Le Claperman; L’Âne d’or. By Alexis Piron

Alexis Piron was a significant figure in France in the first part of the eighteenth century and his twenty or so opéras-comiques include some of the finest works in the genre. The two plays included in this edition are among Piron’s best, and have in common the fact that they make use of pre-existing sources, although these are very different in kind, being, on the one hand, a short and obscure text made available by a group of writers working in the Netherlands but writing in French, and, on the other, one of the best known works of classical literature, the only novel in Latin to survive complete, The Golden Ass of Apuleius. The introduction studies how these disparate texts have been adapted, and notes draw attention to points of detail, comparing and contrasting the two plays. The background to the development of the genre of opéra-comique is also discussed, as is Piron’s use of the musical material associated with the genre in the first decades of its existence.