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137 C.F.R. §201.14 2018 FRENCH OPERA AT THE FIN DE SIÉCLE

Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style

Steven Huebner tu

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Werther

STAGECRAFT

Massenet's delay in getting down to Werther in the early 1880s may have been caused partly by difficulties in extracting an opera from an epistolary novel. The succession of Werther's letters, mainly to his friend Wilhelm, traces the psycho- logical state of the protagonist along a downward curve of increasing despair and alienation, after his initial optimistic identification with resplendent Nature and elation during the first days with his beloved Lotte. Goethe's heroine, like Prévost's Manon, appears mainly through the eyes of her obsessive admirer. As with the figure of Manon, the stage would require Charlotte to have a larger degree of dramatic agency in her own right. But in contrast to Prévost's novel, which contains a rapid succession of coups de théâtre as well as colourful plot twists and geographic displacements, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther is an interior drama that proceeds relentlessly towards an ever darkening horizon. Hence its difficulty for the opera composer, especially one like Massenet who valued effective theatrical entrances, exits, and contrasts as ends in themselves—reflected, as we have observed, by his tripartite division of opera into the dramatic, lyrical, and theatrical. Furthermore (in the realm of the `dramatic'), turning Charlotte into a sharply profiled character suitable for the stage required ingenuity. If ever a model existed that posed obstacles to the stagecraft of the composer and his collaborators, surely this was the one. According to Paul Milliet, the libretto he first produced adhered more closely to the novel than what emerged after a `succession of cuts and arbitrary additions'.' One can only presume that in Milliet's first version Goethe's lyricism outweighed an inclination to produce a colourful plot with dynamic circulation of characters. Milliet implied that Hartmann was to blame for these changes and that the publisher was happier when Blau became involved with the project. Notwithstanding Milliet's obvious disappointment, the cuts and additions also probably sustained Massenet's interest by resulting in a more kinetic and visually enticing production. Nonetheless, Werther still does exhibit a remarkable blend of stageworthiness and fidelity to the epistolary antecedent, including borrowings of many of Goethe's expressions. Paradoxically, the work in its final form follows the events of its model

' 'Werther', L'Art du théâtre, 31 July 1903.

I 113 i Jules Massenet more closely than any of Massenet's previous operas, including Manon. A sub- stantial distortion of Goethe at the end has cast a long enough shadow to obscure this fact for many critics since the première. Whereas in the novel Werther dies alone, in the opera Charlotte rushes into his room for a final heart-wrenching duet after the suicidal gunshot: David Garrick's version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as well as Gounod's operatic adaptation, revisited. Although Charlotte's voice is not heard often in Goethe's work, the creators of the opera did what they could to preserve it in order to fashion a stageworthy character. For example, the exchanges between Charlotte and Werther in the first act follow the two letters in the novel where Goethe includes the greatest number of direct quotations from Charlotte, those of 16 June and 10 September 1771. In the opera, the time-frame of these letters is collapsed into a single evening, with the ball setting—a natural one for an opera composer—drawn from the first letter and the ambience of a moonlit evening in a garden from the second. Massenet organizes his German waltz and character entrances to suggest the ball as an event that occurs elsewhere while the plot advances in the foreground of the Bailli's house and garden. The narrative is mainly driven forwards at this point by Albert's return (while Charlotte and Werther attend the ball), an event that does indeed happen between the same letters of 16 June and 10 September in Goethe's novel. Massenet thus telescopes developments separated by weeks in the source to produce his much favoured ploy of suggesting simultaneous actions in two different locations, an eminently theatrical strategy with roots sunk deep in the repertory of grand opera. At the same time, exhibiting a more characteristically fin-de-siècle compositional concern, he effects seamless continuity among discrete musical sections on the local level. Charlotte and Werther return from the ball in an effective passage of transition where the waltz music sounds for the first time since they left, now in alternation with the clair de lune motif.2 Rather than begin the famous clair de lune duet in its F major tonic, Massenet eases into it with development in another key, while the lighting instructions call for the moon gradually to become brighter: Wagner's 'art of transition', Massenet-style. The conclusion of the novel furnished additional material for the opera. Goethe breaks out of epistolary form following Werther's letter of 6 December 1772 in a section called `Editor to Reader'. The ostensible explanation is that Werther's remaining letters are too sporadic to provide a coherent narrative flow. The Editor completes the story and turns out to be omniscient, able to report on the inner thoughts not only of Werther but of Charlotte as well, while he continues to pres- ent letter fragments. Once again the librettists mined a section where Charlotte

I Julien Torchet wrote that Massenet first used the clair de lune music in a piano piece; preview article on the 1903 Werther in La Semaine française, 16 Apr. 1903. He recounts an anecdote of how Massenet one day brought the piece to Hartmann who found it so beautiful that he urged him to keep it in order to incorporate the music into a future opera.

