Republican Reconfigurations of Catholicism in the Music of Third Republic Paris, 1880–1905

SOUNDING THE RALLIEMENT: REPUBLICAN RECONFIGURATIONS OF CATHOLICISM IN THE MUSIC OF THIRD REPUBLIC PARIS, 1880–1905

JENNIFER WALKER

A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Music.

Chapel Hill 2019

Approved by:

Annegret Fauser

Andrea Bohlman

Mark Evan Bonds

Tim Carter

Clair Rowden

ABSTRACT

Jennifer Walker: Sounding the Ralliement: Republican Reconfigurations of Catholicism in the Music of Third Republic Paris, 1880–1905 (Under the direction of Annegret Fauser)

Military defeat, political and civil turmoil, and a growing unrest between Catholic traditionalists and increasingly secular Republicans formed the basis of a deep-seated identity crisis in Third Republic France. Beginning in the early 1880s, Republican politicians introduced increasingly secularizing legislature to the parliamentary floor that included, but was not limited to, the secularization of the French educational system. As the divide between Church and State widened on the political stage, more and more composers began writing religious—even liturgical—music for performance in decidedly secular venues, including popular cabaret theaters, prestigious opera houses, and international exhibitions: a trend that coincided with Pope Leo XIII’s Ralliement politics that encouraged conservative Catholics to “rally” with the Republican government. But the idea of a musical Ralliement has largely gone unquestioned by historians and musicologists alike. Thus my study of this music provokes a fundamental reconsideration of music’s role in the relationship between the French state and the Catholic Church in the Third Republic and, in doing so, dismantles the somewhat simplistic epistemological position that emphasizes a sharp division between the Church and the “secular” Republic during this period.

I draw on extensive archival research, critical press reception-studies, and close readings of musical scores to demonstrate how composers and critics from often opposing

iii ideological factions undermined the secular/sacred binary through musical composition and the act of musical performance in an effort to craft a brand of Frenchness that was founded on the dual foundations of “secular” Republican ideology and on the heritage of the Catholic Church. The resulting constructions of French identity reveal an asymmetrically configured middle ground, with the state apparatus absorbing seemingly opposing subject positions into appealing and reconciliatory visions of an inclusive

Republic with a broad range of constituencies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child. As I have learned over the course of the last few years, the old adage can also easily apply to the process of writing a dissertation and, indeed, there are many people in my “village” to whom I am greatly indebted and without whom this project would not have been possible. First and foremost among them is my advisor, Annegret Fauser. From the earliest stages of this project, her keen insight, scholarly prowess, and unwavering support have guided me through those moments during which the research behind and writing of this dissertation seemed like an insurmountable task. Over the last six years, her expert guidance has shaped my thinking, my research, and my writing in ways that I am only now beginning to recognize. Alongside her tremendous giftedness as an academic advisor and mentor is the absolutely unrivaled support of, and advocacy for, her students: I would be remiss not to note that I count myself exceptionally privileged to have had an advisor of her caliber who is as strong an advocate for her students’ well-being as she is a scholarly force in her field.

A heartfelt thank you is also due to Tim Carter, whose consistent willingness to read draft after draft of my writing—coupled with his always insightful (and entertaining) feedback—shaped this project from its earliest days: I am deeply appreciative of your perceptive commentary, regardless of the fact that you like Monteverdi more than

Massenet. Mark Evan Bonds and Andrea Bohlman have likewise been formative forces in the development of this dissertation. Their generosity to read drafts of dissertation chapters, conference papers, and grant applications has not gone unnoticed, nor has their thought-

v provoking feedback. Each asked probing questions of this project that, although difficult to wrestle with, ultimately forced me to think more deeply about the issues with which this project grapples. I must also note that this dissertation would not have been possible without the invaluable contributions of Clair Rowden, a scholar to whom I must credit my love of late- nineteenth century France (and Massenet). It was her work on Hérodiade and Thaïs that ignited the first spark of interest in the topic at hand, and it has been her continued support of this project that has kept the flame burning. She has never hesitated to share with me her encyclopedic knowledge of French music, and I value her endearing wit and warm friendship.

Thanks are also due to a great number of scholars whose generous spirits made a nervous graduate student feel at ease abroad in the French archives or at international conferences and whose expertise must be acknowledged as fundamental to this project.

Katharine Ellis and Steven Huebner both provided instrumental assistance at various stages of my dissertation in the form of constructive criticism and, on several occasions, mealtime companionship; this project is particularly indebted to the work of Katharine Ellis, whose foundational monograph on the politics of the plainchant revival began to ask the questions that inform my research. Lesley Wright has my sincerest gratitude for her unceasing assistance in locating the evasive Taffanel papers. Catrina Flint de Médicis is also due a great deal of thanks for her invaluable contributions to my dissertation (and also for the occasional pep-talk). My sincerest thanks to all of you.

Navigating the twisted terrain of archives is often a difficult process—especially when they are held in private hands. Marcelle Dubois, granddaughter of the composer Théodore

Dubois, was exceedingly generous in sharing her family’s private collection with me. She went above and beyond my inquiry, sending me previously unpublished letters as digital files so as to save me a trip to the south from Paris—not that I would have complained visiting the

vi south of France! After over a year of searching libraries, archives, and auction houses for materials on the organization of the official concerts at the 1900 Exposition Universelle de

Paris, I had the privilege to be introduced to Dominique Taffanel, whose willingness to share her grandfather’s personal papers with me was heartwarming. Though the elusive collection had recently been donated to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Madame Taffanel, along with Marie-Gabrielle Soret, ensured that the documents would be available for my consultation. A great deal of Chapter Four is due to their kindness. I also wish to thank Tim

Noakes at Stanford University for his willingness to scan and email an autograph score of

Massenet’s La Terre promise when a trip to California to consult it in person was not possible.

My research, which necessarily involved numerous trips to Paris, would not have been possible without the financial support of the Harold J. Glass USAF Faculty Mentor/Graduate

Student Distinguished Term Professorship—a fellowship that I was honored to hold alongside my advisor during the 2017–18 academic year. I wish to express my appreciation to

Harold E. and Holly Glass for their generous support of this innovative fellowship that expressly supports the relationship between mentors and their mentees. I would also like to thank Andrew and Katherine McMillan for their valuable support of summer research. Other necessary funding for my dissertation research was provided by the UNC Graduate School’s

Off-Campus Dissertation Fellowship and by the AMS M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet travel grant to

France. Financial assistance for the final year of writing was provided by a Mellon/ACLS

Dissertation Completion Fellowship. My thanks go to all of these individuals and institutions for their generosity.

I cannot end without thanking my wonderful colleagues and friends in the graduate program at UNC Chapel Hill. To my fellow Fauserites, particularly Chris Campo-Bowen and

Jamie Blake, thank you for your constant encouragement, your abiding friendship, and your

vii willingness to enable my need for retail therapy. To Amanda Black and Meg Orita, I am lucky to have found friends like you in the dog-eat-dog world of academia. To Brooks and Kjersti

Lockhart, two wonderful friends whose antics have kept me laughing for the past three years:

I finally finished my “paper”! Alexandra Morrison, my Parisian partner in crime, many thanks are due to you for your willingness to indulge my every whim and your incomparable friendship. And lastly, to Evan—my best friend and constant companion, who now knows more about French music, politics, and religion than he ever thought possible: this dissertation would simply not have been possible without your unwavering support. Your continual belief in my potential sustains me, even when I have trouble believing in it myself. I dedicate this dissertation to you with unending love.

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES...... xii

LIST OF FIGURES...... xiii

LIST OF EXAMPLES...... xiv

INTRODUCTION...... 1

CHAPTER 1: CHURCH, STATE, AND AN OPERATIC OUTLAW: JULES MASSENET’S HÉRODIADE...... 47

From the Prophet to the Prophesied...... 52

The Gospel According to Renan, or Massenet’s La Vie de Jean-Baptiste...... 58

Hérodiade and the French Republic...... 71

An Operatic Outlaw...... 75

CHAPTER 2: PIOUS PUPPETS AND CATHOLIC CABARETS...... 88

Pious Puppets at the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette...... 93

Symbolist Marionettes?...... 101

Righteous Tobie...... 106

Noël, ou le Mystère de la Nativité: A Modern crèche...... 113

La Légende de Sainte-Cécile: A Symbolist Failure?...... 127

Drames sacrés: Sacred Drama at Vaudeville...... 142

Sacred Music for the Secular Stage...... 162

CHAPTER 3: “LES GRANDS ORATORIOS À L’ÉGLISE SAINT-EUSTACHE”: A CHURCH FOR THE REPUBLIC...... 167

Eugène d’Harcourt and the Church of Saint-Eustache...... 170

The “Theater” of Saint-Eustache: The Press Reacts...... 181

Repertoire for the Republic...... 190

Saint-Eustache, the Republic, and the Church...... 233

CHAPTER 4: THE (REPUBLICAN) CHURCH UNIVERSAL: THE OFFICIAL CONCERTS AT THE 1900 EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE DE PARIS...... 238

Setting the Stage: Opening Celebrations...... 242

“L’Exposition de la Musique de 1900”...... 247

Shifting Ideologies: The concerts officiels in 1889 and 1900...... 255

“Vive Dieu qui aime les Francs!”: Théodore Dubois’s Le Baptême de Clovis...... 259

Le Baptême de Clovis: From Reims to the Trocadéro...... 268

Gabriel Pierné’s L’An mil, Apocalyptic Fools, and the Church’s Triumph...... 276

Official Concerts, Critical Responses...... 294

Ralliement at the Exposition Universelle de 1900...... 299

CHAPTER 5: JULES MASSENET’S REDEMPTION: GRISÉLIDIS, THE RIGHTEOUS REPUBLICAN WOMAN, AND AN OPERATIC RALLIEMENT...... 305

From Griselda to Grisélidis...... 311

The Devil and Eve...... 315

Massenet’s Two Eves...... 326

Grisélidis, or Massenet’s New Eve...... 337

Grisélidis: A Sainted Heroine...... 342

Eminently French: Grisélidis and Medievalism...... 354

CONCLUSION...... 362

APPENDIX A: “Les Grands oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache”: Programs...... 375

APPENDIX B: Jules Massenet’s La Terre promise: Biblical References...... 378

APPENDIX C: Programs of the Ten concerts officiels at the 1900 Exposition Universelle...... 379

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 389

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1: Religiously-Themed Plays at Parisian Theaters, 1887–1893...... 90–91

Table 2.2: Drames sacrés: Tableaux...... 145

Table 3.1: D’Harcourt’s Translation of “And He Shall Purify” from Handel’s Messiah...... 198

Table 4.1: Texts found in L’An mil, “Te Deum”...... 290

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1: “La lecture des rôles dans La Légende de Sainte-Cécile”...... 98

Figure 2.2: Théâtre du Vaudeville, “Les Drames sacrés,” engraving by Michelet...... 148

Figure 2.3: “Les Drames sacrés,” Le Gaulois supplément (18 March 1893)...... 156

Figure 3.1: “Plan de l’Église St-Eustache”...... 171

Figure 4.1: “La Fête des Fous et de l’Âne,” drawing by Henri Pille...... 279

Figure 5.1: Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique: Grisélidis, Act 1...... 308

Figure 5.2: Le Diable (Lucien Fugère) and Fiamini (Mlle Tiphaine)...... 315

Figure 5.3: François Flameng’s Poster for Grisélidis (1901)...... 356

xii

LIST OF EXAMPLES

Example 1.1a: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, “Introduction”...... 56

Example 1.1b: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, Entrance of the Canaanite Women and Salomé...... 56

Example 1.2a: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, “Encore une dispute!”...... 64

Example 1.2b: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, “Encore une dispute!” ...... 65

Example 1.3: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, “Ce que je veux” (Jean-Baptiste)...... 69–70

Example 2.1: Casimir Baille, Tobie, act 3, scene 4...... 109–10

Example 2.2: Paul Vidal, Noël, “Prélude” (Air Provençal)...... 117

Example 2.3: Paul Vidal, Noël, Tableau 1, “Mélodrame”...... 118–19

Example 2.4: Paul Vidal, Noël, “Berceuse de la Vierge”...... 121–22

Example 2.5a: Ernest Chausson, La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, Act 3, “Prélude et Chœur d’Anges”...... 136

Example 2.5b: Ernest Chausson, La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, Act 3, “Prélude et Chœur d’Anges”...... 137

Example 2.6: Ernest Chausson, La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, Act 1, “Hymne liturgique de Saint-Michel”...... 138

Example 2.7: Ernest Chausson, La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, Act 1, “Mélodrame”...... 139

Example 3.1: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part One, “Promise” Motive...... 210

Example 3.2: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part One, “Moïse fit venir tout le peuple”...... 210–11

Example 3.3: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part One, “Nous avons entendu sa voix”...... 212–13

Example 3.4: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part One, “Promised Land” Motive...... 213–14

Example 3.5: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part Three, “Pastorale”...... 214

Example 3.6: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part Three, “Voici la Terre Promise”...... 215–16

xiii

Example 3.7: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part One, “Maudit celui”...... 217–18

Example 3.8: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, Act 3, “Schemâh Israël”...... 219

Example 4.1: Pierre de Corbeil, “Orientis partibus”...... 285

Example 4.2: Gabriel Pierné, L’An mil, “Orientis partibus”...... 286

Example 4.3: Gabriel Pierné, L’An mil, “Audi homo”...... 289

Example 4.4: “Audi tellus”...... 289

Example 4.5: “Adoro te devote laetens Deitas”...... 291

Example 4.6: Gabriel Pierné, L’An mil, “Adoro te devote laetens Deitas”...... 292

Example 5.1: Jules Massenet, Ève, Prologue, “La Naissance de la femme”...... 329

Example 5.2: Jules Massenet, Grisélidis, “Prologue”...... 329–30

Example 5.3: Jules Massenet, Ève, Part 1, “Prélude, scène et duo”...... 331

Example 5.4: Jules Massenet, Grisélidis, Prologue, Scene 1: “Ouvrez-vous sur mon front”...... 331

Example 5.5: Jules Massenet, Grisélidis, Prologue, Scene 3: “Voir Grisélidis”...... 344

Example 5.6: Jules Massenet, Grisélidis, Prologue, Scene 3: “Voir Grisélidis” (reprise)...... 345

Example 5.7: Jules Massenet, Grisélidis, Prologue, Scene 3: “La volonté du ciel”...... 350–51

Example 5.8: Jules Massenet, Grisélidis, Act 2, Scene 3: “Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce”...... 352

xiv

INTRODUCTION

In the first days of January 1893, crowds flocked to the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in

Paris. Nestled behind the looming Panthéon, the relatively small church played host to the novena of Saint Genevieve, the capital city’s patron saint. For nine days, French Catholics and non-Catholics alike gathered in the church, home of one of the saint’s relics, to celebrate Masses, attend other religious ceremonies, and enjoy concerts. That the celebration of a popular saint’s novena in Paris would attract pilgrims is unremarkable.

Saint Genevieve, however, was no ordinary saint: as a young shepherdess, she had shown a deep devotion to the still nascent Christian faith, and Saint Germain, who had singled her out in a crowd, sensed her faithfulness and entreated her to persevere in her life of faith, virtue, and chastity. As Attila and the Huns closed in on Paris and its citizens prepared to flee, Genevieve instead implored Parisians to remain and to spend their time in prayer. Attila miraculously changed course, and Paris emerged unscathed, saved by

God’s clemency. Upon her death, Parisians built a church over her tomb that house her relics. In the centuries following her death, Paris would continue to witness the fruits of

Genevieve’s intercession: she is believed to have saved the city from a devastating flood in

834, and when an incurable plague decimated the population in 1129, those who touched her shrine were healed. As the savior of Paris, Saint Genevieve became, in essence, the savior of France.1

1 On Saint Genevieve, see Madhuri Mukherjee, “When the Saints Go Marching In: Popular Performances of La Tentation de Saint-Antoine and Sainte-Geneviève de Paris at the Chat Noir Shadow Theater,” in Medieval Saints in Late Nineteenth-Century French Culture, Elizabeth Emery and Laurie Postlewaite, eds. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 2004), 36–7.

1 Across the Seine, Saint Genevieve was being celebrated in another, more unusual, venue. On 6 January, audiences at Le Chat Noir, Montmartre’s famous cabaret, saw the premiere of Sainte-Geneviève de Paris, a “mystery” with text and music written by Léopold

Dauphin and Claudius Blanc.2 The Chat Noir was no cathedral. Founded in 1881 by

Rodolphe Salis, the small cabaret with its iconic signage—a black cat perched on a crescent moon—catered to an increasingly elegant public that came to include the

Parisian literary and artistic elite; among the patrons present at the premiere of Sainte-

Geneviève were the writer Émile Zola, the composers Jules Massenet and Alfred Bruneau, and the actor Coquelin cadet.3 What began as a gathering spot for authors eager to read their works had since become a fashionable cabaret that had shed its reputation as a haven for satirical bohemians and had taken on another, more coveted, mantle by the early

1890s: that of a voguish theater worthy of its bourgeois and Tout-Paris clientele. Though productions at the Chat Noir often retained their sense of satire and wry humor

(fumisterie), they also frequently began to emphasize elements of mysticism. As the theater critic Jules Lemaître noted, the theater was “a sanctuary where satire and mysticism always made a good combination.”4

2 Claudius Blanc (1854–1900) was a student of Jules Massenet at the Paris Conservatoire in the early 1890s and had published several short (and successful) pieces for piano and mélodies by the time of Sainte-Geneviève’s premiere. Léopold Dauphin (1847–1925) was primarily known for his works for piano, voice, orchestra, and four-part choral works; he was also known for his opéra-comique Les Deux loups garous.

3 Émile Pessard, “Critique musicale,” L’Événement (10 January 1893). “La salle est pleine, et quel public, Messeigneurs! (comme dirait M. Salis). Je cite au hazard: MM. Gérome, Olivier Merson, Mercié et Massenet, membres de l’Institut, M. et Mme Émile Zola, MM. Joncières, Arthur Pougin, Bruneau, Colomer, Paul Perret, Edmond Stoullig, Félix Jahyer, André Gresse, les docteurs Aubeau et Coupard, Georges Charpentier, Coquelin cadet, Jean Rameau, Willette, Marcel Fouquier, Blavet, Henri Pille et un grand nombre de femmes toutes plus charmantes les unes que les autres.” All translations henceforth are mine unless otherwise noted.

4 Quoted in Paul Jeanne, Les Théâtres d’Ombres à Montmartre de 1887 à 1923 (Paris: Les Éditions des presses modernes au Palais-Royal, 1937), 46. “Le Chat-Noir est un sanctuaire où la fumisterie et le mysticisme ont toujours fait bon ménage.”

2 Paradoxically, Sainte-Geneviève de Paris proved to be overwhelmingly popular with the cabaret’s predominantly intellectual, bourgeois, and anticlerical audiences and critics.

It played over one hundred times at Le Chat Noir, and critics judged the music worthy of being programmed by either the Concerts Colonne or Concerts Lamoureux, two of Paris’s most prestigious musical societies.5 Complete with a newly devised system of multichromatic shadow production, certain elements of the show’s theatrical production came packaged in the theater’s signature avant-garde wrappings.6 At the same time, however, the authors made no effort to dilute the work’s obviously Catholic subject matter. The musical score, written jointly by Dauphin and Blanc, similarly relied on tropes ubiquitous in religious music: modal mixture, arpeggiated chords meant to invoke the sound of harps, plainchant-inspired solo melodic vocal lines, and chorale-like choral passages—such were musical devices no doubt passed down from Jules Massenet to Blanc at the Conservatoire.7 In the final tableau, audiences even heard a setting of the Pater noster, a venerated sacred text. Perhaps as a way through which to gain a sense of religious legitimacy for the work, Salis even went so far as to hire the choir from the church of

Notre-Dame-de-Lorette to perform the work’s choral ensembles at the premiere. When questioned by the church’s priest as to his motives, Salis responded that the choir’s sole

5 Mariel Oberthür, Le cabaret du Chat Noir à Montmartre (1881–1897) (Geneva: Éditions Slatkine, 2007), 114. See also Pessard, “Critique musicale.” “Par l’effet que cette œuvre a produit dans ces pareilles conditions, on peut préjuger de celui qu’elle produira lorsqu’elle sera exécutée à orchestra avec des chœurs nombreux dans un de nos grands concerts subventionnés. Mais M. Colonne ou M. Lamoureux consentira-t-il jamais à jouer une œuvre dont le théâtre du Chat-Noir a eu la primeur? That is the question.” Emphasis original.

6 On Henri Rivière’s new proto-cinematic method of producing shadow plays, see Mukherjee, “When the Saints Go Marching In: Popular Performances of La Tentation de Saint-Antoine and Sainte-Geneviève de Paris at the Chat Noir Shadow Theater,” 37.

7 For more on Massenet’s extensive usage of religious musical tropes, see Chapters 1 and 5.

3 purpose was to “sing the praises of the Most-High.”8 One might easily read Salis’s response to the suspicious priest as evidence of the theater’s satirical nature. The critical reaction to the production, however, indicates that its reception as a “true” mystery overshadowed the sense of fumisterie for which the theater was so well known.9 Even the openly anticlerical composer and critic Alfred Bruneau congratulated Blanc and Dauphin for their successful portrayal of a true mystery at the Chat Noir. Rife as it was with markers of traditional

Catholicism, Bruneau nevertheless praised the composers for their music and the work as a whole for its emotionally touching evocation of religious events.10

For all the work’s Catholic appeal, the authors also understood that Genevieve and her protection of Paris (France) also had the potential for great Republican appeal. As politicians proposed and passed waves of secularizing legislature, Parisian audiences of varying social, political, and religious affiliations flocked to Saint-Étienne-du-Mont and to

Le Chat Noir, either to pay tribute to the popular saint through prayer or to watch a musical reenactment of their city’s salvation. The coalescence of and the popularity of these two events—at once sacred and secular, popular and “official”—is striking: it

8 Jeanne, Les Théâtres d’Ombres à Montmartre de 1887 à 1923, 54–5. “Pour les chœurs, on fit même appel à la maîtrise de l’Église Notre-Dame de Lorette, pour chanter les ensembles de l’Enfant Prodigue et de Sainte- Geneviève. ‘C’est pour chanter les louanges du Très-Haut’ repondait Salis aux scrupules du curé de la paroisse.”

9 See, for example, Henri Heugel’s advance review in which he praised the production as “nothing less than a mystery.” Henri Heugel, “Nouvelles,” Le Ménestrel (1 January 1893): 6. “Un petit événement artistique se prépare au théâtre du Chat Noir pour les premiers jours de janvier. Il ne s’agit de rien moins que de la representation d’un mystère en quatre parties et douze tableaux...” See also Arthur Pougin, “Sainte Geneviève de Paris,” Revue encyclopédique (15 February 1893): 159–60. “Cette fois-ci, le Chat Noir nous donne un spectacle d’un genre qu’il n’avait pas encore abordé: un mystère intitulé Sainte-Geneviève de Paris, dont la conception poétique et musicale, d’une naïveté voulue, fait le plus grand honneur à MM. Claudius Blanc et Léopold Dauphin.”

10 Alfred Bruneau, “Premières Représentations: Théâtre du Chat-Noir—Sainte-Geneviève de Paris,” Le Gil Blas (9 January 1893). “J’ai loué l’unité d’art de ce joli mystère. La musique de MM. Claudius Blanc et Léopold Dauphin est pour beaucoup dans l’exquise impression qui s’en dégage. Elle s’applique avec un rare bonheur aux délicieuses fantaisies décoratives de M. Henri Rivière. En des sonorités calmes d’orgue, de célesta et de violons, en des harmonies de simplesse charmante, les voix s’élèvent pleines de religiosité primitive, de naïveté sincère, d’émotion attendrie.”

4 suggests that despite the Republic’s “official” anticlerical stance, French Republicans continued to look to their Catholic heritage as they hurried to celebrate the patrie. A writer covering the events at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont for Le Figaro, the mainstream Parisian newspaper, made similar observations:

In the times of atheism and skepticism that we are going through, this tireless worship dedicated to the virgin whose name is so closely and so poetically attached to the first hours of our history is a simultaneously comforting and fortifying spectacle. Certainly, for twenty years, anticlerical propaganda and secular education have weakened the grandeur of religious manifestations and put a sort of veil on all historic events in which faith played the principal role; but one has to admit that these are figures that nothing will tear away from the heart of the people, and whose purity no atheistic preaching can tarnish. That of Saint Genevieve, among all, will always evoke the saving of the fatherland: faith that works miracles.11

This example, however short, serves as a springboard for the larger contribution of this dissertation: that musical composition and performance served as a tool through which a significant faction of “secular” Republicans reconfigured and transformed French

Catholicism in order to utilize it as an indispensable aspect of Republican and, by extension, French identity. Sound—and particularly, music—played a crucial and frequently overlooked role in this complex process. In many cases, music crafted a cultural experience that offered a venue for religious and cultural debate. Though composers, performers, and critics often did not venture into the complexities of Catholic dogma, the aesthetics of “religious” sound frequently furnished a lively metaphorical arena in which

11 J. Cardone, “Au jour le jour: La neuvaine de Sainte-Geneviève,” Le Figaro (10 January 1893). “C’est, par les temps d’athéisme et de scepticisme que nous traversons, un spectacle à la fois consolant et fortifiant qui celui de cette inlassable voué par les Parisiens à la vierge dont le nom se rattache si étroitement et si poétiquement aux premières heures de notre histoire. Certes, depuis vingt ans, la propagande anticléricale et l’éducation laïque ont amoindri la grandeur des manifestations religieuses et mis comme une sorte de voile sur tous les événements historiques où la foi joua le principal rôle; mais, il faut bien le constater, il est des figures que rien n’arrachera du cœur du people et dont aucune prédication athée ne pourrai ternir la pureté. Celle de sainte Geneviève, entre toutes, évoquera toujours la patrie sauvée, la foi qui fait des miracles.”

5 the roles of the Catholic Church in a Republican milieu could be debated.12 This argument enhances traditional considerations of music’s role in the relationship between the French state and the Catholic Church in the Third Republic by stepping away from the somewhat simplistic epistemological position that, for historians and musicologists alike, has long been aligned—whether tacitly or explicitly—with Ralph Gibson’s problematic and influential claim that “Republicans and Catholics could not stand each other in the nineteenth century.”13

My intervention in the historiography of French music draws on new archival research, critical reception-studies, and close readings of musical scores to demonstrate how, as in the example of Sainte-Geneviève de Paris, composers and critics from often opposing ideological factions dismantled the secular/sacred binary through musical composition and the act of musical performance in an effort to craft a brand of Frenchness that was founded at once on “secular” Republican ideology and on the heritage of the

Catholic Church.14 The resulting constructions of French identity reveal an asymmetrically configured middle ground, with the ideological state apparatus absorbing seemingly opposing subject positions into broadly appealing and reconciliatory visions of

12 Here I follow Charles Hirschkind who argues that sound, as a “sensory epistemology,” is essential (or, at times, destructive) to expressions of religious practice and adherence. See Hirschkind, “Religion,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 165.

13 Ralph Gibson, “Why Republicans and Catholics Couldn’t Stand Each Other in the Nineteenth Century,” in Religion, Society, and Politics in France Since 1789, ed. Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin (London: The Hambledon Press, 1991), 107–21.

14 My usage of the term “secular” here and throughout this dissertation references its frequent historiographical usage in texts that document the history of the Third Republic as a “perceived absence or overcoming of religion or the legal separation of Church and State.” See Jeffers Engelhardt, “Arvo Pärt and the Idea of a Christian Europe,” in Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 215.

6 an inclusive Republic.15 I counter the prevailing historiographical and musicological narrative that the Catholic Church acted as an antagonist to Republican—and so-called

“secular”—musical identity by highlighting the nuance of actual events and the ways in which institutions such as Church and State reached downward to effect first events and then experience. I ultimately reveal the complexities of the relationship between the

Catholic Church and the French state at the fin-de-siècle by tracing the entangled ways in which music acted as an ideal medium through which composers, critics, and audiences reconfigured Catholicism and the institution of the Church into a valuable cultural product, one that catered at the same time to the Church and to the Republic.

The Ideology of Two Frances

From the outset of its foundation in 1870, the Third Republic was plagued with instability, especially as it concerned the interrelation between the French State and the Catholic

Church—one that was marked by a complex nexus of political and religious maneuvering that found its origins in the French Revolution. The seeds of Republican thought, first sown during the Enlightenment and then during the Revolution, had blossomed into questions regarding the fundamental role of religion in French society: many revolutionaries asked whether the Church should function as a moral barometer in modern society.16 The end of the Revolution, however, saw the signing of the Concordat

(1801), an agreement between Napoleon I and Pope Pius VII that named the Roman

Catholic Church the majority (but not official) church in France. The Concordat was not

15 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and State Apparatus (Notes Toward an Investigation),” in Lenin, Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, [1971] 2001), 85–132.

16 For a concise review of Church-State relations as a product of Revolutionary thought, see James F. McMillan, “Catholic Christianity in France from the Restoration to the Separation of Church and State, 1815– 1905,” The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. VIII: World Christianities c.1815–c.1914, ed. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 217–32.

7 an invitation for French parishes to reclaim the vast amounts of church lands and properties that had been seized by revolutionaries. It was, however, crucial in tipping the balance of Church-State relations in favor of Napoleon’s France, for it mandated that the state would handle the selection of French bishops, the payment of their salaries, and the maintenance of church property: all actions that would only require the secondary approval of the acting Pope. In the decades following the Revolution, the French witnessed a resurgence of Catholicism that reached its apex during the Second Empire

(1852–70).

The establishment of the Third Republic coincided with the end of the Franco-

Prussian War, a military conflict that had decimated the country’s infrastructure (and pride). The new government, headed by Adolphe Thiers, encountered difficulty in establishing its new authority, especially in the face of a large conglomerate of Parisians who had grown increasingly disaffected with the national government during the war.

When, in 1871, members of the far-left National Guard killed two Army soldiers, a seventy- two-day long period of radical socialist and revolutionary government began. Known as the Paris Commune, the bloody conflict led to additional casualties and deeper political divisions.17 In the early 1880s, Patrice MacMahon’s Moral Order had taken control of the government with policies intended to counteract the lingering turbulence of the Paris

Commune. By 1885, however, the parliamentary majority shifted from moderately conservative Republicans in favor of more radical politicians, such that the revanchiste

Georges Boulanger was named Minister of War in 1889. Boulanger, whose anti-German ideology was marked by an aggressive nationalism—undoubtedly exacerbated by the

17 See Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune, 1871 (London: Routledge, 2013 [1999]).

8 centenary of the 1789 Revolution—sought revenge for France’s loss to Prussia. With a steadily growing base of supporters that counted many traditional Catholics and royalists among its ranks, he was nearly successful in staging a coup that would have toppled the

Republic.

That same year marked the beginning of the Ralliement, a political and religious movement driven by Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) that sought official reconciliation between the Roman Catholic Church and the French Republic. Already in 1879, Jules Ferry had proposed a law that forbade clergy from teaching in public schools. The following year, the Jesuits had been expelled from France, and in 1882, following a surge in anticlericalism, the French government passed the law that rendered public education both compulsory and secular. Divorce was returned to the civil code in 1884 and, in 1886, the Goblet law mandated that monks and nuns would no longer be recruited for teaching positions in state schools. It also removed the traditional ban on working on Sundays.18 By the end of the 1880s, notions of reconciliation between the Church and the State seemed utopian, if not impossible: while the Republic sought to regain a sense of stability after

Boulanger’s attempted coup in 1889, the Church and its supporters grappled for a foothold in a nation that was edging dangerously close to, as they perceived it, total secularization.

Amidst these tensions, however, efforts toward the Ralliement began in earnest in

1890, as the Church attempted to stem the further spread of French anticlericalism. Pope

Leo XIII encouraged Catholic conservatives to cooperate politically with conservative

Republicans as long as they supported religious freedom. Marked by Cardinal Charles

Lavigerie’s famous “Toast of Algiers” (12 November 1890) and Pope Leo XIII’s conciliatory

18 John McManners, Church and State in France, 1789–1914 (London: S. P. C. K. for the Church Historical Society, 1972), 55–60.

9 rhetoric in the two encyclicals Rerum novarum (May 1891) and Au milieu des sollicitudes

(February 1892), the Ralliement led to a complex strategy of political and religious maneuvering toward Pope Leo’s two-pronged objectives: one, that French Catholics accept the Republic as a political system and two, that Republicans and Catholics might work together to ensure the continuation of a Catholic French state.19 Historians have long disagreed about the underlying motivations behind the Pope’s “rallying” rhetoric. While the historian Kevin Passmore, for instance, claims that the only true consensus that underscored Ralliement politics was the shared opposition to Socialism by the Republic and the Church, Alexander Sedgwick argues that the Ralliement emerged from the

Vatican’s effort to pull itself out of political and religious isolation. According to Sedgwick,

France was the Church’s most logical ally given its own military “isolation” following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.20 Given that the success of the Ralliement was dependent on the Republic’s responses to the Pope’s conciliatory actions, the end result that the Vatican desired was difficult to achieve—so much so that Pope Leo, in a 1883 letter to Jules Grévy, then-President of the Republic, had already expressed his disappointment in the fact that the Republic had allegedly ignored the Church’s conciliatory efforts.21 In this climate, any unified national identity remained elusive. The task of defining France as

19 The “Toast of Algiers” refers to a speech given by Cardinal Charles Lavigerie before a large assembly of French officials, many of whom were outspoken monarchists, in which he outlined—at the Pope’s urging— the mandate that French Catholics embrace the Republic as the country’s form of governance.

20 Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 73–100. For many religious and political historians of the Third Republic, the foundational study on the Ralliement is Alexander Sedgwick, The Ralliement in French Politics, 1890–1898 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). See also Maurice Larkin, “The Vatican, France, and the Roman Question, 1898–1903: New Archival Evidence,” The Historical Journal Vol. 27, No. 1 (March 1984): 177–97.

21 Passmore, The Right in France, 82. The Pope’s letter to Grévy is quoted by Sedgwick in The Ralliement in French Politics, 6.

10 a nation was split between multiple and seemingly disparate factions, and not just the

Church, on the one hand, and the Republic on the other.

The eruption of the Dreyfus Affair in 1894 severely curtailed the Vatican’s work toward the Ralliement. When news broke that a French Army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, had been accused of selling military secrets to the Prussian government, scandal quickly ensued. Dreyfus was immediately court-martialed, convicted of treason, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Two years later, in 1896, an investigation by Georges

Piquart (the Army’s newly installed director of counter-espionage) revealed evidence that proved Dreyfus to be innocent of all charges; the guilty party was not Dreyfus, but another

French officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. The military, however, suppressed this exculpatory evidence, and in 1898, Esterhazy was acquitted by a military tribunal after only two days of testimony. Dreyfus’s supporters—the Dreyfusards—were outraged. One of the most vocal, the author Émile Zola, published the famous open letter entitled

“J’Accuse!” in which he exposed the true culprit and eviscerated the military’s handling of the situation. It had no impact: Dreyfus was court-martialed for a second time in 1899 and found guilty. Though he was pardoned days later by Émile Loubet, the President of the

Republic, he was not officially exonerated and reinstated in the army until 1906.

The scandal divided an already fractured nation over a range of issues, not the least of which were politics and religion. Public figures, including intellectuals, politicians, clergy, artists, and musicians openly engaged with the issue, identifying either with the pro-Republican Dreyfusards or their more conservative, largely Catholic counterparts, the anti-Dreyfusards. Anti-Dreyfusards argued for the incontrovertible authority of the military, the army, and the Catholic Church within the structures of the Republic, while

Dreyfusards asserted that the Republic should remain based in the Revolutionary ideals of

11 egalitarian individualism. No less important in the affair were Dreyfus’s cultural origins: the fact that Dreyfus was Jewish exacerbated the fact that he had allegedly betrayed his country to its most distrusted neighbor. Anti-Semitic rhetoric—much of which was produced by the Church—characterized much of the anti-Dreyfusards’ dissent, and it formed the foundation for much of the conservative ultranationalist sentiment that characterized the ideological and aesthetic battles that swirled throughout France in the decades leading up to the First World War.22 As William Fortescue has noted, the eventual defeat of the anti-Dreyfusards was marked by a major political swing to the Left that had traumatic consequences for both the military and the Catholic Church, especially following the installation of the government led by the staunchly anticlerical René

Waldeck-Rousseau in 1899.23

Amidst the tumult of the Dreyfus Affair, Republican legislators continued to propose and pass secularizing legislation—indeed, the Church’s position on the Dreyfus matter likely encouraged Republicans to push toward official secularization. One of

Waldeck-Rousseau’s first acts as the Minister of Religion was to introduce a bill on the parliamentary floor that, through its mandated enforcement of governmental authorization for religious orders, classified numerous Catholic congregations as unauthorized. This bill later passed as the famous Law of Association (1901), a piece of legislation that stripped religious orders of the right to congregate, decreed over five

22 See Pierre Birnbaum, The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), Julie Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Michael Maurrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

23 William Fortescue, The Third Republic in France 1870–1940: Conflicts and Continuities (London: Routledge, 2000), 50–79. For more on the Dreyfus Affair, see Robert Gildea, France 1870–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996), 51–59 and Maurice Larkin, Church and State After the Dreyfus Affair (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1974), 63–80. On Waldeck-Rousseau’s anticlericalism, see Malcolm O. Partin, Waldeck-Rousseau, Combes, and the Church: Politics of Anticlericalism, 1899–1905 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1969).

12 hundred monastic orders and religious congregations illegal, and allowed the State to confiscate and sell their property.24

The death knell for the 1801 Concordat sounded when Émile Combes succeeded

Waldeck-Rousseau as the Prime Minister in 1902. Combes, a product of the Ultramontane

Second Empire, originally wanted to utilize threats of separation as a tool through which to intimidate the Vatican into supporting his own strict interpretation of the Concordat and its provisions for the French State.25 And indeed, two separate pushes toward separation failed under Combes’s watch: one in 1902 (an early separation bill) and another in 1903 that proposed that the budget des cultes be abolished.26 Nonetheless, he was responsible for a 1904 law that prohibited previously authorized clergy from teaching and ordered the closure of their schools over the next ten years, a move that resulted in the shutdown of over one-third of the country’s Catholic schools and the confiscation of over

200 million francs’ worth of Church property.27 It thus came as no surprise that on 9

24 The Law of Association was first targeted toward the Assumptionists, a congregation of ultraconservative Catholics who played a major (and very vocal) role in attacking Dreyfus as a traitor, especially in their newspaper, La Croix. Their position on Dreyfus was extreme and resulted in frantic attacks on Jews, Protestants, Freemasons, and socialists; in Waldeck-Rousseau’s strongly left-leaning and anticlerical government, they were seen as a dangerous threat to Republicanism. On Waldeck-Rousseau’s Law of Association, see Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 219; William Fortescue, The Third Republic in France, 1870–1940: Conflicts and Continuities, 75, and Alain Boyer’s preface to Jacqueline Lalouette and Jean-Pierre Machelon, eds., Les congrégations hors de la loi? Autour de la loi du 1er juillet 1901 (Paris: Letouzet et Ané, 2002), 9. See also Murat Akan, “The Institutional Politics of Laïcité in the French Third Republic,” in The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 53–56.

25 Larkin, Church and State after the Dreyfus Affair, 102. Larkin argues that though he may not have wanted the separation of Church and State, Combes was too entrenched in his Second Empire upbringing (and Catholic education) to believe that the French Church could ever be freed from Roman domination. According to Larkin, Combes wanted complete governmental control over the appointment of Church personnel—a move that, in his view, would weaken the Church’s power and would slowly erase it as a significant feature of French political and social life.

26 Ibid., 105–06.

27 Gildea, France 1870–1914, 75.

13 December 1905, the official Law of Separation Concerning the Separation of Church and

State passed in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

The Catholic Church, however, was dealing with its own internal conflict. Within the realm of the French Church, debates raged between supporters of Ultramontanism and those who aligned themselves with Gallicanism. Ultramontanists believed in the

Pope’s supreme authority and his unwavering control of the French Church and pledged their allegiance to the Vatican and its ecclesiastical governance over the French government in what could be called a pontifical monarchy. Surging in popularity under

Louis-Napoléon’s reign during the 1830s and 40s, the Ultramontanists saw a major victory over their Gallican counterparts when the Roman Rite replaced local Gallican liturgies.

Gallicanists, on the other hand, proclaimed the French Church’s autonomy and looked instead to the State’s governance of French churches as the primary authority in matters of the Church. By the time of the founding of the Third Republic, some thirty years later,

Gallican bishops found themselves in a small (if vocal) minority when the doctrine of

Papal Infallibility passed at the First Vatican Council (1869–70). The act of affording the

Pope the attribute of infallibility further entrenched the battle lines between Republican politicians and the Church. Whereas many moderate Republicans (and even those who leaned more to the left) had been in favor of Gallican-led reforms, the successful vote regarding papal infallibility rendered Ultramontanism and Catholicism virtually synonymous in their minds: the Ultramontanists’ failure to display an appropriate patriotism toward the French nation kicked Republican anticlericalism into overdrive— especially during the Dreyfus Affair, when the Church openly aligned itself with the

French Army in a decidedly anti-Republican fashion.

14 Binary interpretations of this political and cultural uncertainty as a sharp and irreconcilable divide between Church and State are therefore not without reason. Indeed, the Catholic Church and its role in French society had become an obvious point of contention between the clergy, on the one hand, who feared total secularization, and an increasing faction of anticlerical politicians who sought an end to the Church’s “reign” in

France, on the other. Thus the idea of “two Frances”—one Catholic and the other

Republican—continues to persist. Such polar endpoints on the political spectrum have supported not only Gibson’s narrative but also those by historians such as Christopher

Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, James Patrick Daughton, and John McManners, whose conclusions were guided by the assertion that the “anticlerical tail was wagging the

Republican dog.” 28 Joseph F. Byrnes relies on a similar model. Though he bases his study on an early nineteenth-century song entitled “Catholique et français toujours,” he nevertheless categorizes the Third Republic as a battleground between “religiously enthusiastic and secularly nationalistic French citizens.”29 Similarly, the political scientist

William Safran characterizes the Third Republic as a fully secularized entity—one that idealized its separation from the strictures of the Catholic church.30 More recently, Henri

Peña-Ruiz has likened the secular recasting of the French state to “universal emancipation,” or the promulgation of laws and policies that ensure freedom of

28 Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds. Culture Wars: Secular—Catholic Conflict in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); James Patrick Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870-1914 (London: S.P.C.K. for the Church Historical Society, 1972), 44.

29 Joseph F. Byrnes, Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), xi; 69-95; 179-209.

30 William Safran, “Religion and Laïcité in a Jacobin Republic: The Case of France,” in The Secular and the Sacred: Nation, Religion, and Politics, ed. William Safran (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 54-81.

15 conscience for all citizens, a process that he argues began in the early 1880s with the

Republic’s passing of some of its earliest anticlerical legislation.31

The persistent labeling of the Republic as an inherently secular entity glosses over the fact that anticlericalism was not a reaction against religion itself but was rather one of the byproducts of an increasing distaste for the Church as an institution. Though

Republicans may have resented the Church’s increasingly dominant influence on private life (particularly when it concerned women), they nonetheless utilized the institution itself as a framework for civic life. Referred to as conformistes saisonniers, these otherwise secular citizens insisted on Christian baptisms, marriages, and burials, but had little to no relationship with the Church outside of these rituals.32 Many Frenchmen adopted this form of religious practice, but scholars often overlook the fact that sporadic adherences to

Catholic convention did not necessarily indicate a rejection of their Catholic heritage outright.

My project builds on the work of sociologists David Lyon and Grace Davie, whose research reconsiders previously accepted understandings of secularism and emphasizes the notion that there is often a slippage between religion as a literal practice and religion as a figurative cultural phenomenon.33 Davie’s understanding of modern European

Christianity, based on the concepts of believing without belonging (the decoupling of religious belief from institutionalized practice), vicarious religion (the idea that a small

31 Henri Peña-Ruiz, “Laïcité and the Idea of the Republic: The Principles of Universal Emancipation,” in Secularism on the Edge: Rethinking Church-State Relations in the United States, France, and Israel, Jacques Berlinerblau, Sarah Fainberg, and Aurora Nou, eds. (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2014), 95–102.

32 Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 163.

33 David Lyon, “Rethinking Secularization: Retrospect and Prospect,” Review of Religious Research, Vol. 26, No. 3 (March 1985): 228-43.

16 group of churchgoers acts as a proxy for the non-practicing majority), and the force of

Christian cultural memory in Europe, especially highlights the complexities of

Republican culture that often straddled the distinction between religion as practice and religion as a cultural product as a sort of cultural Catholicism.34 These distinctions are exceptionally useful to this project, for this brand of Republican Catholicism, fashioned as it was in large part by the force of a collective Republican memory of a powerful Catholic past, was particularly attractive to Republicans whose egos were still recovering from the turmoil of military defeat and political instability during the early years of the Third

Republic. In terms of music, Catholicism straddled this distinction. At times, Republican critics and composers configured musical works as an expression of Catholicism in its most literal form. At other times, they mobilized Catholicism as a mode of cultural expression in a broader sense. Librettos, performance venues, and, in numerous cases, music itself was imbued with a sense of sacred authority from which French Republicans and Catholics alike could draw meaning.35 Katharine Ellis has made a similar point by writing of a “long tradition whereby the heritage-value or high-art status of a custom or artifact could ‘trump’ Republican feelings of distaste at its Catholic provenance. If the custom or artifact could be re-purposed, or recontextualized, and rendered conveniently secular in the process, it seems there were few barriers to its assimilation into the national metahistory.” 36

34 Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

35 Here I draw on Clifford Geertz’s influential essay “Religion as a Cultural System.” See Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–126.

36 Katharine Ellis, The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2013), 115.

17 I argue, however, that such cultural objects need not always be rendered entirely secular in order to be successfully co-opted into Republicanism. More often than not, the

Church was cast as a lieu de memoire—a site of memorialization, commemoration, and at times, nostalgia.37 In his work on the formation and transmission of French collective history and memory, Pierre Nora wrote that as republics rose and regimes fell, emblems of the French state—along with their meanings—also changed.38 Nora cites places (the

Panthéon, the Arc de Triomphe), people (Descartes and Joan of Arc), and things (the tricolor, the Dictionnaire Larousse, and the Tour de France) as sites of French national memory. 39 Yet the lieu de memoire, especially as it concerned the formation of a unified

French identity, was contested ground between the Church and the Republic both in a literal sense, for example, with Eugène d’Harcourt’s concert series at the church of Saint-

Eustache and, figuratively speaking, in the processes at work when critics attempted to classify musical works as inherently sacred or secular. This dissertation builds on the model of the lieu de memoire by offering a new epistemological framework through which to understand the processes of the Republic’s dialectical reconfigurations of the Catholic

Church in the habitus of Parisian musical life: music could be—and was—transformed into sacred cultural symbols ingrained, nonetheless, with Republican authority. By moving beyond the opposition of conventional institutional religious participation and traditional narratives of secularization, I reveal the disconnect between “rigid,

37 The term “lieu de memoire” is Pierre Nora’s. See Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol. 1, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). This also relates to Davie’s emphasis of the “force of Christian cultural memory in Europe.”

38 Pierre Nora, Présent, Nation, Mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). See also Nora, Realms of Memoryt, Vol. 1, trans. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

39 Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol. 1, 6. See also Hue-Tam Ho Tai, “Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 3 (June 2001): 906–22.

18 contradictory metrics of religious practice” and secular public life by acknowledging the

Catholic Church as a valuable site of national memory through which Republicans and

Catholics ushered in a musical Ralliement.40

Music and the Ralliement

Despite the efforts of historians such as Anthony D. Smith, who argues that the development of, attachment to, and passion for national identities can be traced back to

“sacred and binding commitments to religion,” key musicological studies examining identity politics during the Third Republic position the Church and the French State as mutually exclusive actors.41 Whereas Smith asserts that sacred belief remains central to national identities even in “secular” nations, musicologists such as Jane Fulcher foreground music as ammunition that was used in the “culture war” between Catholics and Republicans.42 In one of the most significant studies of music’s ideological power during the Third Republic, Jann Pasler discusses an “ironic religious revival” in which the

“musical world provided a medium for both resistance and public reconciliation of the republicans with Catholics.” Although Pasler hints at the possible presence of a musical détente, her discussion is limited to music written and performed by well-known Catholic figures such as the composers Vincent d’Indy and Charles Bordes and the organist

Alexandre Guilmant.43 By the mid-1890s, however, these musicians were already well

40 Jeffers Engelhardt, “Arvo Pärt and the Idea of a Christian Europe,” in Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual, ed. Philip Bohlman and Jeffers Engelhardt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 220.

41 Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4–5.

42 Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

43 Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 614–15.

19 established within the realm of religious music, were associated with specific Parisian churches, directed the Schola Cantorum, and were known for their propagation of

Gregorian chant and Renaissance counterpoint as the only acceptable styles of liturgical music. Even as Pasler demonstrates the growing popularity of sacred music in secular contexts during the 1890s, her focus remains on composers such as Handel and Bach, whose reputations as masters of Baroque music located their compositions in the secular concert hall rather than in the Church.

This secularist view of the Third Republic has led to the uncritical assumption that sacred musical works composed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries only reveal the composer’s personal religious beliefs and practices—or, conversely, that secular works indicate the composer’s engagement with anticlerical ideology and politics.

Carlo Caballero’s research on Gabriel Fauré, for example, presumes that the musician’s religious beliefs must have played some role in his compositional process and suggests that Fauré’s music occupies an interstitial space between the “ascetism of the Schola” and the “sugary musical styles that prevailed amongst both the laity and the clergy.”44

Musicologists have often positioned the music of Jules Massenet on the opposite extreme.

Rather than conceding the possibility of a musical Ralliement, scholars instead portray

Massenet as a model anticleric. Indeed, many of his most successful works with

Republican credentials—such as Hérodiade (1881) and Thaïs (1893)—were written for the opera stage, and even his best-known sacred works—the oratorios Marie-Madeleine (1873),

Ève (1875), and La Vierge (1880)—have been widely received as secular works by virtue of

44 Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 185. Katherine Bergeron makes similar claims about Fauré’s religious convictions (or lack thereof) in Voice Lessons: French Mélodies in the Belle Epoque (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–68.

20 the explicit sexualization of the eponymous Biblical women.45 Underpinning this scholarly narrative, however, is the notion that a Republican composer such as Massenet was only capable of composing music that aligned with the most visible historiographical aspects of

Republican ideology. In this light, the concept of a “secularized” Church is just as unlikely as that of a religious Republic, yet as I demonstrate here, music and musical performance allowed for just that and undermined this simplistic dichotomy.

As Republican legislators worked to secularize the country from a legal standpoint throughout the 1880s, musicians, composers, and performers moved in quite the opposite direction, composing and performing musical works that embraced the Ralliement by enfolding aspects of traditional Catholicism into the ideal Republican image. This defies the gloomy prediction of Léon Escudier, a prominent music critic of the time, who feared that “religious art is almost considered as sedition by our municipal counselors. Soon our composers will no longer dare to sing the Glory of God, and they will have to ban all that religion gave birth to in their works: chastity, nobility, truth, and grandiosity.”46 More often than not, such works were intended for performance in decidedly secular spaces, whether at Salis’s Le Chat Noir, the Salle des Fêtes at the Trocadéro, or on the state- subsidized stages of the Paris Opéra and the Opéra-Comique. These works also encompassed a wide swath of musical, dramatic, and performative genres. While bourgeois audiences encountered operas such as Jules Massenet’s Grisélidis (1901) and Le

45 See Erik Goldstrom, “A Whore in Paradise: The Oratorios of Jules Massenet” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1998), and Clair Rowden, Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera: Massenet’s Hérodiade and Thaïs (Weinsberg: Edition Lucie Galland, 2004). See also Clair Rowden, “L’Homme saint chez Massenet: l’amour sacré et le sacre de l’amour,” in Opéra et Religion sous la IIIe République, ed. Jean-Christophe Branger and Alban Ramaut (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2006), 257–84.

46 Léon Escudier, “L’Année 1879,” L’Art musical (1 January 1880): 1. “L’art religieux n’est pas mieux favorisé. Celui-là, au contraire, est presque considéré par nos édiles comme séditieux. Bientôt nos compositeurs n’oseront plus chanter la Gloire de Dieu, et ils devront banner de leurs œuvres tout ce que la religion a enfanté de chaste, de noble, de vrai, de grandiose.”

21 Jongleur de Notre Dame (1902) on the stage of the Opéra-Comique—two operas steeped in the musical portrayal of Catholicism in its most traditional sense—and international audiences of varied national, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds interacted with the Church in new ways at the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris, still other Parisians could purchase a more affordable ticket to experience the Catholic Church on the

“popular” stages of Paris’s boulevard theaters. But the frequency with which such productions were staged, coupled with the overwhelmingly positive reception with which they were met, suggests that efforts toward Ralliement took place—and were more successful—within the cultural sphere rather than inside the parliamentary chamber.

To be clear: this project does not position the act of musical composition, programming, or performance as an expression of personal faith in the Christian religion or in the Catholic Church. In a sense, the religious convictions (or lack thereof) of composers, librettists, performers, and critics do not matter; to insist that they do implies a belief in the notion that one must necessarily be religious in order to write religious music.

This is simply not so. In this regard, I focus on the press as an archive of historiography, as an often-overlooked locus of transformation at which numerous political, religious, and musical reconfigurations take shape. Rather than viewing the press as a chronicle of surface-level evaluations of musical works and events, I utilize reception-studies as a methodological tool through which to consider how critical responses—tempered as they were by politically-affiliated editors and paid puff pieces—sparked questions of value, not simply in musical terms, but rather in broader political, religious, and cultural arenas. In many cases, positive reviews moved beyond cataloguing a work’s musical merits. Critics often intertwined Catholic and Republican histories in such complex ways that musical compositions could be deemed “good” precisely because they evoked equally appealing

22 images of Church and State. Drawing on the country’s Catholic heritage, critics from widely varied political, religious, and musical camps repeatedly positioned religiously themed musical works as extensions of a Catholic French past that supported the legitimacy of the nation’s Republican present. As for the music that accompanied similar dramatic works, critics often hailed it as a marker of religious sincerity, even when its composer was not Catholic and had no association with the Church, professional or otherwise. Conversely, when critics denigrated such music, as in the cases of Charles

Gounod’s Messe à la mémoire de Jeanne d’Arc (1887) or Ernest Chausson’s La Légende de

Sainte-Cécile (1893), their negative reactions originated in their perception that the music was simply not religious enough to befit the sacred nature of the text at hand.

Questions of value and evaluation invariably lead to a discussion of canon. The works that I examine here are not “canonic” by modern standards—indeed, many of them are absent from modern scholarly literature and have been examined in-depth for the first time in this dissertation. Their nineteenth-century receptions, however, position them within a temporally-specific canon that resonates almost exclusively within the specific political, religious, and cultural context of fin-de-siècle Paris—a modern French review of

Massenet’s Hérodiade or Gounod’s Drames sacrés, for instance, would likely read much differently from its late nineteenth-century counterpart. And while their scant appearance in musicological literature or contemporary performance repertoires might suggest an implied lack of “value” to some critics, I reestablish value to these overlooked works in a historical sense by placing them into a specific “canon” that speaks directly to a particular historical moment in nineteenth-century French music.47

47 Here I follow Mark Everist’s observation that “views of canonic status are contingent on historical circumstance, which in turn demands systematic analysis.” Everist, “Reception Theories, Canonic

23 The Catholic Church in Secular Musical Aesthetics: What Makes (Secular) Music Sacred?

Defining the appropriate parameters for the composition of sacred music had long been a concern for French composers and critics, one that predated the founding of the Schola

Cantorum in 1894. From the late 1820s, figures such as the committed Ultramontanist

Joseph d’Ortigue began writing essays for musical and religious journals that proclaimed plainchant as the genre par excellence of sacred music. Its appeal, according to d’Ortigue, was found in its simplicity and ease of communal performance—relative, of course, to the

Renaissance polyphony that was witnessing a simultaneous growth in popularity within

Parisian churches. Moreover, he cast plainchant, in its resistance to secularization, as mirroring the divine qualities of permanence and eternity. D’Ortigue’s contemporaries echoed his position: Félix Danjou, the organist at Notre-Dame-des-Blancs-Manteaux,

Saint-Eustache, and Notre Dame de Paris, asserted that polyphony was complicated and inaccessible to the untrained singer and concluded that polyphonic music was thus entirely unsuitable for liturgical use.48 At the end of the 1840s, the music historian and organist Félix Clément bemoaned in his Rapport sur l’état de la musique religieuse en France

(1849) the popularity of Palestrinian counterpoint as a model for sacred music. He considered it, in contrast to plainchant, elitist music that was conducted by professional maîtres de chapelles, performed by trained singers, and consumed by an upper-class, educated audience.49 As Katharine Ellis has shown, Clément believed that Palestrina’s

Discourses, and Musical Value,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 396.

48 Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 193–97.

49 Ibid., 198.

24 music had “jeopardized the piety of the masses by composing a metaliturgical music whose signification could be appreciated only by the educated and which caused the people to be alienated from the liturgical experience itself.”50

Clément’s assessment of polyphony as degenerate led him to publish his own history of sacred music in 1860 (Histoire générale de la musique religieuse). In a general sense, it echoed the same anti-Palestrina sentiments that he had outlined in 1849. Yet the text was crucial in providing explicit prescriptions for how modern composers should compose sacred music or, at least, in its outlining of parameters derived from earlier musics after which modern composers could model their own works. For Clément, sacred—indeed,

Catholic—music was “serious, slow, and majestic;” it was rooted in melody and was, as a result, beautiful.51 The valuation of melody as a marker of the beautiful was, as Catrina

Flint de Médicis has written, derived from plainchant: Renaissance polyphony had committed the sin of replacing the primacy of melody with harmonic innovation.52 Ideally, religious music should have a four-part, homorhythmic texture and should not “exalt a false, secular beauty that results from human passions and that excites them in turn.” On the contrary, it should “envision a natural and serious beauty that commands admiration and respect”; nor should it be performed in any context other than a cathedral.53 Any other

50 Loc. cit. Ellis shows that the plainchant/Palestrina debate was a by-product of a larger debate within nineteenth-century French culture: that of the importance of the Medieval era versus that of the Renaissance. For French Catholics, particularly Ultramontanes, thought of the Middle Ages as essentially Christian in nature and thus separate from the secular Renaissance.

