s castle. As they depart, the Queen and her fairies celebrate having the woods entirely under their control again.
The green curtain rang down to much applause and then was parted by the sweetly shy face of Claudie smiling as she led the faeries out to calls for encores. The grateful room shouted bravos and bravas as she curtsied and her diamond star flashed. Cheers changed to laughter when, as the rest of the cast emerged, Turgenev appeared at last in his wizard’s robes, and the laughter increased as Firéne came out behind him, smiling gamely as he touched his throat and pointed to her. Pauline gestured to the tenor and me both, thanking us for making the occasion of the performance possible, and he blew her a kiss while I could only stand still in amazement.
That poor man, Giulia said softly, under her breath.
Thank you for these calls for an encore, but I think we must go, Pauline said. To dinner! Pauline called this from the stage as if summoning us to a charge, and the crowd, already standing at attention, made its way out through the back into the cold garden, the women accepting shawls offered by Pauline’s maid and all of us following the lanterns hung to guide us along the way.