114 Werther appears to the reader in a relatively unmediated form. Following Albert's directive, Goethe's Lotte encourages Werther on 20 December to find another woman worthy of his affections. After he responds with bitter irony, she instructs him not to return until Christmas Eve. The duet analogous to this—set in September, with- out bitter irony on Werther's part, and with a Charlotte who rather more firmly tries to distance him—occurs near the end of the second act of the opera. Before this, Massenet's Albert puts his diversionary tactic into practice himself. Framed by the lilting aria 'Du gai soleil' sung by Charlotte's sister Sophie, he suggests to Werther that she is a good catch. Her age changes from 11 in the Goethe to 15 for this purpose. In this way an insignificant character in the novel becomes a full-fledged player who adds both an extra fold in the plot in the second act and a foil during Charlotte's long scene at the beginning of the third. Also drawn from the `Editor to Reader' section is the encounter between Charlotte and Werther on Christmas Eve (21 December in the novel), with its recitation of Ossianic poetry and Charlotte's plea that he never return. The omniscient narrator describes her confused and troubled frame of mind. Charlotte fundamentally wishes to remain faithful to her husband, all the while feeling that Werther is her true soulmate. So strong is this sense, that in thinking about which of her friends she might encourage Werther to marry, she acknow- ledges that she finds something wrong with each in order to keep Werther for herself. The portrait is subtle. Out of marital and maternal duty, she cannot openly declare love for Werther, nor perhaps even admit it to herself. The accent in appreciations of Goethe's Werther has naturally been given to the interaction of the title character's inner world with external reality, yet Lotte has an inner life as well. As Werther reads Ossian she identifies so closely with the dark fate of the characters that she breaks down in tears: 'She became confused and pressed his hand tightly against her breast and, with a plaintive motion, moved closer to him. Their burning cheeks touched, and the world ended for them.'3 Lotte faints upon hearing the news of Werther's death; later the townspeople fear for her life. So close was she to Werther that a part of her seems to die as well. The text does not allow the reader unequivocally to call this love. But it does not per- mit Lotte's attitude towards Albert to be described in this way either. To be sure, by making her emotions more explicit for the stage, Massenet and his librettist trod on such ambiguities. In their reading Lotte is indeed 'in love' with Werther, certainly not an extravagant position. Let us see how expression of that love made for strong music theatre and how this stagecraft was welded to a fin-de-siècle preoccupation with overall musical coherence. An extended duet for Lotte and Albert is conspicuously absent in the

3 The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings, trans. Catherine Hunter (New York, 1962), 119. Subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. 115 Jules Massenet opera; in their one scene alone together in Act II she can bring herself only to remark on his moral rectitude, while his motif unfolds continuously in the orchestra. By contrast, the Ossian scene with Werther in Act III supplies a powerful (to use an adjective that, unfortunately, surfaces all too rarely in Massenet criticism) musical moment to project her suppressed passion. Werther sings the two strophes of the famous Ossian aria `Pourquoi me réveiller', and then voice-dominated texture gives way to an extended passage where the orchestra takes up the main motif of the aria and carries it through different keys while the characters declaim above: `N'achevez pas! / Hélas! / Ce désespoir... ce deuil... on dirait... il me semble!...' (Don't stop! Alas! This desperation... this sorrow... one might say... it seems to me), Charlotte begins. `A quoi bon essayer de nous tromper encore...' (Why try to fool ourselves again), Werther continues. At first, the harmonic rhythm is rapid, the tonal direction discursive. In this context a sudden and unexpected prolonga- tion of the dominant of E flat major generates further tension, heard as Werther, in a self-absorbed bubble, imagines his first kiss (`Ah! ce premier baiser, mon rêve et mon envie!' / Ah! this first kiss, my dream and desire). But resolution to the new tonic is avoided as the orchestra, now accelerando, churns to a vocal reprise of the final phrase of the aria in its original key of F sharp minor. Swept up by the tide, Charlotte falls into his arms and actually emits the Ossian motif herself. Furthermore, the two sing together for the first time and she rises to an A sharp, her highest pitch in the opera. Défendez-moi Seigneur contre lui' (Lord protect me from him) she beseeches, introducing real tension between music and text at this rich moment. For the musical strategies themselves suggest a more appro- priate subtext of 'Lord save me from my passion'. She breaks away on a diminished-seventh harmony (a cliché to urge the drama forwards much abused by Massenet) and sends him off for ever. Later that evening, fearing the worst after Werther has requested Albert's pistols, she rushes to his room. This time an explicit verbal avowal of love finally does occur, followed by a reprise of the clair de lune music. His impending death has allowed her to be explicit without having to live with the consequences. The stakes are perhaps not as high as they might have been, but as far as stagecraft goes the scene, as unfaithful as it is to Goethe, effects satisfactory theatrical release to the emotions stored up since the climactic moment of the Ossian episode. A musical resolution of sorts occurs here as well. In the first moonlit scene at the end of Act I, the clair de lune music functions as the structural scaffolding for a duet in F major. The number draws to a close as Charlotte and Werther learn of Albert's return, but the music cannot seem to settle into an authentic cadence in that key. Instead, after Werther utters a desperate cry just before the curtain (`Un autre! son époux!' / Another! her husband!), Massenet abruptly jacks up the harmony to a G flat major chord for a final unorthodox cadential gesture of Neapolitan to tonic. Similarly, an extended reprise of the clair de lune 116 Werther music in the next act is denied a concluding cadence when Charlotte puts an end to Werther's reminiscing about their first night by coldly observing Albert m'aime, et je suis sa femme!' (Albert loves me, and I am his wife). Only at the reprise in the last act, after Charlotte's avowal of love, does the clair de lune music at last produce a satisfactory cadence with prolonged articulation of F major tonic (from Act I) and parallel singing to round out the first large section of the final duet. She finally enters his moonlit realm: whereas the clair de lune figure mainly underpins Werther's words at its previous appearances, now, for the first time, it accompanies her extensively. Her love is explicit, but, in the spirit of the novel, even here her independence is kept in check as she reciprocates with a passage that really belongs to Werther rather than sing her own music. In spite of Charlotte's final avowal of love, Massenet and his librettists raise the barriers to its realization more than Goethe in order to enhance the theatrical and musical vividness of her struggle and final confession. Not only does she play the role of surrogate mother, a model of bourgeois stability, but (newly invented for the opera) she also recalls her mother's request that she marry the stable Albert. Jean-Michel Brèque has criticized this as an insufficient motivation for her to deny her passion,4 but the weight allotted to the Charlotte-as-mother strand in Act I—even the children become major players—calls this critical position into question. Charlotte is strongly associated from the start with a role of defend- ing the family. The work opens in her space, not Werther's as in the novel. The darker voice-type is a conventional sign of the maternal figure in opera and her melodic style is relatively poised and controlled, largely steering clear of exhilarating rapid sweeps through an octave or more, heard often in Manon and the duet for Chimène and the Infante in the first act of Le Cid. Werther's own attraction to her has an undeniable Oedipal streak. Notwithstanding Massenet's obvious stagecraft, if theatrical weakness be sought in Werther it is more useful not to cite Charlotte's inadequate motivation to deny her passion, but rather to take into account the bourgeois frame and question her initial attraction to Werther. Goethe has the space of the novelist to develop the kinship that Charlotte feels with Werther. Whereas Massenet and his collaborators do allow her to express emotion (admittedly, in a restrained way), they limit her in intellect. The toll the character pays is the potential to be relegated to a role of stereotypical domesticity subject merely to temptation of the flesh. In the compressed world of the theatre, the climactic moment of their first duet looms large: Charlotte recounts the death of her mother to Werther in a passage that ends with disquieting chromatic bass movement (`Pourquoi les hommes noirs ont emporté maman?'). Werther responds with a well-known whole-tone ascending sequence (Ex. 6.1) to a text that includes 'Je donnerais ma