51 Félix Clément, Histoire générale de la musique religieuse (Paris: Librairie Adrien le Clere et Cie, 1860), 323. “Jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle la musique religieuse conserva certaines formes graves, lentes et majestueuses qui en maintenaient le caractère, en faisaient un genre special et la distinguaient de la musique dramatique.”

52 Catrina Flint de Médicis, “The Schola Cantorum, Early Music, and French Political Culture” (Ph.D. Diss., McGill University, 2006), 257–58.

53 Clément, Histoire générale de la musique religieuse, 386. “Mais il faut s’entendre sur le beau, ne pas exalter une beauté factice et profane qui est le résultat des passions humains et qui les excite à son tour, mais avoir en

25 sacred music, according to Clément, might be religious in a general, undefined sense, but it could never be Catholic.54

Writings akin to those by d’Ortigue and Clément undergirded the plainchant revival that was simultaneously underway at Solesmes. Efforts to restore plainchant to its former glory had begun in earnest with the arrival of Dom Prosper Guéranger as the new abbot in 1833. As a supporter of Ultramontane Catholicism, his objective was to reinstate the Roman liturgy within French churches and to strengthen the French Church’s connection with the Papal seat. For Guéranger, this process was as much a national concern as a spiritual one: by reestablishing the Roman liturgy as the official liturgy of the

French Catholic church, Guéranger hoped to reconnect France to its Catholic past.

Central to Guéranger’s enterprise was the restoration of Gregorian chant to its presumed

“natural” state, an undertaking that, as Ellis has shown, was laden with political undercurrents.55 That plainchant continued to be heralded as the purest exemplar of sacred music later in the nineteenth century should come as no surprise; Flint de Médicis notes a direct link between the writings of d’Ortigue and Clément and the Solesmes movement.56

vue une beauté naturelle, grave, qui commande l’admiration et le respect.” The translations above are Catrina Flint de Médicis’s.

54 Ibid., 329. “Cette musique peut être religieuse dans un sens général, mais elle ne saurait être catholique.” These writings are all part of the much broader Cecilian movement yet are set apart from their German counterparts in some regards by their emphasis on plainchant (more so than Palestrina, in some cases) as the ideal model of church music. For more on the Cecilian movement, see James Garratt, Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

55 Katharine Ellis’s masterful monograph explores this movement in depth and thus it will not be discussed at length here. See The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2013). For a more general overview of the Solesmes movement, see Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

56 Flint de Médicis, “The Schola Cantorum, Early Music, and French Political Culture,” 259.

26 By the end of the nineteenth century, efforts to define specific elements of sacred music had gained in urgency—no doubt a result of Solesmes’s increased visibility within

French musical discourse—though by the last quarter of the century, Palestrinian polyphony had found a certain degree of redemption within musical circles, thanks to the combined efforts of the composer and conductor Charles Bordes and Camille Bellaigue, a critic whose Ultramontane sympathies cannot be overemphasized.57 When, in 1894, the

Sacred Congregation of Rites (an administrative body of the Catholic Church charged with the supervision of the liturgy and the process of canonization) issued a set of regulations concerning the composition and performance of music for the Church,

Palestrina’s music was listed as an acceptable model, as were other examples of

“chromatic”—modern?—music that had been written by composers (Italian or not). So long as it displayed a proper religious character, such music was indeed “worthy of God.”58

The text of the decree, originally written in Italian, was reprinted in French—along with lengthy explanations of its individual articles—by the priest Eugène Chaminade in his book La musique sacrée telle que la veut l’Église (1897). Chaminade, who had formerly been the maître de chapelle at the Cathédrale Saint-Front in Périgueux (1888–95), could

57 As Ellis and Flint de Médicis have noted, it was Charles Bordes’s introduction of late-Reformation polyphony at multiple French churches (Nogent-sur-Marne and, later, Saint-Gervais in Paris) and his public advocacy of the idea that the performance of Palestrina’s music was neither elitist nor inaccessible (in terms of musical training) that aided in the composer’s rehabilitation amongst Catholic music critics. Likewise, it was Bellaigue’s reconciliation of Catholic medievalism with so-called “secular” counterpoint that aided in this process. See Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 201–02 and Flint de Médicis, “The Schola Cantorum, Early Music, and French Political Culture,” 105–29.

58 Eugène Chaminade, La musique sacrée telle que la veut l’Église (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1897), 23. “Art. III: Le chant polyphone ainsi que le chant chromatique, pourvu qu’ils aient le cachet religieux, peuvent aussi être employés dans les cérémonies sacrées. Art. IV: Dans le genre des chants polyphones, la musique de Pier- Luigi de Palestrina et de ceux qui l’ont imité est digne de Dieu; comme aussi on reconnaît digne du culte divin la musique chromatique qui a été cultivée jusqu’à nos jours par des maîtres respectables des différentes écoles italiennes et étrangères et en particulier par les maîtres de chapelle romains, dont les compositions ont été plusieurs fois reconnues par l’autorité compétente comme vraiment religieuses.”

27 hardly hide his support for the Ultramontane cause, yet he directed a significant portion of his personal commentary toward modern (read: “secular”) composers who found themselves writing religious music. Secular music, according to the regulations, was strictly forbidden from performance in churches, as was any adaptation of liturgical text to a melody borrowed from the theater or concert hall. This was nothing new, though Masses at Parisian churches often included such adaptations: Carlo Caballero cites an Agnus Dei adapted from an entr’acte from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne and a “Regina cœli” composed on a theme from the same composer’s Les Pécheurs des perles; another notable example is the

“Ave Maria” composed by Jules Massenet on his famous Méditation de Thaïs, though there is no information as to whether or not it was definitively performed as part of a Mass.59

Chaminade also warned against the ways through which liturgical music could take on a secular character: Masses composed without a sense of cohesive unity across individual movements risked taking on the “all too familiar air of an opera or an oratorio.”60

In order to be considered truly sacred (at least according to Chaminade), music had to adhere to the following parameters: the melodic line must be derived from the techniques of plainchant, and must be lyrical, flowing, and easy to learn; it must avoid large intervallic leaps and intervals such as tritones; it must avoid martial, dance-like, and

“passionate” rhythms; chromatic music—“modern” in Chaminade’s classification—must maintain a proper sense of religious decorum by not being too frequently so.61 Chaminade

59 Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics, 181, n. 49.

60 Chaminade, La musique sacrée telle que la veut l’Église, 7; 19. “Art. IX: Est absolument prohibée dans l’église toute musique profane, surtout si elle s’inspire des motifs et des reminiscences du théâtre...Une messe composée dans ce genre [point de separation entre les versets du texte] aurait un air de famille trop evident avec un opéra ou un oratorio.”

61 Ibid., 36; 47–51. The title of Chapter Three is “Musique Chromatique (ou moderne).” Chaminade’s prescriptions for the composition of proper sacred music are as follows: “La mélodie doit toujours tenir le premier rang: plus elle dérivera du chant grégorien, meilleure elle sera. Inventez un chant large, facile, sévère, coolant; évitez les intervalles trop distants ou trop rudes...Le choix d’un rythme, vous le comprenez

28 was particularly prescriptive when it came to rhythm. The ideal rhythm, in his opinion, was what he termed style lié: a rhythmic pattern marked by frequent prolongations, imitations, and harmonic suspensions. Forbidden rhythms, as he referred to them, included “active rhythm” (sixteenth notes), “weak rhythm” (syncopations and off-beats),

“strong rhythm” (martial rhythms), and “arpeggiated rhythm” (broken chords).62 Adhering to these categories was essential in creating the necessary liturgical conditions that could render a musical work truly sacred; the absence of even one, Chaminade wrote, was sufficient grounds on which to forbid the music from liturgical or church performance.63

But it was not only a work’s musical technique that marked a composition as appropriately sacred. Instead, Chaminade also asserted that a sacred work must also fulfill the required aesthetic conditions necessary to a sacred environment. On this point he was complimentary of secular critics’s adeptness at identifying music that met his high standards: citing writing by René de Récy, Hugues Imbert, and Léonce Mesnard,

Chaminade noted that such critics—who, as he pointed out, had no affiliation with the

Church—often had a better understanding of which music was suitable for performance in Catholic churches than Catholics themselves.64 French music, as he claimed, was anti-

maintenant, est d’une importance capitale pour le compositeur. N’est-ce point, en effet, le rhythme, brutal ou passionné, qui entraîne le sauvage, le guerrier, le danseur, l’émeutier?...Certes, il serait puéril de vouloir rejeter une composition, parce qu’on y rencontre çà et là une suite d’harmonies chromatiques: il est question ici de l’emploi fréquent du style chromatique.”

62 Ibid., 19–20. Chaminade cited musical examples for each of his rhythmic classifications: Lotti (style lié), Mozart (rythme actif), Rossini (rythme temps faible), Gounod (rythme temps fort and rythme arpégé). An additional category, rythme divisionnaire, is similar to rythme actif and can easily be subsumed under that category. For this style Chaminade cites Cherubini.

63 Ibid., 22. “Telles sont les conditions liturgiques absolument nécessaires pour qu’une composition puisse être classe parmi la vraie musique d’église. L’absence d’une seule de ces conditions suffirait pour faire éliminer un morceau.”

64 Ibid., 42. “Autre témoignage important: les musicographes Hugues Imbert, René de Récy et Léonce Mesnard n’ont aucune attache avec l’Église: les lecteurs pourront se dire une fois de plus que les musiciens non catholiques comprenent souvent mieux que les catholiques eux-mêmes quel genre de musique convient à nos sanctuaires.”

29 liturgical to begin with. But Chaminade congratulated critics for their ability to spot the works that could best suit the Church’s prescriptions, particularly in the music of Charles

Gounod, the composer in whom these critics had made a distinction between amour profane and amour sacré.65 This observation was key in determining how the late Gounod navigated the complexities of transporting the church to the theater—and vice versa.66

Herein lay the problem of modern religious music for Chaminade. While he recognized the undisputable mastery of composers such as Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet, and

Théodore Dubois, he nonetheless urged them to immerse themselves in the study of liturgical music and its “conditions.” As for César Franck, his music was almost appropriate—but not quite. His music, along with that of Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Dubois, and Gounod, was “light, smart, and sensual:” more appropriate for the café-concert than for the cathedral.67

The idea of blending liturgical music—plainchant and Palestrina—with modern

(secular) compositional styles was not anathema to all Catholics, however. In the decade before the pronouncements made by the Sacred Congregation of Rites and the publication of Chaminade’s text, Félix Huet, the organist and maître de chapelle at Notre Dame de Paris,

65 Ibid., 44. Chaminade’s evaluation of Gounod’s music is unsurprising, especially given the priest’s close ties with and support of the Schola Cantorum, whose affiliated critics likewise disagreed on whether or not Gounod’s sacred music was truly sacred or was tainted with false, theatrical piety. Catrina Flint de Médics’s recent paper “Charles Gounod, Religious Music, and the Essence of the Sacred,” delivered 6 October 2018 at the conference “L’Abbé Gounod:” French Sacred Music During the Romantic Era” examines Gounod’s standing with Schola critics in greater depth.

66 Ibid., 43. “Il fallait nous montrer avec quelle similitude d’accents et de style il a chanté l’amour profane et l’amour sacré; en un mot, comment il a transporté l’église au théâtre, et encore plus justement le théâtre à l’église.” Emphasis original.

67 Ibid., 44; 118. “Mais alors, dira-t-on, nous n’avons donc pas en France de vraie musique religieuse?—Non, nous n’en avons pas, c’est certain. A peine quelques motets, à peu près liturgiques, surnagent comme des épaves—rari nantes!—dans le stock religieux de Gounod, de Saint-Saëns, de Dietsch, de Cés. Franck, de Th. Dubois, de Neukomm, etc...Il serait à desirer que des maîtres incontestés—tels que Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Th. Dubois et autres—se pénétrassent profondément des conditions de la musique liturgique et concourussent à l’œuvre commune.” Emphasis original.

30 outlined his position on modern religious music and its place within the Church. He questioned plainchant’s efficacy in the modern age and asked whether or not such music

(including Renaissance polyphony) still maintained the power to manifest the spirit of sacred texts successfully. In a move that stood in stark opposition to many of his fellow

Catholics, Huet asserted that plainchant was a “dead art” and that it must be substituted for music written by modern composers in contemporary musical styles if the traditional liturgy was to keep its affective hold on French Catholics:

Let’s be honest: is plainchant a sensible element in our time, the sign capable of manifesting the spirit of sacred texts?... No. Plainchant, for lack of an exact interpretation, is no longer the sensitive element of sung prayer. Modern art alone, in the conditions of performance in which it is manifested, is apt to favor the effusion of religious sentiment...Plainchant amply sufficed for a while for the immediate effusion of religious sentiment. But it is a fact recognized by us that we no longer know how to speak the idioms of this sacred language and that thinking in this dead language for the generality of artists is obviously impossible, at least in present times. Now the art of plainchant is a lost art for our contemporary musicians; they must thus search for their procedures of expression in the musical language in use today.68

Contemporary composers, however, had succeeded in discovering a method through which to modernize plainchant, thanks in large part to the École Niedermeyer. Founded in

1853 by the Swiss composer Louis Niedermeyer, the Catholic and state-funded school made a name for itself by educating students in early church music and, more significantly, by teaching them the art of accompanying plainchant.69 Through

68 Félix Huet, La Musique liturgique. L’Art modern dans ses rapports avec le Culte (Chalons-Sur-Marne: Imprimerie Martin Frères, 1886), 61–63. “Soyons sincères: le plain-chant est-il à notre époque l’élément sensible, le signe capable de manifester l’esprit des textes sacrés?...Non.—Le plain-chant faute d’une interpretation exacte, n’est plus l’élément sensible de la prière chantée. L’art modern seul, dans les conditions d’exécution qui le manifestent, est apte à favoriser l’effusion du sentiment religieux...Le plain-chant a suffi amplement pour u temps à l’effusion immediate du sentiment religieux. Mais c’est un fait reconnu par nous que nous ne saurions parler désormais les idioms de cette langue sacrée, et que penser dans cette langue morte pour la généralité des artistes est toute evidence impossible, au moins dans les temps presents...Or, l’art du plain-chant étant un art perdu pour nos musiciens contemporains, il leur faut donc chercher leurs procédés d’expression dans la langue musicale en usage aujourd’hui.” Emphasis original.

69 Guy Ferchault and Jacqueline Gachet, “Louis Niedermeyer,” Oxford Music Online. See also Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 260. Niedermeyer’s methods were published in his Traité théorique et pratique (1857).

31 Niedermeyer, modern composers such as Gounod, Franck, and Gabriel Fauré all learned how to adapt plainchant to modern performance within their own religious compositions.

Significantly, Huet explained, honing this particular skill taught (and could continue to teach) composers how to strip their religious music of “vain ornament” and to imbue it instead with the spirit of the sacred text.70

Moreover, the prescription of plainchant as the only suitable form of church music would necessitate the composition and performance of religious music exclusively for and in secular theaters and concert halls. This, Huet concluded, would inevitably lead to the fatal state of “art for art’s sake”—an aesthetic paradigm similarly disdained by d’Ortigue,

Clément, and Chaminade. For Huet, the church and the theater, along with their musics, were not mutually exclusive entities. Secular critics and composers agreed. As early as

1859, the composer Adolphe Adam wrote that although Palestrina was one of the greatest musical talents of his time, his compositional style was not the religious style par excellence for the modern age. Composing religious music exclusively in such a manner was, in his view, as fruitless as discarding modern French in favor of its seventeenth-century ancestor.71 Others, such as the music critic A. Landely, affirmed Huet’s opinion that modern religious music was entirely suitable for the church. Though he would not go so far as to agree that plainchant was a dead art form—indeed, Landely emphasized the fact that he was not maligning plainchant—the critic echoed Huet by arguing that modern

70 Huet, La Musique liturgique. L’Art modern dans ses rapports avec le Culte, 83. “L’école moderne ne s’y est pas trompée et a vigoureusement écarté ces vains ornements pour s’attacher à l’esprit du texte sacré que la musique devait traduire. Niedermeyer, Gounod, C. Franck...et d’autres encore dont nous aurons occasion de parler plus tard nous offrent, par leurs œuvres, un témoignage irrécusable des nouvelles tendances.”

71 Adolphe Adam, Derniers souvenirs d’un musicien (Paris: Michel Levy frères, 1859), 268. “Ce compositeur [Palestrina] est un des plus grandes genies musicaux qui aient existé; mais je ne crois pas que son style soit le style religieux par excellence, et celui qui voudrait composer de la musiqueuniquement dans ce dernier système, me paraîtrait aussi ridicule que celui qui affecterait de dédaigner notre langue pour adopter le français qu’on parlait au XIIe siècle.”

32 music could indeed be tolerated in the church so long as its grandeur matched that of the sacred subject matter at hand. Landely also argued that plainchant only enjoyed a moderate degree of veneration with the majority of Parisian clergy: whereas the use of plainchant was occasionally deemed necessary, the clergy’s overall preference remained for modern music that, when chosen properly and performed well, could elevate the sacred character of the offices.

In Landely’s assessment, neither bishops nor the Pope himself could control the performance of secular music in churches. Even if plainchant replaced music from the concert hall and stage in the choir loft, he wrote, it would still prove victorious in organists’ improvisations and in various vocal arrangements: its “last but impregnable refuges.”72

Still others questioned whether or not the idea of “sacred music” could even be defined in empirical terms. In a three-part series of essays entitled “Musique sacrée et musique profane,” the critic Albert Soubies and the music historian Charles Malherbe outlined their opinions on the matter. In their opinion, the identification of any musical style as inherently sacred or religious was a fundamentally subjective process: just as some clergy and critics dubbed Palestrina the apogee of sacred music, others granted Carissimi, Bach, and Handel the same honor. Still others named Haydn and Mozart as the highest masters of religious music; works by Lesueur, Cherubini, Rossini and Verdi were, for others, the

72 A. Landely, “Musique et plain-chant,” L’Art musical (15 June 1888): 92–93. “Toute en combatant le règne absolu du plain-chant sur la maîtrise, nous ne voulons pas en médire...On peut donc affirmer sans crainte d’erreur que dans le clergé même, le plain-chant jouit d’une estime modérée seulement. Il est jugé necessaire à certains moments, mais la preference reste à la musique qui, convenablement choisie et bien exécutée, élève le caractère des offices...La musique est au-dessus de tout. Les mandements des évêques, les brefs des papes ne sauraient l’atteindre. Si le plain chant la détrônait à la maîtrise, elle triompherait encore dans les improvisations de l’organiste, dans les cantiques des enfants, ses derniers mais inexpugnables refuges.”

33 pinnacle of the genre. Nonetheless, Soubies and Malherbe echoed Huet’s insistence that sacred musical styles must necessarily evolve with the times.73

Soubies and Malherbe’s major point of argument, however, was their contention that sacred music was indebted to secular music for its very existence. Plainchant, in their assessment, was the product of secular song—where else would the Church have taken the elements of their liturgical song if not from the secular songs of the Middle Ages?74

Arguments in favor of adapting sacred music to modern conventions were, so they wrote, supported by their claim that medieval Popes often did the same in their own time.

Plainchant, therefore, had been unable to escape the influence of secular music as it developed throughout the centuries. Interrelationships between sacred and secular music, then, were supported by historical precedent, and Soubies and Malherbe thus argued that every innovation within the realm of secular music could definitively be identified within the realm of sacred music. From this, the pair concluded that a fixed aesthetic of religious music did not—and could not—exist:

If plainchant was not created for the worship service from scratch and if it is connected to more ancient forms through a mysterious link; if, during the entire duration of the Middle Ages, one encounters no longer an identity, but at least a conformity of style between

73 Albert Soubies and Charles Malherbe, “Musique sacrée et musique profane,” Le Ménestrel (14 October 1888): 330–31. “Chacun se fait de ce qu’il appelle le style religieux une notion particulière, et donne volontiers la palme à celui des compositeurs dont le genie s’est le plus rapproché de cet ideal forge par l’imagination. Celui-ci soutient que l’art religieux a dit son dernier mot avec Palestrina et son école; celui-là s’arrête à Jomelli et à Carissimi, à Bach et à Händel; pour tel autre Haydn et Mozart sont d’incomparables modèles; beaucoup admettent dans la sainte phalange Lesueur et Cherubini; un plus petit nombre Rossini, Berlioz et Verdi.”

74 Soubies and Malherbe, “Musique sacrée et musique profane (suite),” (21 October 1888): 337. “Tout indique, au contraire, que le plain-chant s’est développé peu à peu et que, si l’art moderne s’est greffé sur lui, il s’est de même greffé sur l’art ancien qui l’avait immédiatement précédé. Le plain-chant, tel qu’il résulte de la réforme grégorienne, n’est pas une invention, mais en quelque sorte une réglementation...Or, ces chants devaient être d’autant plus simples que les premiers chrétiens n’appartenaient pas le plus souvent à la noblesse et se recrutaient de preference parmi les gens du people, et ceux qui, suivant un mot très juste, ‘faisaient profession en toute chose de la plus parfaite simplicité.’ Où l’Église aurait-elle pris les éléments de ces chants simples, sinon dans les chants religieux ou profanes des peuples qu’elle convertissait?” Emphasis original. Flint de Médicis has rightly noted that this historiographically positivist mindset is due in large part to the work of Julien Tiersot. See “The Schola Cantorum, Early Music, and French Political Culture,” 270.

34 sacred and secular songs; if the scholastic genre is not unique to the liturgy; if authors have been able to advance in the way of the Church and the theater almost in parallel, then it thus becomes easy to answer this question: is there a religious music? No, there is not a music such that symbolizes religion to the point of being condensed, so to speak, in a special, exclusive, and fixed type.75

Apart from plainchant, they argued, Palestrinian and similar Renaissance counterpoint was no more religious in style than any other music, and they provided a lengthy historical survey of church music that ranged from Martin Luther to Verdi to support their conclusion. Expressing religious ideals through music, then, was best achieved when the idea of the sacred was not confined to a series of prescriptions to be fulfilled by rote, but instead, when it remained a model to which one could aspire based on one’s personal stylistic preferences, regardless of whether or not such modes of expression could be traced to secular sources.76 For Soubies and Malherbe, just as for Félix Huet, sacred and secular were not mutually exclusive entities.

Sacred Music in Secular Spaces

The matter of how composers navigated the divide between the sacred and the secular is crucial to this study for it begins to reveal the discursive slippages between Catholic denigrations of “modern” religious music (such as Chaminade’s) and its “secular”

75 Soubies and Malherbe, “Musique sacrée et musique profane (suite et fin),” (28 October 1888): 346. “Cette revue retrospective de la musique religieuse à travers les âges (il est bien entendu que nous ne parlons ici que de la musique chrétienne) comporte un enseignement qu’il est aisé de dégager, et dont les conclusions ressortent d’elles-mêmes. Si le plain-chant n’a point été créé de toutes pieces pour le service du culte, et s’il se rattache par un lien mystérieux à des formes plus anciennes; si l’on rencontre pendant toute la durée du moyen âge non plus une identité, mais au moins une conformité de style entre les chants sacrés et les chants profanes; si le genre scolastique n’est pas spécial à la liturgie; si, marchant d’un pas égal, les auteurs ont pu s’avancer presque parallèlement dans la voie de l’Église et du théâtre, alors, il devient aisé de répondre à cette question: y a-t-il une musique religieuse? Non, il n’y a pas une musique telle qu’elle symbolise la religion au point de se résumer, de se condenser, si l’on peut dire, en un type spécial, exclusif et fixe.”

76 Although it had decreased in visibility by the late 1880s, the idea of Cousinist eclecticism strongly underpinned Soubies and Malherbe’s thinking on this matter. The idea of a personal, individualized mode of expression lay at the heart of their arguments; the critics Gustave Robert and Camille Bellaigue responded in essays that argued that the essence of religious music was found in precisely the opposite: in the lack of individual expression. See Flint de Médicis, “The Schola Cantorum, Early Music, and French Political Culture,” 272, and Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 202.

35 compositional style that was, more often than not, strikingly close to the Catholic ideal, even when it was composed by a decidedly “secular” composer for non-liturgical use. Here it is important to note that many authors (Catholic or not) conflated the terms musique sacrée or musique religieuse with musique liturgique, which often marked them not only as equal (in terms of their function), but also as interchangeable: whereas “liturgical” music most often referred to plainchant or, in some cases, motets on liturgical texts, “sacred” or

“religious” music could reference any genre of music that had a Catholic subtext. In theorizing how such Republican composers conceived of seemingly “sacred” music and absorbed it into secular constructions of French music, the chapters that follow offer an important intervention in current musicological reconfigurations of nineteenth-century music. But whereas Bergeron, Flint de Médicis, and Ellis have already provided valuable insights into the ways that Catholic clergy and composers with strong Church affiliations defined and prescribed “appropriate” sacred music, no such study has as yet been focused on a “secular” musical engagement with religious music.

Republican (secular) composers frequently merged ecclesiastical compositional prescriptions with musico-theatrical tropes in order to achieve an overall aesthetic that could be perceived and appreciated as simultaneously secular and appropriately sacred. In

1890, for example, the publisher Durand issued, under the title Contes mystiques, a collection of twelve mélodies, each a setting by a different French composer of explicitly

Catholic texts written by the poet Stéphan Bordèse. The twelve composers involved in the project—including Augusta Holmès, Théodore Dubois, Gabriel Fauré, Jules Massenet,

Camille Saint-Saëns, Pauline Viardot, and Charles-Marie Widor—represented a cross- section of the who’s-who of musical Paris. Dubois’s contribution, “Pourquoi les oiseaux chantent,” offers an instance in which the Church’s definition of a sacred musical

36 “essence” merged seamlessly with the composer’s secular work. The melodic line fits squarely within Chaminade’s interpretation of “liturgical” music: the range spans little more than one octave and the largest intervallic motion within—occurring only once—is a major sixth. Nor does the piano accompaniment impede the prevalence of the “easy, lyrical, and flowing” melody (to use Chaminade’s terms). None of the rhythms employed by Dubois falls within Chaminade’s rhythmic blacklist. There are no broken chords, martial rhythms, or references to dance. Rather, the accompaniment remains virtually static, chordal throughout, and harmonically conservative with limited chromaticism— one could also describe it as an adaptation of Niedermeyer’s method of chant accompaniment.77 Dubois, then a professor of harmony and composition at the Paris

Conservatoire and the organist at La Madeleine to boot, was, by 1890, well-versed in the music of the church, and it is therefore not surprising to witness such adaptations taking place in his secular (albeit religiously inspired) music.

The Contes mystiques, however, along with other, similar mélodies, clearly would not have been intended for performance in churches, or even in theaters, though excerpts from the set were performed throughout the 1890s at various Parisian theaters.78 Instead, these intimate settings of religious texts would have found a home within the home itself: in the salon. Though diverse in terms of social class and function, many Parisian salons at the fin-de-siècle were bourgeois affairs that were, for the most part, entirely secular in

77 See Chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion of Niedermeyer’s methods.

78 Following the 1890 premiere of four excerpts (Augusta Holmès’s Prelude entitled“Ce que l’on entendit dans le Nuit de Noël,” Gabriel Fauré’s “En prière,” Émile Paladilhe’s “Premier Miracle de Jésus,” and Charles-Marie Widor’s “Non Credo” at the Concerts Colonne (Le Gil Blas, 30 December 1890), the same concert society played Pauline Viardot’s contribution, “Le Rêve de Jésus,” in late January 1892 (La Gazette de France, 29 January 1892). According to a brief notice in L’Autorité, a conference on Contes mystiques was held at La Bodinière in late January 1897 (L’Autorité, 1 February 1897). As part of the Concerts Charpentier, five excerpts (Holmès, Fauré, Paladilhe, Widor, and Dubois (“Pourquoi les oiseaux chantent”) were performed on Christmas Day 1902 (La Presse, 23 December 1902).

37 nature, not only by virtue of the religious indifference of many of their high-society attendees, but also by way of the cultural products that were intended for production and consumption in salon environments.79 Indeed, the bourgeoisie made up the largest portion of what Gibson has termed conformistes saisonniers: French citizens who maintained only minimal contact with the Church in the form of baptisms, marriages, and burials.80 Thus the “bourgeois mélodie,” as Fritz Noske termed it, should have been a wholly secular endeavor—at least in theory.81 Even a cursory examination, however, suggests that composers turned increasingly toward religious texts (even liturgical, at times) for inspiration in the composition of French art song during the last quarter of the nineteenth century: Massenet, Dubois, Arthur Coquard, Georges Enesco, Franck, Gounod, Émile

Paladilhe, and Florent Schmitt each composed multiple mélodies on religious texts.82

More often than not, these works—intended specifically for bourgeois performance—were marketed as musique religieuse, whether through their musical subtitles (mélodie religieuse, chant sacrée, chant religieux, etc.) or through their visual appeal

79 For a comprehensive account of Parisian salons during the Third Republic, see Myriam Chimènes, Mécènes et musiciens: du salon au concert à Paris sous la IIIe République (Paris: Fayard, 2004). In particular, Part One is devoted to musical and other activities in private spaces; it is in this category that my brief discussion of salons is based. In an additional article, Chimènes describes salon patrons as well as salon attendees as the elite of Parisian society, bourgeois or aristocratic; composers such as Jules Massenet, Gabriel Fauré, and Reynaldo Hahn, all of whom were popular in Parisian salons are pejoratively classified as “mondains” or as “salonards”—subtle implications of their bourgeois (and, by extension, secular) status. See Chimènes, “Le Salon des Girette. Un modèle exemplaire de collaboration entre musiciens amateurs et professionnels à Paris vers 1900,” Revista de Musicología, Vol. 16, No. 6 (1993): 3692.

80 Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism 1789–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989), 163.

81 Frits Noske, French Song from Berlioz to Duparc, trans. Rita Benton (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012 [1970]), 159.

82 This information is taken not only from listings of composers’ works on Grove Music Online, but also on my own examination of the catalogs held in the Départment de la Musique of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where I complied a database of over three hundred such songs composed between 1870 and 1905. Michela Niccolai has recently started research on similar songs that were composed for performance in cabarets and in educational settings. Her paper “Le religieux ‘populaire’. Cabaret, théâtre d’ombres et maisons d’education (1850–1914 environ),” delivered at the conference “L’Abbé Gounod: French Sacred Music During the Romantic Era” on 7 October 2018 begins to examine such works in detail.

38 (cover art, font choice, etc.). P. Basilewsky, for example, marketed his “Salve Regina” (1886) as a mélodie religieuse. Designating it such granted it a double function: the Marian hymn would be associated with its various uses throughout the liturgical year and, at the same time, could be performed at one of Paris’s fashionable salons as a mélodie that was entirely divorced from its paraliturgical context.83 The cover art that adorns Arthur Coquard’s mélodie “Marie: Prière à la Vierge”(1903) presents an image of the Virgin and child surrounded by blooming flowers and twisting vines, each appearing as colored panes in a stained-glass window.84 (Figures 1 and 2)

Figure 1: P. Basilewsky, Salve Regina: mélodie religieuse

83 P. Basilewsky, “Salve Regina” (Paris: L. Parent, 1886). BnF-Mus., Vm7 29787. Apart from the knowledge of an active compositional and publishing stint in Paris throughout the 1880s, very little is known about Basilewsky, including his first name. The Salve Regina is an antiphon sung at Compline during specific times of the year, a processional hymn for Marian feasts, and a prayer that comes at the end of saying the Rosary.

84 Arthur Coquard, “Marie: Prière à la Vierge” (Paris: Costallat et Cie., 1903). BnF-Mus. Vm7 114738 (1).

Figure 2: Arthur Coquard, Marie: Prière à la Vierge

Information regarding the reception of works performed exclusively in salons is difficult to find. On the occasion that similar works moved beyond the private confines of salon performance, however, critics often overlooked the music’s secular origins and described it as religious or sacred. When Massenet’s mélodie “Souvenez-vous, Vierge

Marie” premiered on 27 January 1881 at the Concerts Pasdeloup, for example, the critic

Léon Kerst described the work as exuding a “beautiful religious character.” Massenet set the text—Georges Boyer’s adaptation of the prayer of Saint Bernard—for solo voice, responsorial choir, and twenty harps. Though it relied heavily on more “theatrical” modes of musical expression in its quest to embody a religious essence, Kerst was so convinced of its sacred legitimacy that he concluded that Massenet’s new work would be better suited for performance in a church than in a theater.85 The multiple performances of Contes mystiques met with similar responses. One critic described Fauré’s “En prière” as

85 Léon Kerst, “Chronique musicale,” La Paix (1 February 1881). “Sur ces quelques vers M. Massenet a écrit une musique mystique d’un beau caractère religieux. Vingt violons en sourdine, deux harpes et les quatre cors accompagnent seuls la voix solo et le chœur en répons… Le morceau sera mieux à sa place dans une église.” Massenet later rearranged the work as a mélodie for solo voice.

40 embodying a great religious sentiment, and another critic hailed the set as an “original innovation” that would be destined for great success due to its accessibility and, more importantly, its suitability for young women’s musical skills and their moral sensibilities.86

While many of these composers had professional affiliations with the Church, others did not. Such songs nevertheless reflect a clear understanding of, and engagement with, the controversies surrounding the “essence” of sacred music that were swirling both within and beyond the Church. Furthermore, their popularity speaks to the notion that efforts toward Ralliement were just as—if not more—effective in Parisian musical life as they were within the religio-political sphere. As such, the chapters which follow provide a chronologically-organized series of case studies that demonstrate the ideological shifts at work during the last decades of the nineteenth century that enabled a new enfolding of the

Catholic Church into Republican ideology.

Chapter 1, “Church, State, and an Operatic Outlaw,” traces the complexities with which Jules Massenet’s Hérodiade was confronted during its quest for a coveted Parisian premiere. Based on the infamous tale of Herod, Salome, and John the Baptist, Hérodiade can be situated firmly within Republican anticlericalism through the work’s disavowal of

Catholic doctrine and its ideological apparatus. But while there is little doubt that

Hérodiade rejects Ultramontane Catholic doctrine, I argue that Massenet’s opera is not as

“secular” as it may seem. Instead, by drawing on Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863) as a source, the composer and his librettists positioned John the Baptist as analogous to

Renan’s humanistic portrait of Jesus—a Republican-friendly brand of Catholicism that

86 Gaultier-Garguille, “Propos de Coulisses,” Le Gil blas (30 December 1890). “En Prière, de M. Fauré est empreint d’un très grand sentiment religieux.” See also Unsigned, “Livres nouveaux,” La Revue de famille (15 January 1891), 3. “Ces petits poèmes de Stéphan Bordèse, mis en musique par nos meilleurs maîtres modernes, constituent une innovation originale et que nous croyons appellee à un veritable succès. Toutes ces mélodies peuvent être chantées partout, et seront une bonne fortune pour les jeunes filles si souvent arrêtés dans le choix des morceaux à cause des paroles.”

41 encouraged individual religiosity as an anticlerical strategy. Herein, I argue, lies the trouble with a Parisian performance on a state-sponsored stage: it was not so much the libretto’s liberal transformations of Biblical characters, or even in the sexualization of the

New Testament’s most famous prophet. Rather, it was what those transformations represented to both the Catholic Church and to the French State. The representation of a simultaneously Republican and Catholic Christ alongside the portrayal of the Republic itself presented a dangerous similarity to the political situation during the early 1880s.

Chapter 2, “Pious Puppets and Catholic Cabarets,” begins in the late 1880s and moves into the early 1890s—a period during which decidedly secular performance spaces repeatedly featured productions based on the lives of saints, Biblical characters, and even

Christ himself. These works, produced for “popular” stages, proved overwhelmingly popular with the public and equally so with critics. Works staged at the short-lived Petit-

Théâtre de la Marionnette and the Théâtre du Vaudeville, for example, garnered critical praise as religious events from Catholics and Republicans alike, not least because of the nature of their subject matter, but also by way of the sacred nature of the accompanimental incidental music. Conversely, when such works were unsuccessful, as in the case of Ernest Chausson’s La Légende de Sainte-Cécile and Charles Gounod’s Drames sacrés, critics credited their failures to a fatal lack of religious sincerity. Though these works—particularly those written by Maurice Bouchor for the Petit-Théâtre—have received scant musicological attention, they are frequently cited by literary historians as products of the early Symbolist aesthetic and, as a result, the deeply religious nature of their critical reception has been overlooked. As Roman efforts toward an official Ralliement began in earnest, French playwrights, poets, and composers began to navigate the slippage between avant-garde aesthetics and Catholic qualities; this chapter investigates how they

42 created new ways of understanding the performance of sacred drama and music on the secular stage in the process.

In Chapter 3, “‘Les Grands Oratorios à l’Église Saint-Eustache:’ A Church for the

Republic,” I focus on a series of oratorio performances that took place at the Church of

Saint-Eustache in the spring of 1900 and that generated significant controversy in the

Parisian press. Opposition to the concerts from high-ranking government and Church officials recalled timeworn debates surrounding “appropriate” utilizations of sacred space, arguments that evoked long-standing tensions between Church and State (i.e. rules forbidding the performances of opera during Lent), but that also masked an underlying

(and specifically French) fear that the so-called “theater of Saint-Eustache” was a step towards the Catholic Church’s defeat by the “secularizing” influence of the Republic. At first glance, this dichotomy seems to support the supposed incompatibility between

Catholic traditionalists and secular Republicans. My analysis, however, reveals how the

Parisian press configured both these performances and the music itself as models of religious devotion and as symbols of Republican ideology. Rather than casting the paid concerts as engendering a transformation of Saint-Eustache from sacred sanctuary to secular stage, Republican critics instead celebrated the concerts as an absorption of the sacred into the secular through music. This sense of reconfiguration was supported by the concert programs themselves which included, among others, works by Bach and Handel,

Berlioz and Gounod, as well as Wagner and Massenet (including his oratorio, La Terre promise). Indeed, the music performed at Saint-Eustache carried with it its own ideological baggage that shaped the ways in which church and government officials, critics, and the general public came to view the Church’s relationship to a Republic that moved ever closer to legal separation.

43 I continue this thread in Chapter 4: “The (Republican) Church Universal: The

Official Concerts at the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris.” I analyze the organization and reception of the official concerts at the event as a Republican showcase of French musical culture. These programs contained a significant and unexpected amount of explicitly religious music that—mediated through actors deployed by the state apparatus—transformed the Republic’s image of the Catholic Church on an international stage. I analyze unpublished archival documents to explore the reasons and ramifications behind these programming choices. I then turn to two works that were performed as part of the official concerts—Théodore Dubois’s oratorio Le Baptême de Clovis (1899) and

Gabriel Pierné’s symphonic poem with choir, L’An mil (1898)—to demonstrate not only the

Republic’s “official” coopting of the Catholic Church on an international stage, but also that the critical response to these “religious” events met with unforeseen success, even in light of the impending passing of the 1901 Law of Association.

The final chapter, “Jules Massenet’s Redemption: Grisélidis, The Righteous

Republican Woman, and an Operatic Ralliement” returns to Massenet and traces a marked shift in his portrayal of operatic women. In the early days of his career, the composer built his reputation on his penchant for creating intriguing and “dangerous” female characters—Salomé, Esclarmonde, and Thaïs are only three of many examples. Such women personified and even validated the fear shared equally by the Republic and the

Church: that women who behaved badly could bring about even the most righteous man’s downfall and could, in the process, endanger the strength and health of the nation itself.

Grisélidis (1901) and its eponymous heroine, however, marked a striking departure from the composer’s otherwise “troublesome” women. As a model bourgeois woman whose

Catholic faith shaped her every action, Grisélidis appeared as an exemplar of female

44 behavior to Republicans and Catholics alike. Such an engagement with the Church on otherwise “secular” stages was nothing new to Massenet. But whereas his previous operas were written firmly within a secular vein despite their religious themes, Grisélidis turned out to be paradigmatic for how traditional Catholicism could successfully be staged in

Republican Paris. In the face of the “secular” Republic—or at least of the bourgeois audiences at the Opéra-Comique—Massenet’s abrupt turn to Catholicism as a guidepost for bourgeois female behavior might have had the potential to drive away its Republican audiences, especially as the Church and State inched closer to legal separation. But

Massenet’s newfound traditionalism had quite the opposite effect: the opera went on to enjoy unprecedented box-office success.

Massenet’s operas bookend this dissertation since, as I argue, he was the perfect figure to enact this musical reconciliation. As he had demonstrated throughout his œuvre, his music was unusually adept at mirroring the current political and religious state of affairs: whereas Hérodiade was written from an obviously anticlerical standpoint,

Esclarmonde (1889)—composed and premiered just as the Ralliement began to gain traction—marked the composer’s last large-scale engagement with the Church from an anticlerical point of view. At the turn of the century, his oratorio La Terre promise and the operas Grisélidis and Le Jongleur de Notre Dame (1902) revealed a return to, and an embrace of, Catholic traditionalism as the Church and State moved closer to legal separation.

Massenet enjoyed an unrivaled ability to transform Catholicism into something that the

Republic could value as an indispensable aspect of its vision of French identity—all the while maintaining his Republican appeal. Massenet, however, was but one example of a larger trend at work within the Parisian musical scene at the fin-de-siècle, one that encompassed a wide swath of compositional styles, performance venues, aesthetic stances,

45 and political affiliations. Taken together, the case studies in this dissertation provide a new reading of late nineteenth-century French music that illustrates how music functioned as a sonic Ralliement, a Republican “rallying” cry that enacted a series of reconfigurations that allowed the Republic to retain its Catholic roots, embrace its modernity, and identify itself as simultaneously sacred and secular.

CHAPTER ONE Church, State, and an Operatic Outlaw: Jules Massenet’s Hérodiade

The story of Hérodiade’s creation is a bit of a mystery. Though the opera has fallen out of the modern repertory, it was easily the most sensational musical work of 1885—not in

Paris as might be expected, but rather in Lyon. After an immensely successful (and hardly controversial) premiere at Brussels’s Théâtre de la Monnaie four years earlier, Lyonnais audiences were up in arms over the opera’s admittedly liberal recasting of Gustave

Flaubert’s Hérodias and the well-known Biblical characters of John the Baptist, Salome,

Herod, and Herodias. The Lyonnais critic Paul Bertray recounted a lively conversation that he supposedly overheard at another musical event:

“Did you go to Hérodiade? “No, but I read L’Écho de Fourvière.” “Oh! Me too; I also read L’Éclair.” “It seems that it is disgusting.” “Absolutely. Imagine! This Massenet makes Saint John [the Baptist] fall in love with a prostitute, and they sing an absolutely indecent love duet!” “What do you want? One must scorn religion in order to be successful!”1

Spearheaded by a priest (Father de Pubély), the Archbishop of Lyon (Father Louis

Caverot), and a layman (Joannès Blanchon), the campaign against Hérodiade by this

Lyonnais trinity laid the groundwork for a writer in Le Progrès, Lyon’s most Republican newspaper of the time, to report that the Archdiocese of Lyon would be calling for

1 Paul Bertray, “Hérodiade II,” Le Courrier de Lyon (29 December 1885). “Je ne puis mieux donner une idée de ce qu’on raconte à ce sujet dans les capucinières qu’en reproduisant ici une conversation que j’ai entendue hier [le 28] au concert de Wolf entre deux rappels du célèbre violoniste: -Êtes-vous allé à Hérodiade? -Non, mais j’ai lu L’Écho de Fourvière. -Oh! Moi aussi, j’ai lu également L’Éclair. -Il paraît que c’est dégoûtant. -Tout à fait. Imaginez-vous que ce Massenet fait Saint-Jean amoureux d’une fille publique et qu’ils chantent tous deux un duo absolument indécent. -Que voulez-vous, il faut bafouer la religion pour avoir du succès!”

47 Massenet’s excommunication in order to avenge what it had perceived as an open assault on the Catholic Church.2 For the most part, their protests were based on the opera’s libretto; specifically, they took offense at the transformation of Jean-Baptiste from divine prophet to mere lover through his entanglement with Salomé whose spiritual love for him at the opening of the opera becomes entirely physical at the end.

Parisian newspapers quickly picked up the story that was developing in Lyon. The threatened excommunication of one of the country’s most famous composers made for good entertainment and even better sales. But Hérodiade had not yet been performed in the capital in French: its only performance in Paris had taken place the previous year, on 1

February 1884, at the Théâtre-Italien—and even that Italian-language performance had been a long time in the making. Work on Hérodiade began as early as 1878, as Massenet was in Italy preparing the Italian version of Le Roi de Lahore. After having been given a scenario based on Gustave Flaubert’s Hérodias, Massenet enlisted a young writer, Paul

Milliet, to translate Angelo Zanardini’s Italian text into French. With the assistance of

Georges Hartmann (under the pseudonym Henri Grémont), the French translation was completed, and Massenet began work on the piano-vocal score in September 1878. One year later, in December 1879, that score was completed, and by September 1880, Massenet had finished the orchestration.3

2 According to an obituary in La Semaine religieuse du diocèse de Lyon, Abbé de Pubély was the pseudonym of Father Félix Mathieu Conil (1851–1895), the parish priest at the church of Saint-Pothin de Lyon. See S. Buy, “Necrologie,” Semaine religieuse du diocèse de Lyon (31 May–22 November 1895), 433–34. Joannès Blanchon was the founder of L’Écho de Fouvière and the secretary of the Fourvière Commission that oversaw the construction of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fouvière (between 1872 and 1884). See Alban Ramaut, “La création d’Hérodiade à Lyon,” in Opéra et religion sous la IIIe République, ed. Jean-Christophe Branger and Alban Ramaut (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2006), 148.

3 This timeline is given by Demar Irvine and also by Gérard Condé. See Irvine, Massenet: A Chronicle of His Life and Times (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1994), 97–119, and Condé, “Commentaire musical,” L’Avant Scène- Opéra, No. 187 (1998): 74. Clair Rowden, however, suggests that it is incorrect and provides a more nuanced account in Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera (Weinsberg: Musik-Edition Lucie Galland, 2004), 91–94. Victor Wilder and Paul Milliet both imply that it was the Italian publisher Giulio Ricordi who

48 Having worked towards a premiere at La Scala in Milan, Massenet was disappointed to learn that Giulio Ricordi’s interest in the project seemed to have faded. Equally disheartening was the fact that Massenet had previously refused requests to stage the work in theaters in London, Lyon, and Brussels while awaiting news from Ricordi. After having been denied an Italian premiere, Massenet sought the Paris Opéra as another viable venue to bring out his new opera. It remains unclear who approached whom regarding the production of Hérodiade. Gérard Condé, Demar Irvine, and Clair Rowden all suggest that

Massenet offered the score to the Opéra’s director, Auguste-Emmanuel Vaucorbeil, during the summer of 1881. Massenet’s own memoirs also claimed that, in spite of his disdain for

“knocking at theater doors,” he offered the work to Vaucorbeil. David Grayson, however, asserts that Vaucorbeil solicited the score from Massenet as a possible addition to the upcoming season.4 In any case, Vaucorbeil ultimately rejected Hérodiade in what has since become a famous exchange. While Massenet’s memoirs recall Vaucorbeil’s distaste for the young Paul Milliet’s work as the grounds on which the work was rebuffed—the director explained that Milliet’s text required a carcassier (butcher) to refashion it—numerous

Parisian newspapers reported that Vaucorbeil’s rejection was based on the “incendiary” nature of the libretto.5

had the original idea to have Massenet set Flaubert’s Hérodias to music. See Victor Wilder, “Semaine théâtrale,” Le Ménestrel (25 December 1881): 27. “C’est en lisant dans les Trois contes de Gustave Flaubert, la nouvelle intitulée Hérodias, que l’éditeur Ricordi eut, dit-on, la pensée de faire découper dans cette légende un livret d’opéra pour M. Massenet, que le succès du Roi de Lahore, au théâtre de la Scala, venait de mettre à la mode à Milan.” Milliet provided an interview with writers for Le Gaulois in 1886 in which he similarly claimed that it was Ricordi’s idea. See Maxime Serpeille, “A propos d’Hérodiade,” Le Gaulois (8 January 1886). “L’idée de composer un opéra sur le sujet qu’on nous reproche ne vient d’ailleurs pas de lui: C’est M. Ricordi qui, après la lecture du conte de Gustave Flaubert, intitulé Hérodias, fit une sorte de scénario qu’il envoya à M. Massenet, en lui vantant le parti qu’il pourrait en tirer.”

4 David Grayson, “Finding a Stage for French Opera,” in Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914, ed. Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 13.

5 Jean-Christophe Branger has also claimed that Vaucorbeil refused to mount works whose librettists were little known. See Branger, Manon de Jules Massenet ou le crépuscule de l’opéra-comique (Metz: Editions

49 Thus Massenet turned to Oscar Stoumon and Edouard Calabresi, the directors of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, who offered to stage the work. Hérodiade had its premiere there on 19 December 1881 to a house packed with the who’s-who of Belgian and Parisian high society. In addition to the staunchly Catholic Belgian royal family, the audience counted among its ranks Parisian elites and journalists who had taken the train to attend the performance, including Antonin Proust, the Minister of Fine Arts, and even

Vaucorbeil himself. Notwithstanding the opera’s enormous success in Brussels, neither the Paris Opéra nor the Opéra-Comique would stage the work in the French capital, however, and its premiere in Paris and in French would only come eleven years later, on 18

October 1893, at the Théâtre de la Gaîté. Herein lies the mystery: an opera whose masterful score and sensationalized libretto virtually guaranteed artistic and financial success was relegated to sporadic performances in Paris’s secondary theaters. Hérodiade was, in essence, an operatic outlaw.

There is no question that the opera’s liberal staging of Biblical personae was a theatrical risk and constituted, at least to some observers, an overstepping of poetic license.6 But the story itself—and indeed the freedom with which it was treated—was not new in fin-de-siècle French culture: in addition to Flaubert’s version, Stéphane Mallarmé had begun his dramatic poem Hérodiade in 1869; the tale was depicted graphically by the painters Henri Regnault and Gustave Moreau (in 1870 and 1876, respectively), and the

Serpenoise, 1999), 43; and Jules Massenet, Mes Souvenirs et autres écrits, ed. Jean-Christophe Branger (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2017), 123, n. 262.

6 Victor Wilder, “Semaine théâtrale,” Le Ménestrel (25 December 1881): 27. “Ces légendes sacrées de la Bible ou de l’Évangile sont d’une grâce exquise, je l’accorde, mais elles sont fort délicates à mettre sur les planches. Il faut bien le dire, d’ailleurs, les auteurs d’Hérodiade ont traité leur sujet avec un sans-gêne historique qui dépasse de beaucoup les droits du poète.”

50 trend would continue through Oscar Wilde’s famous play twenty years later, in 1891.7 And

Massenet’s frequent (by the mid-1880s) amalgamation of the sacred with the sensual was well-known and all but expected of him, given that the premieres of his oratorios Marie-

Magdeleine in 1873 (on Good Friday, no less), Ève in 1875, and La Vierge in 1880 had established him firmly within that aesthetic and ideological realm, and his later operas

Manon (1884), Esclarmonde (1889), and Thaïs (1894) would continue the same trend.8 Why, then, was a Parisian performance of Hérodiade so difficult to obtain?

The answer lies not so much in the libretto’s liberal transformations of Biblical characters, or even in the sexualization of the New Testament’s most famous prophet.

Rather, I argue that the problem arose in what those transformations represented to both the Catholic Church and to the French State. I contend that it was neither the opera’s libretto nor its score per se that kept the work off of the most prestigious Parisian stages.

Instead, the work’s musico-dramatic structure held a mirror to contemporary political concerns in ways that were too precarious for it to appear on the nation’s most famous state-supported institutions that in the 1880s were barely clinging to their status as the

“nation’s image.”9 To explore these analogies between musico-dramatic and political

7 For a comprehensive listing of works which are based on the Salomé story, see Anthony Pym, “The Importance of Salomé: Approaches to a fin-de-siècle Theme,” French Forum, Vol. 14, No. 3 (September 1989): 311–22, and J.D. Hubert, “Representations of Decapitation: Mallarmé’s ‘Hérodiade’ and Flaubert’s ‘Hérodias,’” French Forum, Vol. 7, No. 3 (September 1982): 245–51. See also Clair Rowden, ed., Performing Salome, Revealing Stories (London: Routledge, 2016).

8 As Clair Rowden has noted, the interest in the religious erotic increased exponentially during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Positivist theology had situated Jesus and the Gospel stories firmly within an orientalized, exotic milieu, and according to Rowden, “neither the opera house, nor the Church had the monopoly on the religious erotic, and both were quite happy to blur the boundaries between the sensual and the mystical, to liberally exploit a contemporary fashion.” See Rowden, Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera, 110.

9 Jane Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

51 structures in fin-de-siècle Paris, I first analyze the opera’s symbolic representations of the

Church through the multifaceted figure of Jean-Baptiste. Building on the work of Clair

Rowden, I reveal how Jean-Baptiste, simultaneously cast as Christ in both a traditional

Catholic and modern Republican sense, acts as a foil to the French Republic, portrayed in

Hérodiade by Vitellius and the Roman Empire. Whereas Rowden often reads Jean-Baptiste as an operatic personification of the Catholic Church and, at times, of Christ himself, I interpret the prophet as analogous to Ernest Renan’s contemporary—and controversial— vision of Christ. I then trace the opera’s complicated path to performance in Paris and reveal that the controversies spawned by the opera ran much deeper than the stated conundrums of humanized prophets and “indecent” love duets: in pitting the Church against the Republic so openly, the battle that raged between them in Hérodiade was far too close to the current political situation in France to appear on stages that were still trying to portray the nation’s image to an international audience. In the end, the “mystery” of

Hérodiade was forged by the intricate complexities of competing ideologies whose timely coalescence outlawed the opera from what should have been its Parisian operatic home.

From the Prophet to the Prophesied

The story of Hérodiade revolves around well-known Biblical characters. As Salomé enters, we learn that she has come to Jerusalem to find her mother; instead, as she soon reveals, she falls in love with Jean-Baptiste, who implores her to sublimate her earthly love for him by directing it to Heaven. Meanwhile Hérode, who is in love with Salomé, is beleaguered by his wife, Hérodias, to punish Jean-Baptiste for insulting her. Knowing Jean-Baptiste’s popularity amongst his people, the Tetrarch works to deter his wife from her retributive plans. Though he is told by Phanuel, an astrologer, that the people acclaim Jean-Baptiste as their charismatic and popular leader, Hérode remains confident that he will win back

52 his people’s favor by diffusing the threat of the Roman Empire. When Vitellius and the

Roman consort arrive, however, they vow to reopen the Jewish temple. After witnessing the jubilant reaction with which Jean-Baptiste is met as he makes his way through the city,

Hérode fears for his power and has Jean-Baptiste arrested; it is only after Salomé rejects his advances that Hérode threatens to put them both to death. As Jean-Baptiste awaits his execution, Salomé joins him in his cell, and the two profess their love for each other. As

Jean-Baptiste dies, Salomé stabs herself and curses her mother, Hérodiade.

A number of contemporaneous debates surrounding Massenet’s opera centered on the question of whether or not the librettists and the composer had taken things too far with their reconfigured plot. In 1889, for instance, the writer Paul Esdouhard outlined

Massenet’s entanglements with religion and divine influence in his works. Beginning his account with Marie-Magdeleine, he traced a path through Ève, La Vierge, and the “Marche céleste” in Le Roi de Lahore. Arriving at Hérodiade, Esdouhard claimed that it was “the triumph of the genre.”10 Though he praised the composer’s treatment of the “mystical love” between Jean-Baptiste and Salomé that permeated the work, he took issue with the librettists having knowingly violated historical truth. The prophet-turned-lover’s words were, in his opinion, “disagreeable to our Christian ears.”11 Édouard Durrane shared a similar opinion when he claimed that audiences would be better off “ignoring sacred history” when watching Hérodiade. Moreover, he claimed, it might help if audience members had never seen artistic representations in which Salome bore the prophet’s head

10 Paul Esdouhard, “Massenet et l’influence religieuse dans ses œuvres,” (1889), 1051. “Le triomphe du genre, c’est Hérodiade.” Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique (hereafter BnF–Mus.), Fonds Montpensier (Jules Massenet). The exact publication information is unknown.

11 Ibid., 1052. “On a crié à l’inconvenance à cause d’un duo où les paroles sonnent désagréablement à nos oreilles chrétiennes...”

53 on a silver platter—only then, he argued, would the opera’s “disfigured” characters be acceptable and unmarred by memory.12 Others, however, praised the authors for successfully making the Biblical story conform to modern sensibilities. Louis Gallet noted that “the Biblical tradition must be brought down from its Sinai and reduced to human proportions...in order to accommodate it to the taste of our modernity.” For Gallet, the

Biblical narrative on which the libretto was based was too “coldly majestic” to expect success with operatic audiences.13 Ernest Reyer echoed these sentiments when he argued that the “fierce prophet’s” curses against Hérodias to “die like a bitch” were “not invectives to put in the mouth of a tenor from the opera.”14 Reyer likewise claimed that fidelity to the

Biblical narrative by staging the prophet’s decapitation would have been too much for operagoers.15 Thus something had to change in the transformation from Gospel to libretto:

12 Édouard Durrane, “Hérodiade,” La Justice (23 December 1881). “L’Hérodiade n’a de biblique que son titre et le nom de ses personnages. Pour bien comprendre le sujet et suivre le drame sans être importuné par les souvenirs, il importe tout d’abord d’ignorer l’histoire sacrée. Si l’on n’a jamais vu le tableau du Titien représentant Salomé qui porte sur un plat la tête de Jean le précurseur, cela n’en vaut que mieux…Je n’ai nulle intention de chicaner M. Paul Milliet, bien que je n’aime pas qu’on emprunte à l’histoire et pour les défigurer, des personnages qui ont été définitivement fixés par la peinture et la poésie.”

