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By Kenneth LaFave
The Arizona Republic

In August 1792, the French monarchy fell at last to the forces of the 1789 revolution, as King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were taken captive by the ultraradical Jacobins.

As if exploding a dam that held back a mass urge to slaughter, the removal of the royal family from power loosed the Reign of Terror, a 24-month celebration of the idea that only political correctness can save us. Not only aristocrats lost their heads, but priests and writers and children and servants and anyone who said a good word about, or had any ties to, the royal family. And many who just happened to look guilty.

The thousands who visited Dr. Guillotine and came away inches shorter parade before our imagination like long-ago puppets. More recent instances of state-sponsored murder, empowered by technology to kill more people, lurk menacingly around the corner from our comfortable nook in history. The butchery of a few foreigners 200 years ago seems unreal and irrelevant.

Which is where art, in one of its myriad functions, makes a grand entrance.

The French Revolution spawned two major operas, Andrea Chenier and Dialogues of the Carmelites. Many works of art from other genres paint the revolution as heroic, if flawed. Think of the "noble" murdered Marat in Jean-Jacques David's famous painting, or the apotheosis of Robespierre in Abel Gance's film Napoleon.

The operas, on the other hand, portray the revolution as a slaughterhouse for the innocent. At the end of 1958's Dialogues, French composer Francis Poulenc's nuns are led offstage one by one to the executioner, their crime the practice of a religion deemed irrational by the new revolutionary junta. In Chenier, the 1896 Italian opera by Umberto Giordano, a poet is sent to the scaffold for being insufficiently radical.

The nuns and Chenier were real people and died real deaths. However, the true story of Chenier is not identical with the love triangle presented in Giordano's opera.

The real Chenier was born in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) to a French father and a Greek mother. He moved to Paris as a boy to go to school, where he mastered languages and found his calling as a poet. He went to England as secretary to the French ambassador but soon returned, complaining of the exclusivity and stiffness of British society.

Back in France, Chenier's natural bent toward a more relaxed and democratic way of life made him favor the removal of the ancien regime. But when, after the initial glow of optimism in wake of the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the revolution began to take on the character of a power struggle, Chenier grew distrustful of revolutionary leaders such as Robespierre and Marat and wrote poems and essays against them. He sided with the moderate Gerondists against the radical Jacobins. When Charlotte Corday, a Gerondist from Caen, assassinated the Jacobin butcher Marat in his bath, Chenier penned an Ode to Charlotte Corday, here excerpted in paraphrase:

"While on all sides the tears and moans, sincere or feigned, of cowardly and perverted minds consecrate their Marat among the Immortals, the Truth is silent! In her numbed mouth, her tongue, impeded by the trammels of fear, denies the homage due to such a glorious act (as the killing of Marat)! Is it so sweet to live, then? Of what value is life when thought, enslaved beneath a shameful yoke, hides itself timorously?

"One scoundrel less crawls in this slime. Virtue applauds you. Hear the majestic sound of its virile praise, heroic maid!"

Of course, he was arrested. The one true thing about any revolution is that by "freedom of expression" it means the freedom to agree with its principles, not the freedom to call its demigods cowardly, perverted slime.

It was 141 days from Chenier's imprisonment to the day he was beheaded. His greatness as a poet lies in the work he did during that time, putting on paper the inner experience of facing death as a constant possibility. Here's a paraphrase from his best-known poem, La jeune captive, or The Young Prisoner:

"I am only in spring. I want to see the harvest, and like the sun traversing the seasons, I wish to achieve my year. Brilliant on my stem, the honor of the garden, the sunlight I see is but that of the morning. I want to have my day."

While imprisoned, Chenier befriended and held up as a kind of muse the beautiful Anne de Coigny, a fellow inmate. When the executioner called for him, Chenier bequeathed his poems to de Coigny, who survived and eventually brought them to the attention of the post-Terror world.

That would have been the end for Chenier except that Luigi Illica, librettist for Puccini's La Boheme, read about him and made his life into an operatic text, set to music for posterity by Giordano.

The operatic story is a mix of truth and fiction. There is a de Coigny character, called Madeleine (or Maddalena) rather than Anne.

Chenier is in prison, not because his integrity as a poet has brought him there, but because of de Coigny herself. For in the opera, Chenier is in love with the aristocratic Madeleine and she with him.

Alas, Madeleine has also caught the eye of lustful Gerard, a former servant and now a Jacobin leader. Gerard connives to send his rival to the guillotine, little suspecting that Madeleine will . . . well, that would be giving away the ending.

The change from reality to opera is fairly predictable. Where reality finds political struggles, opera must find a woman. It simplifies things. To quote the Arizona Opera publicity sound bite: "Love triangles - what a pain in the neck!"

Chenier's poetry survives only slightly in the opera. La jeune captive finds a faint echo in Chenier's last-act aria, with its reference to dying in spring. In the first act, Chenier improvises a poem, and the subsequent aria is one of the great treasures of the tenor repertoire.

Just ask Mihailo Markovic. Born in the former Yugoslavia "many years ago," Markovic is a retired medical doctor and opera buff who presents pre-performance talks for Arizona Opera. (He'll give one on Chenier at 2 p.m. today at Burton Barr Phoenix Central Library, 1221 N. Central Ave.)

Markovic, who studied verismo (or Italian realist opera, including Chenier) with the great verismo conductor Bruno Bartoletti, owns an audiotape comprising 24 performances by 19 tenors of the Improviso, as Chenier's first-act aria is known. The performers range from Enrico Caruso in 1907 to the Three Tenors in recent recordings.

"The best is Gigli for the exceptional beauty of his voice, insinuations of phrasing and exact interpretation," Markovic says.

Although Markovic knows something of the historical Chenier, he says he is not bothered by the opera's many changes of fact.

"It is music of passionate and sublime love in a time of terror," he says. Politics - and history - are beside the point.

But they weren't beside the point for the Italians in 1896, who nearly subverted the opera's original production, Markovic points out. The mere subject of revolution was deemed ... too revolutionary.

Later, when the Soviet Union had established its own, more lasting terror, Andrea Chenier was not produced by its official opera houses because it was not revolutionary enough.

It's hard not to say something nice about an opera that can be suspected of political incorrectness by opposing sides, even if it turns a brave French poet into a love-struck Italian tenor.

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