' `Le Lointain Reflet d'un chef-d'oeuvre', L'Avant-Scène Opéra: Werther, 61 (1984), 23.

117

Jules Massenet

Peu à peu, en animant Werther PP - -~ • • Rê - ve!.. Ex - ta - se!.. Bon- heur!.._

-Tr 48~n PPP

cresc. peu à peu ~- ßP- 6 r r ~ r Je don-no- rais ma vi - e pour gar - der à ja-mais ces 1,8 -6 (, crest.

~6 0 ~

più f/ j~ .7 • n

.illM1ra1;11•111.. fa;Elrl•MrMErr n.rMIE:, MMELI.•1•11• D•= yeux, ce front charmant, cet-te bouche a - do- ra-ble, é- ton - née et ra-vi - e... ba 8 611'g

più f cresc.

> > rail. piaf f/6-•

Sans que nul à son tour les con - temple un mo - ment!..

66~ ~6â • crac. ff6,

6~ 10;-

Ex. 6.1 Werther, Act I (Charlotte—Werther, duet)

118 Werther vie pour garder à jamais ces yeux' (I would give my life to keep those eyes for ever). The passage exhibits modernist tonal vocabulary, but more immediately relevant to the drama is that it is truly exceptional in the context of Massenet's own language. The whole-tone ascent has nothing to do with Charlotte's tonal world, accenting Werther's self-indulgent reverie while he completely ignores Charlotte's account of her mother's death. He is no more sensitive elsewhere in the opera. Unlike in the novel, Charlotte and Werther appear to share very little, not even an initial love duet where they both listen to one another. For his part, Werther falls in love virtually at first glance, not after several hours in her company as in Goethe; like his operatic forebear, Gounod's Faust, he voices his adoration in an ecstatic aside framed by dance music CO spectacle idéal d'amour').

POSTCARD FROM GERMANY

Some contemporary reviewers managed to turn Charlotte into a stereotypical Hausfrau, part of a more generalized tendency to portray the work as a glimpse into German middle-class life. For Marcello of Le Siècle she amounted to nothing more than a `bonne menagère' (a good housekeeper).5 Roff of Le Pays identified her as 'an essentially German type, what we call in France a good little woman'.6 He felt sure that both she and Werther would be better understood in Vienna and Berlin than in Paris. Another critic reminded his readers that

Werther is above all a bourgeois drama. Charlotte is not a romantic heroine, not like Emma Bovary, hysterical and off the rails, distracted by a temperament too ardent and depraved by lurid readings. She is a Gretchen, full of good sense and reason, whose imagination works minimally and whose flesh seems to get aroused only when Werther is near.?

Massenet's score contains several parodic glimpses over the Rhine. He hijacks one particularly important moment in the rapprochement of Lotte and Werther in the novel for comedic ends. As told by Goethe, a storm breaks out during the ball, and in its aftermath Lotte and Werther walk to a window and gaze over the glistening countryside. With tears in her eyes she lays her hand on his and utters 'Klopstock'. Werther understands this as a reference to an ode to spring by that poet. Tears well up within him as well. A single name has the evocative power to draw their souls together. Massenet turns the episode around to caricature the putative sentimentality of the German. In Werther it is not Charlotte and Werther who utter 'Klopstock', but the minor characters Brühlmann and Kätchen in

s Review of Werther, Le Siècle, 24 Jan. 1893. 6 Review of Werther, Le Pays, 18 Jan. 1893. r Preview article by 'Intérim' dated 16 Jan. 1893, an otherwise unidentified newspaper clipping in BN Mus., Fonds Montpensier (Massenet dossier). 119 Jules Massenet

Brühlmann marche côte à côte avec Käthchen; ils vont les yeux dans les yeux et ne font même pas attention au Bailli qui les suit en riant. Brühlmann, avec un soupir d'extase

Klop - stock!.. un peu retenu

~

Le Bailli, riant Kiithchen, avec ravissement à Brühlmann I - — P

Di-vin Klop - stock!.. Ba - vards!..