13 Louis Gallet, “Revue du théâtre: Musique,” La Revue nouvelle (1 January 1882): 181. “La tradition biblique à laquelle les auteurs d’Hérodiade ont emprunté leur titre est trop haute, trop froidement majestueuse, en général, pour donner à ceux qui l’utilisent au théâtre, sans en modifier les caractères, le succès qu’on doit attendre d’un drame, même d’un drame lyrique. Il faut la faire descendre de son Sinaï, la réduire aux proportions humaines, en animer les personnages de passions vulgaires, mais d’une expression frappante, l’accommoder enfin au goût de notre modernité, sous peine de n’en obtenir qu’un oratorio.” Gallet’s defense of Massenet and his collaborators is not surprising in this case, given that he had written the libretti of some of Massenet’s most successful works to that point, including Marie-Magdeleine, Ève, and Le Roi de Lahore; he would later write the libretto of Thaïs.

14 Ernest Reyer, “Revue musicale,” Journal des débats (25 December 1881). “Ah! Ce n’est plus Jaokanann le farouche prophète, l’homme effroyable vêtu d’une peau de chameau, dont la tête ressemblait à celle d’un lion et qui disait: ‘Je crierai comme un ours, comme un âne sauvage, comme une femme qui enfante! Ce n’est plus le terrible accusateur devant lequel tremblaient Hérode et Hérodias unis par l’adultère. Étale-toi dans la poussière, fille de Babylone! Fais moudre la farine! Ôte ta ceinture, détache ton soulier, trousse-toi, passe les fleuves! Ta honte sera découverte, ton opprobre sera vu, tes sanglots te briseront les dents! L’éternel exècre la puanteur de tes crimes! Maudite, maudite! Crève comme une chienne.’ Évidemment ce ne sont pas là des invectives à mettre dans la bouche d’un ténor d’opéra.” Here Reyer is quoting Flaubert rather than the Gospels.

15 Loc. cit. “Jean est mort; le bourreau qui vient de le décapiter jette son arme sanglante aux pieds d’Hérodiade. La tête, c’eut été trop pour la sensibilité des spectateurs.”

54 although Biblical opera was nothing new to late nineteenth-century audiences, John the

Baptist’s reputation as a lion-headed, locust-eating, and sharp-tongued desert dweller did not fit the bill for operatic or dramatic success.16

Jean-Baptiste’s recasting from prophet to enraptured lover, however, was only part of his character’s transformation in Hérodiade. Critics were quick to make comparisons between Jean-Baptiste and Christ himself. Jean-Baptiste’s entrance into the public square in Act 2—accompanied by swaying palm branches and cries of “Hosanna! Glory to him who comes in the name of the Lord!”—recalls Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem and is perhaps the most apparent conflation of Christ’s life with Jean-Baptiste’s; according to

Johannès Weber, all that was missing from that scene was a donkey.17 The likeness to the

Passion narrative was also made clear at the opera’s denouement, at which point angry crowds scream for Jean-Baptiste’s death and, in a move much like Pontius Pilate’s, is granted its wish by Herod. This was, according to Perkéo, the Belgian correspondent for Le

Figaro, the basis for the “impression of religious emotion that hovers over the entire work.”

In his opinion, the opera’s authors had set their sights on a “different martyr,” one whom

“respect prohibits from putting on the stage.”18

16 For a brief history of biblical opera, see Rowden, Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera, 94– 100.

17 Act II, Scene VII: “Hosannah! Gloire à celui qui vient au nom du Seigneur!” See also Johannès Weber, “Critique musicale,” Le Temps (4 January 1882). “Il n’y manque que l’ânesse par laquelle le Christ était monté.”

18 Perkéo, “Lettre de Bruxelles,” Le Figaro (7 December 1881). “…surtout sentir l’impression d’émotion religieuse qui plane sur l’œuvre entière. On comprend, on devine, on voit que les auteurs visent un autre drame, un autre procès, un autre martyre et que la figure du prophète Jean en remplace une autre que le respect défendait de mettre en scène. Évidemment, ce drame d’Hérodiade, c’est le drame de la Passion, mais la Passion accommodée aux exigences de la scène théâtrale où les conventions exigent que l’amour joue son rôle, et un rôle prépondérant.” Rowden has likewise noted numerous additional critics who commented on Jean-Baptiste’s likeness to Christ. See Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera, 100–9.

55 Perkéo’s “different martyr” was Christ himself. Massenet prepared the libretto’s association between Jean-Baptiste and Christ sonically from the very beginning of the opera. Just as Christ entered Jerusalem accompanied by choruses of Hosannah and the waving of palm branches, so too does Jean-Baptiste. As the crowd proclaims Vitellius and

Rome’s glory, Jean-Baptiste arrives triumphantly, flanked by Salomé and a devoted band of Canaanite women. This clear conflation of the Prophet with the Prophesied is foreshadowed musically from the opening measures of the opera: the first melodic moments in the “Introduction” present the same tune that will come to accompany the

Canaanite women and Salomé’s song of “Hosanna” and Jean-Baptiste’s entrance into the square in Act 2 (Examples 1.1a and 1.1b):

Example 1.1a: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, “Introduction”19

Example 1.1b: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, Entrance of the Canaanite Women and Salomé

19 In the case of Hérodiade, the music examples follow the 1884 piano-vocal score (Heugel) with indications of instrumentation drawn from the 1909 full score, but with no attempt to reconcile the differences between them (in terms of articulation, dynamics, etc.). Minor errors and inconsistencies of styling have been silently emended.

56 In the same way that Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem marks the beginning of his journey toward death, Jean-Baptiste’s own triumphal entry hastens his own execution. Similarly, the operatic prophet recalls Christ’s prayer from the Garden of Gethsemane when he submits himself to the Lord’s will in the hour of his own demise. Like Christ, Jean-Baptiste commends himself unto the Lord and accepts his fate, having similarly been condemned by the cries of an angry crowd and its sycophantic leaders.20 At his execution, then, Jean-

Baptiste’s spirit becomes that of Christ through his martyrdom as a “symbol of Humanity, the strong and simple soul of the new world, that will be nourished for its part in the blood spilled by his executioners.”21

According to the composer Charles Koechlin, the deliberate fashioning of Jean-

Baptiste as a Christ-like figure was later confirmed by Massenet who explained to his composition students that “Saint Jean-Baptiste is, in my view, not the Precursor of the

[Biblical] story, but is Christ himself...and Salomé is Mary Magdalene. The entry of Jean into Jerusalem is that of Jesus. Everything is modeled on the life of Christ.”22 Though one might rightly question the veracity of Koechlin’s recollection (or even of Massenet’s statement, for that matter), the similarities are there. As a symbol of Christ, Jean-Baptiste positions himself in stark contrast to the Roman—or French—Republic. But given the increasingly powerful influence that positivist theology held over Republican society, one

20 Act IV, Scene XIII: “Seigneur, ta volonté soit faite, je me repose en toi!”

21 B. Jouvin, “L’Hérodiade de Jules Massenet,” Le Figaro (22 December 1881). “Si le Jean de M. Massenet a cessé d’être le Précurseur vêtu de poil de chèvre, il est devenu, dans la pensée du jeune maître, la grande figure de l’Humanité, sensible, l’âme forte et simple du monde nouveau qui se fécondera, lui-même, dans le sang versé par ses bourreaux.”

22 Charles Koechlin, “Souvenirs de la classe Massenet (1894-1895),” Le Ménestrel (8 March 1935): 82. “Sur Hérodiade: ‘Saint Jean-Baptiste, dans mon idée, ce n’est pas le Précurseur de l’Histoire, c’est le Christ lui- même (‘Il est bon, il est doux’) et Salomé c’est Marie-Magdeleine. L’entrée de Jean à Jérusalem, c’est celle de Jésus. Partout c’est calqué sur la vie du Christ.’”

57 might also wonder to whose version of Christ Massenet was referring, for the Church and the French Republic held vastly differing opinions on the matter during the last half of the nineteenth century.

The Gospel According to Renan, or Massenet’s La vie de Jean-Baptiste

In the decade prior to the premiere of Hérodiade, the nascent Third Republic was governed by Président-Maréchal Patrice de MacMahon (1808–1893). Under what has now become known as the “Moral Order,” the conservative and devoutly Catholic MacMahon embarked on an attempt to bring about a religious course-correction that was, in the minds of many Parisian citizens, necessitated by the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian

War. Proponents of MacMahon’s Moral Order viewed the devastation of the war as God’s punishment for the nation’s descent into decadence; Rupert Christiansen describes early-

1870s Paris as “the Sodom that God had destroyed for its wickedness.”23 In the early years of the Third Republic, then, a return to the ideals of the Church and to Christ at its head seemed to be inevitable.

At the same time that MacMahon’s moral regeneration was gaining currency with

Parisians, a brand of theology that was heavily steeped in positivism was becoming equally influential across Europe. Even as early as 1836, the German positivist theologian David

Strauss had separated Jesus-as-human from Jesus-as-divine, situated Jesus and the Gospel narratives in their historical and geographical contexts, and argued for a “historical Jesus,” thereby denying his status as divine and demoting the Gospels from their position as

23 Rupert Christiansen, Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 384. For more on the Moral Order, see Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 18–45.

58 bearers of the words of God to exoticized myth.24 Strauss’s ideas—along with those of his like-minded German contemporaries—were highly influential throughout Christian

Europe, and perhaps no more so than to the Frenchman Ernest Renan, whose immensely popular—and compelling—La Vie de Jésus (1863) spawned outrage on the part of its

Catholic critics and an equally passionate interest among its Republican supporters, especially since memories of the repressive Catholicism of the Second Empire remained fresh in many Parisian minds, and an increasing portion of bourgeois society began to transform its conceptions of Jesus as a Biblical figure.25

Though he had trained as a seminarian, Renan’s growing skepticism towards traditional Catholic teachings, fostered largely by his exposure to Strauss’s work, led to a crisis of faith that eventually resulted in his abandoning the Catholic Church in 1845. As a professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France (appointed in 1861), Renan traveled to the

Middle East and, through his archeological studies, came to believe that the doctrine of the Church was inherently incompatible with the historical and anthropological evidence that he had gathered. When La Vie de Jésus was published in 1863, it was immediately successful—not only because it catered directly to a growing anticlerical sentiment in

Second Empire Paris, but also because, as Robert D. Priest suggests, it actively engaged in

24 David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen: Verlag von C.F. Osiander, 1837). See also Jeffrey F. Keuss, “David Friedrich Strauss and Myth in Das Leben Jesu,” in The Sacred and the Profane: Contemporary Demands on Hermeneutics, ed. Jeffrey F. Keuss (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 53–61.

25 Under the reign of Napoléon III, Catholicism flourished in France during the Second Empire (1852–70). Its increased popularity was tied directly into an upsurge in Ultramontanism, or the belief that the Pope’s authority was superior to that of the leaders of the French Catholic Church. As Sophie Heywood points out, the strong ties between Napoléon III, the French Church, and the Pope played an important role in French cultural affairs during the Second Empire; Napoléon III’s strong emphasis on Catholicism, however, sparked a resurgence of both social and political anticlericalism, the vestiges of which were prominent during the foundation of the Third Republic. See Sophie Heywood, “‘The Apostolate of the Pen: Mgr de Ségur and the Mobility of Catholic Opinion in Second Empire France,” French History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 2012): 203–21. For more on the Catholicism of the Second Empire, see Roger Price, Religious Renewal in France, 1789–1870: The Roman Catholic Church Between Catastrophe and Triumph (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

59 numerous debates that spanned diverse intellectual circles. Though its publication resulted in Renan’s immediate suspension from his appointment at the Collège, the book nevertheless popularized secularist criticism of the Bible within France and highlighted the emergence of questions that sought to reestablish Jesus’s political and religious significance.26 As a result, the characterization of the life, death, and teachings of Christ came to depend on an individual’s perception of the nature of the doctrinal praxis of the

Church itself and rested heavily on one’s support of, or distancing from, the clergy, and thus the life of Christ was either defined by scriptural narrative or recast so as to fit within

Republican reconfigurations of religious belief and practice. Whereas post-Revolutionary

Church doctrine had focused on fear, retribution, and as Ralph Gibson calls it, “hellfire and damnation,” Republicans shifted the emphasis towards a religion compatible with positivist values: hell became a metaphorical state, and depictions of God as loving, forgiving, and socially conscious emerged instead.27

Renan’s position fit perfectly into the emergent Republican conception of Jesus as loving human. His central claim was that Jesus should, above all, be stripped of his divinity, treated as a human figure, and that the New Testament—and especially the

Gospels—served as a historical source rather than as a “divinely inspired and harmonious narrative.”28 He castigated Catholicism as a misinterpretation of Jesus’s teachings; his

26 Robert D. Priest, The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 69. See also François Hartog, La Nation, la religion, l’avenir: sur les traces d’Ernest Renan (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), and H.W. Wardman, Ernest Renan: A Critical Biography (London: The Athlone Press, 1964), 72–91. Wardman notes that La Vie de Jésus was so popular that it had gone through ten editions of 5,000 copies each by the end of 1863 and had been translated into numerous European languages by the end of 1864. See Wardman, Ernest Renan, 81.

27 Ralph Gibson, “Hellfire and Damnation in Nineteenth-Century France,” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 74, No. 3 (July 1988): 383–402.

28 Priest, The Gospel According to Renan, 70.

60 reconfiguration of Christ was a direct reaction to the doctrinal teachings of the Catholic

Church that, in turn, had served as catalysts for the anticlerical movement in France. His stance went against the claim for the necessity of Christ-like suffering, the denial of economic, social, and physical pleasure, and subordination to the clergy through confession.29 For Renan’s Jesus, however, “the idea of being all-powerful by suffering and resignation, and of triumphing over force by purity of heart, was indeed an idea peculiar

[i.e., unique] to him.”30 Christ, as Renan molded him, was the ultimate Republican priest:

Never has there been any one less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy to forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. In this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and, if religion be essential to mankind, by this he has merited the divine rank which the world has accorded him. An absolutely new idea, the conception of a worship founded on purity of heart, and on the brotherhood of humanity, through him entered into the world—an idea so lofty that the Christian Church had necessarily to fall short of it, an idea which, in our days, only a few minds are capable of following.31

For Renan, then, a study of Jesus as a historical figure proved that the nurturing of a purity of the heart and love through human fraternity—rather than the clerically-forced adherence to domineering social and moral interdicts—was the foundation of the Church.

To worship Renan’s Jesus called for a transformation of Catholic dogma: “Jesus despised all religion that was not of the heart. The vain ceremoniousness of devotees, the outward display of strictness which trusted to punctiliousness for salvation, had in him a mortal enemy…love of God, charity, and mutual forgiveness—in these consisted the whole law.

Nothing could be less sacerdotal.”32

29 See Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989), 115–20; John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870-1914 (London: S.P.C.K. for the Church Historical Society, 1972), 14–21; Rowden, Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera, 31–43.

30 Ernest Renan, Life of Jesus, trans. William G. Hutchison (London: The Walter Scott Publishing Company, Ltd., 2014 [1897]), 82.

31 Ibid., 58.

32 Ibid., 143.

61 Massenet was no stranger to Renan’s work: his contemporary, the critic Hugues

Imbert, claimed that the composer was, in effect, a frequent guest at Renan’s salon.33

According to Erik Goldstrom, members of the press noticed the influence of Renan’s theology on his music already in his oratorios, especially Marie-Magdeleine (1873) and Ève

(1875).34 And associations between Renan’s philosophies and Massenet’s music, though not always positive, continued well into the end of the nineteenth century. In his description of the composer’s final oratorio, La Terre promise (1900), the ultra-conservative critic

Camille Bellaigue described Massenet as having departed from his former persona as the

“Renan of the oratorio, the feminist and delightful musician of piety without faith,” and in her 1891 biography of Charles Gounod, Marie Anne de Bovet exalted Gounod’s musical expression of faith above Massenet’s fanciful interpretations of Biblical episodes.35 She rejoiced that Gounod, unlike Massenet, was not “the Renan of Music.”36

Love of God and charity were each a defining characteristic of Renan’s Jesus and also of Massenet’s Jean-Baptiste in Hérodiade. As Clair Rowden has shown, Jean-Baptiste was informed by Renan’s portrayal of the prophet as a lesser figure who lacked

33 Hugues Imbert, Profils d’artistes contemporains (Paris: Fischbacher, 1897), 160, n. 1. “La Vie de Jésus exerça une grande influence sur Massenet lors de la création de Marie-Magdeleine. Le jeune compositeur fréquentait la maison de Renan, qu’il aimait beaucoup. Il s’asseyait souvent à sa table, en compagnie d’illustres littérateurs, notamment de Dumas fils.”

34 See also Erik Goldstrom, “A Whore in Paradise: The Oratorios of Jules Massenet,” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1998), 31–50; 68; 204.

35 Camille Bellaigue, “Les ‘Grands oratorios’ à l’église Saint-Eustache,” Revue des deux mondes (15 April 1900): 927. “En général, et sous réserve faite à l’avance d’un ou deux passages particuliers, la Terre Promise témoigne d’une inspiration, au moins d’une intention plus purement sacrée. On n’appellera pas, ou presque pas, aujourd’hui M. Massenet le Renan de l’oratorio, le musicien féministe et délicieux de la piété dans la foi.”

36 Marie Anne de Bovet, Charles Gounod: His Life and His Work (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1891), 190.

62 “inspirational, forward-looking dogma” and “never expounds on the teachings of Jesus.”37

Though in Renan’s writings, Jesus and John the Baptist shared certain similarities, the prophet was ultimately inferior in the end, rendered ineffective by his lack of the idea of a great religion. In Hérodiade, however, Jean-Baptiste is anything but. His proclamation of a new religion based at once on love, fraternity, and forgiveness stands in total opposition to the limited but benign portrait painted by Renan in Vie de Jésus. Indeed, Jean-Baptiste takes on a double persona in Hérodiade, mirroring not only Christ at the head of the

Catholic Church, but also Renan’s humanized—and staunchly Republican—Jesus.

Jean-Baptiste becomes conflated with Renan’s Jesus almost immediately following the opening of Act 1 as the Pharisees and the Sadducees begin quarreling over religion and religious practice. The astrologer Phanuel is quick to point out their ignorance of the

“immortal voice which calls to them: ‘Love! Pardon! Eternal life!’”38 The “immortal voice” to which he refers is that of Jean-Baptiste, yet the message is that of the Renanian Jesus.

Phanuel speaks of a voice that preaches love and does not attempt to instill morality through fear, and thus portrays Jean-Baptiste as a figure whose creed stands in contrast to nineteenth-century French clergy. Phanuel continues by declaring that the prophet has come from “distant parts where deeds will very soon follow words, and soon all will change, laws and creeds!”39 This ideological shift is reflected musically. When Phanuel enters amidst the religious quarrelling, his music is marked by a foreboding sense of

37 Clair Rowden, “Hérodiade: Church, State, and the Feminist Movement,” in Nineteenth-Century Music: Selected Proceedings from the Tenth International Conference, ed. Jim Samson and Bennett Zon (Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2002), 251; 276.

38 Act I, Scene I: “Les débiles humains! Ils en viennent aux mains, ils restent sourds à la voix immortelle qui leur répète: ‘Amour! Pardon! Vie éternelle!”

39 Act I, Scene I: “J’arrive de pays lointains où les actes suivront de très près les paroles, bientôt tout changera, les lois et les symboles!”

63 unease. Accompanied by chromatic harmonies, Phanuel’s text is severe and is declaimed syllabically on descending chromatic pitches. (Example 1.2a) It is only when he speaks of the immortal voice of Jean-Baptiste preaching love, pardon, and eternal life that the music becomes warm, lyrical, and melodic as unsteady chromaticism gives way to clear diatonicism. Before Jean-Baptiste has even appeared on stage, Phanuel characterizes him as the change that was longed for in 1880s France: Jean is the personification of a repositioning of faith away from domineering moral creeds and laws toward love and brotherhood. (Example 1.2b)

Example 1.2a: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, “Encore une dispute!”

64 Example 1.2b: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, “Encore une dispute!”

65 Throughout the opera, however, Jean-Baptiste questions his identity as the

“immortal voice” of God. According to Renan, Jesus often doubted his existence as the

Messiah and was, in fact, unaware of it until the Messianic image was created for him by his followers—much like Jean-Baptiste’s identity is shaped by Phanuel and Salomé. As the time of his death draws near, Jean-Baptiste directly questions the Lord as to his lineage, asking “O Lord, if I am Thy son, tell me: why do You suffer that love has shaken my faith?

And if I come out of this struggle, bruised and vanquished, tell me who has allowed it.

Whose fault is this downfall? Memory which weighs me down…Lord; am I Thy son?”40

Phanuel, however, is well aware of the message that Jean is preaching—at times, he seems to be the only one who is.

Salomé, too, is convinced of Jean-Baptiste’s likeness to Renan’s humanized Jesus, for his serene nature, coupled with his devotion to love and charity, automatically identifies him as such. She sings to him, declaring that “you must be called God, for no man could retain such serenity! You, whose entire life has been but a prayer to love and to charity!”41 Salomé sings of Jean-Baptiste’s good nature, his soft voice, and his tender heart throughout the opera, but she also praises his tender words for their ability to banish sorrow and suffering—key tenets of faithfulness that had been touted by Renan—in her famous aria “Il est doux, il est bon:”

Il est doux, il est bon; He is sweet, he is good; sa parole est sereine, his word is serene, Il parle, tout se tait; he speaks, all is silent; plus léger sur la plaine lighter on the plain l’air attentif passe sans bruit. the listening air passes noiselessly.

40 Act IV, Scene XIII: “O Seigneur, si je suis ton fils, dis-moi pourquoi tu souffres que l’amour vienne ébranier ma foi? Et si je sors meurtri, vaincu de cette lute, qui l’a permis! A qui la faute de la chute? Souvenir qui m’oppresse…Seigneur, suis-je ton fils?”

41 Act III, Scene XII: “C’est Dieu que l’on te nomme, car il n’est pas un homme qui garde ta sérénité! Toi, dont la vie entière ne fut qu’une prière à l’amour, à la charité!”

66 Ah! Quand reviendra-t-il? Ah! When will he return? Quand pourrai-je l’entendre? When could I hear him? Je souffrais, j’étais seule, I suffered, I was alone et mon cœur s’est calmé en écoutant and my heart was calmed by hearing sa voix mélodieuse et tendre! his melodious and tender voice! Prophète bien-aimé, Beloved prophet, puis-je vivre sans toi! can I live without you!

This “prophet” of whom Salomé sings, like Renan’s Jesus, worked to curtail the clergy’s emphasis on Christ-minded suffering familiar to French audiences. Although her affectionate characterization of Jean-Baptiste might be viewed as a product of her infatuation with him, her insistence on his tender nature is a further reflection of Renan’s process of humanizing the figure of Jesus. Renan also noted the serenely sensitive nature of Christ’s temperament:

Thus, as often happens in very lofty natures, tenderness of heart was in him transformed into an infinite sweetness, a vague poetry, a universal charm. His relations, free and intimate but of an entirely moral kind, with women of dubious character, are also to be explained by the passion which attached him to the glory of his Father and made him jealously anxious for all beautiful creatures who could contribute to it.42

Renan, unlike his Catholic critics, does not rebuke Jesus’s relationships with women of

“dubious character.” Instead, he affirms that “Jesus’ extremely delicate feelings towards women which we remark in him was not inconsistent with the exclusive devotion which he had for his ideal.”43

Jean-Baptiste enters the stage not preaching love and brotherhood, however, but rather spewing harsh invective against Hérodiade: a Jezebel whom he claims no one would be able to pity.44 Instead of confirming the later parallels with Renan’s Christ, Jean-

42 Renan, Life of Jesus, 48.

43 Loc. cit.

44 Act I, Scene III: “Nul ne prendra jamais pitié de ta douleur!”

67 Baptiste initially resists them by reinforcing the clerical model of a dogmatic priest.45 For

Jean-Baptiste, Hérodiade’s sins are too grave to be forgiven, even after confession. Indeed, her status as a divorced woman, her incestuous marriage to Hérode, and the abandonment of her own child serves as the antithesis to strict Catholic and indeed, Republican, moral codes for females.46 But when Salomé enters and begins to confess to Jean-Baptiste that she loves him, his disposition changes, and he speaks to her in the tender and serene voice that she has already introduced to the audience. Even though her confession might easily be regarded as blasphemy, Jean-Baptiste does not angrily send her away. Instead, he urges her not to renounce her youth; Salomé is living in a “season to love” during which the

“rashest desires invite kisses on hungry lips.”47 He sings to her in the same manner in which she sings to him, and in doing so, he begins to act more like Renan’s Jesus than a member of the clergy. Jean-Baptiste, however, recognizes that his own destiny is different, and his declaration is underscored musically by an abrupt change of key from E major to

C major—the key that, representing purity and godliness in Massenet’s œuvre, confirms

Jean’s heavenly destiny and distinguishes it from Salomé’s earthly life (Example 1.3).48

45 The idea of Jean-Baptiste-as-priest—albeit a fallen one—is Rowden’s (Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera, 109–56).

46 See Rowden, “Hérodiade: Church, State, and the Feminist Movement,” and James F. McMillan, France and Women 1789–1914: Gender, Society, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000) for more detailed discussions on the moral interdicts directed at women by the Catholic church in France during the nineteenth century.

47 Act I, Scene IV: “Que ferait ta jeunesse à peine épanouie dans les pierres de mon chemin? Pour toi, c’est la saison où les vœux moins timides appellent des baisers sur les lèvres avides; pour toi, c’est la saison d’aimer!”

48 Rowden, Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera, 117.

68 Example 1.3: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, “Ce que je veux” (Jean-Baptiste)

Jean-Baptiste’s initial response to Salomé’s continued outpouring of love is one that implores her to transform her worldly love for him into a spiritual one. Her love is

“d’un sentiment profane” that nonetheless has the potential to grant Salomé religious faith and eternal life. At the same time, Salomé continues to confess her love for him. The first act ends with Jean-Baptiste and Salomé singing their own respective texts in musical unison. Their desires at this point are different, but their musical linkage blurs the spiritual distinction between sacred and erotic love, thus exhibiting the “extremely delicate feeling towards women” that Renan’s Jesus was said to have felt: a point only emphasized by Massenet’s casting of the prophet as a tenor alongside Salomé’s soprano— the voice parts evoking the convention of the archetypal operatic love duet. It will only be in the moments directly preceding Jean-Baptiste’s execution that he sings in perfect unison—musically and textually—with Salomé. Yet then, too, they still sing of the

“mystery of immortality” and the radiance of their love in Heaven. Even after Jean-

Baptiste has reconciled his earthly love for Salomé with the spiritual, both Jean-Baptiste and Salomé remain insistent that their physical love for each other does not negate their religious faith. Indeed, it is God himself who ordained it through the granting of a “voice to say Your name, Lord, and a soul to harbor love!” At the end of his earthly life, Jean-

70 Baptiste continues to reflect Renan’s view that physical love is not necessarily antithetical to the mission of the Catholic church: indeed, as Jean-Baptiste said, “these words are not a blasphemy!”49

For a Renanian Jesus, these words constitute the foundation of an idealized

Christian—and entirely Republicanized—religion. Rowden’s observation that Jean-

Baptiste’s religious message becomes virtually inseparable from his humanized and sensual one only furthers the likenesses between the two: his desire that Salomé transform her carnal love into a divine love eventually gives way to the opposite as he cedes to his physical desire for his disciple—contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church, these events were not mutually exclusive.50 At the same time that Massenet portrays his prophet as a Christ-like figure in the most traditional sense, he utilizes Jean-Baptiste as a mouthpiece for a wholly contemporary theology, one that was loathed by the church and heralded by the Republic as a corrective to the Church’s enormous influence on Parisian society.

Hérodiade and the French Republic

Jean-Baptiste’s Christ-like personification—either in a traditional sense or a modernized,

Republican one—stands in stark contrast to the Republican State as it is personified by

Vitellius and the Romans. Rowden has already noted the numerous ways that Vitellius embodies Republican values in the opera: the Romans’ evocation of a strong sense of patrie

49 Act IV, Scene XIII: “Ah! C’est donc vrai, Seigneur, que tu pardonnes! Que je puis respire cette enivrante fleur, la presser sur ma bouche et murmurer: je t’aime! Ces mots ne sont pas un blasphème: tu m’as donné la voix pour te nommer, Seigneur, et l’âme pour aimer!...Il est beau de mourir en s’aimant, ma chère âme! Quand nos jours s’éteindront comme une chaste flamme, notre amour, dans le ciel rayonnant de clarté, trouvera le mystère et l’immortalité! Transport de l’amour embrasse-nous toujours!”

50 Rowden, Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera, 128.

71 through their patriotic cry of “Romans! We are Romans!” coupled with Vitellius’s proclamation that he represents both Caesar and justice aligns closely with the Republic’s ideals that still looked to the Roman republic as a powerful model.51 Rowden has likewise shown how Church and State are openly pitted against each other on multiple occasions via Jean-Baptiste, Vitellius, Hérode, and the Romans.52 As the head of Roman (civic)

Republican authority, Vitellius stands primed to portray the French Republic against

Jean-Baptiste’s personification of Catholicism: at the moment that Vitellius claims that he is the true arbiter of justice as Caesar’s representative, Jean launches into a counterattack, declaring that “all justice comes from Heaven.” In an obvious reference to the conflicts that were raging between the Church and the State, Jean hotly exclaims that manmade power “will break at the feet of the Eternal like a clay vessel.”53

Contemporary critics were quick to draw their readers’ attention to the similarities between Hérodiade and the French State’s current political situation. When the composer and critic Armand Gouzien noted Vitellius’s appearance on the stage, he followed his observation with the request that a certain Henri Maret be assured that “he [Vitellius] does

51 Rowden, “Hérodiade: Church, State, and the Feminist Movement,” 252, 256–58, 276–77. See also Rowden, Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera, 145–50. The notion that France (especially Paris) had become the new Rome dated from the Revolution. For more on the Third Republic as the “new Rome,” see Diana Rowell, Paris: The ‘New Rome’ of Napoleon I (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Annegret Fauser also addresses the importance of this idea during the Third Republic in “Gendering the Nations: The Ideologies of French Discourse on Music (1870–1914),” in The Politics of Musical Identity: Selected Essays (Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2015), 80–82.

52 Rowden specifically examines the finale of Act II in which Jean-Baptiste enters and confronts Vitellus. She also adeptly shows how the conflict between the Church and the State was played out in Massenet’s portrayal of Salomé and Hérodiade as “emancipated women.” See Rowden, “Hérodiade: Church, State, and the Feminist Movement.”

53 Act II, Scene VII: (Vitellius) “Je représente ici César et la justice: Peuple, quels sont tes vœux?”...(Jean- Baptiste) “Toute justice vient du ciel! Homme, ta puissance fragile se brise aux pieds de l’Eternel comme un vase d’argile!” Rowden likewise notes this conflict between Vitellius and Jean-Baptiste and its similarities to contemporaneous debates between the Church and State. See Rowden, Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera, 145.

72 not resemble Gambetta at all.”54 Here Gouzien was referencing influential figures in

French politics: Henri Maret (1837–1917), a radical left-wing deputé, and Léon Gambetta

(1838–1882), the newly-elected Prime Minister. Though Gambetta had only been in office for one month at the time of Hérodiade’s premiere, he was a well-known figure in French politics, having already served as President of the Chamber of Deputies and the Minster of the Interior. As the founder and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Le Radical—an aptly- named soapbox for radical leftist ideology—Maret had also established quite the reputation amongst Parisians. Gouzien’s remark, however, was not a generalized comparison between the Roman republic and the French State. Instead, it was a pointed reference to a heated debate on electoral procedures between Maret and Gambetta that had taken place only days before, on 14 December, on the parliamentary floor. When another deputy attempted to speak to the matter at hand, Gambetta reminded him that he was not allowed a second response. Maret then compared Gambetta’s rigid control to that of Caesar, arguably in an effort to caustically accuse the latter of corruption; when

Gambetta became visibly agitated, Maret questioned whether or not he would rather have been compared to Vitellius, another Roman emperor who one French commentator described as weak, cowardly, and gluttonous.55 The same writer, however, referenced another unnamed Vitellius-type figure who, according to his description, lived in the fourteenth century, was a Polish diplomat whose character was charming and

54 Un Monsieur de l’Orchestre [Armand Gouzien], “La soirée théâtrale (Par dépêche télégraphique),” Le Figaro (20 December 1881). “Un des personnages de l’Opéra n’est autre que Vitellius. Dites bien à M. Henri Maret qu’il ne ressemble pas du tout à Gambetta.”

55 Diogène, “Chronique: Préférez-vous Vitellius?,” La Lanterne (16 December 1881). “Vitellius était mou, poltron et glouton...son règne fut le triomphe du ventre, le paradis des goinfres...Je comprends que l’on ne soit pas flatté de ressembler à ce Vitellius-là; mais il y en a un autre: il vivait au quatorzième siècle, fut diplomate, évêque et Polonais, charmant garçon, sobre, intelligent et...opportuniste. C’est peut-être de celui- là qu’a voulu parler M. Maret?” On the specifics of the debate in the Chamber of Deputies, see Jean-Marie Mayeur, Léon Gambetta: la patrie et la République (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2008).

73 opportunistic and who was, perhaps most importantly, a bishop. Notwithstanding the fact that Gambetta himself was virulently anticlerical—indeed, part of his anticlerical platform was the secularization of French education that was being spearheaded by Jules Ferry— the critic’s implication that comparisons between Gambetta and a bishop might not have been unfounded, given that at that time, Gambetta was in talks with another coincidentally-named Mgr. Henri Maret (1805-1884) who was the Dean of the theology faculty at the Sorbonne. For his part, Mgr. Maret worked to prevent the dissolution of the theology faculty at the Sorbonne. More significantly, however, Mgr. Maret’s efforts to deter Ferry’s policies of laïcité were characterized by a belief that he could find a middle ground between ultramontane Catholics and anticlerical Republicans and could ultimately accommodate some of the aspirations put forward by both Catholics and

Republicans.56 Gambetta’s willingness to go so far as to negotiate with a cleric in order to further his own lay cause would have thus been too opportunist in the face of Henri

Maret’s radical—and equally anticlerical— position.

Effectively, Henri Maret’s likening of Gambetta to Vitellius was not entirely off the mark, given that the Roman Vitellius was not in negotiations with the Church. What is more, the reference would not have been lost on contemporary audiences, given that multiple Parisian news outlets reported on the parliamentary confrontation only three days prior to Hérodiade’s premiere in Brussels.57 Here, Gouzien’s implication that another

Vitellius-like figure’s opportunistic maneuvering bore a resemblance to the real-life

56 Troy J. Hinkel, ‘Jules Ferry and Henri Maret: The Battle of Church and State at the Sorbonne, 1879–1884’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Kansas, 2011), 2–9; 115–41. See also Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 209.

57 See, for example, columns printed in Le Pays (16 December 1881) and L’Univers (15 December 1881). Henri Maret provided his own account of the incident on the front page of his newspaper, Le Radical, on 16 December.

74 Gambetta, along with the concomitant comparison between Vitellius in Hérodiade and the

French Prime Minister would have been striking for French audiences in the 1880s, for the issue of control was at the heart of anticlerical debates: either the Church or the Republic would be charged with educating and leading French citizens, whether through Mgr.

Maret’s educational reforms or Henri Maret’s electoral strategizing. In Hérodiade, the same desire for control of a subjected people manifested itself in the confrontation between

Vitellius (the Republic) and Jean (the Church). But whereas the Roman empire eventually fell, it proves victorious in Hérodiade by way of Jean’s beheading: at least in this sense, the

Republic—which does not negotiate—stood strong amidst the Church’s threats.

An Operatic Outlaw

Given the work’s clearly Republican credentials, the Parisian directors’ disinterest in

Hérodiade is particularly odd, especially in the face of the overwhelming success (artistic and financial) of Massenet’s previous opera, Le Roi de Lahore, at the Opéra in 1877. More intriguing is the paradox presented by Jean-Christophe Branger’s assertion that religiously-themed operas gained in popularity during the fin-de-siècle regardless of their continually embattled reception from within the Church. In a society that “favored the emergence of struggles against religious doctrine,” Branger points out that religiously inspired works of art—especially opera—were equally valued by Parisian audiences.58

58 Jean-Christophe Branger, “Introduction,” Opéra et religion sous la IIIe République, 10–13. “C’est peut-être là un des paradoxes de cette période qui, en dépit d’une rupture historique avec l’Église, voit naître en France un nombre important d’opéras où la Religion tient une place de premier plan. La situation contradictoire d’une Société favorisant aussi bien l’émergence de luttes contre les doctrines religieuses est d’ailleurs plus largement observée par le Mercure de France qui, en 1907, mène une vaste enquête international recueillant les avis de personnalités invitées à répondre à la question: ‘Assistons-nous à une dissolution ou à une évolution de l’idée religieuse et du sentiment religieux?’”

75 There are various reasons why a French work that was conceived for an Italian stage ultimately had its premiere in Belgium. As many contemporary critics pointed out,

Vaucorbeil had already committed to staging Gounod’s Le Tribut de Zamora and Ambroise

Thomas’s Françoise de Rimini and therefore had no room in an already full schedule for

Massenet’s new work. Yet the announcements to stage Le Tribut de Zamora and Françoise de

Rimini appeared two years prior, in 1879, when Vaucorbeil succeeded Olivier Halanzier as the new director of the Paris Opéra: Gounod’s opera was to open in January 1880, and

Thomas’s later that year in November. By the end of 1880, however, neither opera had yet appeared. When Gounod requested an additional six months to revise the score,

Vaucorbeil planned to fill the vacancy with Françoise de Rimini. Like Gounod, Thomas was not ready; Grayson notes that the composer’s desired singers were either unavailable or had not yet been found, and Thomas asked that his opera not be scheduled so late in the season.59 In the end, Le Tribut de Zamora did not play until April 1881, and Françoise de

Rimini until April 1882. Though Vaucorbeil had also planned to premiere three new ballets in addition to Gounod’s and Thomas’s operas in 1880, only Charles-Marie Widor’s La

Korrigane was produced that year—arguably leaving more than enough space (and ostensibly enough financial reserves) to program Hérodiade in 1881 or at some other time soon thereafter.60

That Massenet was denied the stage of the Opéra thus came as a surprise. The premiere of Le Roi de Lahore was, according to Katharine Ellis, Halanzier’s crowning

59 Grayson, “Finding a Stage for French Opera,” 134.

60 Loc. cit. Along with Widor’s La Korrigane, Grayson notes that Édouard Lalo’s Namouna and an unnamed ballet by Émile Pessard were slated to appear in 1880. Vaucorbeil did, however, mount a new production of Aïda, which opened on 22 March 1880—well before Vaucorbeil would have seen Massenet’s completed orchestral score.

76 achievement, and Vaucorbeil’s early days were still riding the coattails of that success: the celebrations of its fiftieth performance coincided with the transfer of power from

Halanzier to Vaucorbeil.61 And Massenet was, by many accounts, a “safe” composer. By

1878, he was already a “state sanctioned” artist, having been appointed to a professorship at the Conservatoire (the position left vacant by Thomas’s new appointment as its director) and elected to the Institut de France (Académie des Beaux-Arts) that same year.62 Nor was the score likely to pose a threat to an institution that was grappling with Wagner’s enormous influence. Critics were quick to distance both Massenet and Hérodiade from

Wagner’s shadow. Victor Wilder—a staunch Wagnerian—simultaneously praised

Massenet’s compositional style and separated Hérodiade from Wagnerian music:

As for Mr. Massenet’s score, it is surely worthy of the author of Marie-Magdeleine and Le Roi de Lahore. The young master is now at the peak of his talent, and from the point of view of his dexterity, he possesses the last secrets of the craft, those that the muse reveals to the initiates only...Some have spoken of Mr. Massenet’s tendencies, suggesting that this prudent man has ventured into the virgin forests where Richard Wagner is boldly trying to pave the way for the art of the future. That is saying too much! In Hérodiade, there is a visible preoccupation with renewing the hallowed forms of opera, or, rather, to rejuvenating them...63

Although Massenet had, according to Wilder, ventured occasionally into Wagnerian territory, in Ernest Reyer’s opinion he had not come close in Hérodiade:

61 Katharine Ellis, “Olivier Halanzier and the Operatic Museum in Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Music & Letters, Vol. 96, No. 3 (August 2015): 410. See also Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 368.

62 Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin de siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–4. In his review of Le Roi de Lahore, Ernest Reyer made this point in 1877, even before Massenet’s “official” appointments. See Reyer, “Revue musicale: Le Roi de Lahore,” Journal des débats (10 May 1877): 1–2.

63 Victor Wilder, “Semaine théâtrale,” Le Ménestrel (25 December 1881): 27. “Quant à la partition de M. Massenet, elle est assurément digne de l’auteur de Marie-Magdeleine et du Roi de Lahore. Le jeune maître est maintenant à l’apogée de son talent, et sous le rapport de l’habilité de main, il possède les derniers secrets du métier, ceux que la muse ne révèle qu’aux seuls initiés… On a parlé des tendances de M. Massenet, en laissant à penser que ce prudent s’était aventuré dans les forêts vierges, où Richard Wagner essaye audacieusement de frayer la route de l’art à venir. C’est trop dire!... Il y a dans Hérodiade une préoccupation visible de renouveler les formes consacrées de l’opéra, ou de la rajeunir plutôt…”

77 The score of Hérodiade is divided by scenes, following the precepts of the new school, others having already done as M. Massenet did; others will do so after him. But do not infer from these that the composer abused song and what they call “continuous melody.” I think that I have reassured you in that respect: the old mold was not broken.64

But for one critic writing in Le Figaro, Massenet’s Wagnerian tendencies showed themselves in the design of the opera’s musical numbers. Cavatinas, trios, duets, and finales were not to be found. Instead, they had been replaced by “scenes of one, two, three, five, [or] one hundred characters, scenes that follow one another to form the unity of the musical discourse.”65 Notwithstanding the similarities to the concept of a total artwork,

Massenet and Hérodiade were not linked with the troublesome Wagner: according to “two chatty spectators,” Massenet was not of the Wagnerian school. As one viewer allegedly put it, “he goes to Mass, but he does not take communion!”66

Musically speaking, then, Hérodiade would have posed no threat to a musical institution that had, by 1880, become an “operatic museum”: the work was, as Huebner claims, a meeting of Gospel and grand opera.67 By the time that Vaucorbeil took the helm

64Ernest Reyer, “Revue musicale,” Journal des débats (25 December 1881). “La partition d’Hérodiade est divisée par scènes, suivant les préceptes de l’école nouvelle, d’autres ayant fait déjà comme a fait M. Massenet; d’autres devant le faire après lui. Mais n’allez pas inférer de la que le compositeur a abusé de la mélopée et de ce qu’on appelle ‘la mélodie continue’. Je crois vous avoir rassuré à cet égard: le vieux moule n’est pas brisé.”

65 B. Jouvin, “L’Hérodiade de Jules Massenet,” Le Figaro (22 December 1881). “Ce qu’il y a de convenu et de rebattu dans un opéra (je parle même des plus beaux), c’est la coupe des morceaux, en cavatines, duos, trios, finales. Ne cherchez pas ces formules traditionnelles dans Hérodiade; vous ne les trouveriez pas: l’esprit du jeune maître a horreur de ces classifications banales. Massenet écrit des scènes à un, deux, trois, cinq, cent personnages, scènes qui s’enchaînent l’une à l’autre pour former l’unité du discours musical. Voilà ce que j’ai appelé, dans un premier article, les ‘tendances’ du jeune et déjà célèbre maître.” Emphasis original.

66 Un Monsieur de l’Orchestre [Armand Gouzien], “La soirée théâtrale (Par dépêche télégraphique),” Le Figaro (20 December 1881). “Deux spectateurs des fauteuils causant: Premier fauteuil: Massenet est de l’école de Wagner, n’est-ce-pas? Deuxième fauteuil: Oh! Il va à la messe, mais il ne communie pas!”

67 The term “operatic museum” was first used by William Gibbons in Building the Operatic Museum: Eighteenth-Century Opera in fin-de-siècle Paris (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013) and later by Katharine Ellis in “Olivier Halanzier and the Operatic Museum in Late Nineteenth-Century France.” See also Huebner, French Opera at the fin-de-siècle, 41. Rowden likewise notes the opera’s similarities to the traditions of grand opera.

78 at the Opéra, Halanzier’s legacy as having affected a “profound institutional transformation,” wherein public subsidies for premieres of new works had been overtaken by subsidies for new productions of older works (or foreign works in translation) had been firmly cemented.68 This “repertorial stagnation,” as Christophe Charle labeled it, resulted in a theater that took few risks.69 Though the money made from productions of old standards provided at least some financial backing for the staging of new works by young

French composers, threats to new works came from all directions, whether they stemmed from performers who were unwilling or simply unavailable to perform new roles, or from directors like Halanzier and Vaucorbeil who were more comfortable producing operas by older, more established composers whose works had been proven successful with both audiences and the box office. The Opéra was, according to Steven Huebner, “as inhospitable to risk taking as it was conducive to orthodoxy.”70 For the Opéra, Hérodiade, was neither risk nor unorthodox, however.

Hérodiade might have fared even better at the Opéra-Comique. This institution was required by contract to produce more new works per year than the Opéra, a stipulation for its operation that was emphasized to the then-director, Léon Carvalho, by the Commission des Beaux-Arts when it reminded him that the main purpose of his theater’s government subsidy was to promote new works by young French composers.71 Indeed, the Opéra-

68 Ellis, “Olivier Halanzier and the Operatic Museum in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris,” 390–91.

69 Christophe Charle and Jennifer Boittin, “Opera in France, 1870–1914: Between Nationalism and Foreign Imports,” in Opera and Society in France From Monteverdi to Bourdieu, ed. Victoria Johnson, Jane Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 245–50.

70 Huebner, French Opera at the fin-de-siècle, 10. For a detailed discussion of the state of the Paris Opéra during this time, see also Hervé Lacombe, The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Edward Schneider (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 209–25.

71 Grayson, “Finding a Stage for French Opera,” 135.

79 Comique would become known for its progressive repertoire during the 1880s, at least in comparison with the Opéra. Carvalho’s restaging of Carmen in April 1883—albeit in an edited version with a shortened duel scene and a “less provocative” Carmen—along with productions of later Massenet operas such as Manon (1884) and Esclarmonde (1889) helped secure its reputation as the more adventurous theater.72 As Huebner notes, at the same time that the politics of the Republic skewed left, the repertory at the Opéra-Comique moved with it—suggesting that the blatantly Republican Hérodiade might have indeed found a welcoming home there. But a marginal note on the autograph score suggests that

Hérodiade met the same rejection at the Opéra-Comique. Here Massenet indicates that he visited Carvalho on 27 August 1880 and that the director liked the score; another folio suggests that Massenet was waiting for a decision from both the Opéra and the Opéra-

Comique.73 Yet if Massenet truly wanted the Opéra-Comique to stage the opera as his annotations suggest, he would have had to undertake considerable efforts to revise a score that was, as many critics suggested, written as grand opera with its numerous marches, ballets, and its grand scène religieuse. Other aspects of the opera mark it as grand opera as well: its substitution of recitative for spoken dialogue and its historical subject matter.74

Though by the 1880s, the generic boundaries between grand opera and opéra-comique were rarely rigid, there was still a strong relationship between institution and genre, the

72 See Hugh Macdonald, “From Opéra-comique to Opéra-sérieux,” Revista de musicología, 16 (1993): 3113–21; Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 401–2; David Grayson, “Finding a Stage for French Opera,” 135–36; Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin-de-siècle, 5–6.

73 Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra (hereafter BnF-Opéra) , Rés. A. 736 a (III), f. 445. “samedi 28 août/80...hier visite à Carvalho—belle impression musique Hérodiade […] J’attends solution opéra et opéra comique.” Clair Rowden and Gérard Condé have likewise cited this information. See Rowden, Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera, 93, n. 22, and Condé, “Commentaire musicale,” 74.

74 Lacombe, The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century, 227.

80 implications of which suggested that Hérodiade was, in strictly musical terms, inappropriate for the Opéra-Comique.75 Indeed, the opera has, to date, never appeared on its stage.

Like the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique was, to a certain extent, still under state control and therefore depended on government subsidies for its operations: the Opéra received 800,000 francs per year, and 300,000 francs per year went to the Opéra-

Comique.76 Both houses were run by entrepreneurs who, after fronting significant amounts of their own capital, had to be approved by the state and were subject to the conditions put forth in their respective cahier des charges. The state therefore exerted significant control over what could and could not appear on national stages—and the stakes were high. While Wagner and Wagnerism posed a major threat to the last vestiges of the national image at the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique was touted by musicians, directors, and journalists as an “eminently national” stage, one that had, by the 1880s, also picked up a reputation as a theater favored by the bourgeoisie. In his study of Parisian opera audiences between 1830 and 1870, Huebner has noted that the audiences at the

Opéra were, in his words, were intended to be “more elegant” than those at the Opéra-

Comique.77 Whereas aristocrats and high-society elites frequented the boxes in full evening dress at the Opéra, bourgeois Parisians who constituted much of the city’s white- collar workers filled the seats at the Opéra-Comique, where black-tie dress was only required on official State occasions.78 The bourgeois nature of the Opéra-Comique’s

75 Ibid., 240–41.

76 Huebner, French Opera at the fin-de-siècle, 1.

77 Steven Huebner, “Opera Audiences in Paris, 1830–1970,” Music & Letters, Vol. 70, No. 2 (May 1989): 216.

78 Loc. cit.

81 audiences extended beyond fashion, however. By the time that Hérodiade was set to appear, the theater’s foyer had become a popular site for bourgeois wedding interviews and, as parliamentary debates over the reconstruction of the Opéra-Comique intensified during the late 1880s, one deputé cited his nostalgia for his own wedding interview as support for his argument that the theater should be rebuilt on the same site.79

Although there is no extant information regarding the process through which

Hérodiade was rejected by Carvalho, one could easily infer that the opera’s libretto was deemed unsuitable for his predominantly bourgeois audiences, regardless of their penchant for more progressive musical tastes. For his part, Vaucorbeil was known for his predilection for conservatism at the Opéra, a conservatism that was mandated in part by the State: his 1879 cahier des charges decreed that the Opéra “was not a theater for experimentation.”80 Yet if institutions were responsible for the preservation of repertory, either through the personal inclinations of directors or by State mandate, audience tastes did not necessarily match those of the director of any given theater.81 Whereas the more aristocratic audiences at the Opéra may have been, like Vaucorbeil, more conservative about issues of genre and musical form in their appreciation of, and advocacy for, the continued significance of operatic classics, they were perhaps less so regarding operatic

79 The parliamentary debates over the reconstruction of the Opéra-Comique have been recently examined by Sylvain Nicolle in an unpublished conference paper entitled “Quel nouveau théâtre pour l’Opéra- Comique? Les débats parlementaires de la Salle Favart,” delivered 20 October 2017 at the conference “D’une Salle Favart à l’autre: l’Opéra-Comique de 1887 à 1900.” I am grateful to Clair Rowden for bringing this paper to my attention.

80 Cahier des charges: Auguste-Emmanuel Vaucorbeil, Art. 1. Archives nationales de France (hereafter AN) AJ/13/1187. “L’Opéra n’est pas un théâtre d’essai.” For more on cahiers des charges during the Third Republic, see Karine Boulanger, “Introduction aux cahiers des charges de la IIIe République (1871–1914),” in La Législation de l’Opéra de Paris, ed. Vincent Giroud and Solveig Serre (forthcoming). See also Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 328.

81 Mark Everist, “Parisian Music Drama, 1806–64: Social Structures and Artistic Contexts,” in Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 3.

82 subjects. Conversely, bourgeois audiences at the more progressive Opéra-Comique were more concerned with matters of plot—Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) had been more than enough in that regard—than they were with continuing the canonization of already aging operas. Hérodiade thus fell between the proverbial cracks.

Given that the Paris Opéra functioned as an arm of a state that was consistently working toward the separation of Church and State, the openly anticlerical portrayal of the Church in Hérodiade through its representation of a prophet who succumbed to the temptations of the flesh should have been Vaucorbeil’s crowning glory as the theater’s director. Yet change at the Opéra came slowly. As André Michael Spies has shown, the

Opéra and Opéra-Comique reacted to political shifts at different speeds. He argues that between the years 1879 and 1883, the libretti of works produced at the Opéra-Comique overwhelmingly concerned characters whose devotion was given to the state—and that state was generally a republic; according to Spies, these librettos frequently reflected the audiences’ allegiances.82 Similarly themed librettos did not appear at the Opéra until 1883 at the earliest, however. Thus in 1881, as Massenet searched for a stage on which Hérodiade might find its premiere, audiences at the Opéra—the stage on which the opera would have met with the greatest success—were still comprised of aristocrats and political conservatives whose sensibilities would most likely have been offended by the opera’s obvious portrayal of the very contemporary clash between the Church and the Republic.

Had Hérodiade premiered in Paris in 1881, however, its combination of Biblical narrative and scandalous seduction would not have been new to the stage of either the

Opéra or the Opéra-Comique. Following its overwhelmingly successful premiere at

82 André Michael Spies, Opera, State, and Society in the Third Republic, 1875–1914 (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 8.

83 Edouard Colonne’s Concerts Nationales on 11 April 1873 (Good Friday), Massenet’s oratorio Marie-Magdeleine enjoyed six performances at the Opéra-Comique the following year. The oratorio, widely considered to be Massenet’s first masterpiece, featured an erotically-charged love duet between the Biblical prostitute and Jesus that had “touched the purely human side of Jesus’s life.”83 Vaucorbeil himself had facilitated the premiere of

Massenet’s third oratorio, La Vierge, at the newly inaugurated Concerts Historiques de l’Opéra on 22 May 1880. Unlike Marie-Magdeleine, however, La Vierge was a spectacular failure. Though the failure of La Vierge could account for Vaucorbeil’s unwillingness to mount another of Massenet’s Biblical love stories, reviews of the failed oratorio noted that it was the lack of sensual allure that caused its downfall. “With La Vierge,” wrote Victor

Wilder, “Massenet has ventured into the clouds of dogma...I think that because this new score loses itself in this vague supernatural, it is less thrilling than the two earlier

[oratorios] with which it forms a sort of sacred trilogy.”84 Had this description of La Vierge indeed influenced Vaucorbeil’s decision not to accept Hérodiade, however, Vaucorbeil

83 Colonne’s Concerts Nationales later became the more well-known Concerts Colonne. For the performances of Marie-Magdeleine at the Opéra-Comique, see Goldstrom, “A Whore in Paradise,” 199. For the description of Marie-Magdeleine, see Victor Wilder, “Académie nationale de musique: La Vierge,” Le Ménestrel (30 May 1880): 202. “Dans ses deux oratorios qui ont précédé La Vierge, M. Massenet s’était établi sur un terrain plus solide. La légende de Marie-Magdeleine touche au côté purement humain de la vie du Christ...” For more on the role of the erotic in Massenet’s music, see Annegret Fauser, “Le rôle de l’élément érotique dans l’œuvre de Massenet,” in Massenet et son temps, ed. Patrick Gillis and Gérard Condé (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 1999), 156–79.

84 Victor Wilder, “Académie nationale de musique: La Vierge,” 202. “Avec La Vierge, M. Massenet s’est aventuré dans les nuages du dogme...C’est parce que la nouvelle partition de M. Massenet se perd dans ce vague surnaturel qu’elle a un caractère moins saissant, je crois, que ses deux aînées, avec lesquelles elle forme une sorte de trilogie sacrée.” The second oratorio in Massenet’s “sacred trilogy” was Ève, which premiered on 18 March 1875 at the Cirque d’Été under the direction of Charles Lamoureux. Moreover, if the failure of La Vierge did indeed account for Vaucorbeil’s refusal to accept Hérodiade, Vaucorbeil would have heard that the two scores were vastly different.

84 would have recognized that the two librettos (and, indeed, the scores themselves) were vastly different after his initial hearing of the opera in early 1881.85

Hérodiade’s “incendiary” libretto, then, was not as unconventional as it seemed.

Judging from the earlier failure of La Vierge, critics and audiences had become used to— and wanted more of—Massenet’s specific brand of religiously-themed dramatic music.

Thus the unwillingness on the part of Parisian directors to stage the premiere of Hérodiade was likely motivated not by a libretto that was imbued with a distinct blend of religion and sex, but, rather, by a conservatism brought on by a desire to downplay the all-too real discord between the Church and the State on government-sponsored “national” stages.

Indeed, Vaucorbeil’s willingness to perform La Vierge on a concert series coupled with his unabashed refusal to mount Hérodiade—a work, with all its editorializing of a Biblical subject, that was not at all dissimilar—indicates the extent to which opera remained the guardian of a carefully crafted French musical image.86

The refusal to mount the opera in Paris is especially curious, given that the

Republic’s official position toward the arts was relatively lax during the early 1880s.

Antonin Proust, the Minister of Fine Arts, wanted to replace the outmoded standards at the Opéra with those of more contemporary artists and according to Jann Pasler, Jules

Ferry was known for his “aesthetic tolerance” and “ministerial laissez-faire” towards productions on state-subsidized stages.87 Both Proust and Ferry were acknowledged for

85 Demar Irvine notes that Vaucorbeil heard a play-through of the opera sometime during the early months of 1881. See Irvine, Massenet: A Chronicle of His Life and Times, 117.

86 In The Nation’s Image, Jane Fulcher argues that French grand opera was an inherently politicized art form that was a “subtly used tool of the state” from roughly 1830 to 1870. In the case of Hérodiade, I extend this argument to the 1880s: Massenet’s opera was simply too contemporary to not pose a potential threat to the “nation’s image.” See Fulcher, The Nation’s Image, 2.

