Can this be true? It's on the homepage of the Slowakian National Opera in Bratislava.
Have they confused composer and work or have they unearthed something I can't find in any of my reference books or online?
Premiere, Friday, 7. April 2017, 19:00 / Hall of Opera and Ballet, the new building of SND
Fromental Halévy: Ba-ta -clan
A five-act opera
Very strange indeed, and quite impossible. He composed 40 operas, and no catalogue lists this as being his work.
Incidentally, he also composed a "Pique Dame"!
This is the information at the Slovak National Theatre website:
Halévy's Ba-ta-clan follows the best traditions of French opera and the composer created it based on the libretto by the excellent French playwright Eugène Scribe, who was the author of the text templates for many other great works by world-famous authors Meyerbeer, Auber, Bellini, Rossini and Verdi. The forefront of the opera relief bears the strong individual emotional story, a loving relationship between Christian Leopold and Jew Rachel set to a background of a contradictory social context. Halévy provides us with a picture of society that is admittedly divided and intolerant of relationships between people of different faiths. In the enhanced context of content, the message of the piece is the menacing image of intolerance, fanaticism and hatred preventing human understanding and solidarity, a depiction urgently current in today's day and age. The directorial concept by the great director Peter Konwitschny features full and devastating resonance.
Ba-ta-clan has been prepared by the SND Opera in collaboration with Antwerp and Gente Flemish National Opera and the Mannheim National Theatre.
http://www.snd.sk/?opera-7&predstavenie=zidovka (http://www.snd.sk/?opera-7&predstavenie=zidovka)
...hang on a minute, the online info from Bratislava sounds very like La Juive - even the main characters are the same (Rachel, Léopold). Hmmm.........
Yes, the synopsis is obviously a description of La Juive. Ba-ta-clan is a one act operetta by Offenbach but that's not something easily confused with Halèvy's grand opera (although the libretto is by his nephew, Ludovic). I also have a vague memory that it's the title of a call-to-arms aria (in Les Huguenots?), because isn't the phrase the French vocalisation of a snare drum's sound? Of course, un-hyphenated it's the name of the concert hall involved in the Paris terrorist attacks last November. All very odd, though.
It seems to be an error made just on the English website, both the Slovak and the German have La Juive.
Aha! Problem solved!
Confirmation here: http://www.snd.sk/?oper&predstavenie=zidovka (http://www.snd.sk/?oper&predstavenie=zidovka)
The best jobs in artistic domains are given to ignorants!
And not only in the realm of the arts!