Ex. 6.2 Werther, Act I (departure for the ball)

Act I. In fact, this is the only music for them in the entire opera, and Massenet parodies the pregnancy of the name by harmonizing the simple alternation of two pitches D and F in many different ways (Ex. 6.2). The harmonization is overdone, subtle musician's humour. Le Bailli makes clear that Brühlmann and Kätchen are not to be taken seriously with his subsequent ironic observation `Bavards! / Vous direz le reste à la fête... Un aussi long discours vous mettrait en retard' (Chatterboxes! You will continue at the party—such drawn-out talk would make you late). Madame de Staël famously detailed such effusiveness in De l'Allemagne, a book that played a major role in defining German culture for French readers during much of the nineteenth century;8 she described the late eighteenth- century writer Klopstock as instrumental in freeing up the German poetic imagination.9 After the emergence of Prussia as a major military power, her romanticized and benign descriptions seemed increasingly dissonant against the image of the spiked helmet, but in Massenet's Werther older ideas and stereo- types prevail. Indeed, one way to understand the opera is as a work with couleur

The classic study is Claude Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensée française 1870-1914 (Paris, 1959). ' De l'Allemagne, nouvelle édition (Paris, 1867), 134, 137-43.

120 Werther locale shaped by such images. The critic Gustave Samazeuilh, a friend of d'Indy and hardly a defender of Massenet, would remark that regardless of the super- ficiality of the operatic depiction of Werther himself, Massenet 'knew how to give a certain part of his work, especially during the first two acts, the colour, the sentiment, and something of the whiff of simplicity belonging to the Germanic milieu.'10 Some stereotypes in the opera even compactly replace more extended develop- ments in the novel which trace the attraction of Charlotte to Werther. 'The enormous number of romans d'amour published in Germany has turned moonlit settings [and] harps that resonate in the valley during the evening into a source of amusement', wrote Madame de Staël in her chapter on the German novel." The critic Marcello noted in his review of the opera that 'for the German, moon- light is the most powerful of aphrodisiacs', obviously adequate to explain the love of Charlotte and Werther on the operatic stage. In such a view the initial flute and cello scoring of the clair de lune is a musical icon for the complicity of two lovers bathed in moonlight. Later, the Ossian episode evokes another typically German image: the love of music-making at home around the clavier.1z Werther's anguished final effort to draw Charlotte away is at last founded on a semblance of shared experience with her, though even here he declares that Ossian reflects his soul. In place of the mere recitation of Ossianic poetry by Goethe's protagonist, Massenet's Werther actually sings a lied. The free-flow of the spuriously Celtic original becomes domesticated within the rigid confines of a strophic structure and a Massenetic petite malice: the tonality and texture duplicate Schumann's `In der Fremde', the first song of Liederkreis, which also centres on the alienation of a romantic wanderer (Ex. 6.3).

(a) Werther, Act III (Werther's Ossian aria)

= 60 Werther p 6 6 ; 7 Pour - quoi me ré - veil - ler, 6 souf- fle du prin-

s s i •

11 d ~

10 Gustave Samazeuilh, Musiciens de mon temps (Paris, 1947), 54. " De l'Allemagne, 365. " Apropos is Richard Wagner's discussion of music-making in a domestic context in Germany, 'On German Music', trans. and ed. William Ashton Ellis, Richard Wagneri Prose Works (London, 1898; repr. New York, 1966), vii. 84-101.

121 Jules Massenet

dim.

temps pour - quoi me ré- veil - 1er?.. dim.

41P-

O# J P

~ I

(b) Schumann, 'In der Fremde' Nicht schnell

Aus der Hei mat hin - ter den

MP , '~t!~ ~~~a~j~ ~i:~f~W ~.~~ ~~..~~~ /.1••• ~~

Mit Pedal

Blit zen rot da kom - men die Wol ken her, >

9-

Ex. 6.3

In short, the observation of Marie-Françoise Vieuille that in some respects Massenet's Werther has the character of a postcard from Germany rings true.13 At least some contemporaries received it in this way. Grasset's poster for the first production (Fig. 7), despite Oedipal suggestions, brims with flowers and Biedermeier-like quaintness. Goethe's name almost overshadows Massenet's. The poster suggests that the journey to the great German writer and his country is pleasant, untroubling, the stuff of sentimental reminiscing. One reviewer noted that the Bailli's house as constructed for the Opéra-Comique looked like

" 'Werther chez la tante Léonie', L'Avant-Scène Opéra: Werther, 61 (1984), 80.

122 Werther THEATRE NATIONAL DEräirie DOPERA COMIQUEiOie .:

~OETHE ~. par .711 umcl <

En vente au MENESTREL 26isRueVivienne HEUGEL &.C^`• Editeurs pour tous Pa s.PARIS

!!' DER I IEMERCIER. PARIS.

FIG. 7. Poster by Eugène Grasset for the first production of Werther at the Opéra-Comique (1893) a `joujou de Nuremberg'.14 Three years before drafting Werther Massenet had an opportunity to indulge in Germanic couleur locale in his Scènes alsaciennes, an orchestral work which offered a day trip to that part of France where German customs were felt most acutely. The movements are entitled Dimanche matin, Au cabaret, Sous les tilleuls [linden trees], and Dimanche soir. In the post-1870 context, of course, the piece was also a patriotic gesture, underlined by Alphonse Daudet in a programme included with the printed full score: Alsace! Alsace! Now that Alsace is walled off, impressions of that lost land from former times return to me. What I happily recall is the Alsatian village on Sunday morning, at the hour of the church service; streets deserted, houses empty, with a few old folks

'4 `Charles Martel', review of Werther, La Justice, 17 Jan. 1893.