87 Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 368.

85 their advocacy of a secular society. Ferry, who was adamantly opposed to MacMahon’s

Moral Order—or, more specifically, the Church’s public encroachment into Parisians’ private lives—also declared that the State would not intervene in the professional affairs of its artists. Artists would not, according to Ferry, be subject to any sort of official doctrine or aesthetic; rather, as Michael Orwicz has shown, his goal was to facilitate a free, independent artistic environment in which diverse aesthetics and ideologies could prosper.88 Though Orwicz’s study deals specifically with Ferry’s attitude toward French painters, the politician’s sense of individualism and entrepreneurship also transferred to musicians, especially those such as Massenet. Finding a stage for Hérodiade in the milieu of

Ferry and Proust’s tolerant artistic policies should have been much easier than it was, at least in theory. In effect, Hérodiade’s libretto was a worthy model of their battle against conservative academicism in the arts, and its “safe” score—modern yet not Wagnerian— provided a balance that would have likely catered to the likes of Ferry and Proust and even more to conservative musical tastes. And with the amount of ministerial anticlericalism promoted by both Ferry and Proust, the opera’s anticlerical portrayal of the Church should have fit perfectly into their secularizing agenda.

In this context, the controversy surrounding Hérodiade went deeper than the juxtaposition of the religious with the erotic. As the separation of Church and State became a more visible part of the Republican agenda, it fell to the Théâtre de la Monnaie to carry the risk that Parisian directors were unwilling to take in staging Hérodiade, even though those same stages had hosted performances with equally vulnerable Biblical men.

Indeed, the danger in Hérodiade was not, as many have previously argued, the sensual

88 Michael Orwicz, “Anti-Academicism and State Power in the Early Third Republic,” Art History Vol. 14, No. 4 (December 1991): 573. See also Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 359–65.

86 retelling of a Gospel narrative. Rather, the danger lay in the opera’s symbolic representations of a simultaneously Catholic and Republic Christ in the role of Jean-

Baptiste and the State in the representation of Vitellius and the Romans. In pitting the two against each other, the battle between Church and State that raged in Hérodiade was far too close to the current political situation in France to appear on stages that were still trying to portray a conservative nation’s image to an international audience.

CHAPTER TWO Pious Puppets and Catholic Cabarets

Following the immensely successful premiere of Maurice Bouchor and Paul Vidal’s Noël, ou le Mystère de la Nativité at the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette in 1890, an unsigned critic writing for the Journal des débats quipped that “we hardly go to church anymore to hear mass ring out on feast days. But we often go to the theater to hear some kind of mass in music or in verse.”1 However tongue-in-cheek it may have been, the critic’s remark offered the keen observation that theatrical productions on Parisian popular stages throughout the early 1890s were marked with a certain predilection toward the dramatization of subjects that, among others, dealt with the life of Christ and the lives of well-known

Catholic saints. As Holy Week approached during the spring of 1893, René Doumic, a critic for Le Moniteur universel, wrote of a strange trend that had taken hold in Parisian theaters.

This was not a purely dramatic trend, nor was it one of the many aesthetic “isms”—

Symbolism, naturalism, Wagnerism, and the like—that had dominated the critical press during the preceding decades. Rather Doumic, a critic whose comments did nothing to obscure his anticlerical leanings, described this new theatrical obsession as more of an unwelcome “invasion” of “pseudo-religious exhibitions” onto popular stages. Despite the tradition of producing sacred works during Lent (especially Passion plays), the staging of such shows had become so commonplace that Doumic complained that “we could hardly

1 Unsigned, “Théâtres et concerts,” Journal des débats (29 November 1890). “Nous n’allons plus guère à l’église pour y entendre la messe les jours de fêtes carillonnées. Mais nous allons souvent au théâtre pour y entendre des espèces de messes en musique ou en vers.”

88 attend a play now without already being assured that we will find some episode borrowed from ceremonies of worship or from pious practices.”2

Other critics made similar, yet less obviously negative observations. An anonymous writer for L’Evénément cited an “evolution” toward religious inspiration in art and literature; Dom Blasius (the pseudonym of Auguste Foureau) wrote of a “mystic and religious force in art and literature;” and a writer publishing under the catch-all pseudonym “Intérim” detailed a pattern by which “many authors have had the curious idea to transport Saints, Disciples, Angels, and Pharisees to the theater.”3 While this phenomenon might easily be linked to the growing fascination with mysticism among

Parisian intellectuals at the fin-de-siècle, it was also innately separate from it, for at popular theaters such as the Théâtre du Vaudeville, the cabaret Le Chat Noir, and the smaller, short-lived Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette, this brand of mysticism was of an undeniably

Christian—and Catholic—orientation. Between 1887 and 1893, Parisian stages presented no less than thirteen such plays, all of which included musical scores as a key performative element (Table 2.1). By the early 1890s, audiences had encountered Christ on the stage in abundance; he was prominently featured in Charles Grandmougin’s Le Christ and

Edmond Haraucourt’s La Passion, to name but a few. Religiously-inspired plays had been

2 René Doumic, “Causerie dramatique,” Le Moniteur universel (20 March 1893). “Il y a une invasion de la religion au théâtre. Nous n’assistons guère à une pièce maintenant sans être assurés par avance que nous y trouverons pour le moins quelque épisode emprunté aux cérémonies du culte ou aux pratiques pieuses.”

3 J.–L. C., “Avant les premières: Les Drames sacrés,” L’Evénément (18 March 1893). “Il y a actuellement en France, dans l’art et dans la littérature, une sorte d’évolution vers les idées mystiques et religieuses.” Dom Blasius [Auguste Foureau], “Premières représentations: Les Drames sacrés,” L’Intransigeant (19 March 1893). “Depuis un an ou deux, il y a en France et surtout à Paris, une sorte de poussée mystique et religieuse dans l’art et la littérature.” Intérim, “Premières représentations,” La Petite République Française (19 March 1893). “Depuis quelques années, plusieurs auteurs ont eu la curieuse idée de transporter au théâtre Saints, Disciples, Anges, Pharisiens; et de faire descendre des vitraux religieux, où il semblait avoir élu domicile, sur les planches, celui qui, selon l’écriture, s’est sacrifié pour nous, a souffert, est mort pour la rémission de nos péchés.”

89 staged with such frequency that one writer was able to claim that, thanks to the Christian spirituality that had taken hold of modern poets, playwrights, and composers, “Jesus of

Nazareth is in the process of becoming one of our most distinguished dramatic leaders.”4

Table 2.1: Religiously-Themed Plays at Parisian Theaters, 1887–1893

Title Poet/Playwright Composer/Arranger Theater La Tentation de Saint-Antoine Henri Rivière Albert Tinchant and Le Chat Noir (28 December 1887) Georges Fragerolle

Tobie Maurice Bouchor Casimir Baille Petit-Théâtre des (15 November 1889) Marionnettes

La Marche à l’Étoile Georges Georges Fragerolle Le Chat Noir (6 January 1890) Fragerolle

La Passion5 Edmond Gabriel Fauré Société Nationale (21 April 1890) Haraucourt de Musique

Noël, ou la mystère de la Maurice Bouchor Paul Vidal Petit-Théâtre des nativité Marionnettes (25 November 1890) La Passion6 Edmond Francis Thomé Théâtre (6 March 1891) Haraucourt d’Application

Cantique de Cantiques P.N. Roinard Flamen de Labrély Théâtre de l’Art (10 December 1891)

L’Enfant Jésus Charles Francis Thomé Théâtre (24 December 1891) Grandmougin d’Application

La Légende de Sainte-Cécile Maurice Bouchor Ernest Chausson Petit-Théâtre des (25 January 1892) Marionnettes

4 Un Monsieur de l’Orchestre [Armand Gouzien], “La Soirée théâtrale: Drames sacrés,” Le Figaro (18 March 1893). “Grâce à ce mysticisme dont nos poètes semblent hantés, Jésus de Nazareth est en train de devenir un de nos plus distingués leaders dramatiques.”

5 See Sylvia Kahan, “Fauré’s Prelude to La Passion (1890): A Re-examination of a Forgotten Score,” in Regarding Fauré, ed. Tom Gordon (Newark, NJ: Gordon and Breach, 1999), 239–72.

6 Revived 16 April 1897 at the Théâtre d’Application with music by J.S. Bach, adapted by Paul and Lucien Hillemacher.

90 La Dévotion à Saint-André Maurice Bouchor Paul Vidal Petit-Théâtre des (2 February 1892) Marionnettes

Le Christ Charles Clément Lippacher Théâtre Moderne (15 March 1892) Grandmougin

Sainte-Geneviève de Paris Léopold Dauphin Léopold Dauphin Le Chat Noir (6 January 1893) and Claudius and Claudius Blanc Blanc Drames sacrés Armand Silvestre Charles Gounod and Théâtre du (17 March 1893) and Eugène Laurent Léon Vaudeville Morand

Unlike Massenet’s Hérodiade, however, the libretto of which was filtered through

Flaubert and could only be called Biblical by virtue of such recognizable characters as

Herod, Salomé, and John the Baptist, these works were based directly on the Bible and the events recorded therein, or on texts like Jacques de Voraigne’s La Légende dorée, a collection of hagiographies. The latter’s translation into French in 1843 by Gustave Brunet had inspired Émile Zola’s novel Le Rêve (and later, Alfred Bruneau’s opera of the same name) and had since come to possess a great deal of cultural and religious capital among late-nineteenth-century Parisians of varying social, political, and religious allegiances.7

Such a stark penchant for Catholicism on Parisian stages seems almost paradoxical from a purely historical point of view, especially since it saw some of its earliest incarnations during the late 1880s, a decade during which Republican politicians were deep into their efforts to secularize the country via its legislation. Yet the intensity with which the wind of religious inspiration blew across Parisian stages during the latter half of the decade suggests that attempts toward reconciliation were taking shape within the

7 For more on La Légende dorée and its significance in late nineteenth-century Parisian culture, see Elizabeth Emery, “The Golden Legend in the fin-de-siècle: Zola’s Le Rêve and its Reception,” in Medieval Saints in Late Nineteenth-Century French Culture, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Laurie Postlewaite (London: McFarland and Company, 2004), 83–116.

91 cultural sphere rather than inside the parliamentary chamber. As Ralliement politics became more visible, so too did these theatrical productions: beginning in 1890, “popular” theaters in Paris produced three overtly Catholic works per year that featured texts and musical scores by poets, playwrights, and composers who, for the most part, had little to no formal connection to the Church to audiences that consisted of patrons who largely shared this lack of institutional relationship or even a concern with the religious matters of the day. The stories of such works—particularly Maurice Bouchor’s Tobie, Noël, ou le mystère de la Nativité, and La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, as well as Armand Silvestre and

Eugène Morand’s Drames sacrés—shed light onto the larger issue of the place of sacred subjects on secular stages. More specifically, the reception of these productions and the narratives created by the critics outline the popular success or, in some cases, the failure that ensued when writers and composers attempted to portray the Catholic Church on the secular stage.

At the heart of the matter was the question of how such material should be presented to a public whose religious interests and beliefs were altogether diverse and varied. On the one hand, simplicity and naiveté reigned supreme at the Petit-Théâtre in

Tobie and in Noël. Although numerous scholars have since explored the Symbolist undertones of both text and music in these plays, the lavish praise bestowed on them at the time as emblems of religious sincerity was virtually devoid of any mention of this burgeoning aesthetic movement. On the other hand, La Légende de Sainte-Cécile and, later, the Drames sacrés were textual and musical failures both with the critics and with the public by virtue of their dependence on editorial intervention as a means through which to modernize ancient stories. Through analyses of these short works, I reveal two opposite but closely related processes of critical success and failure and examine how each work

92 navigated the slippage between avant-garde aesthetics and Catholic qualities: while successful works eschewed the intellectual aura of Symbolism in favor of a traditional and

“sincere” engagement with Catholic heritage, failed productions embraced the complexities of modern music and drama—authorial decisions that, in the end, rendered them unable to be perceived as truly religious. This chapter highlights what these case studies can tell us about the complex entanglements of Catholicism and Republicanism at the fin-de-siècle. Besides the obvious question about the appropriate portrayal of sacred subjects on the secular stage and the theatrical aura of institutions such as the Petit-

Théâtre de la Marionnette and the Théâtre du Vaudeville, Parisian audiences faced in these productions, perhaps most importantly, the vexing task of reconciling their righteous indignation and their defense of the Church with their supposedly secular world views.

Pious Puppets at the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette

On 28 May 1888, a small theater located in the fashionable Galerie Vivienne staged a double bill of Miguel de Cervantes’s Gardien vigilant and Aristophanes’s Les Oiseaux, portrayed by marionettes. Founded by Henri Signoret, the Petit-Théâtre des Marionettes was intended to revive forgotten or neglected masterworks. Indeed, an early subtitle for the new theater was to be the “Theater of Masterworks.” An aesthetic manifesto—which was published and distributed to select members of the artistic community—detailed

Signoret’s vision for his theater that would cater to audience members who were “attuned to modern painting and music, widely versed in world literature, with little tolerance of the mediocrity of the commercial boulevard theater.”8 His goal was simple: Signoret

8 Keith Tribble, “European Symbolist Theater: Conventions and Innovations” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1990), 279.

93 lamented the absence of Greek and Latin tragedies, mystery plays of the Middle Ages, and the like from modern repertoire, a lacuna that, in his opinion, left a void in French theater that needed filling. In addition to revivals of Cervantes and Aristophanes, Signoret added

French translations of foreign works to his young theater’s repertoire—the most well- known of which was Maurice Bouchor’s translation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest— though he was quick to point out that, by virtue of their near perfect faithfulness to the original text, such works were not the familiar adaptations of such plays that catered to

French taste. The theater was small; it seated a maximum of 250 patrons. But the response to Signoret’s new theater was swift and decisive. It was a smash hit amongst the Parisian intellectual elite. The influential author and critic Anatole France praised the productions of La Tempête, and Jules Lemaître, a prominent theater critic, cited the performance of Les

Oiseaux as one of the most accurate representations of Greek comedy since the time of

Pericles.9

The actors, however, were unusual: they were marionettes that had been expressly created for the theater (as opposed to outdoor fairs or parks). Though Signoret’s high- minded aspirations belied marionette theater’s reputation as a low-brow, predominantly rural, and “popular” form of entertainment, “serious” marionette theater was nothing new in and around Paris. In 1776, for example, Dominique Séraphin established a literary puppet theater in Versailles. Lemercier de Neuville opened a theater in Paris that staged marionette caricatures of celebrities in 1860, and George Sand was well-known for producing marionette performances in her salon in Nohant along with her brother,

9 Early histories of Signoret’s theater can be found in Paul Margueritte, Le Petit théâtre (Théâtre des marionettes) (Paris: Librarie Illustrée, 1888), and Charles Le Goffic, “Théâtre: Le Petit-Théâtre des Marionnettes,” L’Encyclopédie (15 June 1894): 253–59. Lemaître was quoted by Le Goffic at page 256: “...ce théâtre de marionnettes était encore ce qui pouvait nous donner l’idée la plus approchante de la représentation d’une comédie grecque au temps de Périclès.”

94 Maurice.10 Nonetheless, as Emilio Sala has pointed out, the new, high-minded puppet theater broke with “childish” and popular traditions in creating shows destined specifically for an audience of “refined connoisseurs” who were fond of the concept of an

“ideal theater.”11

For Signoret and his coterie, marionettes were particularly suited to their aesthetic and artistic demands. They considered marionette theater as the ideal dramatic medium precisely because it rendered the human actor obsolete. According to Signoret and his supporters, the personalities of actors—and the reputations that frequently accompanied them—overwhelmed the work, effacing the drama itself. This was especially true when it came to works that portrayed supernatural, metaphysical, or more significantly, religious events. Anatole France, one of the theater’s most ardent and vocal supporters, emphasized the mystical qualities of the marionette: pure, mysterious, and divinely innocent, marionettes were the only “actors” that could embody the essence of the sacred. In an ode- like paean to Signoret’s marionettes, France praised their ability to embody the sacred in a passage that recalls the Beatitudes: “You are quite small, but you will appear great...besides, there is no one but you to express religious sentiment today.”12 In a word,

10 See Peter Lamothe’s unpublished paper “From Mélisande to Marionettes: The Importance of Incidental Music in Marionette Plays,” read at the meeting of the American Musicological Society, South Central Chapter on 18 March 2017. I am grateful to Peter for sharing a copy of his paper with me.

11 For more on the popular (or populist) nature of marionette theater in France, see Scott Cutler Shershow, Puppets and “Popular” Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Kimberly Jannarone, “Puppetry and Pataphysics: Populism and the Ubu Cycle,” New Theatre Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3 (August 2001): 239–53, and John McCormick and Bennie Pratasik, eds., Popular Puppet Theatre in Europe, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Emilio Sala, “Petit-Théâtre de marionnettes de la Galerie Vivienne,” in Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIXe siècle, ed. Joël-Marie Fauquet (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 961–62.

12 Anatole France, “Les Marionnettes de M. Henri Signoret,” La Vie littéraire, Vol. 2 (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1894), 147. “Vous êtes toute petite, mais vous paraîtrez grande parce que vous êtes simple. Tandis qu’à votre place une actrice vivante semblerait petite. D’ailleurs il n’y a plus que vous aujourd’hui pour exprimer le sentiment religieux.”

95 Signoret’s puppets were “divine.”13 Similarly, Charles Le Goffic, an early historian of the

Petit-Théâtre, claimed that performances of religious subjects on theatrical stages could only be justified if the actors were “impersonal marionettes:”

Indeed, the poet [Maurice Bouchor] holds the absolute conviction that a religious subject cannot be put on the stage without impropriety, at least in Paris, except at a cardboard theater. We saw actors in secular roles; amorous passion is almost always the subject of the works that they interpret. There will be a painful confusion then between the memories that they awaken in the spectator’s mind and the sacred character that they would have to recreate so exceptionally. The pretense of representing holy things in the natural way is unjustifiable (recall the performances of Mr. Edmond Haraucourt’s La Passion and those of Mr. Grandmougin’s Jésus). It is very well justified with impersonal marionettes.14 Whereas humans were considered to be incapable of achieving and acting out a state of metaphysical purity, marionettes—with their fabricated countenances—could supplant human actors “tainted” by their individual personalities. Yet France and others did not herald them as divine solely on this basis. For Signoret’s supporters, marionettes were religious in origin and should be venerated as such. The marionette, for France, was venerable by virtue of its origins in the “sanctuary.” France cited the mariole—a small figure of the Virgin Mary—as an early forerunner to the term “marionette,” an association that he took from Charles Magnin’s seminal history of the marionette. 15 Published in 1852,

Magnin’s study showed that the term was one of many that, like mariole, had been derived

13 Ibid., 149. “Elles sont divines, les poupées de M. Signoret, et dignes de donner une forme aux rêves du poète dont l’âme était, dit Platon, ‘le sanctuaire des Charites.’”

14 Le Goffic, “Le Petit-Théâtre des Marionnettes,” 257. “Le poète garde, en effet, la conviction absolue qu’un sujet religieux ne saurait être mis à la scène sans inconvenance, à Paris du moins, sauf sur un théâtre de carton. On a vu les acteurs dans des rôles profanes; la passion amoureuse est presque toujours le sujet des œuvres qu’ils interprètent. Il y aura donc une confusion pénible entre les souvenirs qu’ils éveillent dans l’esprit du spectateur et le personnage sacré qu’il leur faudra revêtir par extraordinaire. La prétention de figurer les choses saintes au naturel est injustifiable (se rappeler les représentations de La Passion de M. Edmond Haraucourt et celles de Jésus de M. Grandmougin). Elle se justifie fort bien avec des marionnettes impersonnelles.”

15 Anatole France, “Les Marionnettes de M. Signoret,” 148. “Il y faut un goût vif et même un peu de vénération. La marionnette est auguste: elle sort du sanctuaire. La marionnette ou mariole fut originairement une petite vierge Marie, une pieuse image. Et la rue de Paris, où l’on vendait autrefois ces figurines, s’appelait rue des Mariettes et des Marionnettes. C’est Magnin qui le dit, Magnin le savant historien des marionnettes, et il n’est pas tout à fait impossible qu’il dise vrai, bien que ce ne soit pas la coutume des historiens.”

96 from Marie. In their earliest incarnations, Magnin wrote, marionettes were exclusively associated with images of, or figurines based on, the Virgin Mary.16 Indeed, Magnin devoted two full chapters of his work to the significance of the religious marionette in

France and its influence on modern marionette theater. Only during the most recent two centuries had the puppet taken on its modern, secular form. By contrast, these “pious” marionettes, as France dubbed them, had a long and storied association with the church.

During the Middle Ages, marionettes performed Passion plays in Spain, and in Jerusalem, marionettes danced “piously” and enacted religious plays on the Holy Sepulcher.17 Thus the perceived spiritual superiority of Signoret’s marionettes simultaneously separated them from their popular past—in particular, Guignol—and rendered them truly pious and, therefore, ideal performers on the new “religious” stage of the 1880s.

For his theater, Signoret used a particular type of marionette that had its own associations with the Church. Instead of traditional marionettes operated by strings

(marionnette à fils) or hand puppets, students at the École des Beaux-Arts built rod puppets—the marionette à claviers—at Signoret’s request. For Signoret, hand puppets were too “gross” and “comic;” puppets operated by visible strings destroyed any sense of illusion through the visibility of the strings.18 As Catrina Flint de Médicis explains, rod puppets are only capable of a small set of predetermined movements that are “mainly symbolic, even

16 Charles Magnin, Histoire des marionnettes en Europe depuis l’antiquité jusqu’a nos jours (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1852), 113–16. Charles Le Goffic likewise cites medieval Mary figurines as forerunners of modern marionettes, noting their origin in small, articulated figures that depicted the Virgin Mary, sold by shopkeepers in the Middle Ages. See Le Goffic, Le Petit-Théâtre des marionnettes, 253.

17 Anatole France, “Les Marionnettes de M. Signoret,” 248–49. “Oui, les marionnettes sont sorties du sanctuaire. Dans la vieille Espagne, dans l’ardente patrie des Madones habillées de belles robes semblables à des abats-jour d’or et de perles, les marionnettes jouaient des mystères et représentaient le drame de la Passion...Autrefois, à Jérusalem, dans les grandes féeries religieuses, on faisait danser pieusement des pantins sur le Saint-Sépulcre.”

18 Tribble, “European Symbolist Theater: Conventions and Innovations,” 281.

97 hieratic in nature.” The puppet, attached to a central rod and box, moved when its handler depressed one of five or six levers that connect to strings that ran through the puppet’s body. Its gestures, rudimentary at best, included raising the arm or knee, nodding its head up and down, and gliding horizontally across the stage on rails.19 (Figure 2.1)

Figure 2.1 “La lecture des rôles dans la ‘Légende de Sainte-Cécile’” (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arts du Spectacle, 8–RO–13530 (3))

These rod puppets were modeled on the Provençal crèche tradition, a puppet-theater tradition in which Signoret and other founding members of the Petit-Théâtre were well-

19 Catrina Flint de Médicis, “Little Wooden Actors and Symbolism at the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette,” in Musical Theater in Europe 1830–1945, ed. Michela Niccolai and Clair Rowden (Turnout: Brepols, 2017), 271. I am grateful to Catrina for sharing an early version of this article with me, as well as for our many conversations on the subject. See also. See also Keith Tribble, “The Rod Puppet in the Symbolist Era,” in Marionette Theater of the Symbolist Era, ed. Keith Tribble (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 66.

98 versed. Dating from the ninth century, the crèche was a reenactment of the Nativity, performed by marionettes or small, wax figurines known as santons twice every year: once during theater closures in Lent and at Easter, and again as part of the Christmas liturgy at the celebration of Christmas Mass.20 In Provence, the crèche involved throngs of people— sometimes entire towns—singing carols around a crib filled with marionettes or santons.

Wax figurines were eventually replaced by the more lifelike marionette, and crèches moved from the town square to the transepts of cathedrals. The crèche tradition was so popular that marionettes escaped the ban on the performance of mystery plays during the

Renaissance; as a result, it became more popular by virtue of the fact that the puppet no longer had to compete with its human rivals.21 Though the crèche tradition was not specifically French in nature, it nevertheless took on regionalist and nationalist overtones through its association with French folklore and its regional significance: as Michèle

Fieschi has noted, the setting of the crèche was seldom that of Bethlehem, but was (and remains today) that of the Provençal countryside.22

By the time that Signoret opened the Petit-Théâtre, the regionalist movement had been in full swing for just over thirty years. It began in earnest in 1854 with the formation of the Félibrige, an association of regional writers who fought for the preservation of the

Occitan language amid the increasing presence of spoken French in Provence. Led by the

20 See Tribble, “The Rod Puppet in the Symbolist Era,” 66; Tribble, “European Symbolist Theater: Conventions and Innovations,” 275, and Flint de Médicis, “Little Wooden Actors and Symbolism at the Petit- Théâtre de la Marionnette,” 270. For a contemporary source, see Arthur Pougin’s entry on the crèche in his Dictionnaire historique et pittoresque du théâtre et des arts, in which he notes that such plays remained popular throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, especially in Paris. See Pougin, “Crèche,” Dictionnaire historique et pittoresque du théâtre (Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1885), 257.

21 Tribble, “The Rod Puppet in the Symbolist Era,” 68.

22 Michèle Fieschi, “The Santons of Provence,” in Christmas in France (Chicago: World Book Inc., 1996), 61. As early as 1897, Elzéard Rougier, an early historian of the santon and the crèche had spoken of the “Frenchness” of the Provençal model. See Elzéard Rougier, “Santons,” Revue encyclopédique (25 December 1897): n.p.

99 poet Frédéric Mistral and encapsulated in his epic poem Mirèio (1859), the Félibrige worked to validate the importance of regional culture and language within the deeply centralized French cultural landscape.23 At the same time, however, an increasing number of Provençaux stressed their affinity with Mediterranean cultures, linking their French identity to a sense of latinité that was constructed as the result of the transfer of religion and language to France from ancient Rome and Greece. This notion of translatio studii— the idea that French tradition, culture, and power were the direct result of cultural transfer from Greece to Rome and ultimately to France—persisted well into the nineteenth century as the construction of France as the “New Rome” gained currency in discourses surrounding French cultural supremacy.24 According to legend, the crèche tradition was brought from Italy to France by Saint Francis of Assisi.25 This combination of regionalism and latinité was particularly attractive for the founders of the Petit-Théâtre, Signoret included, as many of them came from Marseille or neighboring towns and had attended crèches throughout their childhoods and “yearned to establish contact with the broader

23 For more on the regionalist movement in France, see Joseph P. Roza, “French Languages and French Nationalism: The Félibrige, Occitan, and the French Identity of Southern France, 1854–1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 2003); Alain Corbin, “Paris–Provence,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol. 1, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 428–64; Andrea Musk, “Regionalism, Latinité, and the French Musical Tradition: Déodat de Séverac’s Héliogabale,” in Nineteenth Century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference, ed. Jim Samson and Bennett Zon (Abingdon (U.K.): Ashgate Press, 2002), 226–49; and Katharine Ellis, “Mireille’s Homecoming? Gounod, Mistral, and the Midi,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Autumn 2012): 463–509.

24 On the concept of translatio studii, see Jeanice Brooks, “Italy, the Ancient World, and the French Musical Inheritance in the Sixteenth Century: Arcadelt and Clereau in the Service of the Guises,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 121, No. 2 (1996): 147–190, and Annegret Fauser, “Gendering the Nations: Ideologies of French Discourse on Music (1870–1914),” in The Politics of Musical Identity: Selected Essays (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 71–102.

25 On the legend of Saint Francis of Assisi and the origin of the crèche, see Matthew Powell, The Christmas Creche: Treasure of Faith, Art, and Theater (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1997), 98 and David Herlihy, “The Making of the Medieval Family: Symmetry, Structure, and Sentiment,” in Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children, ed. Carol Neel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 2004), 204.

100 masses of society by revitalizing a once popular art form that had fallen into decay and neglect.”26 Bouchor himself possessed a strong interest in, and affinity for, the French

“folk,” co-publishing several volumes of folk songs for use in public schools with Julien

Tiersot (1857–1936).27 In this sense, the marionette was a symbol not only of a religious past, but was also, through the rod marionette, a marker of a specific brand of French theater that was rooted in its Catholic and regional past.

Symbolist Marionettes?

According to Harold B. Segel, “the most characteristic turn of the century manifestation of

French interest in puppets after [Maurice] Maeterlinck was their adaptation of the neo- mystery play genre cultivated by the Symbolists.”28 At the Petit-Théâtre, interest in religiously-inspired plays, or “neo-mysteries,” was personified in the poet Maurice

Bouchor. Due to financial difficulties and the concomitant challenges in mounting sufficiently appealing productions, Signoret passed the directorship of the Petit-Théâtre to

Bouchor in 1889. For Signoret, it was the public’s growing disinterest in the “ancient” repertory that had brought about the theater’s meager ticket sales.29 Bouchor took the helm and led the theater in a new artistic direction, despite the fact that Signoret remained on the staff as an honorary director. His new strategy was simple. Instead of performing

26 Tribble, “The Rod Puppet in the Symbolist Era,” 68.

27 Flint de Médicis, “Little Wooden Actors and Symbolism at the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette,” 269.

28 Harold B. Segel, Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant- Garde Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 79.

29 See Le Goffic, “Le Petit-Théâtre des marionnettes,” 256. “Cependant le public, le grand, le seul pour qui la caisse ait des yeux, boudait toujours les marionnettes de la rue Vivienne. Le déficit de l’entreprise grossissait chaque soir; les difficultés matérielles paraissaient moins faciles à résoudre; on se rendait compte de l’impossibilité où se trouvait acculé le Petit-Théâtre de représenter, avec les éléments dont il disposait, certaines pièces plus compliquées du répertoire antique...M. Signoret pesa toutes ces raisons, et le résultat de ses réflexions fut qu’il passa la main à M. Maurice Bouchor.”

101 adaptations or translations of ancient plays or the “classics,” Bouchor sensed that performing original works, written specifically for marionettes, might bring the theater out of its financial hole. Building on the marionette’s pious beginnings, Bouchor specifically called for sacred characters to form the bulk of the dramatis personae in his marionette works. The poet was confident that sacred works, based either on the Bible or on other such “sacred” texts as La Légende dorée, would fare well on the stage of the Petit-Théâtre since, in his opinion, live actors ran the risk of appearing blasphemous when portraying sacred characters. Because they could play such roles without appearing irreverent, marionettes were well suited for them.

From 1889, the repertoire at the Petit-Théâtre became one that was almost exclusively Catholic in nature. What numerous contemporary writers called “neo- mysteries” became standard—and highly regarded—fare with Bouchor’s marionettes. On the evening of 15 November 1889, the first of Bouchor’s sacred marionette plays, Tobie, premiered to great acclaim. One year later, on 25 November 1890, Bouchor found exponentially greater success with the premiere of Noël, ou le mystère de la nativité. Indeed,

Noël was so popular with the public that it allowed the theater to increase its ticket prices first from five francs to ten, and eventually to twenty francs.30 Efforts were later made, albeit unsuccessfully, to arrange a national tour of Bouchor’s nativity play. The production remained so well-liked that it was revived for the opening of the Petit-Théâtre’s 1892 season and, eight years later, two excerpts were performed on the fifth official chamber- music concert at the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris.31 Bouchor’s third “Catholic”

30 Tribble, “European Symbolist Theater: Conventions and Innovations,” 305.

31 On the 1892 revival, see Tribble, “European Symbolist Theater: Conventions and Innovations,” 305–06. In 1892, the Petit-Théâtre relocated to the Théâtre d’Application on account of limited space and the lack of a foyer at the Galerie Vivienne location. A program located in the Fonds Paul Taffanel at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département de la Musique, shows that Paul Vidal’s “Prélude sur un air Provençal”

102 play, La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, premiered on 25 January 1892 to markedly less praise than either Tobie or Noël: after only eight performances, it was dropped from the repertoire and replaced with a comic triple bill.32 Though Sainte-Cécile was unpopular in comparison to

Bouchor’s earlier marionette plays, the continued interest in works that depicted Biblical or otherwise Christian narratives marked one of the earliest incarnations of what one writer, in 1893, called the “neo-Christian theater.”33

Scholars frequently credit the success of Bouchor’s works for the Petit-Théâtre to the rise of Symbolism across the Parisian artistic, literary, and musical scene during the

1880s.34 Citing the Symbolists’ fondness for the realms of the metaphysical, the idealized, and the mysterious as steps on the pathway toward a universally-spiritual world that could only be revealed through non-representational signs, Nadezhda B. Mankovskaya writes that “Christianity is the most important source of Symbolist creative work.” The artists’ frequent recognition of myths, fairy tales, legends, and folklore as sources of inspiration lends a sense of mystical and spiritual otherworldliness to their work.35 Literary and

and the “Idylle” from Bouchor’s Noël were performed at the 1900 Exposition Universelle as part of the chamber-music division of the concerts officiels. See Fonds Paul Taffanel, Exposition Universelle de 1900, Programmes des concerts. VM FONDS 152 TAF-2 (2).

32 Tribble, “European Symbolist Theater: Conventions and Innovations,” 306. Amedée Pigeon’s L’Amour dans les Enfers along with Bouchor’s Le Songe de Khéyam and La Dévotion à Saint-André made up the triple bill that replaced La Légende de Sainte-Cécile.

33 See Paul Berret’s series of articles entitled “Le théâtre neo-Chrétien,” in Revue de l’art dramatique (April– June 1893).

34 See, for example, Marvin Carlson’s assertion that the Petit-Théâtre had “much to do with the development of the Symbolist theory of drama.” Carlson, The French Stage in the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, 1972), 210. Olga Taxidou has similarly noted that the Petit-Théâtre constituted a “specific reading of puppet theater” by virtue of its Symbolist sympathies. See Taxidou, Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (Houndmills (U.K.): Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 18–19. Peter Lamothe has argued that Signoret and his supporters’ motivation in opening the Petit-Théâtre in the first place “laid in their sympathies with the evolving Symbolist movement in the arts.” See Lamothe, “From Mélisande to Marionettes: The Importance of Incidental Music in Marionette Plays.”

35 Nadezhda B. Mankovskaya, “French Symbolism: Aesthetic Dominants,” Russian Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 53, No. 1 (January 2015): 58.

103 theater historians alike have treated these works in a similar fashion, especially when their studies are concerned with the productions staged at the Petit-Théâtre des Marionnettes.

In their search for an appropriate dramaturgical model that could align with their desire to sublimate perception and feeling, Symbolist writers are portrayed as turning toward the ancient marionette tradition as a suitable solution. For Tribble, the marionette was the

“cultural symbol par excellence of the Symbolist era.”36 Musicologists have followed a similar trend in their studies of this repertoire. Notwithstanding her hesitancy to pigeonhole the work of the Petit-Théâtre des Marionnettes into a single aesthetic category,

Catrina Flint de Médicis argues that the specific type of marionette created for the theater catered directly to Symbolist aesthetic desires. Guy Gosselin and Jean-Christophe Branger offered similar assessments.37

Part of Symbolist writers’ attraction to Biblical narratives and medieval hagiographies was likely their fondness for the abstract nature of the supernatural and metaphysical realms that such stories emphasized. Indeed, multiple contemporary commentators pointed directly to the Symbolist influence at the Petit-Théâtre in their reviews of its early productions. In his review of La Tempête, for example, the critic U.

Saint-Vel wrote the following:

Convention triumphs and the symbol flourishes on the stage of the Petit-Théâtre. Indeed, what more powerful convention is there than to use good old cardboard ladies and gents in place of heavily made-up actors who have a habit of choosing their exaggerated gestures to match their diction and move about in a most erratic manner...it is easy to see how theatre understood as such is eminently symbolist.38

36 Keith Tribble, “The Rod Puppet in the Symbolist Era,” 1.

37 The particular arguments of Gosselin and Branger are addressed in the discussion of La Légende de Sainte- Cécile later in this chapter.

38 U. Saint-Vel. “Le Théâtre symboliste: Shakespeare et les Marionnettes,” Revue de l’art dramatique, No. 12 (October–December 1888): 288. The translation above is taken from Flint de Médicis, “Little Wooden Actors and Symbolism at the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionette,” 272. The emphasis above is Saint-Vel’s.

104 Such Symbolist readings of Bouchor’s plays garnered traction to the point that, over one hundred years later, Guy Gosselin writes that in Bouchor and Chausson’s La Tempête, “all allegory appears excluded, as does all social resonance.”39 For Gosselin, it was the work’s

Symbolist aesthetic that precluded any allegory or social commentary.

The reliance on Symbolism as interpretive framework falls short, however, of the aesthetic and political complexities of the genre and its reception. When Bouchor’s

“sacred” marionette dramas—specifically Tobie, Noël, and La Légende de Sainte-Cécile—are considered outside of a purely Symbolist framework, “social meaning” comes into full relief, as Parisian religio-political anxieties and the Rallliement itself appear as the source of the new interest in Catholicism at the popular theater. Just as Tribble notes an abundance of “Catholic dogma” inherent in Bouchor’s early marionette dramas, so too did contemporary reviewers.40 Though the impersonal nature of the marionettes’ abstracted movements and their sublimated personalities held obvious appeal for the Symbolist movement, numerous other contemporary reviews suggest that audiences did not understand these works as “eminently Symbolist.” Herein lies the distinction between

Symbolist theater and Bouchor’s “Christian” puppet plays: audiences and critics alike perceived the marionette theater as sincere and direct representations of the Christian faith—if not religious events themselves—rather than idealized and abstracted representations of a vague spiritualism. And while Christian stories and Catholic symbols such as those of the Nativity, the Virgin Mary, or Saint Cecilia were wholly decontextualized from religious practice at the Petit-Théâtre, they nevertheless evoked

39 Guy Gosselin, “La Tempête, musique de scène pour la pièce de Shakespeare,” Ostinato rigore, No. 14 (2000): 174. “Dès lors, il serait vain de chercher à savoir si Bouchor et Chausson ont donné une interprétation psychologique quelconque de la pièce. Toute allégorie semble exclue, toute résonance sociale aussi.”

40 Tribble, “European Symbolist Theater: Conventions and Innovations,” 301.

105 specific memories of, or associations with, the Church that could never fully be depersonalized in the minds of Parisian audiences. Like the authors themselves, Bouchor’s spectators had matriculated through the Catholic educational system at mid-century and were familiar with Catholic doctrine to varying degrees, even if they did not remain active members of the Church. Coupled with musical scores by Casimir Baille, Paul Vidal, and

Ernest Chausson that relied heavily on traditional musico-religious tropes to portray specifically sacred events, works like Tobie and Noël could never be entirely Symbolist.

Though the overall aesthetic program of the Petit-Théâtre and even the puppets themselves may be associated with Symbolism, Bouchor’s early works cannot be, for critics and audiences alike lacked the ability to decontextualize the religious characters, scenarios and, in some cases, music from their roots in the Church. In this, they could never become fully abstracted and thus “symbolic.”

Righteous Tobie

Writing in response to a speech given by Bouchor at the Théâtre d’Application, the critic known only as H. C. took note of a noticeable change in the playwright’s aesthetic around

1880, such that his mind became “invaded with moral preoccupations.” Bouchor’s

“awakening of religious feeling” was to lead him to study Catholic dogma and theogony during the remainder of the decade such that by 1889, Bouchor, at Signoret’s request, took the story of Tobit as the inspiration for his first marionette play.41 Tobie was based on the

Apocryphal book of Tobit, in which the eponymous character is stricken blind after

41 H. C., “Théâtre: Le Petit-Théâtre des Marionnettes. Une conférence de M. Maurice Bouchor,” Revue encyclopédique, No. 8 (1891): 229. “Mais vers cette époque [1880] une évolution se produit dans l’esprit de M. Bouchor. Le poète effréné des Chansons joyeuses et des Contes parisiens se sent envahi par des préoccupations morales, par une sorte de réveil du sentiment religieux.” Apart from this reference, there is very little extant information on Bouchor’s turn toward Catholicism.

106 having been exiled from Nineveh. In Bouchor’s “légende biblique,” Tobie has grown old; his son, also named Tobie, wants to take a young woman named Sara for his wife. Like the elder Tobie, Sara has seen her fair share of hardship: her previous seven husbands had been killed by Asmodée, a diabolical sea serpent. Both sets of parents are against the marriage, but Tobie passes a test of faithfulness with the protection of the Archangel

Raphael. Having been proven victorious, Tobie kills Asmodée, and the couple’s marriage plans are blessed. The couple returns to Tobie’s father, whose sight is miraculously restored as a reward for his son’s virtue and faith. The moral of the story is clear: even throughout unexplainable hardship, the faith of the pious will ultimately be rewarded by a just and omnipotent God—an appealing source of comfort for a capital city that was still reeling from the chaos brought on by Boulanger and his revanchistes.

Ten years following Tobie’s premiere, Bouchor published a revised version of the play for performance by families and in schools that included a revised piano score by

Baille; this score remains the only extant version of Baille’s music.42 Though few indications as to what Baille’s score may have sounded like in 1889 remain, Tribble has noted that Baille’s original score, consisting entirely of melodrama and one soprano solo, was written for muted string quartet, flute, and harp.43 In the preface to 1899 version— likely identical to or a truncated version of the 1889 original— Bouchor indicated his

42 As Bouchor explains in his preface for the 1899 edition, a number of musical pieces that were originally performed at the Petit-Théâtre were omitted from the new score in keeping with Bouchor’s textual revisions. Bouchor, “Avertissement,” Tobie, Légende biblique en trois actes (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1899), n.p. “La présente partition, œuvre de M. Casimir Baille, correspond à la nouvelle édition de Tobie, que je viens de publier à l’usage des familles et des établissements scolaires où l’on voudrait représenter cette pièce. On ne trouvera donc pas, dans la partition, certains morceaux qui avaient été exécutés au Petit-Théâtre de la Galerie Vivienne, et qui se rapportaient à des scènes éliminées de l’édition nouvelle.” This version of Baille’s score (piano-vocal; Paris: E. Flammarion, 1899) is located at the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University; all music examples are based on this version. There is no extant evidence of orchestration.

43 See Tribble, “European Symbolist Theater: Conventions and Innovations,” 303.

107 preference for the harp, noting that certain melodramatic passages in the score were marked for either piano or harp, the latter of which existed solely in order to indicate a certain musical “character” to the pianist in question.44 And while the flute and harp have longstanding associations with musical evocations of the “exotic”, they also frequently serve as musical markers of the sacred, especially when paired with Tobie or Sara’s prayers or other pious dialogue.45

Baille used the sacred character of the harp to his advantage in the score’s single vocal number. As the archangel Raphael restores sight to the elder Tobie, Sara, Tobie fils, and Anna, the family’s matriarch, behold the unfolding miracle and sing praises to God for his beneficence. The restoration of Tobie’s vision however, represents more to Tobie. He speaks of his newfound sight as a metaphor for the restoration of Jerusalem, describing visions of the restored Temple, resplendent in its beauty, and of crowds of the faithful singing praise to God; in order to bring some portion of his vision to life, Tobie calls for his future daughter-in-law to sing the “prophetic hymn” in praise:

Le Jeune Tobie: Young Tobie: Oh! sois béni, mon frère!... Oh! Be blessed, my brother...!

Raphaël: Raphael: Faites silence, doux enfants: Be quiet, sweet children: Le vieillard est saisi par l’esprit des prophètes. The old man is seized by the spirit of the prophets.

Tobie: Tobie: Qui donc me trouble ainsi? Raphaël, est-ce-toi? Who disturbs me so? Raphael, is it you? Tout mon corps tressaille: pourquoi? My entire body quivers: why? Mon âme est au Seigneur; il exalte ma vie... My soul is in the Lord; he exalts my life...

44 Bouchor, “Avertissement,” n.p. “Certains passages sont marqués comme pouvait être joués au piano ou sur la harpe; mais c’est là une simple indication de caractère, car on trouve bien rarement des personnes qui jouent de la harpe.”

45 A key study on the musical exotic is Ralph Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Locke, Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.)

108 Ma poitrine s’emplit du soufflé de mon Dieu; My chest fills with the breath of my God; Sur ma bouche frémit le feu On my mouth trembles the fire that burns Qui la brûle et la purifie. and purifies it. Plus d’éxil! L’Éternel va nous No more exile! The Eternal is going to rouvrir ses bras. reopen his arms to us. Jérusalem, tu revivras... Jerusalem, you will live again...... Le Temple resplendit. Quelle acclamation ...The temple gleams. What acclamation Sur la montagne de Sion! on the mountain of Zion! Tout un peuple sacré foule au bruit des cantiques.... An entire sacred people crowd at the sound Chantent des hymes prophétiques! of cantiques...They sing prophetic hymns!

Baille’s setting of Sara’s hymn is simple, yet it utilizes numerous musical topoi to represent the sacred nature of the text. The music is straightforward, harmonically unambiguous, and evokes both plainchant and hymn settings and, though the score lacks Bouchor and

Baille’s specification for harp, Baille’s arpeggiated chords that punctuate Sara’s chant-like

Alleluias evoke the instrument’s sound nonetheless. (Example 2.1).

Example 2.1: Casimir Baille, Tobie, act 3, scene 4

109

Though there is no way to know whether or not Baille’s 1889 setting was performed as such ten years earlier, or what modifications were made to the existing original, the music of Sara’s prophetic hymn is hardly symbolic, at least in a strictly Symbolist sense. The chant-like opening, coupled with Baille’s intermittent modal harmonies, suggests an affinity for church music—or at least tropes thereof—that likely resonated with members of the Petit-Théâtre’s audience. Rather than sketching a vague portrait of an ambiguous mysticism or an undefined metaphysical realm, Baille’s incidental music acts as an unmistakable representation of musical Christianity.

The public and the critics were taken with Bouchor and Baille’s Biblical inspiration. Tobie premiered to great critical acclaim, so much so that it spurred Charles Le

Goffic’s assessment—five years later—that the play had acted much “like a second consecration of the theater.”46 The work appealed to Parisians of varying political and

46 Le Goffic, “Le Petit-Théâtre des Marionnettes,” 257. “Le succès de Tobie donna comme une seconde consécration au Petit-Théâtre. Toute la presse, M. [Francisque] Sarcey en tête, était à son poste le soir de la première.”

110 religious affiliations who, for the most part, questioned neither Bouchor’s newest aesthetic turn nor its supposed Symbolist sympathies. To one critic, it was not the marionettes’ association with Symbolist aesthetics that drove Bouchor toward Biblical inspiration, nor was it the Symbolists’ partiality toward mystical subjects. Rather, it was the “great air of naiveté” that was inherent to Biblical stories and its ability to coexist with additional,

“modern,” aspects that attracted Bouchor.47 For another critic, Bouchor was attracted to the story of Tobit because of its Hebrew origin: as the “most profoundly religious

[literature] of all” and “that with which our education makes us the most familiar,” the

Apocryphal story served a dual purpose by fulfilling Bouchor’s growing desire for religious topics while, at the same time, remaining accessible enough to a “blasé and skeptical public” through its familiarity.48 Though Racine had likewise based his plays

Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691) on Biblical, or in Bouchor’s words, “Hebrew,” sources,

Bouchor sensed that marionette theater would fare better with the comedic elements found in Tobie. His work would “fill a regrettable gap” left by plays such as Racine’s that were simply not “made for us.”49

47 Robert Dorset, “Causerie dramatique: Tobie,” Le Moniteur universel (25 November 1889). “Ce qui les séduisait c’était le grand air de naïveté qui est empreint dans ces vieux drames, et c’était encore ce mélange de passages sérieux et de passages burlesques, les scènes pieuses alternant avec les familières et même les triviales.”

48 Le Goffic, “Le Petit-Théâtre des Marionnettes,” 257. “La tournure de son esprit l’inclinait fortement déjà vers des sujets religieux; la poésie et la religion se confondent aux origines des peuples. C’est ce qui explique que M. Bouchor soit allé emprunter le sujet de sa première pièce à la littérature hébraïque, la plus profondément religieuse de toutes et celle aussi que notre éducation nous rend la plus familière… A un public blasé et sceptique, porté à sourire d’abord, il convient de faire tout de suite et délibérément sa part. L’histoire de Tobie remplissait bien ces desiderata.”

49 Maurice Bouchor, “Préface,” Tobie, Légende biblique en vers, en cinq tableaux (Paris: Ernest Kolb, 1889), 6. “Donc, en écrivant ce Tobie que nous te demandons—notre choix est fait—tu combleras tant bien que mal une lacune regrettable...Il y a, dit-on, une Athalie de Racine et une Esther du même poète; mais ces pièces ne comptent pas, puisqu’elles ne furent pas faites pour nous.”

111 Indeed, Tobie’s reception was suffused with observations of the poet’s keen ability to blend the pious with the popular without appearing disrespectful or unfaithful to the

Biblical narrative. According to Le Goffic, Bouchor himself was cognizant of the dangers inherent to adapting a sacred story for the secular stage; the critic quoted the poet’s remark that, in his mind, “it is necessary to amuse the most skeptical without shocking the most believing in a work of this genre. I hope that I will not scandalize anyone. But wouldn’t it be a very bad service to religion to make it seem boring?”50 Tobie, however, was safe on both accounts, given that the faithful and the skeptical alike amongst the press praised the work and its sincerely religious sensibility. The devoutly Catholic critic Jules

Lemaître noted that throughout Tobie, Bouchor was “pious and impious, believing and incredulous, serious and buffoonish in the same work.” Yet Bouchor’s blending of piety with impiety was neither surprising nor unsuccessful, for the poet was “one and the other with equal sincerity.”51 For his part, Saint-Vel—the critic who once had identified La

Tempête as eminently Symbolist—switched gears when it came to Tobie, noting the highly moral and religious impact of the work.52 Moreover, the theater critic Charles Martel suggested that Bouchor treated the Biblical story so well that it was able “simultaneously

50 Le Goffic, “Le Petit-Théâtre des Marionnettes,” 258. “Ce scrupule dans le mode de représentation des personnages sacrés, M. Bouchor l’avait apporté à son texte. ‘Il faut, disait-il, dans un ouvrage de ce genre amuser le plus sceptique sans choquer le plus croyant. J’espère que je ne scandaliserai personne. Mais ne serait-ce pas rendre à la religion un bien mauvais service que de la faire paraître ennuyeuse?’”

51 Jules Lemaître, “Le Semaine dramatique: Tobie,” Journal des Débats (9 December 1889). “Ainsi le poète de Tobie est, dans la même œuvre, pieux et impie, croyant et incrédule, sérieux et bouffon; et cela ne me choque point et ne me paraît pas discordant, parce qu’il est l’un et l’autre avec une égale sincérité et qu’il éprouve un égal besoin d’être l’un et l’autre…” Jules Lemaître eventually became the president of the Ligue de la Patrie Française, an anti-Dreyfusard, conservative, and Catholic organization that attacked Émile Zola’s defense of Alfred Dreyfus. The Ligue became increasingly ultra-nationalistic after the turn of the century. See Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music, 16.

52 U. Saint-Vel, “Le Bible et les Marionnettes,” Revue de l’art dramatique (December 1889): 361. “Mais ici, le régal littéraire est complet, outre la portée hautement morale, et je dirai, religieuse, de l’œuvre. On a le délicat et moderne plaisir de trouver réunis sous une forme parfaite l’esprit le plus amusant, primesautier, original, l’ironie fine et le sérieux et l’élévation des idées.”

112 to satisfy the Puritan commentators of the Holy Scriptures and the Voltarian lovers of the

Bible.”53 Tobie, then, was a crowd pleaser for numerous reasons, not the least of which was the poet’s and the composer’s uncomplicated faithfulness to a religious source whose sacred “symbols” were received more as product of clear dramatic and musical representation rather than as an emblem of a burgeoning aesthetic movement. It was, as the critic simply known as “T.” put it, “a true mystery, very pious, very edifying, and written with candor and gravity,” a total transformation of Bouchor’s earlier “pagan joie de vivre.”54

Noël, ou la Mystère de la Nativité: A Modern crèche

Nowhere was the Petit-Théâtre’s connection with the Provençal crèche tradition more evident than in Bouchor’s Noël. Written in four tableaux, the story largely follows that of the nativity narrative as recorded in the New Testament. As he had done in Tobie, however, Bouchor cleverly found a way to weave a “popular” storyline into the Biblical narrative. The first scene is devoted to the angel Gabriel who, in a similar fashion to

Claudio Monteverdi’s La Musica, explains to the audience what they are about to witness.

His message is unambiguous: he was sent by God to introduce the mystery that He had

“saturated with a profound grace.” Gabriel implores the audience not to resist him, for the mystery of the nativity is so sacred and profound that its members will be possessed by the

Spirit: “For one evening, forget that you are well-educated,” he asks, so that “you will not

53 Charles Martel, “Courrier dramatique: Tobie,” La Justice (25 November 1889). “L’ingénieux auteur a d’ailleurs accommodé le livre de Tobie avec une telle variété d’agréments, qu’il peut satisfaire à la fois les puritains commentateurs des Saintes-Écritures et les voltariens amateurs de la Bible enfin expliquée par plusieurs aumôniers de S. M. L. R. D. P.”

54 T., “Billets du matin,” Le Temps (20 November 1889). “Ils [Jean Richepin, Maurice Bouchor, and Raoul Ponchon] s’abandonnaient furieusement à la joie païenne de vivre...Un véritable Mystère, très pieux, très édifiant et écrit avec candeur et gravité: l’histoire de Tobie, d’après l’Ancien Testament.”

113 listen with a secular spirit to this piously written Mystery.”55 The scene then changes to a donkey and an ox who were inanimate on the stage until this point; they begin to speak, their tongues loosened by Gabriel. They ask forgiveness for their wrongdoings and announce the impending birth of Christ, an event that will be, according to the ox, joyous for man and beast alike. The animals’ master (known simply as “Le Maître”) arrives, drunk, and beats the animals in his alcoholic stupor. Unlike the animals, the Master does not believe either in God or in the Devil. Soon thereafter, Joseph appears with Mary, asking for refuge. The Master refuses; the animals intercede on Joseph’s behalf. Hearing

“celestial” music, the Master has a change of heart and bids them to enter—the music has afforded him the realization that they were sent to him by God himself.

The second tableau introduces Bouchor’s “popular” characters: the shepherds

Farigoul, Myrtil, and Marjolaine as well as Myrtil’s father, Barthomieu. While they are tending their fields, a nightingale announces the holy birth. Myrtil and Marjolaine, who are in love with each other, want to travel to see the child with Farigoul, but Barthomieu does not approve. He locks Myrtil away and chases Marjolaine off. The angel Gabriel appears at Barthomieu’s door and announces that “his Savior” has just been born. Like the

Master, Barthomieu is a bit of a skeptic; when Gabriel begins to explain the narrative of salvation to him, the old miser complains that he was happier tucked away in his bed.

Here again, celestial music changes a hard heart. A choir of invisible angels sings of

Christ’s birth, Barthomieu transforms from skeptic to believer, praises the newborn child,

55 Maurice Bouchor, Noël, ou la Mystère de la Nativité (Paris: Ernest Kolb, 1892), 109–12. “Moi, l’ange Gabriel, j’eus l’immense bonheur/D’être envoyé par Dieu vers Ceux à qui les anges/Offrent le plus suave encens de leurs louanges...Vous n’écouterez pas dans un profane esprit/Ce Mystère qui fut pieusement écrit...Écoutez donc, amis, comme de vrais enfants/Oubliez, pour un soir, que vous êtes savants...Que le sujet, du moins, conçu par le vrai Dieu/Qui, certes, l’imprégna d’une grâce profonde/Pour dénouement sublime a le salut du monde...Ne me résistez pas. Je sais qu’il vous en coûte; Mais l’Esprit vous possède et l’homme vous écoute.”

114 and allows Myrtil and Marjolaine to marry. The quartet set off to pay their homage to the newborn Christ—but not before celebrating a traditional Christmas feast together. The final two tableaux closely follow the Biblical narrative. Whereas Tableau Three recounts the journey of the Magi to the holy child, the final tableau, entitled “The Adoration,” depicts the worship of the Christ-child by the holy family and all their visitors.

The sacred origins of Noël are readily apparent, not only in their continuation of the crèche tradition, but also through their dramatization the newborn Christ, Saint

Joseph, and of the Virgin Mary—divine beings who could never truly be decontextualized from their concrete association with the Christian faith, even on the “secular” stage.56 The danger in bringing them to life on the stage was sizable, however, for a Parisian poet, playwright, or composer. Writing dramatic works on sacred subjects was, in the words of

Émile Michelet, “a boldness that is not always crowned with success.” Yet the critic’s unspoken fear of a decadent treatment of the Christmas narrative never materialized: according to Michelet, “Bouchor treated his sacred subject with so much grace, deference, and delicacy that every believer could only be charmed.”57

Noël was perceived as an eminently sacred work, more so than Tobie, likely by virtue of its surprisingly non-decadent nature. Critics largely heeded Gabriel’s instruction not to listen to it with a “secular” ear and agreed that it was a “piously written” work.

56 Though the audience at the Petit-Théâtre was, as Flint de Médicis and others have noted, comprised almost exclusively of the Parisian literary and artistic elite, at least one critic distinctly noted the connection between Bouchor’s Noël and the Provençal crèche tradition in his review, albeit four years after the work’s premiere. See Henry Fouquier, “Les Théâtres: Théâtre d’Application,” Le Figaro (17 January 1894). “Ces raisons sont, je crois, très plausibles lorsque le spectacle est purement mystique et imaginaire, comme dans le dernier tableau des Mystères, qui donne l’impression d’une crèche provençale.”

57 Émile Michelet, “Au théâtre des marionnettes,” Le Gaulois (29 November 1890). “Toucher à ces sujets sacrés, c’est une audace qui n’est pas toujours couronnée de succès. Les poètes d’à présent sont très tentés de faire des mystères, comme ceux du moyen âge...On redoutait beaucoup que quelque détail ne parût choquant. Il n’en fut rien. Nul âme n’en pouvait être froissée...Maurice Bouchor a traité son sujet sacré avec tant de grâce, de déférence et de délicatesse, que tout croyant n’en peut être que charmé.”

