Flower Duet

About this Piece

Before the "Flower Duet" became the sonic wallpaper of business-class cabins, it served a more modest purpose: establishing the exotic humidity of nineteenth-century British India for the 1883 premiere of Lakmé at the Opéra-Comique. The libretto's exoticism is itself a second-hand fantasy, based on Pierre Loti's autobiographical accounts of "going native" in Tahiti and simply transplanted to India to suit the Parisian vogue for the British Raj. Musically, this translates into a 6/8 barcarolle of shimmering parallel thirds and a swaying, pastoral rhythm that suggests a tranquility soon to be shattered by a trespassing British officer. It is a masterclass in French vocal lyricism, where the voices do not compete but rather dissolve into one another with a purity that borders on the liturgical. The work was famously a vehicle for the American soprano Marie van Zandt, whose career was later sabotaged by a Parisian smear campaign alleging she performed while intoxicated. One suspects the "Flower Duet" itself, with its "liquid" textures, might have been the only thing truly intoxicating about the evening. While contemporary critics often sniff at the opera's "milky sentimentality," Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was an unashamed fanboy, rating the score's "wealth of melody" far above the output of that "giftless bastard" Johannes Brahms. Tchaikovsky even lamented that had he heard such music earlier, he might never have bothered writing Swan Lake. Today, the piece exists in a bizarre state of cultural limbo: a pinnacle of High Romanticism that most listeners associate less with Brahmin temples and more with the distinct anxiety of waiting for a 747 to depart Heathrow.