123 Jules Massenet sunning themselves at their doorsteps; the church filled; snatches of religious chants heard in passing. And in the tavern, in the main street, with its little panes of leaded glass, garlanded with hops and roses... Oh... la! Schmidt, something to drinkj15 The second act of Werther faithfully mirrors this postcard: organ music drifts from the church on the main square, linden trees line its façade, casks ring a tavern on the right. One of the characters is even called Schmidt; he raises a glass with his friend Johann and they both disappear into the tavern. But now we are really in Germany: the church is not une église, but rather un temple protestant. A petite malice, verbal this time, signals the true setting. As in Act I, Johann and Schmidt sing `Vivat Bacchus! Semper vivat!' Johann, Schmidt, Bacchus: the play on the name Johann S. Bach seems intentional. Soon they even jovially bless the Lord (Benissons le Seigneur') in pseudo-canon. For the critic Duret-Hostein, these drinkers did not have 'the roguishness of Guillot but rather the thick and dull merriment of Germans weighed down by beer'.'6 Moreover, the whole score seemed to him to have a `Protestant colour'. Indeed, the second act emphasizes a cultural particularity of the Germans that almost certainly served to accentu- ate its couleur locale for Catholic French listeners. Johann and Schmidt celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of the pastor. Couleur locale is actually pressed into service as dramatic contrast when the very stability of the pastor's marriage offsets the turbulence and alienation of Werther. After Charlotte sends him away near the end of the act, a procession to celebrate the golden anniversary emerges from the church, another typical gambit from Massenet's bag of stagecraft. With agitated declamation against the music of the cortège, Werther quickly informs Sophie that he will never return. Albert observes that Werther loves Charlotte while the orchestra is oblivious, building to a fortissismo ceremonial cadence and curtain.

DRAME LYRIQUE MASSENET—STYLE

In the Wagnerian context Werther was compared to things German in other ways as well. Paul Milliet told Hartmann, on their 1878 trip to read a draft of Hérodiade to Ricordi, that Goethe's Werther made an ideal subject for a lyric work because of its simple action, a `human drama which embraces the enchant- ments and desolation of Nature'." He stressed that the delightful or plaintive murmurs in the immense span of the natural world correspond to the sensations and sufferings of the hero, and that Werther contains largely an interior action. The pistol shot has little relevance because the protagonist dies essentially from an internal wound:

'5 The translation follows Irvine, Massenet, 131. '6 Review of Werther, La Presse, 18 Jan. 1893. `Werther', L'Art du théâtre, 31 July 1903. 124 Werther

When the night of Christmas falls around him, when it envelops his heart with blissful disquiet, a ray of pardon penetrates the shadows where the world disappears, and for Werther, as for Tristan, the music of spirits begins to be audible in the void where mortal voices have been silenced. Milliet must have recalled the 1878 trip through the lens of the finished libretto because Goethe's hero dies on 22 December, a date adjusted to Christmas Eve for the opera. Regardless of Milliet's fidelity to the source, the reference to Tristan will raise eyebrows. To a certain extent this comparison was wishful thinking on his part because the twin companions stagecraft and couleur locale eventually mauled his original draft. Yet despite the reshaping of Werther, Charles Malherbe, a witness even closer to Massenet than Milliet, would again invoke Wagner's opera shortly after the Vienna première. He reminded his readers that, several years before, he had predicted Massenet would push further along the 'road of drame lyrique' and one day `write his own Tristan'. Malherbe now admitted that since he had inside knowledge of the Werther project, he actually had had that work in mind. He noted that `without establishing an importunate parallel between the works of Wagner and Massenet, it should be realized that in one as in the other there is a very simple action, hardly without exterior peripeteia'. Both were `duets in three acts' where the interest centred on the passions of the characters and their `musical subjectivity'.'8 A French counterpoise to the mighty Tristan! As usual with Malherbe, this a~ was nationalist braggadocio. Just what Massenet himself thought of the parallel remains unknown. It seems reasonable to suppose that he would have discouraged it. Nonetheless, Werther does contain a simple basic action and has very little ensemble singing, despite four duets for Charlotte and Werther. The protagonist's inner world and alienation from conventional society form an ideational core to the work. And, to a certain extent, Massenet invited the parallel by calling Werther a drame lyrique, the only one of his works designated by a term generally understood among French critics as a generic signal for a post- Tristan Wagnerian line of opera composition. Besides this generic label, Massenet merely hinted at his own conception of the opera as a whole. In a letter to Van Dyck, he insisted on a setting of the 1780s. Although ten years after the year specified by Goethe in the novel, that decade was important to him because it would send an unmistakable signal to metteurs-en-scène to give the opera in Louis XVI, instead of Louis XV, costume (never mind that the opera takes place in Germany). 'Let us get closer to the modern period', he wrote, 'and let us think also of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, in France, spread ideas of liberty and love of nature which seem to me in harmony with the outbursts of Werther."9 Massenet, as

' `Werther', Le Monde artiste, 21 Feb. 1892. 19 Letter of 17 Jan. 1892 in' 19 Lettres inédites de Massenet à Ernest van Dyck, Le Ménestrel, 11 Feb. 1927.