115 Alcide Bonneau perceived a piety—indeed, faith—beyond mere subject matter. In his opinion, Noël was a product of Bouchor’s own perceived belief. Citing Bouchor’s self- proclaimed sympathy for the mysterious simplicity of the “angel’s speeches,” the

“shepherds’ replies,” and the “ancient song of the star,” Bonneau took Bouchor’s remark one step further, writing that “he is not content to sympathize emotionally with these characters: he also put a bit of that faith into his work, without which an artist could not conscientiously treat a religious subject.”58 Charles Martel agreed with Bonneau’s assessment. If, as he pointed out, the time was right for the “Messiah’s coming at the Petit-

Théâtre,” then the manifestation of faith that revealed itself through the dramatic personnel, including Bouchor, would certainly be welcomed by the “holy public”—if, that is, the audience was to believe Gabriel’s opening monologue. Indeed, Gabriel’s confidence was justified. Though Martel confessed his fear that the “very orthodox God of the

Catholics” might send Bouchor “to roast in Hell” as punishment for his poetic license, the work as a whole nevertheless displayed such great religious sentiment, in his opinion, that it could merit Bouchor’s ultimate salvation: “If they are fond of sweet poetry and gracious music in Paradise, Bouchor’s salvation is assured.”59

58 Alcide Bonneau, “Noël, ou le Mystère de la Nativité,” Revue encyclopédique (1891), 230. “‘Je ne sais si mon art a toute la délicatesse qu’il fallait pour faire dialoguer un âne et un bœuf, noter les discours de l’ange et les répliques des bergers, transcrire le chant lointain de l’étoile; mais je sais bien qu’une profonde sympathie du cœur et de l’esprit m’attire vers la mystérieuse simplicité de ces êtres.’ Cela est vrai et bien dit; mais M. Bouchor ne s’est pas contenté de sympathiser de cœur avec ses personnages, il a mis aussi dans son œuvre un peu de cette foi sans laquelle un artiste ne saurait consciencieusement traiter un sujet religieux.”

59 Martel, “Courrier dramatique: Noël,” La Justice (15 December 1890). “L’heure était donc propice à la venue, sur le Petit-Théâtre des Marionnettes, du Messie, de M. Maurice Bouchor. Cette manifestation de la foi qui anime tout le personnel du théâtre, y compris les pantins et même l’acteur, si j’en crois la préface, devait être accueillie avec transport par le saint public, pour peu qu’elle eût quelque agrément. Or, elle est délicieuse… Suivant la qualité de ceux qui louent le Seigneur, le Noël prend des grâces naïves, un comique innocent, en la haute expression sacrée… Si au Paradis on est friand de douce poésie et de gracieuse musique, le salut de M. Bouchor est assuré. Mais à ne rien cacher, je crains fort que, le Dieu des catholiques, qu’on dit très orthodoxe, ne l’envoie griller en Enfer, pour le payer des libertés prises avec les Saintes-Écritures.”

116 The work’s composer, Paul Vidal, was likewise praised for his musical treatment of the sacred subject. Music played a much more vital role in Noël than it had in Tobie, as it evinced the “conversions” of the inebriated Master in the first tableau and of the ill- tempered Barthomieu in the second. Vidal based much of the music in the first tableau on an “air provençal,” the melody of which opened the work as a whole (Example 2.2). Indeed, the melodic and harmonic structure of the short air provençal governs the entire composition: Vidal ventures outside of the relative major, relative minor, or parallel major keys in only two of the remaining musical numbers, and he does not expand the source tune’s narrow melodic range.60

Example 2.2: Paul Vidal, Noël, No. 1 “Prélude” (Air Provençal)61

Vidal’s choice to source Provençal folk tunes for his score makes sense on multiple levels.62 The tune, identified by Julien Tiersot as a fifteenth-century Noël entitled

60 The “Scène de l’Étoile” in Tableau Three begins in C Major and modulates to E major when the Star begins singing, likely in an effort to highlight the Star’s sacred (or at least supernatural) nature.

61 All music examples from Vidal’s score to Noël are taken from the piano-vocal score published by Georges Hartmann in 1890. Neither the orchestral nor the autograph score are extant.

62 The third tableau opens with the citation of a second Provençal folk tune that is identified in the score as “Le trei rei.”

117 “Chantons je vous en prie,” acts as a musical link between the Nativity-based text and the musical crèche tradition from which it came and thus, as a sonic lieu de memoire, bestows a sense of folk-based “authenticity” to the work.63 Vidal’s initial setting retains the tune’s sacred character. Presented first in unison, and with several instances of modal mixture, the Provençal tune appears as much like a plainchant as it does an ancient folk tune, thereby legitimizing the folk tune as an appropriately sacred musical source. In its next iteration, the tune serves as the music that engenders the Master’s change of heart toward

Joseph and the animals. Here, it is presented polyphonically, a music sent from heaven to answer the donkey’s supplication that God’s “divine mercy” might touch his master’s

“hard heart:” (Example 2.3):

Example 2.3: Paul Vidal, Noël, Tableau 1, No. 4, “Mélodrame”

63 “Chantons je vous en prie” is the first Noël to appear in Tiersot’s published collection of regional French Christmas songs; he identifies it as a “Noël français du XVe siècle.” See Tiersot, Noëls français (Paris: Heugel, 1901). I would like to thank Catrina Flint de Médicis for her willingness to share this information with me.

118

Audiences at the Petit-Théatre would have likely been familiar with this tune and other French folksongs. Throughout the 1880s, for example, excerpts from Tiersot’s volumes of folksongs were frequent offerings in upper-class Parisian salons and concert halls and, in 1890, a review published in Revue des traditions populaires notes that “Chantons je vous en prie” was among a number of folksongs and various other noëls performed at a meeting of the Cercle Saint-Simon late in the previous year.64 And when Tiersot published his volume of French noels in 1901, he noted that it was the oldest noël tune that was recognized by his early twentieth-century audiences.65 Critics commented on Vidal’s successful setting of the folk tune as music that they perceived as sacred in nature. Henry

Eymieu congratulated the composer on his ability to vary the melody without sacrificing its religious character, and an anonymous critic similarly noted, in the Journal des débats, that the composer had written “completely charming sacred music for this religious

64 Jann Pasler, “Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress,” in The Late Romantic Era: From the Mid-19th Century to World War I, ed. Jim Samson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 403. See also Unsigned, “Audition de Noëls français au cercle Saint-Simon, organisée par M. Julien Tiersot,” Revue des traditions populaires (15 January 1890): 54–56. Late nineteenth-century audiences may have also seen the tune published under the title “Adam et sa compagne” in Antonin Aulagnier’s edition of Noëls attributed to Nicolas Saboly (1614–75). See Aulagnier, 60 Noëls de Saboly (Paris: A. Aulagnier, 1863). I would again like to thank Catrina Flint de Médicis for this information.

65 Julien Tiersot, Noëls français (Paris: Heugel, 1901). “C’est en effet le plus ancien de nos noels français aujourd’hui populaires.”

119 drama.”66 Yet neither Eymieu nor the unknown critic specified exactly what musical qualities rendered Vidal’s music sacred. Possibilities abound: the pair of critics may have compared the opening measures of the overture to plainchant, or the open-fifth drone underlying the Master’s conversion to modern chant accompaniment. Eymieu, however, later provided a slight hint. Writing on the prelude to the second tableau, Eymieu noted that it began with a lesser-known Provençal Noël. Though, as Eymieu claimed, it was not quite as charming as the first, it was nevertheless equally sacred; its “archaic character was conserved thanks to the harmonies of plainchant with which Vidal accompanied it.”67

Whereas the Master and Barthomieu’s conversions were enacted through instrumental music underscoring spoken dialogue, it was music that granted Mary her voice. Appearing only once on the stage in the final tableau, the Virgin never speaks—she only sings. Mary sings a lullaby to her newborn child, flanked on one side by the road- weary visitors and, on the other, by Joseph who holds a lily in his hands. Neither Mary’s silence nor Joseph’s lily could have been mistaken for abstracted symbols: the care and reverence with which the Virgin’s stage appearance was treated only heightened the sense of religious sincerity, as did Joseph’s lily—an easily recognizable visual representation of the Virgin’s purity and of Christ himself. The pinnacle of the production, however, was

Vidal’s “Berceuse de la Vierge.” Critics who attended the premiere were nearly unanimous in their naming of the Virgin’s lullaby not only the musical high point of the evening, but

66 Henry Eymieu, “Revue de la quinzaine: Noël,” Le Monde musical (15 December 1890): 8. “L’overture est la paraphrase d’un Noël provençal, dont le thème est présenté quatre fois avec des harmonies, différentes à chaque reprise, mais qui restent toujours dans le caractère religieux.” See also Unsigned, “Théâtres et concerts,” Journal des débats (29 November 1890). “M. Vidal a écrit, pour ce drame religieux, quelques pages de musique sacrée, tout à fait charmantes.”

67 Eymieu, “Revue de la quinzaine, Noël,” 8. “Le 2me tableau débute par un autre Noël de Provence qui n’a peut être pas autant de charme que le premier, mais dont le caractère archaïque a été conserve, grâce aux harmonies de plain chant dont M. Vidal l’accompagne.”

120 also in their praise of the sincerity of Vidal’s religious music. The lullaby, simple in its conception, charmed even the most devoutly Catholic critics through its reverence— indeed, Lemaître used it as a starting point from which he could praise the reverent nature of the score as a whole: “The music that Paul Vidal wrote for these words, and in fact all of the music in which he enveloped this pious poem like a light veil of melody, is inexpressibly charming. It is, properly speaking, airy music; music that appears to come from heaven, so well it suited.”68 For Ernest Reyer, Mary’s berceuse awakened “devout memories” from times past, and the lullaby so touched Reyer that he cautioned future audience members that it would move them to tears.69 (Example 2.4)

Example 2.4: Paul Vidal, Noël, “Berceuse de la Vierge”

68 Jules Lemaître, “La Semaine dramatique,” Journal des débats (15 December 1890). “La musique que M. Paul Vidal a écrite pour ces paroles, et toute celle, d’ailleurs, dont il a enveloppé tout ce pieux poème comme d’une gaze légère de mélodies, est d’un charme inexprimable. C’est proprement une musique aérienne, une musique qui semble venir du ciel, ainsi qu’il convenait.” Translated in Flint de Médicis, “Little Wooden Actors and Symbolism at the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette,” 279.

69 Ernest Reyer, “Revue musicale,” Journal des débats (7 December 1890). “Alors vous sentirez se réveiller en vous des souvenirs d’autrefois, de pieux souvenirs; il vous arrivera comme un parfum de foin frais de l’étable rustique; les rayons de l’Étoile vous pénètreront le cœur de leur clarté scintillante, et, en entendant le naïf et mélodieux refrain de la chanson de Marie, je vous le dis, mes frères, vous pleurerez.”

121

Flint de Médicis argues that descriptions of Mary’s berceuse as light, airy, and veil- like suggests that critics perceived the score as “less expressively forceful” and thereby

“more suggestive in a Symbolist sense.”70 Mary’s berceuse, as she points out, is somewhat

70 Flint de Médicis, “Little Wooden Actors and Symbolism at the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette,” 279.

122 monotonous: the melodic contour is based almost exclusively on the first four notes of the

G minor scale and circles down to the sixth only a handful of times. 71 In this context,

Vidal’s setting seems to align with the Symbolist attraction toward the flattening of individual personality on the stage; through her song, the Virgin appears distanced from a musical reality that would otherwise grant her a sense of musical agency and her own musical character. This is particularly evident given the vocal range in which she sings.

Instead of lulling the infant to sleep in a light, airy, or clear soprano voice, she sings in a lower range, reaching only as high as a C—perhaps in an effort not to wake her sleeping child. Yet Vidal makes subtle references to his earlier treatment of the air provençal in

Mary’s berceuse: both are set in the key of G minor, and both employ frequent instances of modal mixtures throughout as a means through which both the sacred and the folk could be evoked. The linkage between the music of the “peasants” (the animals and their Master) and the Virgin Mary is striking. By portraying each through similar musical styles—styles in which numerous critics sensed something innately sacred—Vidal’s music cleverly situated the Virgin in her traditional role in the Catholic Church as the intercessor between God (in the form of her newborn child) and the lowliest of creatures.

Critics were similarly impressed with the congruency between Vidal’s score and

Bouchor’s verse. Just as Bouchor had been praised for his ability to combine archaism with more modern plot lines, Vidal was likewise complimented for his skillful capability to source antiquated folk tunes while nonetheless remaining “modern.”72 According to Henri

Lavedan, the two were so well suited to each other that he could not imagine one without

71 Ibid., 279–80.

72 See Henri des Houx, “Les Théâtres,” Le Matin (29 November 1892). “Lui [Vidal] aussi, il a traduit pour un minuscule orchestre et des frêles voix, avec toutes les coquetteries de la composition modern, l’inspiration primitive des compositeurs du treizième siècle.”

123 the other.73 Arthur Pougin’s assessment was similar, though he was careful to note the influence of liturgical song on Vidal’s score. It was, in his opinion, the perfect complement to Bouchor’s text and a matter of interest for the musically-trained ear in its “fortunate mixture of personal inspiration with the memory of certain popular noels, songs, and even some liturgical chants that the composer knew to use with a rare skill and a perfect taste.”74

And although Pougin (nor any other critic for that matter) could not identify a specific liturgical melody or Provençal air in their reviews, they nonetheless sensed something innately sacred in Vidal’s music. Pougin went a step further in his praise, claiming that

Vidal’s ingenious composition would have a long-reaching impact on his already successful compositional career and that he would be one of those composers who would

“honor” his country.75 There is no doubt that Vidal’s reliance on medieval Provençal folk melodies played a role in Pougin’s lofty predication. As Flint de Médicis has argued previously, the critics’ fondness for Bouchor’s verse and Vidal’s music was likely motivated by the sense of nostalgia for the folk traditions of Provençe and for the crèches that were so

73 Henri Lavedan, “Causerie,” La Revue illustrée (December 1890): 9. “Et, d’autre part, comment exprimer le charme et la saveur des chansons, des cantiques et des noëls qui forment la petite partition de M. Paul Vidal? Poème et musique sont d’une incroyable homogénéité de sentiment; on a peine à se les figurer l’un sans l’autre, et c’est la même atmosphère de légende, de mystère humble et doux que tous les deux, Bouchor et Vidal, chacun avec leur musique à eux, ont su faire flotter sur ce petit guignol.”

74 Arthur Pougin, “Noël, ou le Mystère de la Nativité,” Revue encyclopédique (1891): 232. “Il y a quelque chose de très curieux à observer, pour une oreille musicale instruite, dans la partition de M. Paul Vidal: c’est le mélange, très particulier et très heureux, de l’inspiration personnelle avec le souvenir de certains noëls et chants populaires et même de certains chants liturgiques, dont le compositeur a su se server avec une adresse rare et un goût parfait.”

75 Loc. cit. “Il fera parler de lui, et il sera de ceux qui honorent leur pays.” Vidal had already been quite successful as a composer prior to the success of his score to Noël: as a student of Jules Massenet at the Paris Conservatoire, he won first prize in both harmony and counterpoint and fugue in 1879 and 1881, respectively. In 1883, he was awarded the Prix de Rome for his cantata Le gladiateur. See David Charlton, “Paul Antonin Vidal,” Grove Music Online.

124 popular there.76 Given the wildly increasing interest in regionalism and for the collecting of folk melodies, this is likely a valid assessment.

Yet there is another layer to consider. Though Tiersot and other folk-tune collectors would come to include regional Noëls in their anthologies, these once sacred tunes generally lost their spiritual character as they were gathered together, appearing in volumes such as Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin’s Chansons populaires du pays de France alongside secular tunes.77 Their identities became contested as accompaniments were added and originally monophonic melodies were harmonized. For collectors like Tiersot, such modifications were not a problem. For others, however, they were. Vincent d’Indy, for instance, considered French folk music as a direct descendant of sacred church music and its related modalities. As Sindhumathi Revuluri has explained, the rhetoric surrounding folk tunes, their collection, and their modern performance often masked deeper underlying aesthetic and political concerns.78 Vidal’s own adaptations of the source material were especially telling in this sense, given that they align more closely with d’Indy’s ideas than with Tiersot’s and thus added to the sense of religious legitimacy that the crèche tradition had already bestowed upon Bouchor’s verse.

In this context, forging a connection between Noël and the Symbolist movement would have been tenuous at best, given that a sense of religious sincerity dominated the critical reception of Noël to such an extent that no critic explicitly associated the work with

76 Flint de Médicis, “Little Wooden Actors and Symbolism at the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette,” 282.

77 Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, Chansons populaires du pays de France (Paris: Heugel, 1903).

78 Sindhumathi Revuluri, “French Folk Songs and the Invention of History,” 19th-Century Music, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Spring 2016): 248–71. Especially significant here is her discussion of the debates between Vincent d’Indy and Julien Tiersot regarding the harmonization of folk melodies and their roots in/as sacred music. Jann Pasler makes a similar observation in “Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress,” 403.

125 the Symbolist tradition. The combination of Bouchor’s verse with Vidal’s “sacred” score precluded the possibility of a Symbolist reading the Nativity story to the point that critics did not—or could not—divorce the narrative from its traditionally Christian and Catholic context. One writer encapsulated this critical trend in his vivid account of his experience.

Writing in La Revue illustrée, the critic Henri Lavedan likened Bouchor and the personnel of the Petit-Théâtre to a Catholic procession into a cathedral:

Maurice Bouchor escorts you on one side of the cope, Paul Vidal on the other, accompanied by the deacons Richepin, Ponchon, and Amedée Pigeon; so thus be very welcome, for you gave us the most exquisite of Noëls, the Noël par excellence, and for christening our spirits as much as moving our hearts.... So powerful was the impression, that we would have loved to see the hall lit by church candles and to breathe the aromatic scent of the wax; we would not have been surprised at all to be close to spectators in surplices and, before putting gloves on, to find more than one bare hand at the exit, looking for the font of holy water from village churches, made with a seashell.79

Perhaps more importantly, the work’s sacred aspects were well-received by the skeptical bourgeoisie: for the critic René Doumic, the best part of Noël was the production’s ability to show “little Jesus” and to sing cantiques to the members of the witty, secular, critical, and intellectual Tout-Paris.80 Though Doumic’s comment was tongue-in-cheek, his words revealed the important cultural role that Bouchor’s Noël played, as its success across party lines signaled a new—and welcome—enfolding of Catholicism into the Parisian

Republican mindset.

79 Lavedan, “Causerie,” 9–10. “Maurice Bouchor d’un côté de la chape, Paul Vidal de l’autre, t’escortent, accompagnés des diacres Richepin, Ponchon, Amédée Pigeon; sois donc la très bienvenue, car tu nous as donné le plus exquis des Noëls, le Noël par excellence, et pour étrenner nos esprits autant que pour attendrir nos cœurs…On eût aimé, si pénétrante fût l’impression, voir la salle éclairée par des cierges, respirer la senteur aromatique des cires; l’on n’eût point été surpris de se trouver près de spectateurs en surplis, et, avant de se ganter, plus d’une main nue, à la sortie, chercha le modeste bénitier des églises villageoises fait avec une coquille de la mer.”

80 René Doumic, “Causerie dramatique,” Le Moniteur universel (1 December 1890). “Et c’est là ce résultat que j’admire: avoir réussi á assembler l’élite du Tout-Paris blagueur pour lui montrer le petit Jésus et pour lui faire chanter des cantiques, comme en chantent les enfants dans les catéchismes...”

126 La Légende de Sainte-Cécile: A Symbolist Failure?

Following the success of Noël, the 1891 season passed at the Petit-Théâtre with no new productions. Bouchor, however, did not rest on his laurels idly; he was preparing the final play in his series of Christian “neo-mysteries.” At some point prior to the end of June,

Bouchor announced that the subject of his new work would be taken from La Légende dorée and he asked Ernest Chausson to compose the accompanying score.81 Even in its earliest stages, La Légende de Sainte-Cécile had been marked as a departure from Tobie and Noël. On the one hand, its subject was not drawn from the Bible. Instead, it came from a medieval hagiography. On the other, the work was unpopular, even from its inception. On 28 June

1891, Bouchor informed Chausson that he had completed the poem and invited the composer to Paris to discuss it in person. Prior to the arrival of Bouchor’s missive, however, Chausson had received a letter from Henry Lerolle that not only outlined how much he disliked Bouchor’s new text—especially when compared to Tobie—but also his hopes that the composer’s score would, in a sense, save Bouchor’s lackluster text.82 Upon reading the play, Chausson’s reaction was mixed. He was annoyed by the news of the text’s weakness and agreed that music would need to play a significant role in elevating the play to success. Yet he was also intimidated by the necessity to match Bouchor’s religious text with “exquisite” music: “despite my seraphic skills,” he wrote, “it scares me a bit. If it is not exquisite, it will be tediously boring. It is intimidating.”83 Nevertheless,

81 Jean Gallois, Ernest Chausson (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 274.

82 Ibid., 275. “Nous sommes allés chez Bouchor entendre Ste Cécile. Eh bien, c’est tout autre chose. Comme c’est peu nouveau! Combien je regrette Tobie!...Je crois que ta musique y fera très bien et y sera d’une grande importance.” Henry Lerolle was one of the set designers at the Petit-Théâtre and was also Chausson’s brother-in-law.

83 Loc. cit. “Ce que tu me dis de Ste Cécile m’ennuie énormément...Je crois que la musique peut avoir une grande importance. Il faudrait qu’elle fût délicieuse et je doute que j’en écrive de semblable...Malgré mes aptitudes séraphiques, cela me fait un peu peur. Si ce n’est pas exquis, ce sera soporifique. C’est intimidant.”

127 Chausson began work on the score on 19 July and completed it two months later, on 28

September.

Chausson’s uncertainty and his distaste for the text were the least of the problems surrounding Bouchor’s new work. Though poet and composer had worked smoothly together in the past, their working relationship when it came to La Légende de Sainte-Cécile was tenuous to say the least. After informing Chausson that he would not recognize him as an artistic collaborator on their new project (as he had previously done with Baille and

Vidal on Tobie and Noël, respectively), Bouchor demanded numerous edits of, and cuts from, Chausson’s score—demands that were met with great disdain from the already exasperated composer. In private comments, Chausson judged Bouchor’s “prejudices and habits” to be too attuned to the needs of other, mainstream Parisian theaters rather than to those unique to the Petit-Théâtre and its marionettes. In Chausson’s opinion, Bouchor’s aesthetics were too academic and catered only to the bourgeoisie rather than to a larger quest for art. As far as La Légende de Sainte-Cécile was concerned, Bouchor was seen as too staid in his artistic endeavors—a concern that suggests that the work lacked appeal to the artistic avant-garde, a movement in which the Symbolists occupied a significant position.84

84 Chausson’s journal entries, dated from 16 to 23 January 1892, detail his growing dissatisfaction with Bouchor and the rehearsals of La Légende de Sainte-Cécile. See, for example, the entry dated 16 January, where he wrote the following: “Hier soir première répétition au piano de Ste Cécile...Je me chamaille avec Bouchor pour le prélude de 3e acte qu’il ne veut même pas me laisser essayer. Tout lui paraît trop long et trop important. Quel directeur!...Ça vaut bien la peine de faire un Théâtre de marionnettes, si c’est pour y porter les mêmes préjugés et les mêmes habitudes que dans les autres théâtres.” See also the entry dated 18 January: “Bouchor est assommant au Petit-Théâtre. Ce n’est pas parce qu’il me demande des coupures, c’est la raison qui le pousse à les demander qui m’exaspère. Quel sera l’effet sur le public, voilà la grosse question. Et si le bourgeois qui paye sa place risque de trouver un passage long, il faut le contenter coûte que coûte. C’est stupide. Il n’y a pas l’ombre d’une recherche d’art...Et toujours la haine spontanée de tout ce qui peut être en dehors des habitudes reçues. C’est de l’esthétique de professeur.” See Ernest Chausson, Écrits inédits, journaux intimes, roman de jeunesse, correspondance, ed. Jean Gallois and Isabelle Bretaudeau (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1999), 279–81.

128 The work itself may have been predisposed to Symbolist acclaim, given its basis in

La Légende dorée. Saints’ lives were popular fodder for appropriation into popular artworks in Paris in the late nineteenth century, not only because of their broad entertainment value—their stories often included legendary feats of strength and moral virtue that could be appreciated by a diverse public—but also because of their edifying religious and historical value to French patrimony. As Elizabeth Emery writes, La Légende dorée was the inspiration par excellence when it came to portraying saints and their lives in literature, in the visual arts, or on the stage. Its popularity was twofold. On the one hand, it served as a reference point from which all modern conceptions of medieval thought could be derived; saints were perceived as a particularly medieval phenomenon, even if, as Emery points out, all saints were not medieval. On the other hand, hagiographies of specific saints— particularly those responsible for mass conversions to Catholicism—were often heralded as democratic events that awakened the people to Christian ideology.85 According to

Emery, these same texts often appealed to Symbolist writers and artists, however, though not because of their connection with the Catholic Church, but instead via their similarities to fairy tales and their frequent classifications as “legends.”86 Often fantastical in nature— consider Saint George and the dragon—descriptions of saints’ lives frequently lent themselves to vibrant artistic representations and a symbiotic relationship between literature and the visual and dramatic arts. As Emery and others have explained,

Symbolist artists experimented with new dramatic forms that would obviate the

85 Emery, “The Golden Legend in the fin-de-siècle,” 87–89.

86 Emery’s reading falls into the rich nexus of medievalism, Symbolism, and Wagnerism. See, for example, Annegret Fauser, “‘Wagnerism’: Responses to Wagner in Music and the Arts,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 229–30. Ernest Chausson’s Le Roi Arthus also fits well into this context. See Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis, Ernest Chausson, Le Roi Arthus et l’opéra wagnérien en France (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2012).

129 materiality of theater and the referentiality of staging works with live actors.87 For the

Symbolists then, depicting holy saints on stage through new (or revised) art forms such as marionettes created the perfect theatrical environment, for saints could be shown without the need for physical representation.

Works derived from La Légende dorée often echoed Catholic stereotypes about the middle ages as a simple, naïve, and pure era.88 The story of Saint Cecilia—the patron saint of music—perfectly fits this description: as a young woman, born in Rome, Cecilia pledged her virginity to God. She married her tutor, Valerian, and informed him of her vows of chastity on their wedding night. She explained that her guardian angel would kill any man who defiled her body (even in marriage), but would protect any man who respected her holy vow. Valerian, skeptical, asked to see the angel for himself; Cecilia tells him that if he believes in her God and will baptize himself, he will certainly see the angel. Valerian set out and met Saint Urban, who swiftly baptized him. Upon his return, he saw the angel, and he and Cecilia were crowned with garlands of roses and lilies—tangible symbols of chastity and purity. The couple then converted throngs of Romans to Christianity, but were ultimately called before the Roman proconsul to deny the Christian God in the face of certain death. Cecilia’s execution, however, was thwarted by her faith: when the guards attempted to burn her, she remained cool. Even three blows with a sword only injured her.

She died three days later, her steadfast chastity rewarded with eternal bliss.

87 Emery, “The Golden Legend in the fin-de-siècle,” 92–93. See also Frantisek Deak, Symbolist Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993), 58–93.

88 Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz posit two conflicting strands of medievalism in late nineteenth- century France. One was based on the works of François-René Chateaubriand that valued piety, simplicity, naiveté, and pure faith; such was the one favored by the Catholic Church. The other, indebted to the works of Victor Hugo, was secular in construction and emphasized battle, revolt, and social revelry. See Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 16–19.

130 Bouchor’s version, however, contained major editorial interventions. In the performance of La Légende de Sainte-Cécile at the Petit-Théâtre, audiences were transported to the exotic setting of Asia Minor rather than to ancient Rome. The king orders his aide,

Gaymas, to propose marriage to the chaste Cécile, who immediately rejects his offer.

Gaymas warns Valérien, who is in love with Cécile, that the king plans to execute him. As in La Légende dorée, Valérien asks for tangible proof of the angels with whom Cécile can converse and promises to adopt her faith if they give him a sign. After he performs several charitable acts and proves himself worthy, Cécile summons her guardian angel, Saint-

Michel, and Valérien confesses faith in Jesus Christ. Valérien, however, is well aware of

Cécile’s vow of chastity prior to their marriage; he respects it on their wedding night, instead aspiring to mystic union with her through martyrdom. Gaymas, however, has overheard their marriage vows and Valérien’s confession of faith. He tells the king who promptly signs Cécile’s death warrant. Yet the king secretly lusts after Cécile himself and offers her freedom in exchange for her renunciation of faith and of Valérien. She refuses, calling Valérien her husband before God. Her response angers the king, who spews a tirade of blasphemy in his outrage. Saint-Michel frees Valérien from his cell and rushes to

Cécile’s cell, where the king is swallowed up in an infernal earthquake for his sin. For a brief moment, Cécile and Valérien savor the earthly love that they will never live to enjoy.

Valérien watches Cécile’s assumption to Heaven as she beckons him to follow.

In an interview published in Le Matin, Bouchor outlined the reasons behind the two major changes in which his version differed from the version found in La Légende dorée. He found Cécile’s refusal to consummate her marriage to Valérien in the medieval source to be edifying on the one hand, but repulsive on the other. It was, in his mind, a sign of disloyalty to her husband—an opinion that was likely formed on the basis of

131 Republican attitudes toward marriage and the ideal French family.89 Secondly, he claimed that the romantic rivalry between Valérien and Gaymas in his version formed the crux of the dramatic action. When asked if he felt whether or not he had remained faithful to the spirit of La Légende dorée, he skirted the issue, stating that he had transformed Valérien into a man driven first and foremost by passion—a man who would be martyred without having a clear idea of the faith for which he had died. Bouchor did not feel that he had been disrespectful to the characters. He justified his choices by claiming that “the torment of the soul is a more moving spectacle than impassive perfection” and that the king’s lustful pursuit of the virgin would only highlight her inviolable chastity.90

Underpinning his poetic choices was his desire to write a “traditional tragedy” instead of a mystery. The poet wanted to create “more human souls” with greater emotional depth than he had in Tobie and Noël. Writing Noël, he claimed, was an act of piety. 91 La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, however, was a “drama like all the others,” similar in

89 For a discussion of the politics of marriage and the ideal Republican family in Third Republic France, see Chapter 5.

90 Unsigned, “Le Petit-Théâtre: Autour des marionnettes, de Maurice Bouchor,” Le Matin (10 January 1892). “—Vous êtes-vous exclusivement inspiré de la Légende dorée? [Bouchor:] Ma légende diffère de ce qu’apporte Jacques de Voraigne en plusieurs points, dont voici les plus importants. La conduite que prête Jacques de Voraigne à sainte Cécile vis-à-vis de son mari, édifiante peut-être, me répugne absolument. Cécile, qui, après avoir fait vœu de chasteté, accepte néanmoins un mari, sait fort bien qu’elle le frustra de ce qu’elle lui promet tacitement. Quel que soit le mobile qui la pousse, elle commet une déloyauté. L’explication a donc lieu, dans ma légende, entre sainte Cécile et Valérien, avant le mariage; cela m’a aussi conduit à imaginer un roi, tâteur de Cécile, qui la poursuit de son brutal désir. De là, une rivalité qui forme le nœud de mon drame, puis une intervention céleste qui en complique la péripétie.—Vous restez cependant dans l’esprit de la Légende dorée? [Bouchor:] Non, quand je fais Valérien entraîné par sa passion et subissant le martyre sans avoir une idée bien nette de la foi pour laquelle il meurt; et j’y reste encore moins quand je prête à Cécile un amour terrestre. Mais le tourment de cette âme est ainsi un spectacle plus émouvant qu’une impassible perfection. Néanmoins, je n’ai pas, je crois, manqué de respect envers Cécile et Valérien, ces nobles martyrs…—Vous ne vous êtes pas cru tenu ici à la même réserve, sans doute, qu’en écrivant Noël? [Bouchor:] Certes en écrivant Noël je faisais presque un acte de piété. La Légende de sainte Cécile est un drame comme tous les autres: les basses convoitises rôdant autour de la Vierge ne feront que mieux ressortir sa chasteté inviolable.”

91 Loc. cit. “[Bouchor:] Elles auront, cette fois, des rôles plus complexes, plus nuances, sans tour de force, cependant. Cette légende est une tragédie selon la formule, puisqu’elle prétend exciter dans les âmes la terreur et la pitié. Quel que soit le résultat de cette expérience, personne, j’espère, ne me blâmera d’avoir voulu créer des âmes plus humaines et produire de plus fortes émotions que dans mes premiers essais.”

132 storyline to Corneille’s Polyeucte (1643). Critics such as Adolphe Brisson noted Bouchor’s success at writing a true tragedy—though not without registering their disapproval.92 The critic Jacques du Tillet pronounced the work a “drama par excellence about love.”93

Bouchor’s successful composition of a tragedy, however, led Henry Fouquier to observe that marionettes were better suited to the performance of mysteries than to the depiction of human drama. In his opinion, the work could be best classified as a Christian tragedy.94

The notoriously conservative critic Camille Bellaigue agreed with Fouquier’s assessment. As far as Bouchor’s “pious puppets” were concerned, Noël had been their greatest success; Bellaigue praised everything in that poem and on the stage as “august and reverential.”95 As for La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, Bellaigue concluded that the more human nature of the characters suited the marionettes less than “supernatural dream and prayer”

92 Adolphe Brisson, “Les premières,” L’Estafette (8 February 1892). “Elles nous ont joué cette fois, non plus un naïf mystère comme Tobie, ni une divine légende comme le Nöel de l’an passé, mais un vrai drame, une tragédie pleine de larmes, de complications sanglantes et de subtilités psychologiques.” See also Jacques du Tillet, “Théâtres,” La Revue bleue (6 February 1892): 188. “...il a fait un simple drame, un vrai drame;” Georges Loiseau, “Les premières,” Le Jour (3 February 1892). “Pour la troisième fois elle nous a charmés, non plus avec quelque mystère naïf puisé aux sources vives de la foi, comme Tobie ou Noël, mais avec une tragédie qui ‘prétend, selon la formule, exciter dans les âmes la terreur et la pitié’, la Légende de Sainte-Cécile;” and Flamberge, “Chronique dramatique,” Le Monde artiste (7 February 1892), 123. “La Légende de Sainte-Cécile n’est pas à proprement parler, un mystère, mais un drame; or, les gestes automatiques, les attitudes hiératiques des marionnettes ne sont point faits pour interpréter des sentiments purement humains.”

93 Du Tillet, “Théâtres,” 187. “C’est ici un drame d’amour, le drame d’amour par excellence, la lutte entre le devoir et la passion.”

94 Henry Fouquier, “Les Théâtres,” Le Figaro (2 February 1892). “Elles ne peuvent être les interprètes que d’une action purement légendaire; dès qu’on a affaire à un drame humain, à des sentiments très divers, à une tragédie, en un mot, et non plus à un Mystère, leur insuffisance apparaît. C’est ce qui est arrivé, il me semble, pour la Légende de Sainte-Cécile...C’est donc, en réalité, une tragédie chrétienne que nous avons eue...La mythologie chrétienne justifie trop souvent le mot de Voltaire sur le Paradis, ‘lieu saint, mais ennuyeux.’”

95 Camille Bellaigue, “La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, de M. Maurice Bouchor, musique de M. Chausson,” L’Année musicale (1892): 76–77. “Les pieuses poupées de M. Maurice Bouchor ont représenté leur mystère annuel: après Tobie et Noël, la Légende de sainte Cécile; la vie des saints après la Bible et l’Évangile...Sainte-Cécile est plus que ne le fut et ne pouvait l’être Noël, un drame véritable, et je l’en aime un peu moins. Noël! récit mélodieux, méditation profonde et attendrie, immobile tableau de la plus belle des nuits et de la précieuse qui jamais ait enveloppé le monde. Tout y était auguste et recueilli.”

133 had in Tobie and Noël.96 Other critics echoed the sentiment that the drama’s emphasis on human emotion was simply too complicated and was, as a result, not naïve enough to be considered truly pious or even religious, let alone suitable for a marionette theater:

Apart from the beauty of the verse and the purity of inspiration, for which we can be proud of Mr. Maurice Bouchor, we are going to miss many elements of emotion here. Noël told us one of—if not the most—beautiful legends that man has ever invented; it reminded us of our humble beliefs of the past. And these beliefs hold the deepest and most intimate parts of our being that, if I may say, was the very basis of the formation of our moral person: it suffices to remind us of our simple souls from earliest childhood in order to return us to that. As detached as we are nowadays from these ancient beliefs, we rediscover their trace in our life, in our manner of seeing, thinking, and acting; their memory (or else, their influence) remains very clear in us, because we cannot replace them: the footprint that they left cannot be erased by any other...From all that...what is going to remain in Sainte- Cécile? The legend is charming, it is a delightful anecdote, but it is only an anecdote; the characters in Noël represented all of humanity to us: what will Cécile, Gaymas, Valérien, and the king represent to us? Then the marionettes, through their rudimentary play, through their lack of expression, through their uncertain mimicry, can only represent symbolic characters...97

Du Tillet’s comments are telling. Like so many other critics, du Tillet favored Tobie and especially Noël for their simplicity and their keen sense of naiveté; these propitious qualities rendered the works—or at least their perceptions of the works—sincerely religious, even in the face of fin-de-siècle skepticism. As du Tillet writes, the sense of

96 Ibid., 77. “M. Bouchor a voulu donner à son nouveau mystère plus de mouvement et de réalité. C’est presque un Polyeucte en miniature que jouent les gentils personnages; cette fois ils ont de vrais cœurs humains dans leur petite poitrine de bois. Peut-être l’humanité leur sied-elle moins que le rêve surnaturel et la prière. Peut-être en les faisant vivre davantage, a-t-on diminué leur poésie et notre illusion.”

97 Du Tillet, “Théâtres,” 187. “En mettant à part la beauté des vers et la pureté de l’inspiration, pour lesquelles on peut s’en fier à M. Maurice Bouchor, bien des éléments d’émotion vont nous manquer ici. Noël nous contait l’une des plus belles, sinon la plus belle Légende, que les hommes aient jamais inventées; il nous rappelait nos humbles croyances de jadis. Et ces croyances tiennent au plus profond et au plus intime de notre être, à ce qui, si je puis dire, a servi de base même à la formation de notre personne morale: il suffit de nous les rappeler pour nous rendre, un instant, nos âmes simples de tout petits enfants. Si détachés que nous soyons aujourd’hui de ces croyances anciennes, nous en retrouvons la trace dans notre vie, dans notre manière de voir, de penser et d’agir; leur souvenir (sinon leur influence) est resté très net en nous, parce que nous n’avons pu les remplacer: l’empreinte qu’elles nous ont laisse n’a pu être effacé par aucune autre....De tout cela...que va-t-il rester dans sainte Cécile? La Légende est charmante, c’est une délicieuse anecdote, mais ce n’est qu’une anecdote; les personnages de Noël nous représentaient l’humanité tout entière: que nous représenteront Cécile, Gaymas, Valérien et le roi? Puis les marionnettes, par leur jeu rudimentaire, par leur manque d’expression, par leur mimique incertaine, ne peuvent guère figurer que des personnages symboliques...”

134 nostalgia for a more faithful time that was fostered by Noël played a key role in its overwhelming critical and popular success. Even though true faith might have waned, works like Noël could potentially serve as a catalyst for religious rediscovery. The same could not be said for La Légende de Sainte-Cécile. Indeed, it was its very complexity that prevented its reception as a truly religious or aesthetic experience. Indeed, Henri de

Bornier decried it as a drama that was “made for the less mystical audience members of our time.”98

Chausson’s score was not received much differently, and it did not fare any better with a significant portion of the critics. Indeed, Chausson’s score was more “complex” than either Baille’s or Vidal’s had been. Not only was it imbued with a strong sense of Franckian

(or Wagnerian) chromaticism, it also encompassed a much more extended presence of melodrama when the music underscored the dialogue. Chausson’s score is rife with extended “dissonant” chords built on sevenths, ninths, and elevenths, and abrupt modulations between distantly related key areas: see, for example, the concluding angels’ chorus from Act 3, in which they sing of Cécile’s impending assumption into Heaven:

(Example 2.5a)

98 Henri de Bornier, “Revue dramatique,” La Patrie (8 February 1892). “Le sujet de ce Mystère est fort simple...ce drame, fait pour les auditeurs peu mystiques de notre temps...”

135 Example 2.5a: Ernest Chausson, La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, Act 3, “Prélude et Chœur d’Anges”99

Chausson indeed conceived of his angels in a different harmonic manner than either

Baille or Vidal. Such chromaticism, heretofore unfamiliar to the stage of the Petit-Théâtre, coexisted in Chausson’s score nonetheless with a more traditional harmonic language, particularly at moments during which a character’s chastity was being praised or as its legitimacy as a truly sacred figure was secured. The same angelic chorus in Act III opens with what is arguably some of the most diatonic music in the score as the angels foretell

Cécile’s coming glory over an accompaniment of arpeggiated harps (Example 2.5b).

99 Music examples for La Légende de Sainte-Cécile are based on the piano-vocal score, published in Paris by Ph. Maquet & Cie. in 1892 and have been compared with Chausson’s autograph score, BnF-Mus. MS 8781. Minor difference have been silently emended.

136 Example 2.5b: Ernest Chausson, La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, Act 3, “Prélude et Chœur d’Anges”

Even more telling is Saint-Michel’s arrival in the first act. Cécile calls for her guardian angel, and he appears with his sword to the sound of a “liturgical hymn:” (Example 2.6)

137 Example 2.6: La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, Act 1, “Hymne liturgique de Saint-Michel”

Amidst the fluid chromaticism that dominates the score as a whole, Chausson nevertheless relied on tried and true musical tropes to ensure that characters like Saint-

Michel could not be mistaken for anything other than sacred, much like his teacher

Massenet had done in Hérodiade. The similarities to plainchant are obvious: unison writing for the orchestra along with a diatonic melody that was written in a medieval church mode (hypodorian).100 The same melodic material forms the basis for the following two movements that underscore the dialogue as a melodrama. Yet as Valérien sets off to prove himself worthy of Cécile (and of Saint-Michel), the harmony becomes increasingly chromatic, effectively obscuring the sacred nature of Saint-Michel’s liturgical hymn as the conniving Gaymas eavesdrops at Cécile’s door (Example 2.7):

100 Jean Gallois additionally notes that as in medieval plainchant, Chausson notated the “Hymne liturgique de Saint-Michel” without bar lines in his original sketch. Gallois, Ernest Chausson, 279.

138 Example 2.7: Ernest Chausson, La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, Act 1, “Mélodrame”

Critics were confounded by Chausson’s combination of sacred musical tropes with all the modern devices of Wagnerian chromaticism. Whereas they had praised Vidal for his ability to incorporate a medieval source seamlessly into his “modern” score, they scoffed at Chausson’s composition with an equal fervor. There were, of course, those who admired the score and found it perfectly suitable to the legendary nature of the text.101 One critic pointed out that angelic voices, sounding from the wings, was a natural and easily recognizable musical trope used to depict the sounds of heaven.102 But other critics

101 See, for example, the unsigned critic’s praise in “Petit-Théâtre des Marionnettes: La Légende de Sainte- Cécile,” L’Art moderne (6 February 1892): 55. “M. Ernest Chausson, qui avait déjà composé la musique de scène de la Tempête, jouée l’année dernière au concert des XX, a écrit pour la Légende de Sainte-Cécile une partition charmante...Cette nouvelle œuvre de M. Chausson est vraiment digne de l’auteur de Viviane, de la Tempête et de la remarquable Symphonie exécutée l’an dernier à la Société nationale.” The conservative (and Catholic) critic G. de Boisjoslin similarly praised the score as neither “too banal nor too decadent.” See G. de Boisjoislin, “Revue musicale,” L’Observateur français (6 February 1892). “L’auteur, M. Chausson—un poète et un lettré—a su, tout en restant dans une note discrète, fournir une suite de tableaux lyriques fort réussis...elle n’est ni banale—ni décadente.” Hugues Imbert argued that Chausson’s “important” score should share in the honors given to Bouchor’s verse and found the music to be admirably adapted to its subject: chaste and celestial for Cécile, and truly angelic when sung by the choir of angels. See Imbert, “Chronique de la semaine,” Le Guide musical (7 February 1892): 46. “M. Ernest Chausson a composé, pour cette légende, une partition importante, qui a largement partagé, avec les vers de son poète, les honneurs de la soirée. Cette partition est une petite merveille qui s’adapte admirablement au sujet...Chaste, céleste quand c’est sainte Cécile, vraiment angélique quand ce sont les chœurs d’anges invisibles qui l’interprètent, cette musique a ravi l’auditoire.”

102 Gaston Salandri, “Le Petit-Théâtre,” Art et critique (6 February 1892): 57. “Naturellement, en ce poème, le ciel se fait entendre par la voix d’anges qui encouragent les membres de l’église militante à ne point faiblir, et les chœurs sont d’un effet agréable.”

139 protested heavily against it, describing it as ugly, sharp, lean, grating, and badly written for the voice, especially in contrast to Vidal’s “delightful” music in Noël.103 In his review, Henry

Fouquier condemned the score as the worst part of the evening, writing that “the angels, who sang heavenly refrains that were really too complicated and too bizarre in the wings of the stage, were angels who should have gone to the Conservatoire!” He continued, quipping that “perhaps they would have lost their wings, but they would have learned how to sing correctly.”104 And even though he liked the work overall, Charles Martel found

Chausson’s celestial voices to be the worst part of the production: “they are, to speak truthfully, more cruel than Gaymas’s tortures and, if this is a concert in Paradise, the

Eternal Father must change the maître de chapelle in all haste.”105

Modern scholars, however, argue that the same musical elements that so angered nineteenth-century critics constitute the score’s classification as Symbolist. Jean-

Christophe Branger identified Chausson’s use of leitmotif, timbre, and melodramatic writing as musical markers of Symbolism.106 Similarly, Peter Lamothe has cited the composer’s reliance on extended chordal harmonies, metric ambiguity, cadential delay, and even his usage of the celesta in La Légende de Sainte-Cécile as an early instance of

103 Bellaigue, “La Légende de Sainte-Cécile,” 82. “Sainte-Cécile, comme Noël, est accompagné de musique. Quand je dis comme Noël, je veux dire le contraire, car la musique de M. Vidal était délicieuse, et celle de M. Chausson est vilaine, aigre, maigre, grinçante, mal écrite pour les voix et les instruments, si je m’en rapporte aux effort infructueux des unes et des autres, mal écrite aussi pour les oreilles, si j’en crois le témoignage des miennes. D’autres ont autrement entendu, et l’un de nos confrères a recommandé la lecture de cette partition. La lecture, peut-être; mais l’audition, jamais.”

104 Fouquier, “Les Théâtres.” “Le pire était que les anges qui chantaient dans la coulisse de célestes refrains d’une harmonie vraiment trop compliquée et bizarre, étaient des anges qui auraient bien dû passer par le Conservatoire! Ils y auraient, peut-être, perdu leurs ailes, mais appris à chanter juste...”

105 Charles Martel, “Courrier dramatique,” La Justice (22 February 1892). “Une partie musicale se charge d’ajouter des harmonies aux vers, mais ces voix célestes sont, à dire crie, plus cruelles que les supplices de Gaymas, et si c’est là concert de Paradis, le Père Éternel doit en toute hâte changer de maître de chapelle.”

106 Jean-Christophe Branger, “‘L’‘Opéra parlé’ dans les théâtres Parisiens: les musiques de scène de Chausson,” Ostinato rigore, No. 14 (2000): 162.

140 musical Symbolism that predates that of Claude Debussy’s infinitely more recognizable

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894).107 But perhaps the work was too Symbolist to be successful at the Petit-Théâtre, especially in the face of Tobie and Noël, two works that represented the Catholic Church in a most traditional fashion. Despite the popularity of

La Légende dorée as a source of inspiration amongst Symbolist writers and artists, critics seemed to have preferred Biblical works to the more legendary nature of hagiographies.

And regardless of the fact that Chausson had already made a name for himself with such works as the incidental music for La Tempête at the Petit-Théâtre des Marionettes, the reception of this score suggests that critics favored music that they perceived to be truly

“sacred” over “modern” musical interpretations of religious works.

La Légende de Sainte-Cécile was not only a flop with the critics, it was also an enormous financial failure for Bouchor and his marionettes. The production was cancelled after only eight performances, and it cost the small theater a whopping eight thousand francs.108 Thus the reception of La Légende de Sainte-Cécile as a whole suggests that the work was unsuccessful precisely because its modern (Symbolist) complexity obscured the public’s ability to experience and understand it as a sincerely religious work: note, for instance, that not even Saint-Michel’s liturgical hymn was enough to temper what was perceived as the difficulty of the score as a whole. Yet although the marionettes at the Petit-Théâtre were distanced from reality to some degree, as Flint de Médicis has argued, the sacred nature of Tobie and Noël, coupled with the fantastic failure of La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, positioned these works closer to a Catholicized reality than to the

107 Lamothe, “From Mélisande to Marionettes: The Importance of Incidental Music in Marionette Plays.”

108 Gallois, Ernest Chausson, 280–81.

141 pantheistic underpinnings of the Symbolist aesthetic, especially when compared to the universalist sense of mysticism evident in Bouchor’s later marionette works.109 Moreover, the success of Tobie and Noël revealed an unexpected insight into French Republicanism: what anticlerical critics and Republican audiences ultimately valued in performances of religious plays at the Petit-Théâtre, it seems, was not the fostering of a burgeoning aesthetic movement, replete with idealistic suggestion, but rather a nostalgic return to the

Catholicism of their youth, regardless of—and likely despite of—their skepticism of the

Church as an institution.

Drames sacrés: Sacred Drama at Vaudeville

Little more than one year after the failure of La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, on 17 March 1893, the poets Armand Silvestre and Eugène Morand, in collaboration with Charles Gounod and the conductor Laurent Léon, produced a new work, Drames sacrés, at the Théâtre du

Vaudeville.110 Notwithstanding the poets’ previous success at the Comédie-Française with

Grisélidis two years earlier and Gounod’s great renown in Parisian musical circles, the premiere was an all-around disaster. The reception history of this work is an interesting one: whereas critics welcomed and praised the representation of religiously themed pieces on the stage of the Petit-Théâtre, they protested the same at the Vaudeville with equal fervor. One critic hoped that the work’s icy reception would “lead theater directors to understand that the domain of faith is private and that it must remain forbidden to them,” and another remarked that Drames sacrés targeted especially those theatergoers who “do

109 Flint de Médicis, “Little Wooden Actors and Symbolism at the Petit-Théâtre,” 269–85.

110 The production played every night during Holy Week that year.

142 not bother with religious feeling.”111 And even Gounod’s well-known faith in, and association with, the Catholic Church was not enough to resurrect the work from its negative press, nor was his admittedly “sacred” music sufficient to render the work as a whole appropriately religious.

Thus the story of Drames sacrés and its reception—especially in comparison to similar works at the Petit-Théâtre—offers crucial insight into the issues that were at stake when sacred subjects were given on Paris’s secular stages. Underlying the vast majority of the critical response was the notion that the popular theater was and should remain completely divorced from sacred matters, even given the country’s long history of staging religious plays and the frequency with which state institutions such as the Opéra and the

Opéra-Comique produced Biblical operas. Nonetheless, however, critics from varying ideological camps repeatedly complained that, despite its New Testament subject matter,

Drames sacrés was simply not religious enough: the problem lay not merely in the fact that the work existed, but rather, in the way in which it had been written and performed.

Silvestre and Morand’s adaptations infuriated supposedly “secular” critics, pushing them to question the sincerity of the poets’ own religious convictions, such that one critic went so far as to classify Silvestre as a pantheistic, if not pagan, poet.112 It seems surprising that such a wide swath of critics would take such strong offense to an adaptation of a Biblical text. After all, Tobie and Noël were also adaptations saturated with artistic license, yet they

111 René Doumic, “Causerie dramatique,” Le Moniteur universel (20 March 1893). “Il serait à souhaiter que l’accueil plus que froid fait par le public aux Drames sacrés fût un avertissement décisif et amenât enfin les directeurs de théâtre à comprendre que le domaine de la foi est un domaine réservé et qui doit leur rester interdit.” See also Léon Kerst, “Paris au théâtre,” Le Petit journal (18 March 1893). “C’est...un spectacle fait pour séduire surtout ceux que ne gêne pas le sentiment religieux.”

112 P. G., “Les Premières représentations,” Le Petit parisien (18 March 1893). “Il n’était pas peu piquant en effet, de voir le nom de M. Armand Silvestre, qui comme poète (je ne parle pas de ses contes gaulois), est un païen, ou tout au moins un philosophe inclinant vers un certain panthéisme...”

143 had garnered an enthusiastic response. Moreover, it had been nearly a decade since the debacle with Hérodiade, an opera that had appealed to Republican critics even though

Catholics and the Church had found much to condemn. In Drames sacrés, the critics and the Parisian public alike were forced to confront several aesthetic and cultural issues, not the least of which was the question about the appropriate portrayal of sacred subjects on the secular stage.

Consisting of a prologue followed by ten tableaux, Drames sacrés was a Lenten spectacle whose text derived from the New Testament. Its premise was inspired by the artworks of the Renaissance painter Fra Angelico (c. 1395–1455). Entitled “Le Sommeil de

Fra Angelico,” the prologue depicts the painter working on a large fresco on the life of

Christ, the majority of which is incomplete. Discouraged, he prays for aid and inspiration from Heaven and falls asleep. A seraphic voice calls to a band of angels to complete the desolate painter’s work during his slumber, and a choir of celestial voices proclaims that their aid is the reward for his faith. When he awakens, he finds his work complete, and praises God and his angels, for they were the only beings who could have accomplished this miracle. The remaining tableaux—purportedly the topics of his frescos—are listed below:

144 Table 2.2: Drames sacrés, Tableaux

No. Title Subject Characters113 Music114 1 Le Jardin de Nazareth The Annunciation Nazarene women; An Ave Maria Virgin Mary; following Gabriel Gabriel’s salutation 2 La Nuit de Noël Nativity Shepherds; A Choir of Angels Woman; Angels

3 Salomé Salomé and the Herod; Herodias; Fading “dance beheading of John Salomé; The music” as the the Baptist Executioner scene opens 4 Première Rencontre de Meeting of Jesus Mary Magdalene; “Celebratory” Jésus et de Madeleine and Mary A Sadducee; music as the Magdalene in Jesus; The Disciples scene opens Galilee 5 Le Jour des Rameaux Palm Sunday Sadducees; Choral number: Pharisees; “Glory to the Son Jesus; “General of David!” Choir;” Blind Man 6 Le Christ aux Oliviers Judas’s betrayal Jesus; Judas; None specified Three Angels 7 Les Saintes Femmes Jesus’s Virgin Mary; Unspecified condemnation to Mary Magdalene melodramatic crucifixion music; reprise of the Ave Maria from Tableau 1 8 La Plainte de la forêt A forest near A Lumberjack; Unspecified Jerusalem The “Soul of the music at the close Forest;” Trees of the tableau 9 Barabbas devant le The Crucifixion A Crowd; A None specified Calvaire Pharisee; Barabbas 10 La Résurrection The Resurrection; Mary Magdalene; Chorus: “Our The Ascension Jesus; A Man Master is seated at the right hand of the Father”

For the most part, the overall narrative appears to align with that of the New

Testament, and the tableaux are easily recognizable as representations of the major events of Jesus’s life, with the eighth serving as an exception. A closer examination, however,

113 Characters are listed in order of appearance.

114 The entries in this column reflect the music that is called for in Silvestre and Morand’s published version of Drames sacrés; the score as a whole is not extant.

145 reveals significant deviations from the traditional Gospel narrative: changes that, according to one critic, Fra Angelico could not ever have imagined and that his brush would never have be tempted to retrace.115 The second tableau (“La Nuit de Noël”), for example, depicts a woman having lost her child. On their way to Bethlehem, the shepherds try to console her with the news of the Christ-child and his virgin mother, who suddenly appear in the doors of the stable. Even that miraculous sight is not enough to soothe the woman’s grief; she is instead moved to jealousy, envying the Virgin who happily rocks her child, while she weeps for her own. But the shepherds have a unique and entirely extra-Biblical power: they can conjure scenes of the future. Behind an illuminated canvas at the back of the stage appears a puppet whose arms and legs are stretched on a cross and are stained red with blood. Faced with the apparition of the

Crucifixion and an understanding of its redemptive power (the shepherds explain that the

Virgin sacrificed her son in order that hers might be saved), the woman begs forgiveness and falls to her knees. In the following tableau (“Salomé”), Salome is immediately converted after seeing the decapitated head of John the Baptist; to her mother’s great distaste, she commits herself to a penitential life in the desert, “far from the perverse world.”

Yet another notable modification to the Gospel text is found in the confrontation between Jesus and Judas (Tableau 6, “Le Christ aux Oliviers”). As Jesus awaits his betrayal in the garden, he prays to God, yet does not seem to know the true meaning of his calling: if he must die, he prays, he at least wants to know for whom he is to give his life. Judas approaches with the cadre of Roman soldiers and prepares to deliver his kiss of

115 Édouard Noel and Edmond Stoullig, “Théâtre du Vaudeville,” Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique (1893): 207. “Jamais, à coup sûr, l’humble moine n’a dû rêver les étranges modifications imaginées par MM. Silvestre et Morand, et son pinceau n’aurait pu même être tenté de les retracer.”

