This weekend, a University of Virginia singer and director will be sweeping audience members back into an 18th-century scenario of small operas as entertainment during intermissions of larger operas, philosophers as composers and librettists, and love conquering all.

Wesley Diener, a fourth-year music major in UVa’s Performance Concentration and Distinguished Majors Program, is organizing and presenting a fully staged production of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Le Devin du village” at 2 p.m. Saturday in UVa’s Cabell Hall Auditorium.

“It’s pretty obscure. It’s pretty much only performed at academic conferences,” Diener said. On the bright side, he said, “it’s practical and realistic for undergraduate singers. I knew it was something we could pull off with our singers.”

Part of the fun for Diener was discovering Rousseau the composer after being more familiar with Rousseau the philosopher. Rousseau penned his own libretto and score.

The work will be a good fit for UVa because “Thomas Jefferson was quite a Francophile,” Diener said with a chuckle. “And it was parodied by Mozart when he was 12 years old.” (“Bastien und Bastienne” is W.A. Mozart’s preteen spoof.)

The cast includes Josephine Miller, who also is in UVa’s Distinguished Majors Program, as Colette; Rachel Mink, a 2016 UVa graduate who’s a program alumna herself, is in the trouser role of Colin. Diener sings the role of the Devin, or village soothsayer, whom Diener is portraying as a tarot card reader.

Diener’s background is in musical theater, and he’s accustomed to directing pieces with more complex and well-defined story arcs. “Le Devin du village” is a textbook classical work, so the plot isn’t as busy as Diener — and most of his audiences members — usually expect.

Colette, a shepherdess, is dismayed by relationship issues with Colin, her beau. Each suspects the other of infidelity. Each pays a visit to the friendly neighborhood soothsayer for advice — Colette is told to play hard to get, for instance — and, after a series of misunderstandings, there’s a happy ending. To classical audiences, of course, that meant marriage.

“It all just sort of comes together in the next scene,” Diener said.

If it seems rather abrupt to modern audiences, that’s how this art form worked back in the day. This opera is an intermede, a short humorous work designed to be presented during an intermission or similar break in a larger opera; it’s brief enough to have been performed during wedding festivities for France’s King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Diener said he realized early in the process that many viewers would find the quick transition from suspicion-filled dating relationship to happy marriage rather jarring. He decided that modern audiences, raised on a steady diet of realism from theater and films, would appreciate having more context or backstory to buy into the lean plot.

“I’m keeping the core intact, but adding a lot of context,” Diener said.

He said listeners will enjoy the music and the interactions among the characters, and he’s determined to create a pleasant afternoon of “pure entertainment.”

“That’s why I’m passionate about directing,” Diener said. He loves being “in the intersection between music and theater to make these classical work more easily accessible.”

Cabell Hall’s elegant setting will get listeners in the right frame of mind for Rousseau’s confection, the director said.

“It’s such a beautiful space, and it has the classical grandeur,” Diener said.

Jane Dunlap Sathe
Features Editor
Original Publication: The Daily Progress