125 Jules Massenet ever, was concerned about the colour of the work but also with Werther's ideas, his identification with nature. On another occasion, he may well have encour- aged Wagnerian parallels with his answer to a reporter's question about why there was not more choral writing in Werther: Because I sought above all to render the intimate thoughts of the drama, from which choral forces would only have detracted. I wanted to translate with the orchestra alone, that is with symphony, the profound human sentiments that motivate Werther and Charlotte.20 This implies a leitmotivic orchestra used not as a matter of doctrine, infatuation, or nationalist posturing but rather because it suited the poetic essence of an intimate subject. In Werther, leitmotif serves the imperatives of Destiny and affect much more than in an opera such as Esclarmonde. Couleur locale and Massenetic stagecraft now combine with the (sometimes opposing, sometimes not) generic demands of a type of opera less centred upon animated stage traffic, and charac- terized by (among other things) a relatively organic musical, poetic, and dramatic construction around a well-articulated idea. Drame lyrique comes up somewhat short. Moonlight as love, moonlight as death. At the fin de siècle the formulation was vaguely Tristanesque, as difficult as it was to separate from more generalized imagery of German romanticism. Given the important role that moonlight plays in the opera, the letter of 10 September 1771 in the novel has special significance. Charlotte remarks `I never walk in the moonlight without being reminded of my dead. In the moonlight I am always filled with a sense of death and of the hereafter ... but Werther, do we meet again? Shall we recognize each other?' The libretto draws special attention to the moonlit conclusion of the opera as a moment of regeneration when Werther turns to Charlotte: `Pourquoi ces larmes?... Crois-tu donc / Qu'en cet instant ma vie est achevée? / Elle commence, vois-tu bien...' (Why these tears? Do you think that my life is over at this moment? / It is only beginning, you see). The deliberate skewing of the novel's chronology so that Werther's suicide comes on Christmas Eve, accompanied by the Christmas carol `Jésus vient de naître', embraces this vision. The ending may be understood entirely as a bril- liant, and very Massenetic, theatrical coup: the innocence of children situated in a different location played off against Werther's anguish in the foreground. Like several other critics over the course of the work's history, the normally indulgent Gabriel Fauré was less sympathetic when he once described the conclusion as 'too melodramatic and puerile'.21 The musical signs suggest a richer dimension. As Werther expires, the Ossian theme—now clothed darkly by cor anglais, saxophone, bassoon, and horn—abuts on the Christmas carol so that the thematic

I0 Interview in Le Matin, 9 Jan. 1893. In his review of the 1903 Opéra-Comique revival, reprinted in Opinions musicales (Paris, 1930), 76-8. 126

Werther relationship between them becomes clearly highlighted (Ex. 6.4). `All my soul is there!', Werther had earlier exclaimed about the Ossian music, which now appears to bear the seeds of Christian redemption and love. At the final curtain, then, Werther's own potential for regeneration in the hereafter becomes reflected in the symbol of the Christ's birth. Moreover, the orchestra floats to the end along a tonally indecisive course. The downbeat at the reprise of the Ossian music sounds as dominant harmony of C and, despite the chromatic pitches above, the sustained G pedal at the end never quite escapes this role. The last harmony of the opera is open-ended, suggesting that there is indeed a continuation for Werther.

~

f > r' J~ i,...•

II

Charlotte • fi ~ 7 ~ w Ah!... Voix des enfants (au loin) f 43.:` ~.-~~~.~1~ S-S — ~"~:.~ L~7D ~ ~ .----i--•-it------J6-sus vientdenaï- tre. Voi- ci no- tre di - vin mal - tre; I 412.W' ,~-c.~ —

ff>i>~> > ~ dim. • .B' -• - - ~- •~ •

Ex. 6.4 Werther, Act IV (concluding scene)

Powerful representation of Destiny through long-term musical strategies often drives Wagnerian drame lyrique, and in this respect a case may be made for Werther as an example of that genre. Among the many foreshadowings of Werther's fate in Goethe's novel are accounts about other lovers in despair: a former clerk in the office of Charlotte's father who now wanders the fields, a peasant whose love of his widowed mistress is blocked, a girl who commits suicide. Massenet adumbrates Werther's death with more than the Ossian music. Another sign of

127 Jules Massenet impending tragedy is the Neapolitan—tonic resolution at the end of Act I that we have already discussed, where Werther's 'Un autre! son époux!' gives way to a breath-taking quick curtain: the essential tragic revelation of the opera explodes incisively and ominously, like Chimène's sudden realization that it is Rodrigue who has killed her father at the curtain of Le Cid Act II/i. In the next act Werther will compare death to passing to the other side of a curtain before singing the B major aria `Lorsque l'enfant', a pronounced signal of impending tragedy because he sings of returning to the Father after Charlotte, paragon of motherhood, beseeches him to stay away. Another premonition is embedded in Charlotte's ländler motif, heard from the beginning of the opera: the chromatic motif that represents Werther's anguish derives from the crest of this figure (Ex. 6.5). Her music is literally the catalyst for his self-destruction. Premonition works through thematic transformation as well. Albert's motif, a figure that first sug- gests bonhomie (at Le Bailli's le l'ignore, it ne m'en parle pas encore' in Act I, for example), becomes rhythmically transformed—gentle sixteenth notes changed to nervous thirty-seconds—to lend a sinister edge to the scene in Act III where he allows pistols to be brought to Werther.

(a) Act I (`Charlotte) Kien chanté atf ; r%_-t~$1i ~! ~ S~f-=.--#1,—#. ~ k ~ f e MI 247 — e—' —_k ~ 7 7 ~

Act III ('Werther's anguish') Assez animé (agité et passioné) (~ = 138)

Ex. 6.5 Werther

Goethe explicitly foreshadows Werther's death in the `Editor to Reader' section of the novel by brilliantly combining epistolary and narrative forms: Werther begins his suicide letter on the morning of 21 December and continues it on the morning and evening of the 22nd, the latter sitting occurring just before

128

Werther

he takes his life. Rather than cite the letter in one block, Goethe's narrator pres- ents the three portions at the time each is written and, otherwise, recounts events during Werther's last two days. In other words, the suicide letter frames the Ossian episode as well as Werther's request for Albert's pistols the next day. These events also form the substance of Massenet's third act, where a recurring musical motif has the very same framing and foreshadowing function of the completely written- out suicide letter of the novel. The device demonstrates the compelling emotional immediacy that opera can bring to even the greatest literary antecedents. Before Werther arrives, Charlotte reads over some of his old missives in an extended aria that not only acknowledges the epistolary form of the antecedent—a `postcard' of the novel's structure—but also alludes to the suicide letter in the novel, the first part of which is written precisely at this point. The last letter reviewed by the operatic Charlotte is particularly frightening. Werther has informed her that if he does not appear at her house on Christmas Day, she should not be angry, but rather weep: 'Ces lignes to les reliras / Tu les mouilleras de tes larmes' (You will reread these lines and dampen them with your tears). A motif on horn and trombone with a minor-ninth leap punctuates her rereading of this suicide note avant l'heure (Ex. 6.6). The Ossian episode and delivery of the pistols ensue, just as they do following the first block quotation from Werther's suicide letter in the novel. After Charlotte rushes out following these events, the minor-ninth motif sounds many times on different instruments in the orchestral transition to the last tableau.

