Miss Helyett is an opérette in three acts with music by Edmond Audran and words by Maxime Boucheron. It depicts the complications ensuing when the excessively puritanical heroine believes herself duty-bound to marry an unknown man who, in rescuing her from a serious fall in the Pyrenees, has been unable to avoid seeing the exposed lower half of her body.
The piece was first performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens on 12 November 1890. Productions followed in continental Europe, Britain, the US and Australia. The most recent revival in Paris was in 1921, and the piece remained popular in the French provinces during the next two decades, but fell out of the repertoire after that.
Background and first production
By 1890 Audran was a well-established composer of opérette and opéra comique, with 18 full-length pieces to his credit, including the very popular La mascotte (1880). Boucheron was also experienced, having written librettos for Paul Burani, Georges Grisier, André Martinet and others. This was the first of the three operas on which the two men collaborated. The premiere was marred by the illness of the leading lady, Biana Duhamel, whose performance was hampered by a cold, but the work was nevertheless a success, and played for 166 performances in its first run.
Original cast
Smithson – M. Montrouge
Paul – M. Piccaluga
Puycardas – M. Tauffenberger
James – M. Jannin
Bacarel – M. Désiré
Gandol – M. Wolff
Miss Helyett – Mdlle. Biana Duhamel
La Senora – Madame Macé-Montrouge
Manuela – Mdlle. Saint-Laurent
Norette – Mdlle. Mary Stelly
Ida – Mdlle. Meryem
Eva – Mdlle. Suzanne-Nery
Marguerite – Mdlle. Cora-Bertte
Rosa – Mdlle. Derieu
Source: Vocal score.
Synopsis
Act I
The Ballroom of the Casino-Hotel Val-Montois, Bagnères (Pyrenees) Miss Helyett Smithson is a beautiful but excessively prudish 16-and-a-half-year-old American. She is the eleventh, youngest, and only unmarried daughter of a nonconformist pastor, Smithson, with whom she is revisiting Bagnères after a two-year interval. She dresses in a costume similar to that of the Salvation Army, and remarks adversely on the revealing dresses of the other young women in the ballroom. Other guests at the hotel include Paul, an artist; unlike most of the guests he is not there for pleasure but to paint. He concentrates on landscapes, although what he longs for and cannot find is his ideal woman to paint. Helyett and he have met during her previous visit, but he pays little attention to her, still thinking of her as the fourteen-year-old child he met previously.
Also at the hotel are Puycardas, a Gascon bullfighter, and his Spanish girlfriend Manuela, closely supervised by her mother, Senora Fernandez, who is not keen on the prospect of having Puycardas, a pusillanimous Frenchman, as her son-in-law. Smithson's party includes also James Richter, a young Chicago merchant, who is a possible husband for Helyett. She is not greatly taken with him, but has said that she will marry him if she finds no-one better in the next three months.
Helyett goes off every day for a walk in the mountains. Today she returns shaken and distressed. She lost her footing and fell down a precipice; her fall was broken by a shrub as her skirt was caught on a branch. A passer-by rescued her, but, mortified by being seen with her lower half exposed, she covered her face with her cloak, and so could not see him before he left after extricating her. She tells her father that it is her duty to marry this man, whoever he is, because he has seen what only a husband should see.