JULES MASSENET – His Life and Works by Nick Fuller I
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JULES MASSENET – His Life and Works By Nick Fuller I. Introduction Jules Massenet’s operas made him one of the most popular composers of the late nineteenth century, his works performed throughout Europe, the Americas and North Africa. After World War I, he was seen as old- fashioned, and nearly all of his operas, apart from Werther and Manon , vanished from the mainstream repertoire. The opera-going public still know Massenet best for Manon , Werther , and the Méditation from Thaïs , but to believe, as The Grove Dictionary of Opera wrote in 1954, that ‘to have heard Manon is to have heard all of him’ is to do the composer a gross disservice. Massenet wrote twenty-seven operas, many of which are at least as good as Manon and Werther . Nearly all are theatrically effective, boast beautiful music and display insightful characterisation and an instinct for dramatic and psychological truth. In recent decades, Massenet’s work has regained popularity. Although he Figure 1 Jules Massenet, drawing by Ernesto Fontana (Source: is not the household name he once http://artlyriquefr.fr/personnages/Massenet%20Jules.html) was, and many of his operas remain little known, he has been winning new audiences. Conductors like Richard Bonynge, Julius Rudel and Patrick Fournillier have championed Massenet, while since 1990 a biennial Massenet festival has been held in his birthplace, Saint-Étienne, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, its mission to rediscover Massenet’s operas. His work has been performed in the world’s major opera houses under the baton of conductors Thomas Beecham, Colin Davis, Charles Mackerras, Michel Plasson, Riccardo Chailly and Antonio Pappano, and sung by Joan Sutherland, José van Dam, Frederica von Stade, Nicolai Gedda, Roberto Alagna, Renée Fleming, Thomas Hampson and Plácido Domingo. In 2014/15, according to Operabase , he was the 21 st most performed opera composer around the world. This year (2016), 38 productions of his operas – La Navarraise , Cendrillon , Werther , Don Quichotte , Manon , Le portrait de Manon , Thaïs , Hérodiade , Cléopâtre and Le Cid – will take place around the world, at locations as far apart as Russia and Brazil, Australia and Japan. In April 2016, one of his most obscure operas, Don César de Bazan , was performed for the first time in nearly a century. Massenet is still too often dismissed as a decadent sentimentalist, a sensuous composer of salon music painted in pastel colours. This is facile. While his music has the power to move, charm and please, it is also dramatic, robust and high-spirited. He is the most versatile of all opera composers, and his operas among the most varied of any composer. They include grand opéras full of historical pageantry and exotic local colour; austere neo-Classical opera in the tradition of Gluck; Rabelaisian haulte farce ; intimate, psychologically acute bourgeois tragedies; mediaeval dramas of Wagnerian scale; intensely dramatic verismo operas; and delicately melancholy fairy tales. The range of his oeuvre doesn’t weaken its quality; each new and different work was both an artistic challenge and a source of inspiration. ‘My operas are based on very diverse sources’, Massenet told Le Temps in 1896. ‘I try to vary the subjects. I tear myself away from one setting — and immediately immerse myself in a completely different one, to change the course of my ideas. It’s the best way of avoiding monotony.’ His operas are set in powdered eighteenth century boudoirs, late 19 th century artists’ studios and Bohemian cafés, gemütlich German villages, ancient Persia and Pakistan, monasteries in the burning deserts outside Alexandria, mediaeval cathedrals and amidst the gunshot and cannonade of a Spanish battlefield. As well as opera, he wrote Figure 2 Massenet rehearsing Manon with Sybil Sanderson in Pierre Loti's oratorios, ballets , religious salon (Albert Aublet) music, music for the stage, symphonic suites , concertos , mélodies ( review review review ) and music for piano or organ. Many of his works are unfamiliar and poorly represented on CD. Several operas need new studio quality recordings, ideally with a cast that can sing idiomatic French: Don César de Bazan ; Le Roi de Lahore ; Le Cid ; Le Portrait de Manon; Sapho; Ariane ; Roma and Panurge . 2 The biggest gap in the discography is Bacchus , which has never been recorded. It was written in the middle of one of Massenet’s most creatively fertile phases, and was arguably the victim of critical prejudice. These rare operas and Massenet’s most popular works all show that he was one of opera’s great melodists. His arias are theatrically effective, musically beautiful and illuminate the corners of his characters’ souls. One thinks of Chimène’s “Pleurez mes yeux” and Grisélidis’s “Il partit au printemps”, moving depictions of grief; of Werther’s rapturous hymn to nature “Ô nature pleine de grâce”; of Cléopâtre’s cruelly, languorously erotic “J’ai versé du poison”; of Chérubin’s youthfully exuberant “Je suis gris”, giddily drunk on simply being alive; of Ariane’s “Chère Cypris”, Hérodiade’s “Venge-moi d’une suprême offense”, Panurge’s “Touraine est un pays”, and Athanaël’s “Voilà donc la terrible cité”. ‘Massenet,’ wrote Reynaldo Hahn, ‘gave to the melodic expression of love a vigour and vivacity, a languor and a strange grace it never had before him.’ He had, as Georges Auric wrote in 1961, ‘the extraordinary gift of melodic invention, which resists time because it captivates the audience, which is elegant and graceful, which evokes the tender or dramatic emotion and which truly expresses human feelings, all the better in that it is supported by an adroit, elegant and noble orchestration.’ Each of his operas has its own atmosphere, its own Figure 3 Jules Massenet, by Lemaire (Source: distinct sound-world. He http://artlyriquefr.fr/personnages/Massenet%20Jules.html) could evoke a long dead or distant place, or cleverly paint an external event with as much insight and ingenuity as he depicted a character’s emotions. Listen, if you will, to the opening of Hérodiade , to the windmills scene in Don Quichotte , to the entr’actes in Thérèse and Roma , or to the Méditation from Thaïs . Massenet unites the free-flowing Wagnerian music-drama with the French opéra-comique, grand opéra and opéra lyrique styles to create his own idiom — one that would influence a whole generation of French composers, Richard Strauss in Germany and Puccini and the 3 verismists in Italy. Massenet could move seamlessly between recit, song and orchestra, without the symphonic element overwhelming the singers. ‘I do not think that there exists a suppler and more varied composer than Massenet,’ wrote his early biographer Louis Schneider. ‘He has created so many characters, invented such a large universe of sound and colour, that he seems to have nothing new to say, no new songs to sing. And yet each of his creations that we owe to his dream, his imagination or his vision, appear to us with an astonishing ease of evocation. ‘Nobody has more sense of the dramatic situation, nobody knows better how to adapt the orchestral material to dramatic or sentimental episodes. ‘What one must praise above all in his theatrical works is the balance between the vocal and instrumental elements. His works, while they are music and lovely music, are at the same time theatre.’ II. Early Years Massenet was born in Montaud, Hérault (now part of Saint-Étienne), on 12 May 1842, the son of a wealthy ironmonger. His mother, an amateur musician, taught him to play the piano. At the age of nine (1852), he entered the Conservatoire, with a piano performance of Beethoven that earned Auber’s admiration. He received the premier prix de piano in 1859, the second prix de fugue in 1862, and, in 1863, the coveted Grand Prix de Rome for his cantata David Rizzio . He spent three happy years in Italy, where he met Liszt’s pupil Louise- Constance ‘Ninon’ de Gressy, whom he married in 1866. During this time, he supplemented his income by teaching music. Massenet’s operatic career began with four light works: • La Grand’Tante. Opéra-comique in 1 act. Libretto: Jules Adenis & Charles Grandvallet. First performance: Opéra- Comique (2 e Salle Favart), 3 April 1867. • Don César de Bazan. Opéra-comique in 3 acts and 4 tableaux. Libretto: Adolphe D’Ennery & Jules Chantepie, after Dennery & Dumanoir’s play Don César de Bazan (1844), inspired by Victor Hugo’s character in Ruy Blas (1838). First performance: Opéra-Comique (2 e Salle Favart), 30 November 1876. Revised 1888, in 4 acts. • L’Adorable Bel’-Boul’. Opérette in 1 act. Libretto: Louis Gallet. First performance: Cercle des Mirlitons, Paris, 17 April 1874. • Bérangère et Anatole. Sainete in 1 act. Libretto: Henri Meilhac & Paul Poirson. First performance: Cercle de l’Union artistique, February 1876. Figure 4 Frédérick Lemaître in Don César de Bazan (source: http://artlyriquefr.fr/oeuvres/Don% 20Cesar%20de%20Bazan.html) 4 None of these operas has been recorded in full, although Richard Bonynge recorded the vibrant Entr’acte Sevillana from Don César de Bazan, and several sopranos, including Nellie Melba, Amelita Galli-Curci and Sumi Jo, performed the Sevillana itself. The opera was performed earlier in 2016 in full for the first time in a century. At the time of writing, it is not known whether a recording will follow. Massenet’s first musical successes came with the oratorios Marie-Magdeleine (1873) and Ève (1875), and the stage music to Les Erinnyes (1873). In 1876, he was made a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. The next year his career as an opera composer truly began. Le Roi de Lahore. Opéra in 5 acts and 7 tableaux. Libretto: Louis Gallet. First performance: Théâtre de l’Opéra (Palais Garnier), 27 April 1877.