,= 132 Charlotte lisant

Tu m'as dit: à No- ei, et j'ai cri - é: ja-mais!.

ff>

o ro ro =~—> ~~s~> Ex. 6.6 Werther, Act III (letter scene)

Despite such musical control over ominous signs, the ideational core of the opera does not have the coherence of much fin-de-siècle drame lyrique. Harnessing Christian symbolism for Tristanesque ends is not without its problems in the light of the Goethe model. There the hero explicitly renounces conventional Christianity. To finish his account, the Editor reports coldly that `There was no 129 Jules Massenet priest in attendance' at Werther's funeral. Earlier, in his letter of 15 November, Werther himself undermines doctrine by assuming a Messianistic posture, claim- ing the right to cry out to the world 'My God why hast thou forsaken me'. (The conclusion of the opera also has a Messianistic aura—a glorification of the Romantic subject—but it does send more affirmative signals.) Goethe's Werther is a pantheist who seeks the absolute in both the splendours and terrors of Nature. Massenet's Werther also tries to be a pantheist, but never seems quite able to renounce a Christian God. Take his entrée in Act I. It occurs to pastoral music, tagged `nature's calm' by Gérard Condé,22 that leads to the well-known cavatine `O nature, pleine de grâce' (O nature full of grace). Typically for Massenet, a transformation of the `nature's calm' motif returns in the middle section of the cavatine, one of the truly glorious moments of the score: as Werther declaims independently, the melody-bearing woodwinds are voiced with thirds and fourths over shimmering strings in a languid sequence along thirds (Ex. 6.7). Gounod updated, nature assimilated. During the reprise, Werther avoids a final G major cadence in a wash of E flat harmony that acts as a pivot to a recall of the chil- dren's Christmas carol, heard from within the house. In a poignant foreshadow- ing of the conclusion, he reacts by wistfully evoking lost innocence. But now Christian allusion has suddenly usurped his apostrophe to Nature: the children sing of `guardian angels' who spread their wings `singing Noël'. This makes for an elegant symmetrical inversion across the breadth of the opera. The work begins in aestival plenitude but with something of a dissonance represented by a Christmas carol in July; Werther dies in barren winter but with an optimistic resolution of the earlier dissonance in the reprise of the carol. Typically, couleur locale also worked its way in: the first productions in Vienna and Paris com- bined archetypal imagery of the seasons with operatic spectacle by means of a picturesque tableau showing snow falling over a quaint German village during the final entr'acte.~3

(a) Act I (`nature's calm') Modéré

'Z 'Commentaire littéraire et musical', Lovant-Sc?ne Opéra: Werther, 61 (1984), 37. ~3 According to his autograph, where the opera is described as containing four tableaux, Massenet initially planned for the final orchestral interlude to be performed with lowered curtain. Although the tableau showing snow falling over the Wetzlar was created for the Vienna and Paris premières, in the 1903 Opéra-Comique production that established Werther in the Paris repertory this tableau was not staged.

130 Werther

(b) Act I (Werther's entrance aria) 84 Werther

~ Y• r 7D r ~ Tout Mat-tire et me plait!... Ce mur, et ce coin

ft xL, 8 • PP Y 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 • a a • • ~ • • • • • • • • • • • ~ ~ I---1 ~~ P - r r 36 S6 ~ r som - bre.... Cet - te sour - ce lim - pide ~ ~

3 3 3 3 - 3 3 3 3 • • • • • • • • • ~■ é

Ex. 6.7 Werther

How much sense does the interweaving of nature imagery with Christian reference really make? In the second act Werther sings an aria in B major where he beseeches God's mercy and equates his own death with the return of the prodigal son (`Lorsque l'enfant'). The piece ends with a histrionic chromatic inflection of the sixth scale degree, `Père que je connais pas, en qui pourtant j'ai foi' (Father whom I do not know, but in whom I still have faith). In the next act, just after he decides irrevocably upon suicide, Werther solders this climactic passage to a recollection of the nature cavatine, with the melody reharmonized and raised a semitone to match the original key of `Père que je ne connais pas, en qui pourtant j'ai foi' (Ex. 6.8). Carried out over a much larger time span than in Manon, Steigerung creates dramatic intensification, not heard by most listeners but felt in the voice by tenors. `Prends le deuil, ô nature! Nature! / Ton fils, ton bien-aimé, ton amant va mourir' (Take the sorrow, o Nature! Nature! / Your son, your beloved, your lover will die'), Werther sings at this gripping moment. The meaning of this musical reprise is not terribly clear: does Werther cast himself only as the son and lover of Nature, with the chromatic inflection ironically appropriated from its original role where it translated faith in God? Or, rather,

131

Jules Massenet

Plus large G = 72) avec ampleur Werther If! Prends le deuil, ô na - tu re Natu - re.... > ♦~ s > r ~ ! • dim. a` • >j--~ i--• ii ~

1- P

Ton fils, ton bien - ai - me_ ton a- mant va mou-rir!

tï00 f• ~ • z s

;—; ~!