146 betrayal. He is stopped suddenly, however, by Jesus’s demand that he reveal the motive behind his betrayal. Judas explains: though he believes him to be the son of God, he does not understand the constant presence of pain and suffering in the world, a misery brought on, in his opinion, by secular law. In true Renanian style, Jesus proclaims the coming of a new world renewed by love, pardon, and mercy. Jesus orders Judas to kiss him; Judas, moved by Jesus’s words, refuses, and Jesus is left to hand himself over to his executioners.

Perhaps as a means of offering proof of Jesus’s proclamation, Tableau Seven (“Les Saintes

Femmes”) depicts a meeting between the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene just prior to

Jesus’s condemnation to death. The Virgin fulfills her role as heavenly intercessor, opening her arms to Mary Magdalene and declaring that just as she had given life to Jesus in this world, so too will he grant the repentant courtesan new life in heaven. This tableau is immediately followed by a peculiar scene in a forest to which a lumberjack has been sent to collect the wood that will form Jesus’s cross. The trees and an ambiguous presence known as the Forest’s Soul scold the lumberjack, the trees refuse to give their wood for

Jesus’s cross, and an oak tree reveals itself to be the tree on which Judas hanged himself.

147

Figure 2.2: Théâtre du Vaudeville, “Les Drames sacrés,” engraving by Michelet (gallica.bnf.fr)

Though the text of Drames sacrés strays at time rather far from its Gospel inspiration, it aligns closely with the Renanian portrayal of Jesus as a loving and merciful figure. The many unconventional conversions that this view of Christ engenders— particularly those of Salomé and Judas—simultaneously speak to the widespread popularity of Renan’s ideas amongst “secular” Republicans as well as to the emergence of similar doctrinal shifts within the French Church that emphasized Christ’s beneficence over God’s vengeance.116 At the same time, the work highlights traditional aspects of

Catholic doctrine, namely, that Jesus was born into the earthly world for its redemption, a point highlighted by the critic Jules Lemaître when he recounted an encounter with a

116 See Chapter 1 for an in-depth discussion of Renan’s ideology in his 1863 La Vie de Jésus. For a discussion of doctrinal changes in the late nineteenth-century French Catholic Church, see Ralph Gibson, “Hellfire and Damnation in Nineteenth-Century France,” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 74, No. 3 (July 1988): 383–402.

148 “good Catholic” at the premiere who noticed the absence of an essential tableau: that of

Jesus chasing greedy merchants from the temple.117 On the one hand, Silvestre and

Morand’s decision to omit that particular scene could be read as an implicit understanding of Renan’s Jesus and their desire to portray him on the stage—the image of an angry Jesus toppling tables does not mesh well with a portrait of an all-loving, non-retributive divinity.

On the other hand, Lemaître’s “good Catholic” and his observation of a lacuna in the

Gospel narrative would have surely pleased more traditional Catholics who likewise would have recognized this gap, especially in light of some reviewers who praised

Silvestre and Morand’s fidelity to the narrative, writing that the poets had done their best to preserve the integrity of the Biblical text and that Christ had only appeared on the stage in order to speak in a purely “orthodox” manner.118 The critic Adolphe Mayer, however, perhaps summarized it most accurately when he described Silvestre and Morand as

“unbelievers full of faith” who could, better than anyone else, “measure out the proper dose of Catholicism and modern evangelism to a theater audience.” For Mayer, Drames sacrés embodied one thing: “Holy Scripture put within reach of people of the world.”119

Yet the lion’s share of critics did not share Mayer’s optimistic assessment and were aghast at the dramatic liberties taken by Silvestre and Morand. René Doumic, a critic for

117 Lemaître, “Drames sacrés,” Impressions de Théâtre, Vol. 8 (1893): 210. “Un bon catholique me disait: ‘Il y manque un tableau essentiel: celui de Jésus chassant les vendeurs du temple.’”

118 See [Pierre] Chassaigne de Néronde, “Revue dramatique,” L’Observateur française (21 March 1893). “Il [Silvestre] a évidemment fait de son mieux pour rester respectueux de la lettre et de l’esprit.” See also F. O., “Les Théâtres,” Le Matin (18 March 1893). “Car, c’est uniquement l’Évangile qui a inspiré MM. Silvestre et Morand; les textes sont respectés avec le plus grand scrupule et la personne du Christ ne traverse la scène que pour émettre des maxims purement orthodoxes.”

119 Adolphe Mayer, “Premières Représentations,” Le Soir (19 March 1893). “MM. Silvestre et Morand sont des incroyants pleins de foi, des artistes poètes dont l’habilité supplée à la conviction et qui, mieux que tous autres, pouvaient mesurer à un public de théâtre la dose qu’il convient de catholicisme pittoresque et d’évangélisme modern: l’Écriture sainte mise à la portée des gens du monde.”

149 Le Moniteur universel, was so angered by the text that he lambasted it as a pseudo-religious work devoid of artistic merit; Drames sacrés committed, as he wrote, a crime against taste, given the fact that the authors did not have the right to use as a theatrical prop that which was a matter of belief and faith for many Parisians.120 Marcel Fouquier perceived a certain

“abuse of miracles” that gave the “evangelical legend” the air of a bad theatrical show.

Jacques du Tillet, however, pushed the issue further, citing the work as a perpetration of moral indecency. Writing for the journal La Revue bleue, whose readership consisted largely of anticlerical politicians, du Tillet observed the following:

Believers or non-believers, Christians or pagans, everyone, as much as we are, we undoubtedly owe the greatest part of what we have in us to Jesus. And if someone speaks of him, we want it to be with the feelings of respectful piety that we have in our own depths...and it seems that to speak of him too publicly is to render ourselves guilty of a sort of moral indecency.

Du Tillet, a Catholic and member of the right-leaning Ligue de la Patrie Française, nevertheless recognized that while some critics might no longer equate Drames sacrés to blasphemy, modern audiences still required the respect of the letter for a positive reception of a work in which Christ was so predominantly featured. Like so many others, however, du Tillet did not like the work: seeing as it no longer constituted poetry, mysticism, or even theater, he left his readers to classify it for themselves.121

120 René Doumic, “Causerie dramatique,” Le Moniteur universel (20 March 1893). “L’œuvre de MM. Silvestre et Morand est sans aucune valeur artistique. Elle est en outre une grave faute contre le goût. On n’a pas le droit de prendre un prétexte à décors et à figuration dans ce qui est pour beaucoup matière de croyance et de foi.”

121 Jacques du Tillet, “Théâtres,” La Revue bleue (1893): 382–83. “Croyants ou incrédules, chrétiens ou païens, tous, tant que nous sommes, nous devons sans doute à Jésus la plus grande part de ce que nous avons en nous. Et, si quelqu’un parle de lui, nous voulons que ce soit avec les sentiments de respectueuse piété que nous avons au fond de nous-mêmes...et il nous sembler qu’en parler trop publiquement, c’est se rendre coupable d’une sorte d’indécence morale. Devant des Drames sacrés, nous ne crions plus au blaspheme; mais nous voulons qu’on nous rende au moins un peu de ce que la légende nous avait donné jadis; surtout nous exigeons le respect de la lettre et l’intelligence de l’esprit...Ce n’est pas plus de la poésie que ce n’est du mysticism, et comme ce n’est évidemment pas du théâtre, je vous laisse à decider ce que c’est...”

150 On the opposite side of the aisle, Henry Fouquier, a self-professed non-believer, agreed with his Catholic counterpart that the authors’ liberties with Biblical text—which he referred to as “historical truth”—hindered the work’s likelihood of success with a varied public, especially when the subject at hand was Christ’s life. The question of the artists’ own personal faith was of no matter to Fouquier, even though an anonymous critic for the Republican newspaper L’Estafette found Silvestre and Morand’s supposed lack of faith and naiveté to be the main reason for its critical failure.122 In Fouquet’s mind, the issue at play in Drames sacrés was the lack of sincerity evident in the work: theatrical productions that portrayed religious characters—especially Christ—should at least be convincingly pious.123

The unexpectedly negative press response emphasized the fact that what undergirded concerns about sincerity and piety was the question of whether or not such subjects should be performed on popular stages in the first place. By 1893, Parisians were well used to seeing Biblical and other sacred subjects in their theaters (Table 2.1, above), and thus the mere performance of Drames sacrés should not have surprised anyone, at least theoretically. But the question remained, so much so that prominent Church officials

122 Unsigned, “Les Premières,” L’Estafette (19 March 1893). “Cet artiste élégant, quoique un peu maniéré, avait- il les qualités de simplicité, de sobriété nécessaires pour traduire dignement les épisodes de la Passion? Sa muse pouvait-elle s’envoler à ces hauteurs? Je crains que l’expérience tentée hier soir n’ait pas été très heureuse...Il a écrit avec amour son drame sacré. Mais l’amour ne suffit pas, en pareille matiére. Il y faut la foi, la naïveté.”

123 Henry Fouquier, “Les Théâtres,” Le Figaro (18 March 1893). “Une question préjudicielle se pose. Est-il bien compatible avec des croyances que je respecte d’autant plus que je ne les partage ni ne les exploite, de mettre les figures divines à la scène et de confier à des acteurs réputés comme jeunes premiers le soin d’évoquer Celui qu’on adore? Cette familiarité avec le Christ me paraît avoir sa raison d’être et rester pleine de naïveté et de grâce dans les époques de foi. Elle me semble moins heureuse dans les époques sceptiques. Je n’ai pas à sonder les reins des auteurs et à savoir s’ils sont chrétiens. Mais l’œuvre ne me donne pas l’apparence et la sensation de la sincérité...Il ne m’est pas possible de prendre cette affaire-là au sérieux. Et cette impression que c’est là de la piété truquée pèse sur l’émotion que j’aurais pu ressentir en face d’un poète ému, quand bien même sa conviction ne fût pas mienne...Je vois bien ce que les auteurs ont voulu faire. Ils ont négligé tout souci de la vérité historique.”

151 chimed in on the flurry of press attention that Drames sacrés had garnered. Several newspapers published excerpts of an interview with Father Henri Didon (Père Didon), a famous French Dominican priest who was well-known for his sympathetic views toward the Republic—only one year earlier, in 1892, he had delivered a pointed sermon in

Bordeaux that painted the Republic in a positive light.124 Perhaps the choice to interview

Père Didon was strategic: by selecting a priest who was an obvious ally of the State, journalists might have gotten more tempered views on the matter at hand—and indeed they did. Though the press had castigated Silvestre and Morand’s loose treatment of the text, Père Didon took a more optimistic view. He found the critical outrage to be a sign that

Parisians were returning to the Gospel and cited their near-unanimous defense of, and preference for, an unsullied Biblical text over Silvestre and Morand’s adaptation as evidence. When asked about the suitability of putting Christ on the stage, he responded that it was indeed possible, just as it had been in the Middle Ages. His answer echoed the overall critical opinion: what mattered more in such situations was the spirit in which works featuring such subjects and characters were conceived. Admittedly, the unnamed interviewer was biased in favor of Silvestre and Morand—excerpts of the interview had originally been published in an issue of Le Gaulois Supplément as part of a massive pre- performance advertising campaign—in citing the poets’ respectful treatment of Christ and faithful adherence to the Gospels, but Père Didon was unashamedly supportive of the representation of sacred subjects on popular stages. However risky it was to have staged a nativity scene after Bouchor’s popular Noël, Didon claimed, the poets had written a

124 For more on Père Didon (1840–1900), see Simone Hoffmane, “La carrière du Père Didon, Dominicain. 1840–1900” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1995).

152 charming and sincere work for which the act of paraphrasing Biblical text was their artistic right.125

For all his support, however, Père Didon was unsuccessful in his efforts to convince a skeptical public that sacred subjects could indeed be appropriately staged, particularly at the Théâte du Vaudeville. Writing in response to Père Didon’s published interview, the left-leaning critic André Hallays continued to assert that staging such works amounted to an indecency. Hallays himself felt no loyalties to the Catholic Church, yet he nevertheless found Père Didon’s encouragement and support of Drames sacrés and other such dramatic enterprises to be fruitless. Though theater directors, actors, artists, and musicians seemed to have the Church’s blessing (via Père Didon) to continue mounting religious productions, Hallays vehemently disagreed:

When dramatic authors began the lucrative exploitation of sacred legends for the first time two or three years ago, some people criticized them, thinking that these slightly sacrilegious farces uselessly hurt believers. But these secular people have just learned, once more, that they are wrong to meddle in matters of religion and that they hear nothing of it. When priests encourage these sorts of performances, one must be very Jansenist in order to not fall under their opinion. Here, finally the Church and the Theater reconcile... The most scrupulous Christians are now reassured. Unfortunately, Father Didon is incapable of changing the feeling of honest people, even of little faith, whom all of these parodies continue to dismay. It is a question of taste... Stage directors must make up their minds: there are legends, there are symbols the staging of which is an indecency.126

125 Unsigned, “Chez le Père Didon,” Le Gaulois supplément (18 March 1893). “Nous parlons de l’indiscutable mouvement qui ramène les foules sur les chemins de l’Évangile.—[Didon] Oui, oui, ils y reviennent! Ils ont beau s’en defender, ils y reviennent!—Maintenant, nous abordons le sujet même de notre visite, nous disons que l’idée de mettre le Christ sur la scène, pour audacieuse qu’elle puisse paraître, a ses précédents, que le Moyen âge l’a fait dans sa foi, et que notre âge à son tour le tente en sa piété nouvelle.—[Didon] Sans doute, la chose est possible encore: tout dépend de l’esprit dans lequel est conçue votre œuvre.—Nous expliquons les vues de MM. Armand Silvestre et Eugène Morand, nous disons que Jésus, dans leur ensemble de drames, ne paraît que quatre fois et que les auteurs lui ont fait dire seulement les mots cités par l’Évangile...—Et l’entretien continue. Nous disons les détails de l’œuvre...Ah! la nuit de Noël maintenant. Bien. Bien. Ingénieuse, cette idée...—[Didon] Il était dangereux de reprendre ce sujet après l’exquis Noël de Maurice Bouchor. Une œuvre absolument charmante, je suis de votre avis. Mais chacun voit les choses sous un jour qui lui est propre. MM. Silvestre et Morand ont à leur tour paraphrase le texte sacré, c’était leur droit. L’essentiel, c’est la sincérité.”

126 André Hallays, “Au jour le jour: L’Évangile au théâtre,” Journal des débats (19 March 1893). “Quand, pour la première fois, il y a deux ou trois ans, des auteurs dramatiques commencèrent l’exploitation lucrative des légendes sacrées, quelques personnes les en blâmèrent, estimant que ces mascarades un peu sacrilèges blessaient inutilement les croyants. Mais ces laïques viennent d’apprendre, une fois de plus, qu’ils ont tort de se mêler des affaires de la religion et qu’ils n’y entendent rien. Lorsque des prêtres encouragent ces sortes de

153

It was not, however, merely the fact that the life of Christ was on the stage that offended

Hallays’s sensibilities. Instead, it was the actors’ inability to represent the characters and stories to the audience with a sufficient degree of sincerity, dignity, and credibility: “If

[stage directors] forget for a moment, the professional allure of actors would suffice to make them remember it. For the most skilled actors are pitiful in sacred scenes: the praiseworthy efforts that they make to acquire the proper solemnity reveal the ridiculousness of the spectacle. They are not and will never be able to wear these particular masks.”127 Catholic or not, Parisian audiences thus yearned for a certain level of respect and fidelity to tradition in theatrical representations of traditional Catholicism.

In this light, the poets’ choice of Gounod as their musical collaborator was ingenious given the composer’s well-known association with the Church. Moreover,

Gounod had already created a substantial and highly regarded corpus of church music.

While at the Villa Médici as a winner of the 1839 Prix de Rome, Gounod had been drawn to the teachings of the Dominican priest Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802–1861), a highly influential clergyman whose philosophy was founded on his desire to synthesize ultramontane Catholicism with political liberalism in order to reconcile democratic aspirations with the Church. Lacordaire’s teachings were renowned throughout France; his dynamic sermons emphasized Dominican ideology that maintained the belief that

représentation, il faudrait être bien janséniste pour ne point tomber de leur avis. Voilà enfin l’Église et le Théâtre réconciliés...Les chrétiens les plus scrupuleux sont donc maintenant rassurés. Malheureusement, le P. Didon est incapable de changer le sentiment des honnêtes gens, même de peu de foi, que toutes ces parodies continuent de révolter. Il y a là une question de goût...Il faut que les metteurs en scène en prennent leur parti: il y a des légendes, il y a des personnes, il y a des symboles dont la représentation est une indécence.”

127 Loc. cit. “L’oublieraient-ils un instant, l’allure professionnelle des acteurs suffirait à les en faire souvenir. Car les plus habiles des comédiens sont pitoyables dans la comédie sacrée: les louables efforts qu’ils font pour acquérir la solennité convenable accusent encore le ridicule du spectacle. Ils ne savent et ne sauront jamais porter ces masques-là.”

154 religious orders were not incompatible with the ideals of the Revolution. As a result,

Lacordaire was responsible for the reestablishment of the Dominican order in France.128

Gounod was highly influenced by Lacordaire’s teaching and, shortly after his return to

Paris in 1843, entered the seminary at Saint-Sulpice. His tenure there was short-lived due to the 1848 Revolution, but his exposure to Lacordaire and his deep faith in the Catholic

Church kindled a desire to revive French sacred music.

Though remembered today primarily for his two greatest operatic successes, Faust

(1859) and Roméo et Juliette (1867), Gounod was steadfast in his quest to establish Paris as a center of sacred music. His own compositions were central to that cause. Having composed nineteen masses, four oratorios, and a number of other small-scale liturgical or sacred vocal works prior to the score of Drames sacrés, “Abbé Gounod,” as he signed his scores and letters for a short time, had established himself as a key figure in the world of

Parisian sacred music.129 Silvestre and Morand were indeed strategic in linking their

Drames sacrés with the venerated composer: perhaps in an effort to validate the work’s religious sincerity, the advance press kit that appeared in Le Gaulois supplement began not with an ode to Silvestre and Morand’s poetic skill or even a defense of their religious credibility, but rather with a lengthy account of Gounod’s musical engagement with the

Catholic Church—even the very layout of the page attempts to legitimize the work’s religious nature.130

128 On Lacordaire, his ideology, and the Dominican order, see Thomas C. McGonigle and Phyllis Zagano, The Dominican Tradition: Spirituality in History (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 75–84. See also Thomas Bokenkotter, Church and Revolution: Catholics and the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice (New York: Doubleday, 1998).

129 Steven Huebner, “Charles Gounod,” Grove Music Online.

130 Though portions of this supplementary edition were left unsigned, the segment that detailed Gounod’s sacred compositions was written by Ange Galdemar. See Galdemar, “Les Drames Sacrés,” Le Gaulois supplément (18 March 1893).

155

Figure 2.3: “Les Drames sacrés,” Le Gaulois supplément (18 March 1893)

Despite the overwhelmingly negative reception of the work, critics were largely in agreement that its only saving grace was, in fact, Gounod’s music, which they hailed as the work’s most beautiful and sincerely religious aspect. The composer, then seventy-five years old, only wrote four large pieces for the production: the orchestral prelude, an Ave

Maria and the chorus of the Annunciation, a chorus for the sixth tableau (“Le Christ aux

Oliviers”), and the “Symphony of the Resurrection.”131 While little of Gounod’s music for

131 J.–L. C., “Avant les premières,” L’Événement (18 March 1893). “M. Gounod a écrit pour Drames sacrés quatre grands morceaux: 1e Le Prélude, grande page orchestrale; 2e un Ave Maria et les chœurs de l’Annonciation; 3e les chœurs du Jardin des Oliviers et tout la symphonie de la Résurrection.” The remainder of the music was composed by Laurent Léon, the then-director of the orchestra at the Comédie-Française.

156 Drames sacrés remains extant—only a small fragment of the autograph orchestral manuscript is currently available—there is, however, one transcription that can shed light onto what Gounod’s music may have sounded like.132 The manuscript, dated 15 April 1893, bears the title “Fra Angelico de Gounod” and a marginal note at the end states that “the reduction conforms to the orchestral score.” The short, seventy-five bar piece was purportedly transcribed from Gounod’s orchestral score by Henri Büsser (1872–1973), a

French composer and conductor who had been a student in Gounod’s composition class at the Conservatoire only a few years prior.133 The music is simple and straightforward: homophonic voices accompanied by a berceuse-like rhythm lull the painter to sleep.

While this is the only surviving manuscript that can be definitively linked to Drames sacrés,

Gérard Condé has hypothesized that Büsser published three additional excerpts from

Gounod’s score in his own name shortly after the senior composer’s death in October 1893:

Ave Maria (1894), Élevation (1895), and Pater noster (1895).134

But not even the great master of French sacred music was able to restore a sense of religious legitimacy to this so-called “pseudo-religious” work. There was no doubt that critics approved of Gounod’s score overall. Chassaigne de Néronde praised it as “the most

132 Gérard Condé, Charles Gounod (Paris: Fayard, 2009), 498. The fragment contains measures 149 to 167 of music that corresponds to the Prologue, Scene III.

133 Barbara Kelly, “(Paul-)Henri Büsser [Busser],” Grove Music Online. Büsser transcribed the chœur céleste from the Prelude; the manuscript is held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département de la Musique, Ms-18828.

134 Condé, Charles Gounod, 499. One reviewer, however, noted that Gounod’s music for the sixth tableau (“Le Christ aux Oliviers”) was written with a “unison of string instruments and human voices.” See Unsigned, “Les Drames sacrés: Avant la première de ce soir—Une curieuse tentative—Le Christ au théâtre—La musique de Gounod,” Le Matin (17 March 1893). “Il a écrit en entier, notamment, le tableau du Jardin des Oliviers avec un unison d’instruments à cordes et de voix humaines.”

157 sincerely religious element of the entire work.”135 And unlike the text, Gounod’s music had been composed in a “grand religious style” and carried with it a “beautiful religious feeling.”136 For one critic, the work as a whole lacked faith and, as a result, a sense of true sincerity. But, as the critic wrote, it was sustained by the “religiosity” of Gounod’s music.137

Léon Kerst took these vague references to religiosity and defined its musical qualities when he described the score as “simple, inspired, naïve, and completely imbued with a suitable mysticism.”138 Indeed, for one critic, Gounod’s score was so stripped of dramatic ornament that it resembled the compositional procedures of plainchant and was completely devoid of all the musical hallmarks of theatricality.139 The critic known as A. G. likewise found the music to be “pure” precisely because it seemed to have been conceived outside the realm of musical “modernism.” It was not written in the idiom of César Franck: indeed, it was the opposite of Franck’s “mysticism.” But, as A. G. declared, “there are many ways to honor and celebrate God!”140

135 Chassaigne de Néronde, “Revue dramatique,” L’Observateur français (21 March 1893). “M. Gounod a écrit pour les Drames sacrés une musique de scène exécutée dans la coulisse, qui est, je crois bien, ce qu’il y a de plus religieux dans le spectacle.”

136 Unsigned, “Premières représentations,” Le Radical (19 March 1893). “La musique de M. Ch. Gounod est d’un grand style religieux.” See also Adolphe Mayer, “Théâtres: Premières représentations,” Le Soir (19 March 1893). “M. Gounod a composé quelques accompagnements symphoniques d’un beau sentiment religieux...”

137 J. Claveau, “Chronique dramatique,” Le Soleil (21 March 1893). “Il y manque sans doute la profondeur de conviction, la pure simplicité des primitifs. Pour tout dire, il y manque la foi, et par conséquent la plénitude de la sincérité....et MM. Silvestre et Morand, soutenus par la religiosité de la musique de Gounod...”

138 Léon Kerst, “Paris au Théâtre,” Le Petit journal (18 March 1893). “La musique qui accompagne ces drames sacrés est de la bonne marque de vénéré maître Gounod. Elle est simple, inspirée et naïve, tout empreinte du mysticisme qui convient.”

139 Unsigned, “Les Drames sacrés: Avant la première de ce soir—Une curieuse tentative—Le Christ au théâtre—La musique de Gounod,” Le Matin (17 March 1893). “M. Gounod a écarté tous les ornements de la musique théâtrale et adopté les procédés du plain chant.”

140 A. G. “Le Théâtre à Paris,” Le Soleil (19 March 1893). “...aujourd’hui, c’est une illustration musicale des Drames Sacrés, conçus dans le style le plus pur, le plus calme, le plus beau, en dehors de toute évolution, de toute modernisme musical. C’est l’antipode du mysticisme de César Franck, dont nous allons entendre demain les Béatitudes. Mais il y a tant de manières d’honorer et de célébrer Dieu!”

158 Not all critics were convinced that the music deserved such high praise. Despite the composer’s renown, a number of reviewers found the score to be banal, monotonous, and mediocre—even the critic who noted the various ways in which music could be perceived as religious confessed that Gounod’s contribution to the work added nothing to his musical reputation.141 And George Lefèvre quipped that “as for the music that Gounod wrote, the nicest thing is to say nothing.”142 Those critics who were disappointed by

Gounod’s efforts found the music lacking a sense of the archaic, a remark that points to a long tradition of understanding music as sacred only when it was inspired by, or directly referenced, the past: an old criterion for aesthetic judgement that dated back to the stile antico and that had gained new currency during the late nineteenth-century early-music revival and the efforts toward restoring plainchant that were currently underway at

Solesmes.143 The notoriously anticlerical Alfred Bruneau detected “a somewhat conventional religiosity” in Gounod’s music, whereas he would have preferred a more

141 Loc. cit. “Je ne dirai pas que l’œuvre de M. Gounod ajoute à sa Gloire.” See also Edmond Stoullig, “Chronique dramatique,” Le Monde artiste (26 March 1893), 221. “...ce prétendu ‘mystère,’ accompagné d’une musique assez banale (j’en appelle à mon savant collaborateur Tic-Tac) encore qu’elle soit signée du grand nom de Charles Gounod.”; Henry Fouquier, “Les Théâtres,” Le Figaro (18 March 1893). “...la musique quelque peu monocorde de M. Gounod...”; and Francisque Sarcey, “Chronique théâtrale,” Le Temps (20 March 1893). “La musique n’a fait qu’un effet médiocre, malgré le nom de Gounod sur l’affiche.”

142 Georges Lefèvre, “Théâtres et concerts,” La Revue mondiale [ancien La Revue des revues] (January 1893), 305. “Quant à la musique que M. Gounod a écrite là-dessus, le plus charitable est de n’en rien dire.”

143 Hippolyte Lemaire, “Théâtres,” Le Monde illustré (25 March 1893), 187. “Le Vaudeville nous a offert, aux approches de la semaine sainte, un spectacle édifiant, mais sévère, les Drames sacrés, de MM. Armand Silvestre et Eugène Morand, avec musique de M. Ch. Gounod. Sans vouloir empiéter sur les attributions de mon excellent collaborateur Auguste Boisard, je ne puis me retenir de constater que j’ai été fort déçu par l’audition de la partition plus que sommaire que M. Gounod a écrite pour l’accompagnement des Drames sacrés. Une suite de mélopées vagues, hésitantes, comme inachevées, et ça et là quelques airs rustiques sans le moindre caractère archaïque, voilà tout ce que les tableaux sacrés de MM. Armand Silvestre et Eugène Morand ont inspiré au musicien. Cela est regrettable, car l’intérêt de la représentation dramatique eût été accru très utilement par celui d’une composition musicale plus importante ou plus originale.” For more on the significance of archaism in French musical reception during the late nineteenth century, see Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past.

159 archaic style merging modernism with the flavor of earlier musics—only then would the score have been rendered truly “mystical.”144

The matter of sincerity may help to explain the extent to which critics were disappointed with Gounod’s lackluster score. References to sincerity as it applied to matters of aesthetics were pervasive during the last decades of the nineteenth century and, as Carlo Caballero has argued, sincerity, at least in a purely musical context, lay at the heart of the distinction made between expressions of a composer’s true thoughts and feelings and superficial expressions of an “externally affiliated” consciousness that was more concerned with allegiances to new compositional styles and schools than it was with faithfulness to one’s personal sensibilities.145 In the case of Drames sacrés, the question arises as to how a composer such as Gounod, known for his abiding Catholic faith, could project sincerity through his music when translating the words of openly secular poets into music. Here, the composer—one who considered sincerity a key musical issue—was caught between two aesthetic and religious extremes: on one end was the liberal adaptation of Christ’s life, a move that could arguably align with fin-de-siècle attempts to reform Catholicism by adapting it to modern intellectual, political, and social sensibilities.146 On the other, however, were Gounod’s deep roots in the music of the church and the many prescriptions that came along with its composition. Whereas

Gounod’s “traditional” score may well have been appreciated as a sincere expression of

144 Alfred Bruneau, “Premières représentations,” Le Gil Blas (19 March 1893). “La musique que M. Gounod a composée pour les Drames sacrés ont dans la teinte de religiosité un peu conventionnelle, si chère à l’illustre auteur de Faust. On la pourrait désirer plus primitive et plus moderne en même temps, plus véritablement mystique...Nous y retrouvons maints souvenirs de Rédemption et de Mors et Vita, œuvres qui caractérisent assez nettement la dernière manière de M. Gounod.”

145 Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11–57.

146 Ibid., 22.

160 religious conviction on its own merits, its combination with Silvestre and Morand’s shocking reconfigurations rendered it insincere by virtue of its steadfast adherence to ecclesiastical pronouncements and to compositional convention. Indeed, as Caballero has written, “an archaic or traditional mask may be as insincere as an ultramodern one.”147

There was, however, widespread disagreement as to what musical characteristics could render a work sacred, even within the church itself. Whereas more conservative clergy and laymen held up plainchant as the only true form of sacred music, others, including Félix Huet, the maître de chapelle at Notre-Dame de Paris, had asserted some years earlier that only modern religious music had the power to express the beauty of sacred texts successfully.148 For Huet, Gounod was not so much the future of French sacred music, but rather, he was the ancestor from which modern masters of sacred music had sprung. And though Gounod had arguably cornered the market on what was considered appropriately sacred music in a religious performance context, Bouchor’s marionette plays and the incidental music that accompanied them had set different parameters for the kind of music that could be considered appropriately religious in the context of the secular stage. Within these performative bounds, not even the venerable master of church music himself was able to counteract the crime of religious insincerity the text had been understood as committing, especially because he clung to a musical idiom now considered outdated and conventional. Drames sacrés simply could not live up to the standard that had been set by Bouchor and his marionettes, neither through its dramatization of the life of

Christ nor through its traditional musical score.

147 Caballero, “Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics,” (Ph.D. diss, University of Pennsylvania, 1996), 53.

148 Félix Huet, La Musique liturgique. L’art moderne dans ses rapports avec le Culte (Châlons-sur-Marne: Imprimerie Martin Frères, 1886), 62–5; 84.

161 Sacred Music for the Secular Stage

Critics, for their part, were deeply invested in the level of religious sincerity that each work brought to the stage, independently of their own personal beliefs and allegiances.

Whereas a significant number of critics had praised the religious sincerity of Bouchor’s poetry and Baille and Vidal’s music, the theater critic Paul Berret surprisingly awarded

Silvestre, Morand, and Gounod highest marks in their collective effort to produce a sincerely religious drama for what he termed the “neo-Christian theater.” Unlike Bouchor, whose plays had been met with little success prior to his stint at the Petit-Théâtre,

Silvestre and Morand were already established poets in the Parisian literary milieu. For

Berret, this ensured that the production of Drames sacrés was not merely a ploy through which they could accrue name recognition with the public.149 Instead, he wrote, their reputation paved the way for the composition of a work that could be truly religious.

Drames sacrés was that work. It possessed the necessary qualities for success on a neo-

Christian stage: reserve, restraint, sobriety, and scholarly discretion.150 Berret enumerated the reasons for Silvestre and Morand’s success. For one, the association of the Biblical tableaux with Fra Angelico in the Prelude provided much-needed historical distance. By inferring that the Biblical scenes which followed were the products of a human imagination, albeit divinely inspired, Silvestre was able to portray a sense of the religious marvelous without becoming overly humanist in his portrayal of the sacred characters.

149 Paul Berret, “Le Théâtre Néo-Chrétien,” Revue de l’art dramatique (1 June 1893): 270. “Entre tous, il me semblait presque le seul sincère. Son passé littéraire m’était un garant qu’il ne cherchait point à se faire une renommée à l’ombre de l’Église, et son inspiration me paraissait avoir d’autres sources qu’un dilettantisme avant tout préoccupé du désir d’arriver.” Berret’s praise of Drames sacrés was mirrored with an equally strong distaste for the religious marionette works that had been produced at the Petit-Théâtre.

150 Ibid., 271; 273. “...le seul homme qui ait apporté dans le théâtre néo-chrétien quelques-uns des qualités de réserve, de retenue, de sobriété, de discrétion savant, qui y sont indispensables...A n’en pas douter, les Drames sacrés sont une des meilleures œuvres d’inspiration néo-chrétienne.”

162 Instead all of the characters remained “elusive” to the audience—one could only catch a

“glimpse” of Jesus or Mary—but in this way, Berret concluded, they were portrayed in a more authentic form than they would have been had they been fully exposed on the stage.151 Indeed, Berret was so fond of Drames sacrés and its adherence to his idea of a truly neo-Christian theater that he declared no author could have engaged with the Christian tradition in a more pious manner than Silvestre.152

Though his conclusions were out of step with the majority of his colleagues regarding Tobie, Noël, La Légende de Sainte-Cécile, and especially Drames sacrés, they were nevertheless symptomatic of a deeper underlying issue that Jules Lemaître referred to as

“piety without faith.”153 To Lemaître, such unfounded piety was simply an exercise in an undesirable form of social sensibility in which beliefs in defined dogmas or the practice of moral obligations were no longer prerequisites for authors and composers who wished to produce and perform sacred works on secular stages. Berret and Lemaître were, however, exclusively concerned with the theatrical aspects of each production. But their

151 Loc. cit. “Tout d’abord, je sais très grand gré au poète de nous avoir par son prologue, donné le sentiment du lointain et du merveilleux. Il ne faut point que nous soyons de plain-pied avec les personnages d’un poème religieux: chercher à les rendre très humains, c’est faire fausse route, et retomber dans l’indiscrétion de nos premiers mystères; il faut savoir écarter d’eux, tout d’abord, le réalisme déplacé d’une archéologie prétentieuse: les mille détails de la vie quotidienne doivent s’effacer; le spectateur ne les exige point; loin de là, il en serait choqué; il faut se garder, en les lui montrant, d’ouvrir la porte à son septicisme [sic], qui n’attend pour entrer qu’un entrebâillement. Ni Madeleine, ni Salomé, à plus forte raison ni le Christ ni la Vierge ne sauraient être transportés dans un milieu trop vivant. Il me plaît donc que le poète n’ait point d’autre prétention que de traduire, que d’effleurer en des vers très délicats une œuvre déjà idéalisée par le pinceau de Fra-Angelico. Sans doute tous les personnages des Drames sacrés sont un peu fuyants, on n’entrevoit Jésus et Marie qu’à la lueur de l’auréole qui les nimbe. Mais comme ils sont plus vrais dans ce demi-jour! Ce qu’ils ont d’inachevé permet à l’imagination de compléter plus subtilement encore une esquisse faite d’une main déjà discrète et légère. Rien d’ailleurs ne vient troubler le spectateur dans cette évocation, où le poète lui laisse la plus grande part. Armand Silvestre, en effet, a su se garder de commenter mal à propos la tradition biblique.”

152 Ibid., 275–76. “Mais, si le principe des représentations religieuses est une fois admis, avouons qu’on ne saurait avoir touché à la tradition chrétienne d’une main plus artistement pieuse que ne l’a fait Armand Silvestre.”

153 See Jules Lemaître, “Le mysticisme au théâtre,” Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique (1892): iv. “J’ai appelé cela, ailleurs, ‘la piété sans la foi’ et j’ai essayé d’expliquer ce que c’était.”

163 observations transfer almost seamlessly to the criticism that followed the incidental music with which the spoken text was accompanied. The music composed by Baille, Vidal, and, to a lesser extent, Gounod was largely viewed as a sincerely religious artistic product regardless of the personal convictions of the artists themselves. For their part, neither

Berret nor Lemaître took any stock in whether or not Silvestre or Morand held any deep

Catholic beliefs; musical critics similarly did not appear to care whether or not composers were themselves devout practitioners of Catholicism. Nor did they dwell on whether or not composers had previously shown themselves to be disciples of any specific compositional style or aesthetic school. Here again Caballero’s observations on the concept of sincerity are indispensable. For composers, the antithesis of sincerity— especially in late nineteenth-century France—was a marked adherence to convention, obedience to trends, and the penchant for creating sensation rather than sentiment.154 On the other hand, the expression of sincerity in musical composition was not defined by a rejection of historical and social matters but was instead bolstered by their deployment within a more individualized musical perspective. In their praise of both Baille and Vidal’s music as successful syntheses of “traditional” sacred musical styles with their own versions of modern compositional techniques, critics thus rendered them exemplars of sincerity. By the same token, Chausson’s score could never have passed the litmus test of sincerity: in perceiving the work as more complex “sensation” than genuine “sentiment,” critics implicitly indicted both composer and score as insincere.

Sincerity was key in the quest for success when it came to sacred music on the secular stage. Unsurprisingly, neither Berret nor Lemaître believed that the “neo-

154 Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics, 12–19.

164 Christian” theater would have any lasting impact on the Parisian dramatic scene, precisely because the “new” Christianity could only ever be a weak substitute for sincere religious belief. But the overwhelmingly positive reception of Tobie and Noël at the Petit-Théâtre— especially given its elite bourgeois clientele—coupled with the collective public distaste for La Légende de Sainte-Cécile and Drames sacrés suggests that Parisian audiences valued productions of the neo-Christian theater more than either Berret or Lemaître ever imagined. To many Parisian critics, Catholic or not, the matter of sacred drama on the secular stage embodied what Ralph Gibson has termed “popular religion:” elements of religiosity such as pilgrimages and the increasing popularity of the saints that were tolerated and sometimes even encouraged by the church.155 By the 1890s, however, such signs of popular religiosity had come to be seen as signs of genuine faith. This point is emphasized by the overwhelming popularity of Bouchor’s Tobie and Noël, and even by the failure of La Légende de Sainte-Cécile. Whereas critics praised the former as representations of a genuine Christian faith, the latter was criticized simply for not being religious enough.

By the early 1890s, popular religion had transformed into a cultural phenomenon that insisted on the projection of a true and sincere faith as prerequisite for success on the neo-

Christian stage.

A writer for La Justice described the proponents of this transformative process as

“neo-Christians.” These were Christians who proposed to reform Christianity by adapting it to modern intellectual, political, and social sensibilities.156 Bouchor, Silvestre, and their musical collaborators were indeed examples of this “neo-Christianity.” While such neo-

155 Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989), 134.

156 [Abbé] B. [Benjamin] Guinaudeau, “La Réaction idéaliste,” La Justice (21 March 1892). “Ceux-là sont les néo- chrétiens. Ils se proposent de réformer le christianisme, d’amener l’Eglise à s’adapter aux nécessités présentes, aux conquêtes réalisées dans l’ordre intellectuel, politique et social.”

165 Christians may not have expected to succeed in their efforts to reconfigure Catholicism for a modern, Republican age, their productions nevertheless functioned as some of the earliest musico-theatrical incarnations of a brand of Catholicism that was compatible with

Republican ideology. These works—and particularly their reception—provide new ways of understanding the importance of sacred productions for secular stages and were not far from proving that it was “still better to simply return to the Church and to its old doctrines,” particularly in the age of the Ralliement.157

157 Loc. cit.“Ils ne comptent guère réussir, peut-être, mais ils en manifestent l’espoir et ne sont pas loin de déclarer que, au pis-aller, mieux vaut encore revenir simplement à l’Eglise et à ses vieilles doctrines.”

166

CHAPTER THREE “Les Grands Oratorios de l’église Saint-Eustache”: A Church for the Republic

On 15 January 1900, multiple Parisian newspapers announced an upcoming series of oratorio performances that was to take place at the church of Saint-Eustache during the coming months. Such advertisements, especially by 1900, were commonplace in Parisian newspapers, and audiences in the capital were well used to attending musical performances in churches. In the early 1890s, for example, Charles Bordes had made a name for himself with his newly-founded choral group, the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais, through their performances of the music of Palestrina, Josquin, Lassus, and the like at the church of the same name.1 But one advertisement for the upcoming series at Saint-

Eustache was curious, for its headline was prefaced with the phrase “les grands oratoires comiques.”2 The juxtaposition of “comiques”—a term whose association with the Opéra-

Comique would not have been lost on readers—with a small chapel intended for private worship (“oratoire”) was striking, and would come to serve as perhaps the most apt description of the events that would soon unfold—so much so that the critic Henry

1 Bordes’s Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais were the performance arm of the Schola Cantorum, an organization dedicated to reforming the performance of sacred music in French churches; officially founded by Bordes on 2 December 1894, the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais had the support of such luminaries as the organist Alexandre Guilmant, Vincent d’Indy, Edmond de Polignac, and Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, who all served on its board of directors. See Catrina Flint de Médicis, “The Schola Cantorum, Early Music, and French Political Culture from 1894 to 1914,” (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 2006), 5–6. For a complete listing of the repertoire performed by the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais, see her Appendix 1. See also Fanny Gribenski, “L’Église comme lieu de concert. Pratiques musicales et usages de l’espace ecclesial dans les paroisses parisiennes, 1830–1905,” (Ph.D. diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2015), 19–62.

2 Unsigned, “Les grands oratoires comiques,” L’Estafette (15 January 1900). “Les grands oratoires comiques: C’est le jeudi 18 janvier à 8 h. ¾ du soir qu’a lieu à Saint-Eustache l’audition du Messie de Haëndel. Orchestre et chœurs (300 exécutants) sous la direction de M. Eugène d’Harcourt.”

167 Mortimer quipped that the series of performances was sure to be successful by virtue of the humor of the situation, writing that “when one has laughter on one’s side, one is very close to success.”3 Indeed, Mortimer proved to be correct: the concert series ultimately garnered overwhelmingly positive reviews by critics with varying ideological and aesthetic allegiances.

While the preparations for the upcoming 1900 Exposition Universelle took up the lion’s share of the Parisian press, Eugène d’Harcourt’s series of oratorio performances nonetheless commanded a surprisingly substantial portion of journalists’ attention, due in no small part to objections raised by figures no less than Cardinal François-Marie-

Benjamin Richard de la Vergne (hereafter, Cardinal Richard), the Archbishop of Paris, and a senator from Aveyron, Joseph Fabre. They publicly bemoaned the prospect that such performances transformed the church into the “theater of Saint-Eustache” and that, as a result, the Catholic Church had finally succumbed to the “secularizing” influence of the

Republic. Critics and commentators quickly responded to their strident dissent, and the ensuing controversy rivaled that of a major political event: to many writers, it was these overblown reactions and counter-reactions to the concerts that justified the likening of

Saint-Eustache to an “oratoire comique.”

Amidst the ongoing tensions between the Catholic Church and the French

Republic, d’Harcourt’s concert series at Saint-Eustache could easily be read as simply one more sticking point in a long string of conflicts between Catholic traditionalists and so- called secular Republicans. While the complex relationship between Church and State played itself out on a large scale, the Parisian musical season of 1900 revealed the

3 Henry Mortimer, “Les Concerts de Saint-Eustache,” La Vérité (18 January 1900). “Le ‘théâtre’ Saint-Eustache est un bon mot, il fera rire. Lorsqu’on a les rieurs de son côté on est bien près du succès.”

168 intersections and fluidity between these two apparatuses, thereby bringing Catholicism back into the mainstream.4 Over the span of five concerts, Parisian audiences were treated to large-scale performances of oratorios—both French and foreign, old and modern—that took place at the church of Saint-Eustache. These “Grands oratorios à l’église Saint-

Eustache,” as they came to be known, were presented by the newly formed (and short- lived) Société des Grands Oratorios, a performance society founded by count Christian de

Bertier and the conductor Eugène d’Harcourt. The concerts spawned a firestorm of critical response by figures ranging from prominent music critics to politicians and high-ranking church officials that reignited the timeworn debate centering on the appropriateness of the use of churches for concert-style performances of either sacred or secular music. And although the Archbishop and Senator Fabre couched their arguments in language that addressed the proper use of sacred space and the matter of ticket sales, more significant questions of ownership underscored these practical concerns. What drove their arguments was the fear that the Republic might successfully appropriate the Catholic

Church as a meaningful and broadly appealing facet of Republican identity. Indeed, as they perceived it, the church had finally succumbed to the secularizing influence of the

Republic: the cathedral had become a concert hall.

Analyzing the narratives created by the press coverage of d’Harcourt’s concerts reveals that this fear was perhaps not unfounded after all. Contrary to the objections

4 In his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser describes two different but closely related types of State Apparatuses. While the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) functions primarily within the public domain through violence, Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) function through such “private” institutions as family, political party, or the church through ideological control and subjection to the ruling ideology. For Althusser, ideology is a representation of the imagined relationship of the existence of individuals (“subjects”) to their actual conditions of existence; the set of ideological discourses at work is always dominated by the ruling ideology (or ideologies) which, in the present case, are represented by the Catholic church and the Republic. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 85–132.

169 raised to these performances that claimed that paid concerts in church settings constituted a transformation from sacred sanctuary to secular stage, members of the press frequently configured the performances as religious events in such a way that their appeal to

Republican audiences and ideology was not lost. This sense of reconfiguration was supported by the concert programs themselves: the music performed at Saint-Eustache, as curated programs distinct from narrative productions such as opera or puppet shows, carried with it its own ideological baggage that shaped the ways in which Church and government officials, critics, and the general public came to view the Church’s relationship to the Republic. Alongside such perennial favorites as Handel’s Messiah and

Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, the performance and reception of the series’s high-profile premiere of Jules Massenet’s La Terre promise demonstrated how music could simultaneously function as a model of religious devotion through sacred music and also as a symbol of a Republican brand of Catholicism. Furthermore, this music called into question the nature of sacred versus secular music: if the church became the concert hall and the concert hall the church, how would religious and political officials, the press, and the public define sacred music and its function within the church or its feasibility for performance on the concert stage? Above all, the fluidity of these narratives illuminates the many crossovers between the Church and the Republic at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, these concerts proved that Republican ideology and the church were still compatible, their reception as religious events being configured in such a way that their appeal to Republican audiences and ideology was not lost.

Eugène d’Harcourt and the Church of Saint-Eustache

“Les Grands Oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache” opened with a performance of George

Frederic Handel’s Messiah on 18 January 1900. Led by conductor Eugène d’Harcourt, a

170 choir of over three hundred singers performed to a packed house. Special platforms to accommodate the massive performance forces had been constructed for the occasion, and tickets ranging in price from two to twelve francs sold out well in advance. The series continued with four further concerts, scheduled one per month until April. The second concert, on 15 February, included Hector Berlioz’s Requiem alongside two excerpts from

Charles Gounod ‘s Mors et Vita (“Resurrectio mortuorum” and “Judex”). On 15 March, audiences heard Richard Wagner’s La Cène des Apôtres and the premiere of Massenet’s fourth oratorio, La Terre promise. On 12 and 13 April—Holy Thursday and Good Friday— the series closed with a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, played in two parts between the two days. (See Appendix A for a listing of the full programs.)

Figure 3.1: “Plan de l’Église St-Eustache” Program of the Performance of Saint- Matthew Passion, 12 April 1900 (AHAP Series 2 G 2 1)

171 Eugène d’Harcourt, together with Christian de Bertier, capitalized on his reputation, the pair’s collective wealth, and his association with the Parisian musical elite in order to bring this vision of a grand festival of oratorios to life. Born to the aristocratic d’Harcourt family in Paris in 1859, d’Harcourt studied composition with Jules Massenet at the Paris

Conservatoire before spending four years as a student of Woldemar Bargiel at the

Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Immediately following his return to Paris in 1890, he founded the “Concerts populaires éclectiques d’Harcourt,” a concert society that aimed to bring the classical repertoire—works both popular and relatively unknown—to the broad

Parisian public. According to the journalist Maurice d’Hérival, d’Harcourt’s concerts quickly came to play a significant role in Parisian musical culture:

By the force of circumstances, Mr. d’Harcourt’s concerts gained an increasingly important place in the musical movement after their modest beginnings. With a staff of 150 performers, he made unknown or forgotten works known to the Parisian public: among others, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Freischütz and Euryanthe by Weber, Faust and Geneviève by Schumann, Die Meistersinger (1893–1894) and Tannhäuser by Wagner.5

Yet the society was plagued with financial difficulties and, after three years, was abandoned by d’Harcourt. In 1892, with the aid of his family’s wealth in combination with that of multiple affluent sponsors, he tried again, this time opening the Salle d’Harcourt at

40 rue Rochechouart where, on 13 December 1893, the newly founded Concerts d’Harcourt presented its first concert.6 Divided into three sections, the program featured music from

5 Maurice d’Hérival, “Les Grands oratorios,” La Gazette de France (18 January 1900). “Par la force des choses, les concerts d’Harcourt, après des débuts modestes, prirent une place de plus en plus importante dans le mouvement musical. Avec un personnel de cent cinquante exécutants, il fit connaître au public parisien entre autres grandes œuvres inconnues ou oubliées: Fidelio de Beethoven, Freyschutz et Euryanthe de Weber, Faust et Geneviève de Schumann, les Maîtres chanteurs (1893–1894) et Tannhauser de Wagner.”

6 Program dated 13 December 1893, BnF-Mus., Fonds Montpensier. The concert program’s header lists this performance as the “première audition.” This is the earliest evidence to date of performances given by d’Harcourt’s newly founded society. See also Sylvia Kahan, Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 83. Among d’Harcourt’s sponsors were Winnaretta Singer, Prince Edmond de Polignac, and Henriette Fuchs.

172 the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with selections from church music, theater music, and court music.7

Coupled with d’Harcourt’s attraction to music of the Renaissance was a keen interest in the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly that of

Handel and Bach. One concert given on 17 January 1894 was entirely devoted to the two

Baroque masters: the first half to Handel and the second to Bach.8 D’Harcourt’s eclectic interests in early music, on the one hand, and modern French composers, on the other, stemmed from his interest in education.9 A brief biography written after his death in 1918 described d’Harcourt’s significance to French musical life:

Although Eugène d'Harcourt was an aristocrat by blood since he belonged to one of the most solid and oldest families in France, he nevertheless extended efforts toward the musical education of the people, thus demonstrating a truly democratic spirit. His two great works, to this effect, left traces in the history of music in France: the foundation of the famous ‘Concerts éclectiques populaires d’Harcourt,’ where the public could hear the works of the great masters for fifty centimes and the ‘Concerts populaires du Jeu de Paume,’ the realization of which was unfortunately interrupted, first by the war, then by the death of their organizer.10

7 The program included the following: “Ave Maria” (Josquin), the Sanctus and Benedictus from Palestrina’s Missa de Papae Marcelli, “O vos omnes” (Vittoria), excerpts from Euridice (Caccini), Orpheus’s song at the gates of the underworld from Monteverdi’s Orfeo, the final chorus from Dafné by Marco da Gagliano, two chansons by Lassus, Le Ballet de la Reine by Beaujoyeux, and La Bataille de Marignan by Janequin. (BnF, Fonds Montpensier) For a discussion of the significance of the performance of early music in nineteenth century France, see Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

8 Program dated 17 January 1894. BnF-Mus., Fonds Montpensier.

9 Eclecticism as it pertains to concert programming and democratizing educational practices was, generally speaking, unusual at this time. See, for example, Annegret Fauser’s discussion of the “double axis of modern performance and historical retrospective” in the musical performances at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 World’s Fair, 15–42, at 16) and Jann Pasler’s discussion of various concert programs in “Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology,” in Writing Through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 365–416. A similar discussion of eclecticism appears in Pasler’s Composing the Citizen, 368–70.

10 “Guide Hayet,” (22 May 1922) BnF-Mus., Fonds Montpensier. “Bien qu'aristocrate par le sang, puisqu'il appartenait à une des plus solides et des plus anciennes noblesses de France, Eugène d'Harcourt a néanmoins fait tendre ses efforts vers l'éducation musicale du peuple, faisant ainsi preuve d'un véritable esprit démocratique. Ses deux grands œuvres dans cet ordre d'idées ont laissé des traces dans l'histoire de la musique en France: la fondation des fameux ‘Concerts Éclectiques populaires d'Harcourt,’ où le public pouvait entendre pour cinquante centimes les œuvres des grands maitres de la musique et ‘les Concerts Populaires de Jeu de Paume’ dont la réalisation a été malheureusement interrompue par la guerre d'abord, puis par la mort de leur promoteur.” This short biography was part of a two-page guidebook, a format often

173 Though the author’s effusive positivity toward d’Harcourt’s reads as hyperbolic, his words nonetheless emphasize the fact that d’Harcourt’s turn from his aristocratic roots toward a “democratic spirit” of education was an essential aspect of his musical success.

He argued that, by virtue of its low ticket prices and the trend toward eclectic programming, the “Concerts éclectiques populaires d’Harcourt” offered a wide swath of the Parisian public the opportunity to hear music from “the masters,” both ancient and modern. D’Harcourt’s democratization of music, in this case, meant that the music of

Handel, Bach, and the older French masters had the potential to function in two ways.

First, by increasing the accessibility of such repertoire through the lowering of ticket prices, d’Harcourt granted the Parisian public far greater access to performances of large-scale choral works that were seen as more widespread in other countries such as

England and Germany: as a writer for Le Figaro described it, “the ‘Concerts éclectiques’ of rue Rochechouart, destined by their founder to the means of the surrounding limited budgets, soon enjoyed a success that attracted listeners of all classes and from all neighborhoods.”11 As Katharine Ellis has pointed out, such performances fostered the naturalization of a choral culture, “primarily via Handel but also via Bach” throughout

France.12 Secondly, d’Harcourt’s democratization of music through his frequent performances of Handel’s oratorios, both as a part of the “Concerts éclectiques populaires d’Harcourt” and as the opening concert of “Les Grands oratorios à l’église

used to feature biographies of French musicians, composers, and conductors. Its function is not clear: whether or not this accompanied any sort of performance is unknown. It is likely not an obituary, however, given that d’Harcourt died in 1918.

11 Fabien, “Au jour le jour: Les Grands oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache,” Le Figaro (17 January 1900). “Les ‘Concerts éclectiques’ de la rue Rochechouart, destinées par leur fondateur aux petites bourses d’alentour, jouirent bientôt d’une vogue qui y attira des auditeurs de toutes classes et de tous les quartiers.”

12 Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 210.

174 Saint-Eustache,” played a significant role in the emergence of Handel as “a musical symbol of idealized Republican nationhood.”13

Evidence suggests, however, that d’Harcourt’s “grand oratorios” were never intended for performance at the Salle d’Harcourt but, instead, were designed to be held at

Saint-Eustache. The church was a logical choice from a practical perspective. As one of the largest churches in Paris, it could comfortably accommodate d’Harcourt’s proposed performance forces of about four hundred and also provide a venue large enough to accommodate the spatial requirements set forth by the repertoire that he chose to perform. Moreover, it had excellent acoustics and a newly restored organ.14 The church also had a history of musical performances that had gone unquestioned by the

Archbishop. Founded in 1847, the Association of Artist Musicians, based at Saint-Eustache, was founded on the model of the charitable concert, in which the proceeds garnered from ticket sales would be given (either in part or in whole) to benefit various charitable organizations and causes.15 Additionally, in 1846 and in 1852, Berlioz conducted his Requiem there, and this undoubtedly “dramatic” work met with no interference from church or government officials; three years later, in 1855, Saint-Eustache hosted a performance of the same composer’s Te Deum. Even as late as 1891, Cardinal Richard received and approved without question a request made on behalf of the mayor of the third arrondissement to

13 Loc. cit.

14 “Fabien” of Le Figaro (17 January 1900) justified the choice of Saint-Eustache as follows: “Ces messieurs, naturellement munis des autorisations nécessaires, avaient pour fixer leur choix sur l’église Saint-Eustache, le meilleur des arguments à faire valoir : à savoir que par ses admirables proportions, son acoustique parfaite et la merveilleuse qualité de son grand orgue (un des meilleurs qui soient à Paris), cette église se prêtait, d’une façon presque exceptionnellement favorable, à la grandiose manifestation d’art sacré dont MM. de Bertier et d’Harcourt apportaient le programme.”

15 Gribenski, “L’Église comme lieu de concert,” 193–275.

175 assemble students of the state primary school for a performance of a “musical mass” at

Saint-Eustache on the grounds that it would provide a “favorable opportunity to these children to successfully apply their musical knowledge and, at the same time, an opportunity to prompt the charity of the residents of the third arrondissement.”16

Thus it should have come as no surprise that d’Harcourt would petition to use

Saint-Eustache as the venue for his concert series. Parish council minutes from the church indicate that d’Harcourt approached the church with his request at some point prior to

July 1899 and that it was accepted by the parish priest, Father Gaultier de Claubry, soon thereafter:

The council, in this circumstance, considers that the matter in question does not have to be deliberated; it wishes to record, however, that it stands to allow the concerts in principle though the program must be approved by the parish priest. Accordingly, it ratifies the letter of Mgr. Abbe Gaultier Claubry, on the condition that if a concert were to be given on Holy Thursday at the evening service, admission would be free. Finally, it sets at 500 fr. per concert, payable in advance, the fees to be paid to the council.17

Between June and November 1899, the dates of the concerts were fixed, 12 and 13 April included, regardless of some resistance to Father Claubry’s suggestion that all Holy

Thursday services be cancelled in order to accommodate d’Harcourt’s request—yet even

16 Letter from the Prefect of the Seine to Cardinal Richard, Archbishop of Paris, dated 20 June 1891, Archives Historiques de l’Archevêché de Paris (hereafter AHAP), Series 2 G 2 1. “Monsieur l’Archevêque, M. le Maire du 3ème arrondissement vient de m’adresser une demande à l’effet d’obtenir l’autorisation de réunir un certain nombre d’élèves des Écoles communales pour l’exécution d’une messe en musique à l’Eglise de St Eustache. Ce magistrat pense que ce serait offrir à ces enfants une circonstance favorable d’appliquer heureusement leurs connaissances musicales, en même temps qu’une occasion de provoquer la bienfaisance des habitants du 3ème arrondissement.” Cardinal Richard’s approval is indicated by the following marginal notation: “répondu le 21 juin 1899 (approbation).” See also Gribenski, “L’Eglise comme lieu de concert,” and Isabella Montersino, “Saint-Eustache des Halles au XIXe siècle: portrait musical d’une église parisienne” (Ph.D. diss, Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne), 1994.

