La fille de Madame Angot
La fille de Madame Angot (Madame Angot's Daughter) is an opéra comique in three acts by Charles Lecocq with words by Clairville, Paul Siraudin and Victor Koning. It was premiered in Brussels in December 1872 and soon became a success in Paris, London, New York and across continental Europe. Along with Robert Planquette's Les cloches de Corneville, La fille de Madame Angot was the most successful work of the French-language musical theatre in the last three decades of the 19th century, and outperformed other noted international hits such as H.M.S. Pinafore and Die Fledermaus. The opera depicts the romantic exploits of Clairette, a young Parisian florist, engaged to one man but in love with another, and up against a richer and more powerful rival for the latter's attentions. Unlike some more risqué French comic operas of the era, the plot of La fille de Madame Angot proved exportable to more strait-laced countries without the need for extensive rewriting, and Lecocq's score was received with enthusiasm wherever it was played. Although few other works by Lecocq have remained in the general operatic repertory, La fille de Madame Angot is still revived from time to time. During the Second Empire, Jacques Offenbach had dominated the sphere of comic opera in France, and Lecocq had struggled for recognition. Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 brought the Empire down, and Offenbach, who was inextricably associated in the public mind with it, became unpopular and went briefly into exile. Lecocq's rise coincided with Offenbach's temporary eclipse. Before the war his only substantial success had been Fleur-de-Thé (Tea-flower) a three-act opéra-bouffe in 1868. After moving to Brussels at the start of the war, Lecocq had two substantial successes there in a row. The first, the opérette Les cent vierges (The Hundred Virgins), ran for months at the Théâtre des Fantaisies-Parisiennes; productions quickly followed in Paris, London, New York, Vienna and Berlin. The success of this piece led Eugène Humbert, the director of the Brussels theatre, to commission another from Lecocq.