Empor-tant a- vec lui l'é - ter- nel le tor - tu - re,

ff

• .. ~ ~ T ♦r très expressif

Ex. 6.8 Werther, Act III (Werther's departure)

does he now recognize God in Nature? Pantheism, alienation, Christian redemption, Tristanesque premonitions of love implicated with death and even- tual transcendence: the listener had better not seek an over-arching world-view à la drame lyrique in this cocktail, but rather savour how the separate elements produce highly effective dramatic and lyrical moments. Another deviation from drame lyrique lies in the hint of opéra comique, the `genre éminemment national', in the role of Sophie. Albert's proposal to marry her off to Werther seems an attempt to rescue the piece from its Drang towards

132 Werther a tragic conclusion and establish a bourgeois domestic environment appropriate to comedy. A. Goullet of Le Soleil actually called Sophie's Act II aria couplets, a telling misnomer since this type of piece is closely associated with opéra comique. He was one of several reviewers to praise the role, which `crosses the drama like a ray of sunshine'.24 That 'Du gai soleil' was the only section of the work encored at the French première suggests that the audience at the Opéra-Comique also approved. Debussy beamed `I prefer, in fact, the feminine side in Werther, espe- cially the character of Sophia [sic] who is charming from one end to the other of this work.'25 Now, there was much about Werther that Debussy did not like and his kind words for the relatively trivial Sophie smack of marginalization of a composer unable to light the requisite dramatic fire. (Even in a work so centred around a male protagonist, Massenet had to contend with his reputation as a specialist in the feminine: the reviewer for Le Guide musical referred to an `effeminate muse' inappropriate to the inexorable passion of the original, and Albert Montel wrote of his `nervous and febrile' temperament that seemed depleted by subjects requiring `serenity and force'.)26 Besides the role of Sophie, Werther contains several other conventional opéra comique, or more broadly speaking, number-opera set-piece types. It opens with a festive (but small) choral section with secondary characters on stage. Whereas in conventional nineteenth-century opéra comique a main player often enters with a short air that forms part of a compound introduction, here the principals are introduced by their orchestral motifs, in effect, a modernization of an old expository strategy. The second number updates in another way: it is a drinking song for Johann and Schmidt in C major, but in place of voice-dominated texture the orchestra spins out a lusty Bacchic motif. Werther sings a ternary cavatine at his first appearance and both main characters deliver a preghiera. Werther's agitato effusion in Act II, `J'aurais sur ma poitrine', met with frowns from most writers, even Massenet's supporters, who heard music too derivative of an Italianate cabaletta style. Charlotte's `Va! laisse couler mes larmes', with its well-known saxophone counterpoint, followed by her Allegro vivo `Seigneur Dieu!' might be convincingly described as a traditional slow section—transition— cabalette sequence. Despite—or perhaps because of—the designation drame lyrique, Wagnerian critics remained unimpressed. Fourcaud took up themes he had already voiced in his review of Esclarmonde to remark that although Massenet tried to be Wagnerian, he fell flat because he pursued that course with so little sincerity.27

Z4 Review of Werther, Le Soleil, 18 Jan. 1893. 25 Review of 1903 Opéra-Comique production reproduced in Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure (Paris, 1971), 157. x6 Unsigned review of the Vienna production in Le Guide musical, 28 Feb. 1892 and review in Le Voltaire, 18 Jan. 1893. 37 Review of Werther, Le Gaulois, 17 Jan. 1893. 133 Jules Massenet

Ernst was dismayed by so much talent `wasted on works with so little candour'.28 Servières liked Werther better than Massenet's previous operas because at least it showed a praiseworthy effort to produce `concise action', but wondered whether Massenet had gone in this direction just because the public now demonstrated greater taste for this kind of opera.29 Had the image of the postcard occurred to them, they might well have used it: Massenet's metaphorical trip to Wagner, perhaps even to Tristan, all described superficially after a few shallow greetings. As with Manon and Esclarmonde this is loose-knit number opera and the techniques that Massenet deploys to effect continuity fall into the same family as those in his earlier works: evaded final cadences, substantial beginnings on the dominant, local-level and medium-term thematic reprises and motivic reitera- tions, and subtle motivic manipulations for smooth transition from one number to the next. Where Werther may be distinguished from the other two operas is in its much higher proportion of pieces built out of parlante texture—orchestra leading with a single motif spun in a relatively unadorned treble-bass framework, often in four-square phrases, and with vocal declamation above. This was a stick- ing point with a Wagnerian such as Servières, who referred to `eternal recitative with repeated notes over orchestral ideas ... a monotone parlando', and wished that Massenet had been able to create true `musical declamation' in his voice parts. Servières's Wagnerian perspective blinded him to the real expressive subtle- ties of Massenet's vocal lines. Ironically, French anti-Wagnerians, in their own way blinded no less severely, had themselves once regularly referred to Wagner's music as eternal recitative. Massenet had no such axe to grind and comes off correspondingly better with historical distance. Werther is much darker than Manon—in tone, orchestral colour, première chanteuse voice-type. Even in the context of opéra comique with serious themes, a troubled and alienated romantic hero presented a risk. The performance his- tory of the work in Paris bears witness to this. Although the ingredients to be synthesized were far more variegated than in the earlier work, the result is no less convincing. There is little of the sense that Wyzewa communicated in his pre- view Le Figaro article of a Massenet who unwisely, even meekly, sacrificed his native talent in a pale imitation of Wagner destined for failure. Rather more per- suasive is the image of a composer handling a wide variety of dramatic materials with compositional bravura and confidence. Hardly creating a parallel to Tristan, Massenet succeeded in integrating certain characteristics of drame lyrique into a taut, theatrically effective work consonant with his own tradition.

za Review of Werther, Le National, 18 Jan. 1893. 39 Review of Werther, La Revue indépendante, 1 Mar. 1893.

134