17 Procès-verbeaux de le Conseil de Fabrique de Saint-Eustache, 7 July 1899. AHAP, Series 1E. “Le conseil, dans le circonstance, estime que la question étant engagée il n’a pas à prendre de délibération, toutefois il tient à consigner qu’il admet en principe ces auditions le programme devant en être arrêté d’accord avec Mgr. le Curé. Il ratifie en conséquence la lettre de Mgr. l’Abbé Gaultier de Claubry, mais sous réserve que si une audition devait être donnée le jeudi Saint à l’office du soir, elle ne serait pas payante. Enfin il fixe à 500 fr. par audition, payables d’avance, la redevance qui serait versée à la Fabrique.”

176 then, the council offered little in the way of resistance. Ultimately, the services remained intact:

About the concerts that are the matter in these minutes, a member asks if we fixed the time at which it would take place on Holy Thursday. [Father Claubry] responds that the hour has not yet been determined, but that he is of the opinion, if need be, to cut the evening office on Holy Thursday this year. Various observations were exchanged on this subject and the Council, all regretting this suppression, recognize that the priest is the only judge of which offices to celebrate.18

Father Claubry’s unquestioning acceptance of d’Harcourt’s proposal engendered an embittered response from both Church and government officials, a reaction that rivaled that of a major political event. On 10 January, Cardinal Richard wrote a letter to

Claubry outlining his concerns; three days later, on 13 January, the letter was published in the Catholic weekly, La Semaine religieuse:

Father,

I regret that you have not communicated the program of concerts announced in your church in advance.

The first three are to take place at 8:45 in the evening. At this time, the holy sacrament has been removed from the tabernacle. I can consent to a concert composed of serious pieces, provided, however, that the meeting has the serious character appropriate in a church, even though this meeting is not accompanied by a liturgical office.

It is only as an exception that I permit the concerts announced in the programs. I could not approve a church to habitually become a great religious concert hall.

I know that the distinguished men who prepared the musical ceremonies of Saint- Eustache were animated by Christian sentiments and seek to honor great religious art through these ceremonies. But ceremonies of this kind, renewed periodically, gradually diminish respect for our churches, such that we are getting used to considering it as an orchestra hall.

For a very long time, we have performed Rossini’s Stabat at Saint-Eustache church each year on Good Friday with great solemnity. The Oratorio of the Passion will replace the Stabat this year.

18 Procès-verbeaux de le Conseil de Fabrique de Saint-Eustache, 17 November 1899, AHAP, Series 1E. “Au sujet des auditions dont il est question dans ce procès-verbal, un Membre demande si on a fixé l’heure à laquelle aura lieu celle du Jeudi Saint. M. le Curé répond que cette heure n’est pas encore déterminé, mais qu’il est d’avis, le cas échéant, de supprimer cette année l’office du soir le Jeudi Saint. Diverses observations s’échangent à ce sujet et le Conseil, tout en regrettant cette suppression, reconnaît que M. le Curé est seul juge des offices à célébrer.”

177 On Holy Thursday you will take care, Father, that the tomb will be prepared in the chapel of catechisms so that the faithful can adore the holy sacrament there throughout the day, without being embarrassed in their acts of piety by the concert that will take place that day.

We must, in effect, religiously conserve the traditions of the church for Holy Week by reserving serious acts of Christian piety for the days consecrated for the memory of the grand mystery of the passion of our Lord and by the preparation to fulfill the Easter duty.

If other musical ceremonies were required of your church in the future, you must, Father, see me, and they could only take place with my express authorization.

Please accept, Father, the assurance of my devout affection.

François, Cardinal Richard, Archbishop of Paris19

On the surface, it appears as if Cardinal Richard’s discontent with Father Claubry’s decision was a matter of bureaucracy: the Archbishop begins and ends his letter by admonishing Father Claubry’s failure to seek advance authorization for non-liturgical use of the church. According to Julien de Narfon, however, the reason for Father Claubry’s misstep was a matter of miscommunication (and perhaps a bit of disingenuousness on the part of Father Claubry):

In order to better understand this act of authority on the part of the Archbishop, whose gentleness is proverbial, some explanations are necessary. Yesterday Father Gaultier de

19 “Partie Officielle,” La Semaine religieuse (13 January 1900): 46–47. “Monsieur le curé,/Je regrette que vous ne m’ayez pas communiqué à l’avance le programme des auditions annoncées dans votre église./ Les trois premières doivent avoir lieu à huit heures trois quarts du soir. A cette heure, le saint sacrement aura été retiré du tabernacle. Je puis consentir à une audition composée de morceaux sérieux, à la condition toutefois que la réunion ait le caractère sérieux qui convient dans une église, lors même que cette réunion n’est pas accompagnée d’un office liturgique./ C’est seulement à titre exceptionnel que je permets les auditions annoncées dans les programmes. Je ne pourrais approuver qu’une église devint habituellement une grande salle de concert religieux./ Je sais que les hommes distingués qui ont préparé les solennités musicales de Saint-Eustache sont animés de sentiments chrétiens et cherchent, par ces solennités, à mettre un honneur le grand art religieux. Mais des solennités de ce genre renouvelées périodiquement diminueraient peu à peu le respect du à nos églises, que l’on s’accoutumerait à considérer comme un salle orchestre./ Depuis très longtemps, on exécute chaque année, le vendredi saint, dans l’église Saint-Eustache, le Stabat de Rossini avec une grande solennité. L’Oratorio de la Passion pourra, cette année, remplacer le Stabat./ Le jeudi saint, vous aurez soin, monsieur le curé, que le tombeau soit préparé dans la chapelle des catéchismes, pour que les fidèles puissent y adorer le saint sacrement durant toute la journée, sans être gênés dans leurs actes de piété par l’audition qui aura lieu ce jour-là./ Nous devons, en effet, conserver religieusement les traditions de l’Eglise pour la semaine sainte, en réservant aux actes sérieux de la piété chrétienne les jours consacrés par la mémoire du grand mystère de la passion de Notre-Seigneur et par la préparation à l’accomplissement du devoir pascal./ Si d’autres solennités musicales étaient à l’avenir demandées dans votre église, vous devez, monsieur le curé, m’en référer, et elles ne pourraient avoir lieu qu’avec mon autorisation expresse./ Veuillez agréer, monsieur le curé, l’assurance de mon affectueux dévouement./ François, cardinal Richard, archevêque de Paris.”

178 Claubry said to one of our colleagues at Le Temps “that he had told the Cardinal about his plans and that he had intervened only in order to make the church available to the organizers of these concerts.” This is not the whole truth. Father Gaultier de Claubry indeed “told” the Cardinal, not directly, but through the intermediary of the Vicar General, and Mgr. Richard, thus vaguely notified, believing moreover that the plans in question must be fulfilled only at the moment of the Exposition, waited to speak with the priest of Saint-Eustache in order to give or deny the necessary authorization. This was the state of things—the cardinal was still awaiting the visit of the priest of Saint-Eustache, and the priest of Saint-Eustache receiving no response from the archdiocese—when the program and the date of the concerts were published several days ago. This should be enough to explain the annoyance of Mgr. Richard.20

Nonetheless, the Archbishop’s letter revealed objections to the concerts that ran deeper than bureaucratic red tape. While the Archbishop worried about the practicalities of the concurrence of the concerts with the Holy Thursday service, he was much more concerned that performances like those planned by d’Harcourt would catalyze the church’s transition from sacred space to secular concert hall.

Five days later, on 18 January, the Catholic newspaper La Vérité published a similar letter, written by Senator Joseph Fabre to René Waldeck-Rousseau, the Minister of the

Interior and Religion:

Theater posters announce, between Belle Hélène and Dame de chez Maxim, musical concerts that are going to take place at Saint-Eustache. Tout-Paris received leaflets inviting them to this show, where the price of seats varies from 12 francs to 2 francs.

To what extent these practices of Catholic priests must benefit Catholicism—this is to what true devotees inquire.

20 Julien de Narfon, “Le Monde Religieux,” Le Figaro (14 January 1900). “Pour bien comprendre cet acte d’autorité de la part d’un archevêque dont la douceur est proverbiale, quelques explications sont nécessaires. M. l’abbé Gaultier de Claubry a dit hier soir, à un de nos confrères du Temps, qu’il avait prévenu le cardinal de ses projets et qu’il n’était intervenu, lui, que pour céder l’église aux organisateurs de ces concerts.’ Ce n’est pas là toute la vérité. L’abbé Gaultier de Claubry a, en effet, ‘prévenu’ le cardinal, non pas directement, mais par l’intermédiaire d’un vicaire général, et Mgr Richard, ainsi vaguement avisé, croyant d’ailleurs que les projets en question ne devaient se réaliser qu’au moment de l’Exposition, attendait, pour donner ou refuser l’autorisation nécessaire, l’occasion d’en causer avec le curé de Saint-Eustache. Les choses en étaient là, le cardinal attendant toujours la visite du curé de Saint-Eustache, et le curé de Saint-Eustache ne recevant aucune réponse de l’archevêché, lorsque furent publiés, il y a quelques jours, le programme et la date des concerts. Voilà qui suffirait à expliquer le mécontentement de Mgr Richard.” Julien de Narfon was Le Figaro’s columnist on religious matters.

179 But it is necessary to ask you, Mr. Minister of Religion: 1.if you find that such a usage of a grand church fits within the rights of the clergy to use religious buildings for the needs of the congregation; 2. if the receipts of the Saint-Eustache theater will be subject to, as all the other theaters, to the debiting of the droit des pauvres.21

Fabre’s letter added further layers to the criticism of the concerts at Saint-Eustache.

Whereas Cardinal Richard did not address the issue of ticket sales, Fabre laid bare the fact that these were paid concerts, advertised primarily to the Parisian elite, and accessible only to those spectators who could afford the steep ticket prices. Through his invocation of the droit des pauvres, Fabre’s comparison of the church to a theater expanded the issue, shifting his opposition from merely religious and moral grounds to legal and political ones as well. In the late seventeenth century, it was customary for the Comédie-Française and the Paris Opéra to deduct a certain percentage from all receipts and to donate them to poor Parisians; in 1699, the droit des pauvres became a legal mandate with the establishment of a tax of one-sixth of the total receipts to be allocated for the poor. Following the

Revolution, the law was amended in order to require the deduction of one centime per franc in addition to the price of each seat for all theaters, concerts, and other such venues

(1809).22 In some cases during the nineteenth century, ticket prices were raised significantly in order to compensate for the lost revenue; whether or not this was the case at Saint-Eustache is unknown. But even the question of whether the proceeds of these concerts were to be subjected to the droit des pauvres affirmed the Archbishop’s and

21 Letter from Joseph Fabre to Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, printed in La Vérité (18 January 1900). “Les affiches de théâtre annoncent, entre la Belle Hélène et la Dame de chez Maxim, des auditions musicales qui vont avoir lieu à Saint-Eustache. Le Tout-Paris a reçu des prospectus l’invitant à ce spectacle, où la prix des places varie entre 12 francs et 2 francs./ Jusqu’à quel point ces procédés de prêtres catholiques doivent profiter au catholicisme, c’est aux vrais dévots à s’en enquérir./ Mais il y a lieu de vous demander, monsieur le ministre des cultes: 1. si vous trouvez qu’un tel usage d’une grande église rentre dans le droit qu’a le clergé de disposer des édifices religieux pour les besoins du culte; 2. si la recette du théâtre Saint-Eustache sera soumise, comme celle de tous les autres théâtres, au prélèvement du droit des pauvres.”

22 See Jérôme Renaud and Sylvain Riquier, Le spectacle à l'impôt: inventaire des archives du Droit des pauvres à Paris, début XIXe siècle–1947 (Vélizy: Doin, 1997) for a history of the droit des pauvres.

180 Fabre’s fears that the church would be transformed into a Republican concert hall. On the one hand, the law made no provisions for concerts that were held at churches and thus, d’Harcourt and de Bertier were under no legal obligation to comply. On the other hand, such protestations on the part of high-ranking Church and government officials linked the commercial church concerts with the secularizing and demoralizing effect that Catholic traditionalists actively attempted to avoid.

The “Theater” of Saint-Eustache: The Press Reacts

Jann Pasler has written that the decade from 1890 to 1900 was a time during which a “new acceptance of religious music in secular contexts” blossomed. Citing performances of

Bach’s Mass in B minor at the Société des Concerts and excerpts from Handel’s Israel in

Egypt at the Trocadéro, she claims that Catholics and Republicans alike welcomed the change.23 Nevertheless, Cardinal Richard and Fabre’s decisions to make their objections public was symptomatic of their desire to reassert their claim to control over the Church and to wrest it back out of the hands of “secularizing” Republicans who, in their eyes, took no issue with transforming the church into a theater. When asked by a writer for La

Gazette de France to explain why the Archbishop’s letter had been given so much publicity, one Abbé Thomas, the Archbishop’s former secretary, explained the reasons behind the

Church’s protests: “Because, on the one hand, it is too late to oppose the announced concerts and, on the other, we must avoid that these concerts could be seen as a precedent, which other priests in Paris could use as authorization...Let us not secularize our churches ourselves, not even for an hour.”24

23 Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 615–17.

24 Unsigned, “Nouvelles religieuses: Les concerts dans les églises,” La Gazette de France (16 January 1900). “Dans ces conditions, monsieur le vicaire général, pourquoi la publicité donnée à la lettre de Son Eminence?—Parce que, d’une part, il est trop tard pour s’opposer aux auditions annoncées, et que, d’autre

181 But the Church’s strategy backfired tremendously. Whereas Cardinal Richard and

Senator Fabre argued that performances of works such as Messiah, Mors et Vita, or Saint

Matthew Passion transformed the church into the theater, numerous writers defended the innate religious nature of d’Harcourt’s concerts to the extent that one writer accused the

Archbishop of chasing great music out of churches. Fearing the end of sacred music in

Parisian churches, a writer for Le Courrier du Soir took an apocalyptic tone in his conclusion that “the paid concerts of Saint-Eustache will probably be the last, at least in the churches of the diocese of Paris.”25 In an interview with André Gaucher, however,

Christian de Bertier, the series’ co-founder, insisted that the concerts constituted truly religious experiences. After describing the series as a “true apotheosis of religious art,” he went on to explain that the decision to use Saint-Eustache was made not only because

Paris lacked a suitable theater or concert hall that could accommodate the performances, but also because the sacred environment of the church would reunite the music’s

(especially that of Handel’s) aesthetic beauty with its religious sentiment.26

Just as Bertier argued that the music on the programs constituted an apotheosis of religious art, other writers further disputed the idea that the music itself could be

part, il faut éviter que l’on voie dans le fait de ces auditions un précédent dont les autres cures de Paris seraient en droit de s’autoriser plus tard [...] Et puis, sans parler de la légalité, n’est-il pas évident qu’il est peu convenable de détourner les églises de leur veritable destination, même pour les affecter à l’exécution d’une œuvre d’art au profit d’une bonne œuvre? Ne laïcisons pas nous-mêmes nos églises, même pour une heure [...].”

25 Unsigned, Le Courrier du Soir (19 January 1900). “De cet accord, on peut conclure que les concerts payants de Saint-Eustache seront vraisemblablement les derniers, au moins dans les églises du diocèse de Paris.”

26 André Gaucher, “Les oratorios de Saint-Eustache,” La Liberté (16 January 1900). “Il insiste aussitôt sur le caractère religieux des auditions qui se préparent.—C’est moi, dit-il, qui eus le premier l’idée de ces oratorios qui seront une veritable apothéose de l’art religieux [...] Il n’y a pas à Paris une salle de spectacle ou de concert qui puisse se prêtes à de pareilles executions, à cause de caractère profane de l’édifice, ici, sous les arceaux de ces voutes superbes, les émotions de l’art et les sentiments de la piété se réuniront pour donner à l’œuvre de Hændel une double beauté esthétique et religieuse.”

182 considered secular and challenged the Archbishop to find a more suitable performance venue. An anonymous writer for Le Temps mused sarcastically whether the Folies-Bergère or the Eldorado might program the likes of Messiah if it was not allowed to be performed in churches:

An oratorio is a secular show, if we have the narrow strictness of Cardinal Richard. But if the place of oratorios is not in the church, where will it be? Do you believe that the director of the Folies-Bergère or the Eldorado is going to put these works on his lineup?...If the oratorio is a secular thing, Bach’s Mass in B and Beethoven’s Mass in D are also secular works because they do not have a strictly liturgical character, and from then on, we will be led by Cardinal Richard’s hand to this extraordinary conclusion that the only places where one will not be able to play religious music will be…churches. 27

In a similar manner, Henry Mortimer’s front-page critique in Le Voltaire—an overtly

Republican newspaper—argued that musical performances in churches were not only appropriate, but also beneficial in some cases:

However, for our part, we do not consider that there is a large problem when one gives musical performances in churches, sacred or not: does music not soothe the savage beast? And would that not be a beautiful result if, after a certain number of concerts, we saw the religious zealots and sanctimonious people, particularly cantankerous and fanatic characters, acquire this sweetness that we describe as evangelical?28

In his opinion, “Les grands oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache” had the potential to create the opposite effect than the one proposed by Cardinal Richard. Rather than contributing to the secularizing of the sanctuary, the performance of religious music (or any music at

27 Unsigned, “La Musique à l’Église,” Le Temps (20 January 1900). “Un oratorio est un spectacle profane, si l’on a la rigueur étroite du cardinal Richard. Mais si la place des oratorios n’est pas à l’église, où sera-t-elle? Croyez-vous que le directeur des Folies-Bergère ou de l’Eldorado va mettre ces œuvres sur son affiche? Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie dit que l’oratorio est ‘destiné à être exécuté dans une solennité religieuse ou dans un concert.’ Si l’oratorio est chose profane, la Messe en si de Bach et la Messe en ré de Beethoven sont aussi des œuvres profanes, car elles n’ont pas un caractère strictement liturgique; et, dès lors, nous serons conduits— par la main du cardinal Richard—à cette extraordinaire conclusion que les seuls endroits où l’on ne pourra pas jouer de la musique religieuse, ce seront…les églises.”

28 Henry Mortimer, “Les Concerts de Saint-Eustache,” Le Voltaire (16 January 1900). “ Cependant, pour notre part, nous ne considérons pas qu’il y ait grand inconvénient à ce que l’on donne dans les églises des séances de musique, sacrée ou non: la musique n’adoucit-elle pas les mœurs?...Et ne serait-ce pas là un joli résultat si, après un certain nombre d’auditions, nous voyions les bigots et les dévôts [sic], personnages particulièrement acariâtres et fanatiques, acquérir cette douceur qu’on qualifie d’évangélique?

183 all) could function as an agent of religious revival by transforming religious zealots

(presumably ultramontanes like the Archbishop himself) into “evangelicals:” a sentiment he crystallized through the words “if only music could turn the sanctimonious into good

Christians.”29

The behavior of the “sanctimonious” who would be in attendance at Saint-

Eustache, whether they were religious or musical, added another layer to the debate.

Central to Cardinal Richard’s dissent was the notion that d’Harcourt’s concerts constituted a non-liturgical usage of a sacred space that would, in his view, likely be marked by inappropriate audience conduct, ill-suited to such a reverent environment. In a preview to the performance on 15 March of Massenet’s La Terre promise and Wagner’s La Cène des

Apôtres, Gaston Mery, a writer for La Libre parole, provided a colorful account of his previous experiences at the “theater” of Saint-Eustache. The church he wrote, had become subject to the same abuses and “scandalous scenes” that plagued Parisian theaters:

But all of a sudden, Saint-Eustache is again going to be the theater—and the word is particularly exact—of the same scenes and the same abuses. The performance of grand oratorios begins again this evening…

We eat frozen chestnuts, we crunch melting candies, we suck oranges. Tomorrow—it was like that one month ago—the church will be littered, not with roses like past days on the passage of the processions, but with crumpled bags, peels, old programs. Because there are programs! They even give the exact tone of this musical enterprise. On one side, the sacred text; on the other, advertisements. Religiosity and money mixed!30

29 Loc. cit. “Si seulement la musique pouvait rendre les dévots bons chrétiens…”

30 Gaston Mery, “Au jour le jour: À Saint-Eustache,” La Libre parole (15 March 1900). “Mais voici qu’aujourd’hui Saint-Eustache va être de nouveau le théâtre—et le mot est particulièrement exact—des mêmes scènes et des mêmes abus. L’exécution des grands oratorios recommence ce soir… On mange des marrons glacés, on croque des bonbons fondants, on suce des oranges. Demain—c’était ainsi il y a un mois—l’église sera jonchée, non de roses comme jadis sur le passage des processions, mais de sacs froisses, d’écorces, de vieux programmes. Car, il y a des programmes! Ils donnent même la note exacte de cette entreprise musicale. D’un côté, le texte sacré; de l’autre, des annonces. Religiosité et galette mêlées!”

184 While Mery’s account should be considered in light of the newspaper’s anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist agenda, his description of the littering of the church and the disruptive behavior of the attendees stands in stark contrast to numerous other journalists who describe the audience as respectful—reverent, even, after an initially chaotic entrance, as

Albert Soubiès explained: “if the entry of the crowd (because the church was absolutely packed) was a bit tumultuous at times, the concert of Messiah took place in the most appropriate conditions of reverence.”31 Even writers for religiously affiliated journals such as La Tribune de Saint Gervais and La Semaine religieuse noted the respectful behavior of the audiences. G. de Boisjoslin, a frequent contributor to La Tribune de Saint Gervais, contended that the only valid arguments against the usage of Saint-Eustache were those that were not based on the audience itself: “artistic reasons and questions of the appropriate environment seem to me to be, until now, the only ones to invoke against the venture, since the attitude of the audience was such that the dignity of the place did not suffer at all, to the point that a liturgical office, however short, would not have been inappropriate there.”32 The audience’s good behavior might be explained by the growing preoccupation with concert etiquette among concert societies and promoters in the late nineteenth century. Throughout the 1890s, programs of performances by the Concerts

31 Albert Soubies [B. de Lomagne], “Le Messie,” Le Soir (20 January 1900). “Bornons-nous à constater, aujourd’hui, que si l’entrée de la foule (car l’église était absolument bondée de monde) a été quelque peu tumultueuse, l’audition du Messie s’est effectuée dans les conditions de recueillement les plus convenables.” In his review of the performance of Messiah, Gaston Carraud also complained about the unorganized entrance into the church: “Un petit conseil aux administrateurs de ces intéressantes soirées: ils feront bien d’annoncer très haut; avant la prochaine audition, qu’ils ont trouvé moyen d’organiser de sérieuse manière l’entrée du public dans l’église, s’ils y veulent revoir une seule des personnes qui se sont trouvées hier en cette épouvantable cohue.” See Carraud, “Les Grands oratorios à Saint-Eustache,” La Liberté (19 January 1900). B. de Lomagne was the pen name of Albert Soubies.

32 G. de Boisjoslin, “Mois Musical: Paris,” La Tribune de Saint-Gervais (January 1900): 29. “Des raisons artistiques et des questions de milieu approprié me paraissent être jusqu’à présent les seules à invoquer contre l’entreprise, car l’attitude de l’assistance a été telle que la dignité du lieu n’en a nullement souffert, au point qu’un office liturgique, si court soit-il, n’y aurait pas été déplacé.”

185 Lamoureux and Colonne, for example, printed instructions for audience comportment began to appear alongside lengthy program notes. Audiences were instructed not to enter or exit the hall during performances, movement around the performance space was prohibited, and premature applause was forbidden.33 The upper-class audience at Saint-

Eustache, filled as it was with the aristocratic elite, would likely have been familiar with these expectations; this consideration might easily explain their appropriate behavior.

Such conduct, however, was not the standard: though James Johnson has documented a history of silent listening during the nineteenth century, Katharine Ellis has recently argued that such behavior on the part of Parisian audiences was rare enough to be noticed by the press. Indeed, as she notes, even performances of religious music could not hold an audience’s attention in such a way that it would remain quiet throughout any given performance.34 The attention given to the audience’s behavior at Saint-Eustache, then, indicates that it was an anomaly—especially given the fact that numerous critics moved beyond describing the audience’s rapt attention as simply respectful in their observations.

In a similar fashion to his aforementioned colleagues, an anonymous reviewer for La

Semaine religieuse—the journal in which Cardinal Richard’s letter originally appeared— rendered a “just homage to the audience by noticing the good manners, the absolute dignity of its attitude during the entire duration of the concert, which was exactly two and a half hours. Neither applause nor murmurs of approval could be heard; they kept a

33 Pasler, “Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology,” 379.

34 Katharine Ellis, “Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 37–54. See also James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

186 religious silence to the letter.” 35 At Saint-Eustache, it seemed as if the burgeoning art- religion of the Republican bourgeois concert hall was cast as returning to the church.

For the most part, however, bourgeois Parisians were not attracted to Saint-

Eustache as they were to more fashionable parishes such as La Madeleine or Saint-

Sulpice. Rather, the church had a long association with the commercial and merchant classes. As a columnist for Le Matin described it, the church, which sat in the “democratic quarter of Les Halles” catered to a congregation that belonged mainly to the merchant class.36 The cathedral began as the chapel of Saint-Anne, constructed as an outpost for the quickly growing parish of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. As Louis VI called for the creation of new market spaces and, eventually, for the construction of a new commercial quarter (Les

Halles), the rapid urban expansion surrounding the small chapel of Saint-Anne led to its rededication as the church of Saint-Eustache in 1216; the transformation of Saint-Eustache from chapel to church was due not only to the church’s proximity to Les Halles, but also to the fact that it was, at the time, the only church in the northwest corner of the city.37 Thus from its establishment, to the announcement of its official expansion in 1532, and into the nineteenth century, the parish of Saint-Eustache catered directly to the commercial class.

35 Unsigned, “L’Audition de Messie à Saint-Eustache,” La Semaine religieuse (27 January 1900): 125. “Sans doute, c’est rendre un juste hommage à l’assistance que de constater la correction, la dignité absolue de son attitude pendant toute la durée de l’audition, qui fut exactement de deux heures et demie. Ni applaudissements, ni murmures approbateurs ne se firent entendre; on garda, à la lettre, un silence religieux.”

36 Unsigned, “La Chandeleur,” Le Matin (13 February 1900). “A Paris, deux églises, Saint-Eustache et Sainte- Geneviève, ont une grande clientèle de visiteurs, appartenant principalement au monde des halles et marchés et à la culture.” See also “Le Messie de Hændel à l’église Saint-Eustache,” Le Matin (19 January 1900). “Elle a eu lieu hier, cette audition du Messie à Saint-Eustache, et le quartier démocratique des Halles aura seul été révolutionné par la foule inusitée d’équipages et d’automobiles qui stationnèrent dans ses rues commerçantes.” See also Andrew Ayers, The Architecture of Paris: An Architectural Guide (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2004), 51–53.

37 Anne-Marie Sankovitch, The Church of Saint-Eustache in the Early French Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols Publishing, 2015), 16-25.

187 D’Harcourt’s concert series attracted much the opposite demographic. On the nights of the concerts, the usually quiet streets surrounding Saint-Eustache teemed with elegant horse-drawn carriages and fashionable concert-goers—Tout-Paris at its finest. 38

These were the members of an elite intellectual, political, and cultural class that often comprised groups of upper-class, “secular” Republicans who had become prominent during the 1880s and 1890s, and it was precisely the secular (and secularizing) nature of this audience that likely worried the Archbishop and Senator Fabre. Some critics regretted that the concerts were not as accessible to the general public as they could have been, but other writers and news outlets attempted to remedy that very problem. Recognizing that the desire for tickets might exceed some Parisians’ financial capabilities, Le Figaro sponsored a contest that awarded one free ticket each (worth twelve francs apiece) to the first one hundred subscribers who mailed in their requests.39 Although never mentioned

38 René d’Aral, “Le Messie de Hændel à Saint-Eustache,” Le Gaulois (19 January 1900). “Hier soir, vers huit heures et demie, le quartier des Halles, généralement silencieux et morne à partir de la tombée de la nuit jusqu’à l’heure où arrivent les longues files de charrettes chargées d’approvisionnements, offrait un coup d’œil inattendu et singulier. Une animation extraordinaire régnait dans les petites rues sombres qui s’entrecroisent et se perdent parmi le dédale de vieilles masures; d’élégants équipages, de modestes fiacres s’alignaient à perte de vue jusqu’au Louvre, et devant le grand portail et les portes latérales de l’église Saint- Eustache dont la silhouette massive se détachait sur un fond de ciel nuageux et s’éclairait parfois de lueurs blanches sous de pâles et fugitifs rayons de lune, une foule compacte attendait patiemment l’ouverture des portes […] Prince et princesse Edmond de Polignac, duchesse de La Motte-Houdancourt, marquis et marquise de Villefranche, prince et princesse d’Essling, comtesse Alexis de Bertier de Sauvigny, comte de Reilhac, comtesse René de Béarn, vicomte et vicomtesse d’Harcourt, baron et baronne Louis de La Grange, princesse Constantin Radziwill, marquise de Lubersac, comtesse d’Azincourt, comtesse de Montesquiou- Fezensac, Mmes Balli, Hersent, vicomtesse de Nioac, comtesse de Lapeyrouse, vicomtesse de Grandval, baronne La Caze, Mme Jules Porgès, M. André de Fouquières, comtesse E. de Moustier, comte et comtesse de Moltke-Hvitfeldt, Mmes Jameson, Depret, Herbault, comte et comtesse de Gontaut-Biron, comte et comtesse de Gabriac, M. et Mme Théodore Dubois.”

39 See Georges Street, “Le Semaine Théâtrale,” L’Autorité (23 January 1900). “Tous, en un mot, organisateurs et artistes, se sont donné beaucoup le peine pour mener à bien cette exécution. Il faut le reconnaître et regretter en même temps que de pareilles auditions ne soient pas plus à la portée du grand public.” See also Fabien, “Au jour le jour: Les Grands oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache,” Le Figaro (17 January 1900). “Le Figaro ne pouvait rester indifférent à une tentative d’art aussi noble; et nous n’avons cru pouvoir mieux marquer l’intérêt qu’elle nous inspire qu’en offrant à quelques-uns de nos amis le plaisir d’y assister. Nous nous sommes donc assuré et nous tenons—gratuitement, cela s’entend—à la disposition de cent de nos abonnés d’un an cent places: à savoir, cinquante pour l’audition de demain et cinquante pour celle du 15 février. Ces places, qui valent 12 francs, seront attribuées aux cent premiers abonnés qui nous en adresseront la demande—suivant l’ordre de hasard où leurs lettres seront ouvertes.”

188 explicitly by either the Archbishop or Senator Fabre, the ticketed concerts and the audiences of elite Republicans (plus the winners of Le Figaro’s contest) appeared to be yet another step in the process of secularizing the church.

The idea that the theater of Saint-Eustache signaled a Republican-driven secularization of the church was perhaps most eloquently captured by Paul Aubert, a writer for the newspaper La Paix. Aubert was ambivalent to the concerns regarding the location and the chosen music: as for the performances, he found them to be mediocre at best, and he expressed his indifference to the matter of musical concerts in churches, writing that at the church, “we make appointments, we go on festival days to see the women and admire the outfits, so why the hell cry because now there will be a concert?”

But his commentary unmasked the true apprehension that underlined the Archbishop and Senator Fabre’s resistance to the concert series:

The more that the Church neglects its true appointment, the more it falls into disrepute. Making money is not a good system for bringing back faith. Ah! We are far from the times when religion was sufficient in itself for calling the faithful to the temple, where all, prostrate at the feet of the altar, begged the remission of their sins to the priest. The Church had omnipotence then. This is the past. Today, religion leaves, heaven and hell make their cost no more, the sacristy feels the building shake, the priest sees the end of his reign approaching. And this is understood. But, like a survivor, it clings to all of its branches. As for the rest, it will accommodate religion to the taste of the day and, by a sensational number added to the repertory, it hopes to bring back under the grand vaults—almost deserted—the clientele who moved away.40

40 Paul Aubert, “Le Théâtre à l’Église,” La Paix (21 January 1900). “On a critiqué le lieu choisi. Les uns sont pour, les autres sont contre. Pour moi, je déclare volontiers qu’il m’est indifférent que l’église serve à tout ce que l’on voudra. On y donne des rendez-vous, on va les jours de grandes fêtes y voir les femmes, admirer les toilettes, pourquoi diable tant crier parce que maintenant il y aura concert…Plus l’Église se détourne de sa véritable affectation, plus elle tombera dans le discrédit. Battre monnaie n’est pas un bon système pour ramener la foi. Ah! nous sommes loin di temps ou la religion, à elle seule, était suffisante pour appeler les fidèles au temple, ou tous, prosternés au pied de l’autel suppliaient du prêtre, la rémission de leurs pêchés. L’Église alors avait la toute puissance. Cela est le passé. Aujourd’hui, la religion s’en va, le ciel et l’enfer ne font plus, leurs frais, la sacristie sent l’édifice trembler, l’homme noir voit la fin de son règne approcher. Et celui-ci l’a compris. Mais, comme le naufragé, il s’accroche à toutes les branches. Tout comme pour les restes, il accommodera la religion au goût du jour et par un numéro sensationnel ajouté au répertoire il espère ramener sous les grandes voutes quasi désertes, la clientèle qui s’est éloignée.”

189 Aubert’s comments unveiled the true reason behind ecclesiastical resistance to d’Harcourt’s concert series, namely, the Church’s fear that it had lost its influence on the religious sensibilities of Parisian Republicans. Indeed, the religious taste of the day was shaped more by popular modern—even “secular”—ideologies than the church was ready to admit: not for nothing did Biblical plays attract French audiences to the boulevard theaters. Aubert’s words suggest that the concerts could potentially bring “secularized”

Republicans back into the fold of the Church. But the “theater” of Saint-Eustache may very well have confirmed the fears of the Archbishop and his supporters, at least according to Aubert, who ended his article claiming that “there, the Republic has everything to gain.”41

Repertoire for the Republic

The transformation of Saint-Eustache into an idealized Republican space had as much to do with Bertier and d’Harcourt’s choice of repertoire as it did with their usage of the space itself. While critics like Henri de Curzon and André Suarès argued that a church setting was the only one appropriate for the performance of works like Messiah and Saint

Matthew Passion, for others, such as the notoriously ultramontane Camille Bellaigue, the non-liturgical nature of the music clashed with their conviction that the only music suitable for performance in the church was that championed by the Church itself:

Gregorian chant, propagated by the Benedictine monks of Solesmes, and Palestrinian counterpoint, both of which formed the cornerstone of the curriculum at the Schola

Cantorum.42 Underlying Bellaigue’s criticism in particular was the threat of Republican

41 Loc. cit. “La République a tout à y gagner.”

42 For discussions of the curriculum of the Schola Cantorum and its emphasis on Gregorian chant and Palestrinian polyphony, see Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 30–31; Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 179–208;

190 anticlericalism since, at least in the minds of the most ultramontane Catholics—including

Bellaigue and Cardinal Richard—countering the church’s prescribed musical practices meant going against the church and the Pope himself.43 A curious letter, held in the

Archives historiques de l’Archeveché de Paris, paints a similar picture. After expressing a clear distaste for the Saint-Eustache concerts, the unidentified writer condemned the chosen repertoire as heretical:

One must perform music with a grand orchestra in a church, music called religious. The goal that you propose is to encourage religious art, and to come to the help of certain philanthropic works. And yet, among the pieces of the repertoire, there is one in which some words (at least one sentence) are taken from a heretic book ex professo; the sentence in question is the rather evident expression of heresy, and this phrase is found not only repeated many times in the musical text, but it is again reproduced in the programs destined to put religious thought within reach of the listeners.44

In a brief statement added to the end of the letter, almost as an afterthought, the author encourages the reader to turn to the words of Messiah as proof, though additional works such as Wagner’s La Cène des Apôtres might have also seemed heretical to the writer. In this light, even the most “religious” works of Handel, Bach, Berlioz, and Gounod and could be perceived as a Republican threat to the power of the Catholic Church.

Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 617–20; and Flint de Médicis, “The Schola, Early Music, and French Political Culture,” specifically chapters 1, 3 and 4.

43 Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 74.

44 Undated letter, AHAP, Series 2 G 2 1: “On doit exécuter dans une église de la musique à grand orchestre, musique dite religieuse. Le but qu’on se propose est d’encourager l’art religieux, et de venir en aide à certains œuvres philanthropiques. Or, parmi les morceaux du répertoire, il en est un dont certains paroles (une phrase au moins) sont empruntées à un livre hérétique ex professo; la phrase en question est l’expression assez évidente d’une hérésie ; et cette phrase se trouve, non seulement répetée plusieurs fois dans le texte musical, mais encore elle est reproduite dans les programmes, destinés à mettre la pensée religieuse à la portée des auditeurs.” Added to the end of the letter is the phrase “Voir, comme preuve, les paroles du Messie.” The author’s reference to a “heretical book” could also be read as a protest against textual sources, such as the 1662 Common Book of Prayer (a Protestant source) used by Charles Jennens in assembling the texts for Handel’s Messiah. The letter bears an almost illegible signature in the lower right margin; the letters appear to be “Lil,” but the author’s identity is unknown.

191 Handel’s Messiah

Handel—and especially Messiah—came to be viewed as a prominent Republican symbol during the early years of the Third Republic. France’s perceived lack of a widespread choral culture, especially when compared to those of Germany and England, contributed to a nagging sense of musical and cultural inferiority among the country’s leading critics and composers.45 For Republicans, Handel’s Protestant faith provided an ideal foil to

Catholic church music that had originated in Italy and that was favored by traditional

(ultramontane) French schools and churches. By the early 1870s, Handel thus began to epitomize Republican ideals through a number of avenues, not the least of which was the contrast of his melodious and accessible style with the more learned and complicated

Germanic manner of Bach—Handel’s supple, elegant music was considered closer to the

“French spirit” than was Bach’s “dry counterpoint.”46 By the time that Charles Lamoureux mounted the first complete Parisian performance of Messiah in 1873, the Republicanization of Handel was virtually complete, effected by a process through which Republican critics actively distanced his music from its Germanic heritage so as to Latinize and appropriate his music as truly French in character. As part of this transformation, Handel’s music

45 The notion that France’s choral culture was inferior to that of Germany or England was a common thread in choral music criticism during the nineteenth century and will be discussed later in this chapter. It is, of course, not true that France “lacked” a choral music culture, but the perception of inferiority was all too real for many critics and had much to do with extramusical factors such as Franco-Prussian relations following the Franco-Prussian War. For discussions of French choral music making, see Clair Rowden, “Choral Music Making in France,” in Nineteenth-Century Choral Music, ed. Donna di Grazia (New York: Routledge, 2013), 205–212, and Donna di Grazia, “Concert Societies in Paris and Their Choral Repertories” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1993), especially pages 1–14. Jann Pasler has also examined choral music’s “usefulness” in the development of a fraternal spirit; see Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 22–23.

46 Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 210–40. She also outlines Handel’s prominent position in the push to reform orphéon societies and to transition their performance repertoire from short, generally homophonic, a cappella pieces into large-scale choral and orchestral works such as Messiah. Handel thus became the symbol of democratization through “good music” and was regarded as the leading composer “for the people.” According to Ellis, Handel was “the image of the singing nation.” (227)

192 came to be viewed in largely non-Christian terms, and indeed, reviewers in the 1860s and

1870s did not deem religion to be a key element in his music. For these audiences it did not matter whether or not the work was sacred in nature. The “dechristianization” of Handel worked well during the early Third Republic: given the disdain for the Ultramontanism of the Second Empire and the sting of military defeat in 1870, a secular and Latin Handel was favorable to a Protestant Bach.47 As Ellis notes, however, Handel’s music had stopped functioning as a Republican symbol by the 1880s, and his role in the revitalization of

France’s choral culture was considered a failure.48

But if Handel’s role in the Republic had weakened during the 1880s, the composer would reemerge as a Republican symbol in a different guise at the turn of the century.

Printed in booklets that were available for purchase in advance of the performance, program notes were essential to the reconfiguration of Handel as a composer of sacred music even before the concert was given. Written by the musicologist Charles Malherbe, the program’s introductory essay outlined the work’s compositional history, its various international performances, and highlighted editorial variants between extant printed editions. Malherbe was smart: he was certainly aware of the church’s position on the concert series, and thus it was in the organizers’ interest that he emphasize the Christian nature of Messiah. But Malherbe went farther than merely stating the work’s obvious

47 Ibid., 214–15. For additional discussions of the importance of latinité to the formation of Republican ideology, see Annegret Fauser, “Gendering the Nations: Ideologies of French Discourse on Music,” in Fauser, The Politics of Musical Identity: Selected Essays (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 71–102. See also Andrea Musk, “Regionalism, Latinité, and the French Musical Tradition: Déodat de Séverac’s Héliogabale,” in Nineteenth Century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference, ed. Jim Samson and Bennett Zon (Abingdon (U.K.): Ashgate Press, 2002), 226–49.

48 Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 232–33.

193 religious content. From the opening lines, Malherbe placed Handel on an equal plane with Palestrina—the “official” composer of the Catholic Church:

Thus Roland de Lassus and Palestrina, Bach and Handel, Mozart and Beethoven, summarize the thought of many generations and mark the stages in the history of music. Some opened the way, others enlarged it. A number of disciples and admirers followed their lead: Their dream became beauty, and their word, truth.49

For Malherbe, Handel’s music was just as “true” as Palestrina’s: the quasi-Biblical connotation of the word becoming truth was one of many steps needed to argue that this performance constituted a religious event and that Handel’s music was indeed Christian.

Malherbe characterized Handel’s setting of the “divine mystery” not “as a work of the theater, but a work of religion, created as an act of faith.”50 Malherbe’s rhetoric was readily echoed by Parisian critics. J. d’Offoël referred to it as a “musical cathedral,” while René

Benoist, writing for Le Moniteur universel, referenced the “perfect intensity of a manifestation of art conceived in full religious conviction, as was Messiah,” and described a

“powerful element of emotion that the ardor of each listener communicates closely with the faith of the composer.” According to René Benoist, “the master was very careful to put the person of the Son of God in his work.”51 In René d’Aral’s opinion, Messiah was an

“essentially religious” work that he praised as “one of the greatest Christian inspirations to

49 Charles Malherbe, Program booklet, AHAP, Series 2 G 2 1. “Ainsi Roland de Lassus et Palestrina, Bach et Hændel, Mozart et Beethoven, résument la pensée de plusieurs générations et marquent des étapes dans l’histoire de la musique. Les uns ont ouvert le chemin, les autres l’ont agrandi. A leur suite s’est élancé tout un peuple de disciples et d’admirateurs: Leur rêve est devenu beauté, Et leur parole, vérité.” 50 Malherbe, Program note, “Et ce divin mystère, le compositeur l’a dit avec une éloquence surhumaine; il en a fait non une œuvre de théâtre, mais une œuvre de religion, comme un acte de foi.”

51 J. d’Offoël, “Les Grands Oratorios à Saint-Eustache,” Le Guide musical, Vol. 46, No. 4, 28 (January 1900): 77. “Eloquence toute personnelle, puisque, par un pieux scrupule, le maître s’est bien gardé de mettre dans son ouvrage la personne du Fils de Dieu.” René Benoist (Des Tournelles), “Le Messie de Hændel à Saint- Eustache,” Le Moniteur universel (21 January 1900). “En jurer, serait téméraire: pour la parfaite intensité d’une manifestation d’art conçue en pleine conviction religieuse, comme l’a été le Messie, c’est un puissant élément d’émotion que l’ardeur de chaque auditeur communie étroitement avec la foi du compositeur… Eloquence toute personnelle, puisque, par un pieux scrupule, le maître s’est bien gardé de mettre dans son ouvrage la personne du Fils de Dieu.”

194 emerge from a human brain.”52 These were not observations that were written largely in non-Christian terms. Rather, writers at the turn of the twentieth century were quick to establish the innate Christian and, in some cases, distinctly Catholic nature of the composer and his work.

On the whole, d’Harcourt, along with numerous other musicians and critics, was unsatisfied with the two French translations of the work that were available for use in

1900. Malherbe was quite vocal on the matter. The first translation, completed by the composer Ferdinand Gasse in 1827, was one whose “poetic language bears the often annoying trace of an improper and old-fashioned style.”53 The second version, created by the Wagnerian music critic Victor Wilder for the Lamoureux performances of 1873, obviously had “literary qualities” but, as he continued, “the necessities of meter and the requirements of the rhyme led the translator to add or subtract notes, to link what is detached or vice-versa to, in a word, alter the purity of the melodic contour and the character of the musical rhythm.”54

The faults of both Gasse’s and Wilder’s editions necessitated the production of a new

French edition, and it was to d’Harcourt that the task fell. This was not the first time that

52 René d’Aral, “Le Messie de Hændel à Saint-Eustache,” Le Gaulois (19 January 1900). “Idée originale et grandiose qui devait permettre un déploiement considérable de masses chorales et instrumentales et qui était intéressante par ce fait seul qu’une des plus grandes inspirations chrétiennes qui soit sortie d’un cerveau humain allait être entendue dans un cadre mystique et solennel: le seul qui fût digne d’elle…Et ce divin mystère, le compositeur l’a exprimé avec une éloquence surhumaine, il en a fait une œuvre essentiellement religieuse, dont la sérénité admirable domine toujours les accents dramatiques.”

53 Charles Malherbe program note. “Le texte anglais a de bonne heure été traduit, et bien traduit en allemand; l’affinité naturelle des deux langues facilitait la tâche et permettait une relative exactitude. Il n’en va pas de même en français, et les deux traductions actuellement existantes demeurent l’une et l’autre critiquables. La première est de Gasse, compositeur qui vivait au début de ce siècle, et dont le langage poétique porte la trace souvent fâcheuse d’un style impropre et démodé, sans vigueur et sans précision.”

54 Loc. cit. “La seconde est de Victor Wilder et fut écrite en 1873 pour les séances de l’Harmonie sacrée; elle offre certes des qualités littéraires, mais trop souvent les nécessités de la métrique et les exigences de la rime ont entraîné le traducteur à ajouter ou retrancher des notes, lier ce qui est détaché, ou vice-versa, altérer en un mot la pureté du contour mélodique, et le caractère du rythme musical.”

195 d’Harcourt had provided new translations for his audiences—according to Henri de

Curzon, d’Harcourt frequently translated foreign texts before he performed them. He had done the same with Robert Schumann’s Genoveva and Carl-Maria von Weber’s Der

Freischütz, and he and de Curzon would later work together to translate the text of Saint

Matthew Passion for its performance at Saint-Eustache. 55 Unlike his predecessors’ efforts, however, d’Harcourt’s translation of Messiah was considered “an authentic copy of the original.”56 Many found his attempt to “restore the original text without taking into account the regrettable transformations of the English edition” to be successful—indeed, a writer for Le Soleil praised it as superior to that of Wilder.57

D’Harcourt’s musical revisions did not fare as well with critics. Writing for the satirical newspaper Le Cri de Paris, an anonymous critic condemned d’Harcourt’s various editorializations as a “true scandal.” The alterations were numerous: the three-part original had been condensed to two; the famous “Hallelujah” chorus was moved to the end, thus replacing the final choral fugue that ultimately became an organ postlude; multiple recitatives, arias, and choruses were cut; and “trumpets or horns [were] added at the whim of the Maestro’s inspiration.”58 Multiple arias were relocated to different voices:

55 Henri de Curzon, “Le Messie de Hændel à Saint-Eustache,” La Gazette de France (19 January 1900). “Quand il s’agit d’un texte étranger, il en fait généralement lui-même la traduction et celle-ci, à l’instar des versions Wagnériennes du regretté Alfred Ernest, est pour la première fois la décalque authentique de l’original. Ainsi avait-il fait jadis pour Geneviève (de Schumann) et le Freischütz.”

56 Loc. cit.

57 See A.M., Le Monde musical (30 January 1900): 17. “La version du Messie que nous avons entendue était une version nouvelle de M. Eugène d’Harcourt qui s’est efforcé de rétablir le texte original sans tenir compte des transformations regrettables de l’édition anglaise, généralement comme jusqu’à ce jour, et dans laquelle des airs écrits pour soprano étaient chantés par le ténor et réciproquement, un solo était arrangé en duo, des quatuors devenaient des chœurs, etc…;” and A. Goutiot, “La Musique à Paris: Le Messie à Saint-Eustache,” Le Soleil (19 January 1900). “La faute n’en est pas à M. d’Harcourt, qui a monté l’œuvre avec le plus grand soin et qui nous a offert une nouvelle traduction en prose de sa façon, que je veux bien croire supérieure à la poésie de Wilder.”

58 Unsigned, “A Saint-Eustache,” Le Cri de Paris (28 January 1900). “Ce fut un véritable scandale. Oh! ni chrétien ni mondain. Du moment que le M. le cure ne trouve pas inconvenant de transformer son église en

196 several soprano arias, including “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion” were given to the tenor, and vice-versa. Perhaps d’Harcourt’s most striking addition for the Saint-Eustache performance was the insertion of a symphonic adaptation of the aria “Ombra mai fu” from

Handel’s Serse (1738) as an interlude between the first and second parts. Certainly d’Harcourt’s decision to perform an operatic excerpt at Saint-Eustache might seem surprising, given the response to the blurring of the boundaries between church and concert hall.59 But critics who ostensibly should have been troubled by its presence as part of Messiah were not: two of the series’ most vocal opponents—Camille Bellaigue and

Gaston Mery made no mention whatsoever of an operatic excerpt during the performance of an oratorio. Many writers, however, applauded d’Harcourt’s decision, even going so far as to claim that d’Harcourt’s “innovation” was driven by a sense of reverence:

Two reasons argue in favor of this innovation: one historical, the other religious. Between the various parts of these oratorios, Handel was accustomed to going up to the organ and performing there as a virtuoso, whether he played a concerto or whether he improvised according to his imagination. This is therefore to conform to his views to musically fill the void left by an interruption between two parts, and to bring the memory of one of his most exquisite inspirations to the listeners in the absence of improvisation by Handel himself. What is more, the oratorio is not a dramatic work and in order for it to keep its sacred character, it was important that attention not be diverted for an instant, that the musical discourse maintained its strict continuity and did not know pauses, as it happens at a concert between the various

salle de concert, nous aurions mauvaise grâce à être plus intransigeant que lui. Le scandale fut purement artistique et musical, mais il fut grand. M. Eugène d’Harcourt, chef d’orchestre plein d’idées, a eu en effet l’ingénieuse prétention d’améliorer l’œuvre de Hændel. Et voici ce que, au hasard de la partition feuilletée pendant le concert, nous avons trouvé: 1e. Le Messie est en trois parties. M. d’Harcourt l’a fondu en deux; 2e. Pour rejoindre sa première partie à la seconde, M. d’Harcourt a introduit dans ce poème religieux le Largo de Hændel, bâti sur un thème d’opéra (Xerxès) et orchestré par Guiraud. Largo superbe, mais sans plus de rapport avec le Messie que la Bénédiction des poignards; 3e. L’Alleluia qui termine la seconde partie de Hændel a été transporté à la fin de l’œuvre; 4e. La fugue, chantée par tous les chœurs, qui termine l’ouvrage, a été transformée en un morceau pour orgue!; 5e. Coupures multiples dans la seconde et troisième parties, et ce qui est plus grave, coupures au cours des morceaux, chœurs ou airs; 6e. Pour faire plus d’effet, introduction de temps à autre de contre-points variés; 7e. Dans le même but, trompettes ou cors ajoutés au hasard de l’inspiration du maestro.”

59 D’Harcourt had his own history with the aria: during the 1890s, multiple arrangements of the aria— including one for English horn and up to twenty chromatic harps—were frequently performed at the Salle d’Harcourt. See Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 93, n.23.

197 numbers of a program. The church is a temple: manifestations of art must be but a form of prayer, an act of praise and faith that rises to the feet of the Eternal like pure incense.60

It was indeed this sense of reverence that overshadowed any of the work’s theatrical or dramatic qualities, whether they were original to its composition or imbued by d’Harcourt’s addition—even the perceived “heresy” of the work had nothing to do with the rearranged opera aria.

D’Harcourt’s translation of the text was far less precise. In the minds of devout

Catholics and ultramontane Church officials, the very idea of transforming Scripture into a prosaic “libretto” had the potential to ruffle feathers. D’Harcourt’s translation of the chorus “And He Shall Purify,” for example, significantly alters the meaning of the Biblical text:

Table 3.1: D’Harcourt’s translation of “And He Shall Purify” from Handel’s Messiah

English Text D’Harcourt’s Translation

And He shall purify the sons of Levi, that Il va vous soutenir, vous qui l’aimez they may offer unto the Lord an offering in vraiment, enfants de Lévi; car vous savez righteousness. (Malachi 3:3) combattre pour la justice, pour tous les bons droits!61

[He is going to support you, you who truly love him, children of Levi, for you know how to fight for justice, for all good rights!]

60 Malherbe, program note: “Deux raisons militent en faveur de cette innovation, l’une historique, l’autre religieuse. Entre les diverses parties de ces oratorios, Hændel avait coutume de monter à l’orgue, et de s’y produire comme virtuose, soit qu’il jouât un concerto, soit qu’il improvisât au gré de son imagination. C’est donc se conformer à ses vues que de remplir musicalement le vide laissé par une interruption entre deux parties, et d’apporter aux auditeurs, à défaut de l’improvisation de Hændel lui-même, le souvenir d’une de ses plus suaves inspirations. De plus, l’oratorio n’est pas une œuvre dramatique, et, pour lui garder son caractère sacré, il importait que l’attention ne se détournât pas un instant, que le discours musical eût sa continuité stricte, et ne connût pas les temps d’arrêt, comme il arrive au concert entre les divers numéros d’un programme. L’église est un temple: les manifestations d’art n’y doivent être qu’une forme de la prière, acte de louange et de foi qui monte, comme un pur encens, aux pieds de l’Eternel.” 61 Program booklet, Messiah, 18 January 1900. AHAP Series 2 G 2 1.

198 In the English text, the purification of the sons of Levi carries with it the implication of sacrifice and cleansing, especially in light of its Old Testament context and its placement in the oratorio, having been immediately preceded by the bass aria “But who may abide the day of His coming?” The text’s reference to purification by the “refiner’s fire” evokes a frequent Old Testament narrative: trial, cleansing, and ultimate purification through metaphorical fire. D’Harcourt’s text, however, makes no mention of purification. In his version, the “He” of the refiner’s fire and of purification is replaced by one who will support and sustain those who truly love him. Any allusion to a God of fire has been removed; those who follow him need not fear retribution, for they already know how to fight for justice and “good rights.”

While certainly not heretical in any sense of the word, d’Harcourt’s thematic and textual shift from vengeance to social justice may also have been perceived as a subtle nod to doctrinal changes within the Catholic Church that were more popular with Republicans than with their more traditional counterparts. During the course of the nineteenth century, the focus of the church’s teachings shifted from an emphasis on a God of fear, retribution, and “hellfire and damnation” toward ones that painted God as a loving and caring being whose salvation was much more easily attained. According to Ralph Gibson, throughout the decades following the Revolution, the Church focused on returning the country to its Christian roots through scare tactics and teachings based in death, judgment, and the threat of hell. But as the century progressed, the possibility of hell as a metaphorical state emerged, and with it came a marked increase in the depiction of God as a loving and forgiving being.62 There is no doubt that the shadow of Renan loomed heavy

62 See Ralph Gibson, “Hellfire and Damnation in Nineteenth-Century France,” The Catholic Historical Review Vol. 74, No. 3 (July 1988): 383–402.

199 here: his 1863 Vie de Jésus emphasized the humanity of Jesus and his loving nature and concern for social justice.63 Through its emphasis on justice, d’Harcourt’s translation also spoke directly to the growing concern regarding the Church’s position on social justice—a point that had been explicitly addressed by Pope Leo XIII in his 1891 encyclical Rerum

Novarum. Social Catholicism, defined as a movement in which the upper classes became aware of their social and economic distance from the industrial and working classes, began to address this disparity and opened the door for a new “left-wing” participation of

Republican intellectuals in the Church.64

Malherbe’s essay even attributed Messiah’s enduring success to Handel’s choice of subject matter, citing the absence of Old Testament storylines as the source of the work’s popularity and accessibility. Oratorios with subjects drawn from the Old Testament, according to Malherbe, depict characters “whose lives are relatively little known, whose virtues are less familiar to us, and whose passions find a weaker echo in us.” As for

Messiah: “It is about Jesus, the Son of God, the Chosen one whom the Prophets announced, the Savior of the world.”65 Despite the fact that Handel set texts from both the

Old and New Testaments, for Malherbe, the work’s accessibility was based on a narrative that Republican audiences would likely recognize, whether their knowledge of the life of

Jesus came from attendance at Mass or by reading Renan. If Old Testament stories had

63 For more on Renan and La Vie de Jésus, see Chapter 1.

64 See John McManners, Church and State in France, 1789-1914.

65 Malherbe program note. “Parmi les œuvres si nombreuses qu’à écrites Haendel, le Messie n’est pas seulement l’une des plus considérables, l’une de celles qui méritent le plus l’admiration des connaisseurs; par un merveilleux privilège elle a été dès le premier jour et elle est restée l’une des plus populaires. Peut- être le choix du sujet n’a-t-il pas été étranger à cette fortune artistique. D’autres oratorios, également remarquables, mettent en scène des personnages de l’Ancien Testament, dont la vie est relativement peu connue, dont les vertus nous sont moins familières et dont les passions trouvent en nous un plus faible écho. Mais il s’agit ici de Jésus, le Fils de Dieu, l’Élu qu’ont annoncé les Prophètes, le Sauveur du monde.”

200 been positively viewed by Republicans as representations of strength, virility, and

“purification” after military defeat earlier in the century, the changing image of God’s character coupled with the force of social Catholicism meant that by 1900, d’Harcourt’s textual transformations could resonate strongly with Republican audience members, even if it might have been considered blasphemous by more ultramontane Catholics.

Massenet’s La Terre promise and Richard Wagner’s La Cène des Apôtres

D’Harcourt devoted the program of the third concert to the performance of “new” works, whether they were works that had been rarely performed in France, like Wagner’s La Cène des Apôtres (Das Liebesmahl der Apostel), or true premieres, such as that of Jules Massenet’s

La Terre promise. Indeed, this curious program piqued the interest of the Parisian public in such a significant way that Adolphe Jullien was able to claim that it attracted the largest audience of any other concert in the series.66 The pairing of Massenet and Wagner on the same program—the former representing the Republic’s “genius” and the latter a composer whose reputation as a controversial threat to (or savior of) French cultural superiority still carried currency—was ingenious on the part of the organizers: the premiere of a new oratorio by Massenet potentially balanced the performance of the more controversial

Wagner.

D’Harcourt’s choice to perform a Massenet work, however, undoubtedly magnified the Church’s unease. Prior to 1900, many of Massenet’s greatest successes had been produced on the operatic stage rather than in the church. Even his three major “sacred” works that preceded La Terre promise—the oratorios Marie-Magdeleine (1873), Ève (1875), and

66 Adolphe Jullien, “Revue musicale (La Terre promise),” Le Moniteur universel (21 March 1900). “Cette annonce avait dû piquer la curiosité des amateurs, car, autant que j’en ai pu juger, c’est à cette séance-là que les curieux ou les amateurs, comme vous voudrez les appeler, se sont rendus en plus grand nombre: espérons qu’il n’en viendra pas moins, dans un mois d’ici, pour l’exécution de La Passion, du grand Sébastien Bach.”

201 La Vierge (1880)—had been widely received as more secular than sacred due to the explicit sexualization of the eponymous Biblical women.67 Often labeled France’s “genius” by the musical press, he was a composer of whom the Republic could be proud, especially at the height of the Parisian Wagnerian craze. Although neither the Archbishop nor Senator

Fabre’s objections mentioned Massenet by name, it is entirely likely that his reputation influenced their opposition to d’Harcourt’s series, despite the fact that neither had yet heard Massenet’s new composition.

Although completed some twenty years after his last oratorio, critics expected La

Terre promise to be similar in style to those that preceded it, especially given that the press had come to regard Massenet as an entirely secular composer. According to Henri de

Curzon, the work’s premiere was notable because it showed “what could be done in the realm of sacred music by composers who were essentially men of the theater and more at ease in secular music.”68 Gaston Carraud wrote that it would be futile to look for a continuation of Massenet’s earlier oratorios in La Terre promise, while Louis Schneider noted his pleasure and surprise at the ease with which the composer of Cendrillon was able

67 See Erik Goldstrom, “A Whore in Paradise: The Oratorios of Jules Massenet” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1998), and Clair Rowden, Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera: Massenet’s Hérodiade and Thaïs (Weinsberg: Edition Lucie Galland, 2004). See also Clair Rowden, “L’Homme saint chez Massenet: l’amour sacré et le sacre de l’amour,” in Opéra and Religion sous la IIIe République, ed. Jean- Christophe Branger and Alban Ramaut (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2006), 257–84. For another overview of the role of eroticism in Massenet’s œuvre, see Annegret Fauser, “Le rôle de l’élément érotique dans l’œuvre de Massenet,” in Massenet et son temps, ed. Patrick Gillis and Gérard Condé (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 1999), 156–79.

68 Henri de Curzon, “Les Grands oratorios à l’Église Saint-Eustache,” La Gazette de France (19 March 1900). “Elle comprenait en effet, à la fois, une œuvre de Wagner, qui n’avait jamais été produite en France: La Cène des apôtres, et un petit oratorio de M. J. Massenet, intitulé: La Terre Promise, composé spécialement pour ces auditions. Le rapprochement était assez piquant, puisque c’était donner là une sorte d’aperçu de ce que peuvent faire, dans le domaine de la musique sacrée, des compositeurs essentiellement hommes de théâtre et plus à l’aise dans la musique profane.”

202 to “pass from fairytale to oratorio.”69 Malherbe introduced the premiere in a similar fashion:

Secular music and sacred music are responding to opposing sentiments and offer an ideal so different in principle that they seem to not at all be cultivated with the same success and by the same hands. But if many religious composers have never, in effect, approached the stage, there are only few dramatic composers who have, at one day or the other, worked for the altar.70

Indeed, the vast majority of critics who reviewed the performance judged Massenet’s latest venture into the sacred realm to be a spiritual success, especially in comparison to Marie-

Magdeleine, Ève, and La Vierge. La Terre promise was considered to be genuinely sacred, not only by virtue of its text and subject matter, but also because of its musical style. To

Malherbe, the religious feeling that reigned supreme throughout Massenet’s new oratorio was the key to distinguishing it from the other three: in La Terre promise, the secular composer “piously soaks his lips in the sacred cup.”

The Holy Books have provided the richest and most varied subjects as inspiration to composers of all times; it is the profound and pure source where all, at some time of their career, large and small, have come to draw forth… In writing La Terre promise, he has been his own poet, or rather, following the example given by Handel in Messiah, he took his texts from the Bible. He cut certain passages whose nature or developments damaged the equilibrium of the musical discourse; he brought together or inverted some verses; but he did not introduce any word that had not been in the Vulgate, translated into French by Silvestre de Sacy, into his poetic and musical version…Eve is the mother of humankind; she succumbs to temptation and passes on the stain that reminds of her first [original] sin to future generations. Mary Magdalene is a loving and gentle creature; she exhausts all the tears of her eyes in order to redeem all the weaknesses of her flesh. The Virgin is the purest of all beings, the golden lily that no shadow has tarnished; but she is also Mother and suffers down here from all the sorrows of her divine Son. Massenet expressed these

69 See Gaston Carraud, “Les Concerts,” La Liberté (16 March 1900). “Il ne faut point, en effet, chercher dans le nouvel ouvrage de M. Massenet, que la Société de Grands Oratorios a fait exécuter hier à Saint-Eustache, une suite à Marie-Madeleine, à Ève, à la Vierge: trilogie exquise, ou, avec l’incomparable séduction de sa personnalité, le musicien sut des vieux mythes de l’Écriture dégager en vision nouvelle le charme de l’éternel féminin;” and Louis Schneider, “Musique: La Terre promise,” La Paix (16 March 1900). “M. Massenet est un musicien d’une souplesse couleuvrine. Quand un compositeur peut passer de Cendrillon, conte des fées, à Terre promise, oratorio, avec une telle virtuosité cela tient du prestige. Ce qui m’a étonné aussi c’est la simplicité de sa musique sacrée.”

70 Malherbe program notes. “La musique profane et la musique sacrée répondent à des sentiments si opposés et se proposent un idéal si différent qu’elles sembleraient en principe ne pouvoir être toutes deux cultivées avec le même succès et par les mêmes mains. Or, si bien des compositeurs religieux n’ont en effet jamais abordé la scène, il est peu de compositeurs dramatiques qui n’aient un jour ou l’autre travaillé pour l’autel.”

203 desires, these affections, these sorrows through the magic of sounds; he depicted the states of the soul and showed, if one may say, the poetry of simply human figures. This time he rises and speaks of above. Woman disappeared from his work. Of all aspirations, only one remains, that of the hereafter! For the Promised Land is the symbol of the eternal Kingdom that man must conquer after a series of battles and efforts. Then he will heave a grand cry, a cry of deliverance and joy, earthly walls will crumble, and he will enter into the domain of ineffable splendor and ideal bliss. Massenet translated this vision with the security of science, the effusion of his heart, and the sincerity of his faith. The work is by an artist and a believer; it is inspired by a divine text; it observes the letter and the spirit: here resides the secret and the force of its beauty.71

An anonymous critic for Le Petit Bleu echoed Malherbe’s description: “We are far from

Marie-Magdeleine, an extraordinarily secular masterpiece! Far from Ève, a jewel of passionate charm! Far from La Vierge, an opera in disguise!”72 Some writers went so far as to claim that the seemingly genuine sacred nature of the work was an expression of

Massenet’s own personal religious convictions. Blondel, writing for Le Monde Artiste, claimed that in the oratorio, “it was certain that Massenet wanted to prove the grandeur of his religious conceptions,” and that “this thoughtful work places Massenet at the top of the masters of the oratorio.” In Blondel’s opinion, La Terre promise represented a “consecration

71 Loc. cit. “Les Livres Saints ont fourni de tout temps à l’inspiration des compositeurs les sujets les plus riches et les plus variés; c’est la source profonde et pure où tous, à quelque époque de leur carrière, grands et petits, sont venus puiser… En écrivant la Terre Promise, il a été son propre poète, ou plutôt, suivant l’exemple donné par Hændel dans le Messie, il a emprunté son texte à la Bible; il a supprimé certains passages dont la nature ou les développements nuisaient à l’équilibre du discours musical; il a rapproché ou interverti quelques versets; mais il n’a introduit dans sa version poétique et musicale, aucun mot qui ne fut dans le Vulgate, traduite en français par Silvestre de Sacy… Ève est la mère du genre humain; elle succombe à la tentation et transmet aux générations futures la tache qui rappelle son premier péché. Marie-Magdeleine est la créature aimante et douce; elle épuisera toutes les larmes de ses yeux pour racheter les faiblesses de sa chair. La Vierge est le plus pur de tous les êtres, le lys d’argent dont nulle ombre n’a terni éclat ; mais elle est aussi la Mère, et souffre ici-bas de toutes les souffrances de son divin Fils. Par la magie des sons, Massenet a exprimé ces désirs, ces tendresses, ces douleurs; il a décrit des états d’âme, et montré, si l’on peut dire, la poésis [sic] des figures simplement humaines. Cette fois il s’élève, et parle de plus haut. La Femme a disparu de son œuvre. De toutes les aspirations, une seule subsiste, celle de l’Au-delà! Car la Terre promise est le symbole du Royaume éternel que l’homme doit conquérir après une série de luttes et d’efforts. Alors il poussera un grand cri, cri de délivrance et de joie, les murailles terrestres s’écrouleront, et il entrera dans le domaine de la splendeur ineffable et de l’idéale félicité. Cette vision, Massenet l’a traduite avec la sûreté de da science, l’effusion de son cœur, et la sincérité de sa foi. L’œuvre est d’un artiste et d’un croyant ; elle s’inspire du texte divin; elle en observe et la lettre et l’esprit: la réside le secret de sa force et de sa beauté.”

72 Unsigned, “Musique,” Le Petit Bleu (March 1900). “Que nous sommes loin de Marie-Magdeleine, un chef- d’œuvre extraordinairement laïque! D’Ève, un bijou de charme passionnant! De la Vierge, un opéra déguisé!”

204 of an innate force, rich in its manifestations, that waited for a time to show itself fit for the supreme understanding of the divine.”73 To René d’Aral, “a very interesting Massenet is revealed to us in this work of gigantic proportions: a Massenet imbued with a profound religious sentiment to the exclusion of everything else. And he seems to have translated it with the confidence of his skill, the effusion of his heart, and the sincerity of his faith.”74

After at first questioning the sincerity of Massenet’s “conversion,” Pierre Lalo agreed that it was indeed serious. 75 Lalo concluded his review by considering which direction the composer’s future work might take: “And now, what will be the work of Mr. Massenet?

Divine or human? Worldly or religious? Does Mr. Massenet want to sing only to the Most

High? Or will the beautiful sinners that he preferred until now return some of their charms to him? Time will tell.”76

73 Blondel, “Concerts à Saint-Eustache,” Le Monde artiste, No. 3 (18 March 1900): 165. “Il est certain que Massenet a voulu prouver—il l’a fait victorieusement—la grandeur de ses concepts religieux… Aussi, viens- je saluer avec la plus entière admiration, cette composition neuve, réalisation d’un travail réfléchi que place Massenet au premier rang des maîtres de l’Oratorio… Régénération d’un talent supérieur? Non. Consécration d’une force innée, riche en manifestations et qui attendit son heure pour se montrer apte à la suprême entente du divin.”

74 René d’Aral, “L’Audition de Saint-Eustache,” Le Gaulois (16 March 1900). “Un Massenet fort intéressant se révèle à nous dans cette œuvre aux proportions gigantesques: un Massenet empreint d’un sentiment religieux profond, à l’exclusion de tout autre. Et il semble l’avoir traduit avec la sûreté de sa science, l’effusion de son cœur et la sincérité de sa foi.”

75 Pierre Lalo, “La Musique,” Le Temps (20 March 1900). “Après vingt années consacrées a l’art profane du théâtre, M. Massenet revient à l’art sacré de l’oratorio, auquel il dut jadis plusieurs de ses plus brillants succès et l’une de ses meilleures partitions, c’est Marie-Magdeleine que je veux dire. Cette conversion rappelle la conversion de Racine; en a-t-elle tout le sérieux et l’austérité? On est tenté de le croire à l’examen de la Terre promise. Car, autrefois, même lorsqu’il s’attachait à traduire en musique la Bible ou l’Évangile, M. Massenet restait un musicien d’amour; il ne pouvait concevoir d’œuvre sans qu’une femme en fût la figure principale; par la tendresse et la sensualité qu’il y insinuait, les sujets les plus sacrés devenaient des sujets très profanes. Cette fois, rien de pareil. Aucune femme en cette aventure, et pas un mot d’amour. Dans la Vulgate, il a choisi l’un des passages les plus austères, et le texte n’en a été orné d’aucune grâce illicite: il s’est servi des paroles mêmes du livre saint.”

76 Loc. cit. “Et maintenant, quelle sera l’œuvre de M. Massenet? Divine ou humaine? Mondaine ou religieuse? M. Massenet ne veut-il plus chanter que le Très-Haut? Ou les belles pécheresses qu’il lui préféra jusqu'ici reprendront-elles pour lui quelques charmes? Qui vivra verra.” These responses by the press recall the discourse surrounding sincerity that were popular during the late nineteenth century. See Chapter Two for a more detailed discussion.

205 There were, of course, writers who rejected the idea that the sacred nature of La

Terre promise had prevailed over Massenet’s secular reputation as a successful composer of opera. Though André Suarès admitted that the work was more serious than either Ève or

Marie-Magdeleine, he claimed that La Terre promise “is not a model of the religious style either, and the work is often closer to the theater than to the church.”77 Adolphe Jullien described the oratorio as only superficially religious, and for Réné Benoist, “secular grace dominate[d] the work.”78 But even Camille Bellaigue, was able to write that, save for certain passages, “La Terre promise shows a more purely sacred intention, if not inspiration.” To his joy, the “Renan of the oratorio” had all but disappeared.79 The idea of a successful “conversion” through music is telling: a Catholic(ized) Massenet could still garner the attention and respect of “secular” Republicans while simultaneously and in a more restrained fashion, impress one of the most ultramontane critics active in Paris during the time. Indeed, the vast majority of critics who reviewed the performance judged

Massenet’s latest venture into the sacred realm to be a success, not only by virtue of its text and subject matter, but also because of its musical style.

77 André Suarès, “Les Grands concerts,” La République française (18 March 1900). “La Terre promise, qui est le quatrième oratorio de M. Massenet, fut composée de 1897 à 1899; ce n’est pas non plus un modèle de style religieux, et l’ouvrage est souvent plus près du théâtre que de l’église. Toutefois, il a quelque chose de plus grave que Ève ou Marie-Madeleine; le musicien s’est efforcé de ne pas donner cours à la verve sensuelle qui est sa caractéristique, et il essaie à diverses reprises de forcer sa nature.”

78 See Adolphe Jullien, “Revue musicale,” Le Moniteur universel (21 March 1900). “Ce qui me plaît le plus dans cet ouvrage, médiocrement sévère et d’un caractère religieux bien superficiel, c’est l’agrément que présentent pour l’oreille certains thèmes agrestes et d’autres d’un exotisme un peu moderne, d’un orientalisme un peu cru, mais amusants par cela-même;” and Réné Benoist, “Les Grands oratorios à l’Eglise Saint-Eustache,” Le Moniteur universel (20 March 1900). “Moab, ou ‘l’Alliance;’ Jéricho ou ‘la Victoire;’ Chanaan ou ‘la Terre promise.’ Malgré ces noms qui engagent et ces sous-titres imprudents, la grâce profane domine dans tout l’ouvrage.”

79 Camille Bellaigue, “Les ‘Grands oratorios” à l’église Saint-Eustache,” Revue des deux mondes (15 April 1900): 927. “En général, et sous réserve faite à l’avance d’un ou deux passages particuliers, la Terre Promise témoigne d’une inspiration, au moins d’une intention plus purement sacrée. On n’appellera pas, ou presque pas, aujourd’hui M. Massenet le Renan de l’oratorio, le musicien féministe et délicieux de la piété sans la foi.”

206 The sacred nature of La Terre promise was most often attributed to two aspects of

Massenet’s composition: one, his meticulous setting of the Biblical text, and two, its markedly different style that recalled traditionally sacred works—particularly those of

Handel. In passages taken verbatim from Lemaistre de Sacy’s French translation of the

Vulgate, the text of Part One (“L’Alliance”) recalls the promise made by God to the

Israelites that those who follow his law would enter into the Promised Land. Part Two (“La

Victoire”) depicts the capture of Jericho and the famous crumbling of its walls, and Part

Three (“La Terre promise”) celebrates the entrance of the Israelites into the Promised

Land (see Appendix B for a complete listing of Massenet’s Biblical sources). Critics applauded Massenet’s fastidious attention to his treatment of the Biblical texts. The critic

Blondel observed that “the composer deserves to be congratulated for this effort. For too long, musical works sung in the church distorted true orthodoxy; for too long, religious correctness escaped critique; it disappeared and made room for bizarre interpretations of sacred texts.”80 D’Aral found in Massenet’s text a “scrupulous accuracy” and a “perfect religious correction,” and Malherbe described it as a “perfect orthodoxy and a religious accuracy that escapes all criticism.”81 In a sense, and despite the Old Testament storyline, critics considered Massenet’s oratorio as a Republican Catholic corrective to an old- fashioned, ultramontane Catholic doctrine.

80 Blondel, “Concerts à Saint-Eustache,” Le Monde artiste (18 March 1900): 165. “Le compositeur mérite d’être félicité pour cet effort. Depuis trop longtemps les œuvres musicales dites d’église faussaient la véritable orthodoxie; depuis trop longtemps la correction religieuse échappait à la critique, disparaissait et faisait place à de bizarres interprétations des textes sacrés.”

81 See René d’Aral, “L’Audition de Saint-Eustache,” Le Gaulois (16 March 1900). “Le sujet de la Terre promise, ce nouvel oratorio de l’auteur de Marie-Magdeleine, est emprunté à la Bible avec une scrupuleuse exactitude et une correction religieuse parfaite;” and Malherbe, program notes: “…mais il n’a introduit dans sa version poétique et musicale, aucun mot qui ne fut dans le Vulgate, traduite en français par Silvestre de Sacy. A cet égard, son ouvrage demeure donc d’une orthodoxie parfaite et d’une correction religieuse qui échappe à toute critique.”

207 Apart from the Biblical text, Massenet’s compositional choices made significant contributions to the work’s validation as sacred. If Massenet’s previous oratorios had been operas in disguise, then his newest was a paean to the Baroque, as frequent comparisons to

Handel placed La Terre promise on an equal plane with that of his Baroque predecessors. whose works, according to Ellis, had served as longstanding symbols of the Republic.82

After identifying La Terre promise as a “classic oratorio, one of the most magnificent and most lofty,” Gaston Carraud claimed that Massenet’s “monument” was built on Handel’s model.83 Suarès also noticed Massenet’s affinity for Handel: “At the beginning and at the end, he imitates Handel very closely, and one could hardly follow a better model.”84

Indeed, a cursory examination of the score reveals an affinity for fugal writing that

Massenet had rarely exhibited in his earlier works and would even less frequently return to.85 But in numerous reviews, critics discussed the work in terms that had, in the 1860s and 1870s, been used to appropriate Handel’s work as French and, in 1900, had fostered a rechristianization of his sacred music. Nobility, clarity, and simplicity of style—all adjectives that symbolized Frenchness for the Republic— dominated descriptions of La

Terre promise. While Henri de Curzon wrote that Massenet was looking for “color and grace” rather than “force and grandeur,” the writer known as T.M. praised the work as

82 Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 210–40.

83 Gaston Carraud, “Les Concerts,” La Liberté (16 March 1900). “Après la tragédie moderne, toute d’humanité la plus poignant; après la féerie légère, toute de grâce spirituelle, voici l’oratorio classique, un ce qu’il a de plus magnifique et de plus élevé… Aujourd’hui c’est à l’exemple de Hændel que M. Massenet construit un monument sonore largement décoratif, d’où humanité est absente, et qui la domine de son ample masse aux lignes majestueuses et tranquilles.”

84 See Suarès, “Les Grands concerts.” “Au début et à la fin, il imite Hændel de très près et on ne peut guère suivre un meilleur modèle.”

85 The work ends in a great four-part fugue of praise to God for his goodness.

208 having “many pieces full of charm and grace.”86 Writing in Le Ménestrel, Arthur Pougin commented that La Terre promise was an “oratorio of severe and grandiose forms, full of nobility, full of loftiness,” and described it as a “holy, noble, uplifting, restorative work

[that] elevates thought, exalts the purest feelings, and shines the most radiant beauty.”87

Yet a major editorial intervention and other, more subtle compositional choices in the oratorio were geared directly toward a specific brand of Republican Catholicism that operated outside of the Church’s institutional domain. The libretto eliminates a key aspect of the Promised Land narrative: specifically, the forty years that the Israelites were kept out of the Promised Land as punishment for their unwillingness to enter therein.

Massenet’s omission of such a crucial part of the narrative therefore removes the element of God’s vengeance completely from the salvation of the Hebrew people. Perhaps Camille

Bellaigue was wrong when he celebrated Renan’s absence from La Terre promise, for the removal of divine retribution from the oratorio’s narrative shifts the focus almost entirely onto the character of God as a universally kind, loving, and humble being, one favored by both Renan and the Republic.

From the outset, Massenet’s compositional style underscores the softened textual narrative. The orchestral introduction presents a short, two-measure motive in C major—

86 See Henri de Curzon, “Les Grands oratorios à Saint-Eustache,” La Gazette de France (19 March 1900). “La force et la grandeur ne sont pas d’ailleurs ce qu’a cherché ici M. Massenet, mais plutôt la couleur et la grâce;” and T.M., “La Terre promise,” La Petite République (16 March 1900). “Il y a des morceaux pleins de charme et de grâce, et d’autres d’une puissance rare et de l’effet le plus saisissant, notamment la marche du septième jour, avec son effet des sept trompettes, et le passage foudroyant de la chute des murailles de Jéricho.”

87 Arthur Pougin, “La Terre promise,” Le Ménestrel (18 March 1900): 83-4: “…La Terre promise, un oratorio aux formes sévères et grandiose, plein de noblesse, plein d’élévation…Tout ce que je puis dire, c’est la joie qu’on éprouve à entendre une telle musique, à se trouver en présence d’une œuvre saine, noble, élevée, fortifiante, qui élève la pensée, exalte les sentiments les plus purs et rayonne de la plus radieuse beauté. ”

209 the key that, for Massenet, signifies godliness and purity—that acts as the “Promise” motive.88 (Example 3.1)

Example 3.1: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part One, “Promise” Motive89

As La Voix (here, representing Moses) recalls the words of God’s promise, the motive reappears when he reminds the people that “the Lord made a covenant with us on Mount

Horeb.” (Example 3.2)

Example 3.2: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part One, “Moïse fit venir tout le peuple”

88 See Chapter 1, n. 48.

89 Music examples for La Terre promise are taken from the piano-vocal score (Paris: Heugel, 1900). Instrumental indications are based on the orchestral score, also published by Heugel in 1900.

210

Following a partially fugal (and minor-mode) depiction of God’s voice speaking through fire—one that could easily symbolize both Handelian and Old Testament narratives of punishment through fire—the motive returns to remind the people of God’s promise of protection and benevolence, again in C major, as the people recall having seen God’s

“grandeur and majesty:” fear of punishment has been replaced by the promise of Canaan

(Example 3.3).

211 Example 3.3: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part One, “Nous avons entendu sa voix”

212

God’s promise of a Promised Land to the people of Israel is fulfilled musically soon thereafter. As La Voix shifts from abstract narrator to Moses, Massenet introduces the

“Promised Land” motive: a slowly lilting, pastoral motive in F-major that underscores

Moses’ presentation of God’s promise to the Israelite people as he instructs them that they will soon cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan (Example 3.4).

Example 3.4: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part One, “Promised Land” Motive

213

Given first in the future tense, Moses’ description of the Promised Land as a yet unfulfilled promise becomes a concrete reality in Part Three to identical music and virtually identical text. Appearing first as the theme for the “Pastorale” that opens Part

Three, it soon underscores the Israelites’ entrance into the Promised Land; Moses’s earlier statement that “you will cross the Jordan into the Promised Land” has now become “here is the Promised Land” (Examples 3.5 and 3.6). Thus in Part One, the Promised Land motive plays a dual function, not only foreshadowing the fulfillment of the promise itself, but also serving as a constant musical reminder of a Republican God’s kindness and his beneficent, non-retributive character, even amidst fire.

Example 3.5: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part Three, “Pastorale”

214 Example 3.6: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part Three, “Voici la Terre Promise”

215

Just as Handel’s music appealed to modern audiences, so did Massenet’s Handelian oratorio with its blending of Baroque choral writing and its more modern, quasi-

Wagnerian reliance on thematic motives. Nowhere was this comingling more evident than in Massenet’s orientalist depiction of the Levite priests who intone the Law in Part One.

The Levite priests, accompanied by four flutes, two English horns, twelve chromatic harps, triangle, cymbals, cello, and bass reiterate the commandments of God to the people who, in turn, answer “Amen” in unison. Multiple contemporary critics highlighted this section in their reviews as one of their favorites; one known simply as H. L. cited the passage to be

“remarkable by its oriental color” by virtue of its modal harmonic language and its stereotypically oriental instrumentation.90 (Example 3.7)

90 H.L., “Les Grands oratorios à Saint-Eustache,” Le Monde musical, No. 6 (30 March 1900): 90. “Dans notre dernier numéro, M. Charles Malherbe a longuement parlé de la Terre promise de Massenet: une nouvelle analyse ne serait ici d’aucune utilité; disons seulement que l’interprétation en fut parfaite, la première partie remarquable par sa couleur bien orientale avec ses chœurs accompagnés de douze harpes chromatiques…”

216 Example 3.7: Jules Massenet, La Terre promise, Part One, “Maudit celui”

217

Comparisons to Hérodiade were frequent, but such parallels only highlight the active process of othering that was operating in both works.91 Although Bruneau compared La Terre promise’s “March of the Seventh Day (Part Two)” to Hérodiade, parallels could also easily be drawn between the Levite chorus of La Terre promise and the priests’ intonation of the Jewish prayer “Schema, Israel” in Act III of Hérodiade: each is portrayed using musical styles that differ vastly from those predominantly in use in their respective work. In La Terre promise, Handelian fugues are interrupted by the Levites’ unison incantation that is accompanied by arpeggiated chords that oscillate between B minor, G

91 Alfred Bruneau, “Notes de Musique: à Saint-Eustache,” Le Figaro (16 March 1900). “Et l’on retrouve le Massenet d’Hérodiade dans la marche du septième jour, modulant à l’orchestre tandis que, du haut de la tribune de l’orgue, les trompettes lancent de temps en temps leurs notes obstinées.” Gaston Carraud made a similar comparison to the opera in La Liberté when he wrote “Un morceau—ou les lévites énoncent les commandements de Dieu, entrecoupés par les répons du peuple—d’un grand charme musical, d’ailleurs a un peu étonné par son coloris oriental, proche parent de celui d’Hérodiade; l’effet n’eût sans doute pas été le même dans tout autre cadre que celui de l’église.” See Carraud, “Les Concerts,” La Liberté (16 March 1900).

218 major, and modal variants. Conversely, in Hérodiade, the priests chant their prayer as a purely chordal, diatonic, chorale-like chant after having been surrounded by intense and often sensual chromaticism (Example 3.8)

Example 3.8: Jules Massenet, Hérodiade, Act 3, “Schemâh Israël”

219 In both of these instances, Massenet’s musical settings create a sense of a Jewish Other.

In the case of Hérodiade, it is the Jewish priests who are portrayed as “other” in comparison to their pagan Roman counterparts. In La Terre promise, however, the Levite priests stand as what Katharine Ellis has called an “internal other:” although still members of the tribes of Israel, Levite priests had been chosen by God to be the only

Jews who could enter into the innermost sanctum of the Temple where the Ark of the

Covenant was kept.

While such parallels with Hérodiade may have reminded some conservative

Catholics of Massenet’s previously-threatened excommunication, his musical choices likely could have also supported a pro-Dreyfusard reading of La Terre promise. In 1900, the very act of setting the Promised Land narrative—the story of the Jews’ delivery from bondage to freedom—to music could be read as an implicit show of support for the

Republican Dreyfusard cause.92 Even though Hérodiade was composed well before the start of the official Dreyfus Affair, the trend that it establishes situates Massenet within

92 Although the chronology of the work’s composition does not suggest that Massenet composed the piece as a direct response to the Dreyfus Affair, the indirect connection is hard to miss. Massenet’s available correspondence makes virtually no reference to La Terre promise, but the general consensus among scholars is that Massenet began outlining the libretto in 1897 while in Aix-le-Bains, finished the piano score in 1898, and completed the orchestration on 17 August 1899; the manuscript bears the date 17 August 1899 at the end of the score. (See Patrick Gillis, “La Terre Promise,” L’Avant-Scène Opéra (Sept.-Oct. 1992), 133 and Massenet, Massenet: Mes Souvenirs, ed. Gérard Condé (Paris: Éditions Plume, 1992), 233. However, a short write-up in La Journal de Musique, dated 4 January 1879, suggests that Massenet had completed a strikingly similar work that was intended for performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall during that same year. (La Journal de Musique, (4 January 1879). “M. Massenet termine en ce moment, pour l’Albert-Hall de Londres, un grand oratorio en trois parties dont le poème est de M. Roger Ballu. Titre: La Terre promise. 1re partie: La Captivité des Hébreux. 2e partie: La Prise de Jéricho. 3e partie: Le Pays de Chanaan.”) I am thankful to Jean-Christophe Branger for sharing this information with me, although his transcription includes the name “M. Roger Bailu” and not “Ballu.” While there is no information available on a Roger Bailu, there is, in fact, a connection between Roger Ballu and Massenet: Ballu was the Inspector General of Fine Arts during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and was a frequent collaborator on musical works—he wrote the poem for André Wormser’s Prix-de-Rome winning cantata, Clytemnestre (1875)—and Massenet indicated in his autobiography that Ballu was amongst the group of dignitaries that visited his home upon his election to the Institut de France. See Jules Massenet, My Recollections, trans. H. Villiers Barnett (Boston: Small, Maynard, and Co., 1919), 119. I am also grateful to Lesley Wright for her help in researching the mysterious M. Roger Bailu.

220 the camp of anticlerical Republicans who supported Dreyfus. In La Terre promise,

Massenet dedicated an entire work to the establishment of the Jews as God’s chosen people.

Right-leaning nationalists were not the only group who had a troubling relationship with French Jews; the anti-Semitic views of the Catholic church itself have been well-documented in recent years.93 Yet the press was virtually silent on any political echoes of Massenet’s oratorio, save for a brief comment in La Libre parole. The right wing, Catholic, and infamously anti-Semitic newspaper published only one article regarding d’Harcourt’s series at Saint-Eustache. Published on 15 March—the day of La

Terre promise’s premiere—the essay constituted a barrage of criticism of the very idea, as discussed above, at the thought that the church might become a theater. For the author,

Gaston Mery, the venture might have better fit into a synagogue:

… ham actors and impresarios begin to become cumbersome. And there is, I don’t know, something shocking, not only for the Catholic, but also for the man of simple common sense, to see them thus stick themselves everywhere and to invade the churches. Why not synagogues? They would be much better there!94

Mery’s anti-Semitic bent is clear; his reference to the “inferiority” of ham actors and to impresarios—many of whom were Jewish—and thus to their money that was often used to fund theatrical or musical ventures is only made stronger with the claim that d’Harcourt’s entire venture would have been better off in a synagogue. While Mery never directly mentions La Terre promise, the fact that the paper printed its only article on the

93 A particularly useful monograph on the relationship between French Jews, the Catholic church, and the Republic is Zvi Jonathan Kaplan’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? French Jewry and the Problem of Church and State (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2009).

94 Gaston Mery, “Au jour le jour: À Saint-Eustache,” La Libre parole (15 March 1900).“Car, en vérité, cabotins et impresarii commencent à devenir encombrants. Et il y a je ne sais quoi de choquant, non pas seulement pour la catholique, mais aussi pour l’homme de simple bon sens, à les voir se fourrer ainsi partout et à envahir jusqu’aux églises. Pourquoi pas les synagogues ? Ils y seraient beaucoup mieux!”

221 concert series on the day of its premiere is hardly a coincidence and, indeed, it would only be eight months later that Vincent d’Indy would label the modern French school of which

Massenet was a leading member as a product of “l’école judaïque.”95 Yet comments such as these regarding Massenet’s oratorio were virtually nonexistent in the Parisian press, and

La Terre promise, at least in the context of d’Harcourt’s concert series, demonstrated instead how music by a modern Republican composer could function simultaneously as a model of religious devotion through sacred music and a symbol of Republican ideology.

D’Harcourt’s decision to program one of Massenet’s most sincerely religious and least Wagnerian works (especially when compared to an opera like Esclarmonde) with the

German composer’s choral composition, Das Liebesmahl der Apostel, was ingenious, for that work was, in effect, one of Wagner’s least “Wagnerian” works and thus one of the least threatening and potentially most appealing to both Republican audiences and church officials alike.96 The French response to Wagner and Wagnerism was entangled in multiple strands of reception, appropriation, and ideology, each of which had involved both the Church and the Republic. Apart from purely musical responses to Wagnerism made by composers ranging from Camille Saint-Saëns to Emmanuel Chabrier, Wagnerian reception in Paris was marked by two competing ideological strands: one, wholly secular and political in nature, and the other, thoroughly spiritual.97

95 Vincent d’Indy, “Une école d’art répondant aux besoins modernes,” La Tribune de Saint-Gervais (November 1900): 311.

96 For a discussion of Esclarmonde in reference to its Wagnerian reception and its function as a “French answer to Wagner,” see Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 62–79.

97 For a discussion of multiple responses throughout the arts to Wagner and Wagnerism in France, see Annegret Fauser, “Wagnerism: Responses to Wagner in Music and the Arts” in The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 221–34.

222 Advocates for both the French nationalist movement on the political right and the

Republican and Socialist left appropriated Wagner and his music for their own ideological ends. For composers like Vincent d’Indy and other members of nationalist leagues such as the Ligue de la Patrie Française, Wagner’s music had the ability to purge French music of the decadence and the “contaminated Jewish style” that d’Indy and others found in modern French music. In the realm of opera, supporters of the claim that Wagner’s music could purify French music found the work of composers like Massenet to be nothing more than cheap imitations of the Italian style that Wagner had so famously derided—indeed, the conductor Charles Lamoureux had been so fond of Wagner’s music that he hailed the composer’s music as “essentially French.”98 But for those whose ideology aligned with the

Republican left, Wagner’s Germanic heritage and musical style was viewed as a threat to

French music and to the country’s cultural image. Wagner’s exceedingly lengthy works, his abstract philosophies, and his frequent usage of “idealistic” myths and German symbolism were, according to the Republican composer and music critic Alfred Bruneau, intrinsically Germanic traits that were antithetical to the French musical style.99 At the turn of the century, Wagner’s music was also closely associated with issues of class: elitism and snobisme were markers of the composer’s music that were at odds with the Republic’s striving toward an identity that was based in the Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.100

98 Pasler, “Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology,” 367.

99 See Jane Fulcher, “Wagner in the Cultural Politics of the French Right and Left Before World War I” in Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme, ed. Annegret Fauser and Manuela Schwartz (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1999), 137–54.

100 See Myriam Chimènes, “Elites sociales et pratiques wagnériennes: de la propagande au snobisme” in Fauser and Schwartz, eds., Vom Wagner zum Wagnérisme, 155–98.

223 Wagner’s music and philosophies were also hugely popular with Sâr Joséphin

Péladan at his Salon de la Rose-Croix. Founded in 1892 and based on the medieval practice of Rosicrucianism, the salon espoused an “anti-realist, aristocratic idealism” and a mystic occultism that clashed with its leader’s devout Catholic faith.101 Péladan, whose criticism was aimed at artistic styles that were officially sanctioned by the Academy (and also the Impressionists), championed works that were overtly connected to religion and mysticism through the reliance on subjects based on legends, myths, and dreams—

Arthurian legends, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, and the music of Wagner were ideal fodder for Péladan’s Rosicrucians. In a reference to Cardinal Richard’s reaction to the announcement of the oratorio performance, Péladan’s affinity for Wagner’s music was satirized by a writer for Le Cri de Paris:

Before getting married (this is already old!) to Saint Thomas Aquinas, Sâr Péladan asked the parish priest, for lack of a great wise man [wizard], if the organ could play the March from Tannhäuser for the princess’s entrance.—This is not in the repertoire of my church, said the priest; it requires the Archbishop’s authorization. Sâr obtains a hearing with Cardinal Richard and gives him a letter, a petition. The other reads and asks:—Good, my son. But who is this, this Mr. Vagnié (he pronounced it Vagnié)? One of your friends, no doubt? Is he a pious man?102

Thus Wagnerism formed part of the cultural field within which d’Harcourt’s performances and the surrounding controversies were received.

101 Peter Franklin, “Die Rose vom Liebesgarten,” Grove Music Online. See also Isabelle Cazeaux, “One Does Not Defend the Sun: Some Notes on Péladan and Wagner,” in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang, ed. Edmond Strainchamps and Maria Rika Maniates (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1984), 94.

102 Unsigned, “Richard et Wagner,” Le Cri de Paris (21 January 1900). “Devant se marier (c’est bien vieux déjà!) à Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, le Sâr Péladan demanda au curé, faute d’archimage, que l’orgue pût jouer, pour l’entrée de la princesse, la Marche du Tannhauser. —Ce n’est pas au répertoire de mon église, dit le cure; il faut une autorisation de l’archevêque. Le Sâr obtient une audience du cardinal Richard et lui remet une lettre, une supplique. L’autre lit et interroge: —Bien, mon fils. Mais qui-est-ce, ce Monsieur Vagnié (il prononçait Vagnié?) Un de vos amis, sans doute? Est-ce un homme pieux?”

224 Although hidden in coded language, critics’ commentary demonstrated that neither Wagner’s threatening German heritage nor his affinity for occult mysticism were perceived as characterizing features of Das Liebesmahl. Gone were the charges of

Germanic bombast and complexity. Instead, echoing early responses to the Parisian performance of Tannhäuser in 1861, the work was frequently labeled as monotonous and boring.103 Gaston Carraud wrote that, in general, the work was “dull and empty, interminable, [and] of a cruel boredom,” and, echoing Carraud’s assessment, Henry

Boyer claimed that it had a “dull tone” and that it “added nothing to the glory of the master.”104 Hugues Imbert disparaged d’Harcourt’s critical judgment, for if the conductor

“had realized the piece’s weakness, he would have avoided bringing a work out from oblivion that can add nothing to Wagner’s glory.”105

More specific criticism was leveled at the work’s disproportionate structure.

Written in two main sections, Das Liebesmahl begins with an a cappella men’s chorus that comprises twenty-five of the work’s thirty-five minutes; the entrance of the orchestra marks the beginning of the second main section.106 Descriptions of the work as boring

103 For a discussion of the Parisian premiere of Tannhäuser and its critical reception, see Annegret Fauser, “Cette musique sans tradition: Wagner’s Tannhäuser and its French Critics” in Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914, ed. Mark Everist and Annegret Fauser (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 228–55.

104 Carraud, “Les concerts.” “Avant l’oratorio de M. Massenet, nous avions entendu la Cène des Apôtres de Wagner, composition grise et vide, interminable, d’un ennui cruel, qui date d’un peu avant Tannhäuser, et qui semble dater d’avant Rienzi.” Henry Boyer, “Grands concerts,” Le Courrier du Soir (20 March 1900). “La Cène des Apôtres, œuvre de jeunesse de Wagner, m’a paru d’une tonalité grise à terme et n’ajoutera pas à la gloire du maître.”

105 Hugues Imbert, “Les Oratorios à l’Église Saint-Eustache,” Le Guide musical, Vol. 46, No. 22 (25 March 1900): 267. “Si M. d’Harcourt s’était rendu un compte exact de la faiblesse de la Cène des Apôtres avant de la monter, il se serait gardé de sortir de l’oubli une page qui ne peut rien ajouter à la gloire de Wagner.”

106 Katherine R. Syer describes the work as a “half-hour style work,” but many accounts of d’Harcourt’s performance indicate that the orchestra played for approximately ten minutes. See Katherine R. Syer, ““Unseen Voices: Wagner’s Musical-Dramatic Shaping of the Grail Scene of Act I,” in A Companion to Wagner’s Parsifal, ed. William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer (Rochester: Camden House, 2005), 177.

225 and monotonous were often based on the first section’s length and lack of orchestral accompaniment. Arthur Pougin found that the “purely choral part seemed to be, I confess, a bit long [and] consequently a bit monotonous,” yet he contrasted his criticism with the confession that “from the entrance of the orchestra, the work takes on a brilliance, a stature, a power, where we rediscover the hand that wrote the most beautiful pages of Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, and Die Walküre.”107

Critics who sought to defend Das Liebesmahl against charges of boredom claimed that it was not only Wagner’s part-writing, which included groups of smaller choirs in alternation, that created a sense of variety. Coupled with the fact that the work itself was a product of the composer’s youth, the haste with which it was written, as they argued, meant that it could not be held to the same standard as his later works.108 Pougin, who had once praised Wagner’s orchestral writing in Das Liebesmahl, also quickly pointed out that it was “certainly not the orchestra of the Ring, but the master’s hand already shows itself in many places.”109 Numerous other reviewers emphasized similarities between Das

107 Arthur Pougin, “La Terre promise,” Le Ménestrel (18 March 1900): 84. “Si toute la partie purement chorale m’a semblé, je l’avoue, un peu longue, partant un peu monotone, en revanche, à partir de l’entrée de l’orchestre, l’œuvre prend un éclat, une envergure, une puissance, où l’on retrouve la main qui a écrit les plus belles pages de Lohengrin, de Tannhäuser et de la Valkyrie.”

108 Malherbe wrote in his program notes that “Wagner a su quand même éviter la monotonie que pouvait produire cette succession de chœurs où manque le timbre clair et brillant du soprano; il a cherché et trouvé le moyen d’obtenir des contrastes; il a opposé les voix entre elles par groupes; il a ménagé son orchestre qui entre seulement vers le milieu de l’ouvrage; il a tiré en somme un merveilleux part des forces spéciales dont il disposait.” Similarly, Adolphe Jullien claimed that Wagner had a “rare ingenuity for avoiding monotony.” See Adolphe Jullien, “Les Grands Oratorios à l’Église Saint-Eustache,” Le Moniteur universel (20 March 1900). “Elle échappe néanmoins à la monotonie, grâce à l’opposition des groupes, peut-être encore à cause de l’artifice qui retarde l’entrée de l’orchestre jusqu’à la dernière partie.” See also Camille Bellaigue, “Revue musicale: Les ‘Grands Oratorios’ à l’Église Saint-Eustache,” Revue des deux mondes (1 April 1900): 930. “La première [partie] sans doute est un peu longue; mais cela ne signifie pas qu’elle soit monotone. Au contraire, par le groupement et le partage des voix, par la succession des mouvements, par l’alternance de l’unisson avec la polyphonie, surtout par la diversité de l’expression, Wagner a trouvé moyen de rompre l’uniformité de cette oraison commune et seulement virile, d’introduire dans l’austérité de l’ensemble des traits de sensibilité souvent exquis.”

109 H.L., “Les Grands Oratorios à Saint-Eustache,” Le Monde musical, No.6 (30 March 1900): 90. “Ici seulement l’orchestre intervient et se joint aux voix; ce n’est certes pas encore l’orchestre de la Tétralogie, mais déjà la main du maître s’y manifeste en maints endroits.”

226 Liebesmahl and subsequent works such as Tannhäuser and Lohengrin: A. Boisard perceived the work as “the seed of great inspiration for the future,” and noticed the

“embryonic form of the vigorous pages of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin sketched out, as well as the first steps toward the sublime religious scenes of Parsifal.”110 The writer known as

H.L. made the comparison more explicit, citing the a cappella chorus of the disciples in the first section as a foreshadowing of the Pilgrim’s chorus from Tannhäuser, while numerous other writers drew attention to the similarity between the chorus of forty men representing the voice of the Holy Spirit staged in the dome of the church and the analogous scene that utilized off-stage voices in Parsifal.111

For a range of critics, however, it was Wagner’s compositional inexperience that doomed the work to failure at Saint-Eustache. Blondel described the work as “the groping of a genius without equal,” while Bruneau’s general disdain for the work called into question the very necessity of performing Das Liebesmahl in the first place: “What good is it to insist on the first tentative steps of great geniuses when their masterpieces

110 A. Boisard, “Chronique musicale: La Terre promise,” Le Monde illustré (24 March 1900): 206. “Dans la première de ces œuvres—œuvre de jeunesse de Wagner—on perçoit le germe des grandes inspiration de l’avenir, et les formes embryonnaires des vigoureuses pages de Tannhäuser et de Lohengrin s’y ébauchent, ainsi que les premiers balbutiements des sublimes scènes religieuses de Parsifal.” The same comparisons were made by multiple other critics. See Réné Benoist, “Les Grands oratorios à l’Eglise Saint-Eustache,” Le Moniteur universel (20 March 1900). “N’ayant à sa disposition que des voix d’hommes—au nombre de douze cents—le maître de la chapelle royale improvisa presque en deux semaines (!) les paroles et la musique de cette scène biblique, très large, et dont il reprit plus tard quelques accents mélodiques dans Tannhauser et Lohengrin.” See also Soubies, “Musique,” Le Soir (20 March 1900). “La mélodie du premier chœur fait penser à celle du chœur des Pèlerins, dans Tannhœuser;” and Louis Schneider, “Musique,” La Paix (16 March 1900). “La Cène des Apôtres, de Wagner, précédait cet oratorio. On y pressent l’auteur de Tannhauser en maints passages des chœurs.”

111 H.L., Le Monde musical (30 March 1900): 90. “Même remarque à propos des chœurs: n’y a t-il pas quelque parenté mélodique et harmonique entre le chœur des Pèlerins, de Tannhauser et celui des disciples?” For comparisons to Parsifal, see Henri de Curzon, “Les Grands oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache,” La Gazette de France (19 March 1900); A. Boisard, “Chronique Musicale,” Le monde illustré (24 March 1900): 206; René Benoist, “Les Grands oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache,” Le Moniteur universel (20 March 1900); Adolphe Jullien, “Revue musicale,” Le Moniteur universel (24 March 1900); Albert Soubies, “Musique,” Le Soir (20 March 1900); Camille Bellaigue, “Les Grands oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache,” Revue des deux mondes (1 April 1900): 931; and Malherbe’s program notes (BnF-Mus.).

227 are enough for our admiration? If we continue, Rienzi, Das Liebesverbot, and Die Feen will soon seriously threaten us.”112 For Hugues Imbert and Pierre Lalo (a notoriously anti-

Wagnerian critic), Wagner’s youthful work was constructed with disjointed melodic and thematic designs that lacked depth and beauty.113 Such writers who blamed the shortcomings of Das Liebesmahl on the composer’s youth often turned one of Wagner’s classic degradations of French music back on the composer himself, describing the lack of melodic interest as Italianate and comparing it to Rienzi rather than to any of his later operas: “The style is that of an Italian opera, as in Rienzi, and the work, when it stops being cold and hardly interesting, results in brilliant effects of a vulgar feeling.”114

Yet Das Liebesmahl as a product of Wagner’s early compositional style made the work ideal for its French premiere at Saint-Eustache. Behind accusations of monotony, dullness, and even Italianism hid the perception that the work was much less threatening than its progeny. Although the work hinted at what was to come in

Tannhäuser (which caused its own problems in Paris in 1861) and in Parsifal (which could only be seen at Bayreuth, given copyright restrictions), it was not viewed as a product of

112 Bruneau, Le Figaro (6 March 1900). “A quoi bon insister sur les tâtonnements des grands génies, quand leurs chefs-d’œuvre suffisent à notre admiration? Si l’on continue, Rienzi, Défense d’aimer et les Fées nous menaceront bientôt sérieusement.”

113 Hugues Imbert, “Les Oratorios à l’Église Saint-Eustache,” Le Guide musical, Vol. 46, No. 22 (25 March 1900): 267. “Ce qui est plus grave, c’est que les thèmes sont sans intérêt, manquent d’élan; cela est décousu.” Pierre Lalo, “La Musique,” Le Temps (20 March 1900). “Et peut-être, après tout, cette monotonie dans la sonorité ne serait-elle pas à ce point accablante, si du moins les idées mélodiques avaient quelque relief et quelque beauté.”

114 Suarès, “Les Grands concerts,” La République française (18 March 1900). “Mais il faut bien avouer que la conviction et l’accent sincère y font défaut: le style est celui de l’opéra italien, à la Rienzi, et l’œuvre, quand elle cesse d’être froide et peu intéressante, aboutit à des effets brillants d’un sentiment assez vulgaire.” In the program note, Malherbe admitted that the work was “stained a bit with Italianism.” (“Le chœur des Disciples forme la dernière partie de l’ouvrage. C’est d’abord un chant expressif et doux, réparti entre les ténors et les basses, tantôt à l’unisson, tantôt à deux et trois parties; la phrase est franchement mélodique, un peu teintée d’italianisme, avec des harmonies et même certains contours dont l’auteur s’est souvenu plus tard dans Tannhœuser et aussi dans Lohengrin...”)

228 the controversial Wagner who had proved so problematic for the Republic.115 It was indeed a “safe” work that as of yet did not bear the marks of Germanic culture and anti-

French ideology that were yet to become so controversial within Republican musical culture.

Das Liebesmahl also lacked the musical and textual elements that made its composer so popular with Péladan and the Rosicrucians during the 1890s—at least, its brand of religion was significantly closer to traditional Catholicism than it was to

Péladan’s mysticism or Wagner’s own in Parsifal. Like Massenet in La Terre promise,

Wagner took his text directly from the Bible. Wagner’s work recounts the Pentecostal narrative in which the Holy Spirit descends upon the twelve disciples as they celebrate the Eucharist, after which he instructs them to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth.

The Catholicized Wagner of Das Liebesmahl found an advocate in the form of Camille

Bellaigue, who admired the work of Wagner’s youth not only for its musical qualities, but also for its religious significance.116 For Bellaigue, the work’s beauty was a product of

“what it announces, what it evokes, and what it signifies” and revealed not only the talent of Wagner’s compositional craft but also, and above all, his “religious genius.” 117

115 See Annegret Fauser, “Debacle at the Paris Opéra: Tannhäuser and the French Critics, 1861,” in Wagner and His World, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Princeton: Princeton Univerisity Press, 2009), 231–34; and Fauser, “‘Cette musique sans tradition’: Wagner’s Tannhäuser and its French Critics.” See also Mark Everist, “Wagner and Paris: The Case of Rienzi (1869),” 19th-Century Music, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Summer 2017): 3–30.

116 Bellaigue, Revue des deux mondes (1 April 1900): 930. “Quoi qu’en puissant dire certains wagnériens, plus wagnériens que Wagner, la Cène des Apôtres est une chose admirable de jeunesse, de force, de grandeur et de clarté.”

117 Ibid., 930–31. “L’œuvre d’abord est belle en soi; elle l’est aussi, peut-être plus encore, d’une beauté qui la dépasse et la déborde, d’une beauté faite de ce qu’elle annonce, de ce qu’elle évoque et de ce qu’elle signifie…C’est ici comme le seuil de l’œuvre future de Wagner et de son génie. De Tannhäuser à Parsifal on peut ici l’entrevoir. Je dis son génie encore plus que son talent ou son métier et surtout, ou seulement, son génie religieux. ”

229 Through the “grand Christian mystery” as portrayed by Das Liebesmahl, Wagner’s genius appeared fully formed:

And above all, here are the men who together eat and drink the body and the blood of the Lord. Thus through the subject, through the material arrangement, sometimes even the harmonic and melodic arrangement of the voices, Das Liebesmahl der Apostel, one of the first of Wagner’s works, announces or joins the last, and the master appears to us entirely complete, consecrating the beginnings and the relics of his genius to the grand Christian mystery.118

Other critics also praised the religious nature of the work: despite his indifference to the first section of the work, Henri de Curzon described the work as one that possessed a

“very religious character” and was “faithful to the Biblical scene.”119 Das Liebesmahl was therefore not a product of the Wagner who would later become so popular in Péladan’s salon—here, the religious nature of the work was entirely “traditional” in nature. If the work’s innocuous musical style could appeal to Republican audiences, the nature of its orthodox religious subject matter erased any threat that Wagner may have posed to the

Church.

The context surrounding the work’s composition was also of interest to multiple journalists and critics. In 1843, Wagner had been named head of the royal court orchestra of Saxony. During the same summer, the choral societies of Saxony were invited to gather in Dresden to take part in a large choral festival for which Wagner was asked to compose an appropriate piece for performance. Given only two weeks in which to complete the work, Wagner chose the text and amassed over 1,200 singers for the

118 Loc. cit. “Et surtout voici des hommes qui mangent et boivent ensemble le corps et le sang du Seigneur. Ainsi par le sujet, par la disposition matérielle, quelquefois même harmonique et mélodique des voix, la Cène des Apôtres, une des premières œuvres de Wagner, annonce ou rejoint la dernière, et le maître nous apparaît tout entier, consacrant les prémices et les reliques de son génie au grand mystère chrétien.”

119 Henri de Curzon, “Les Grands oratorios à l’Église Saint-Eustache,” La Gazette de France (19 March 1900). “C’est une œuvre grandiose, d’un style serré et sévère, un peu longue, surtout dans sa première partie qui est sans accompagnement et variée seulement par les différents groupes de voix, mais d’un caractère vraiment religieux et fidèle à la scène évangélique.”

230 premiere, which took place in Dresden (at the Frauenkirche) on 6 June 1843. According to Glenn Stanley and Ryan Minor, such choral festivals were an immediate and successful forum for the development and propagation of German cultural nationalism.

Through their emphasis on collective, communal performance, participation in men’s choral societies symbolized the nation in its most ideal form.120 Although Katherine R.

Syer broadly describes this type of performance as “secular male-voice choral singing,” the fact that Das Liebesmahl was premiered in a church and would subsequently be performed in churches throughout Germany and France significantly added to the religious aspect of nation-building through male a cappella choral singing.121

The analogous tradition of communal choral singing in France was the orphéon.

From its origins in 1838, the orphéon system was intended to provide “structured leisure for the working and artisan classes.”122 Like their German counterparts, orphéon societies promoted a sense of brotherhood and fraternal community through singing and were viewed throughout the nineteenth century as a vital element in the formation of a national identity through music. By the turn of the twentieth century, supporters of the movement pushed for its reform, primarily through a shift of repertoire from small-

120 See Glenn Stanley, “Parsifal: Redemption and Kunstreligion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 151–75, and Ryan Minor, Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity, and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), especially Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter’s “Germans as the ‘People of Music:’ Genealogy of an Identity,” 1–35, and Bernd Sponheuer’s “Reconstructing Ideal Types of the ‘German’ in Music,” 36–58.

121 Syer, “Unseen Voices: Wagner’s Musical-Dramatic Shaping of the Grail Scene of Act I,” 177. Syer is specifically discussing the off-stage and a cappella voices heard in Parsifal, but she nonetheless likens them to “non-operatic performance,” including that of “secular male-voice choral singing.”

122 Clair Rowden, “Choral Music and Music-Making in France,” 208. See also Jane Fulcher, “The Orphéon Societies: ‘Music For the Workers’ in Second Empire France,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 10, No. 9 (June 1979): 47–56; Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen, and Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 65–70.

231 scale, largely homophonic, a cappella male voice choral works to large-scale works written for both men’s and women’s voices accompanied by orchestra. Reviewers of the

1900 performance of Wagner’s Das Liebesmahl were quick to point out the work’s similarity to earlier works composed for orphéon societies—but not always as a compliment. The writer G. de Boisjoislin was disappointed by the work and described it as an “excessive and orpheonic work that [was] hardly worthy of the grand master of

Parsifal.”123 An anonymous writer for Le Petit Bleu described it as having been “written for something akin to a colossal orpheon contest!”124 While Boisjoslin’s labeling of the work as “orpheonic” was likely not meant to flatter in this context, the critical perception of the work as fitting the French orphéon tradition was ideal for Republican musicians and critics who wanted to revitalize the system and to return it to its former glory as a symbol of French musical and national identity.

D’Harcourt’s choice to program Das Liebesmahl was indeed brilliant. By virtue of its non-threatening nature, the work—especially when paired with La Terre promise— another work that had been divorced from its composer’s reputation as secular and sensual—was configured such that it could function as a display of Parisian cultural superiority by way of both music and religion. Just as the Dresden premiere at the

Frauenkirche imbued Das Liebesmahl’s potential for nation building with a sense of religious significance, its performance in Paris at Saint-Eustache transformed the work

123 G. de Boisjoislin, “Les Grands Oratorios de Saint-Eustache,” La Tribune de Saint-Gervais (April 1900): 128. “La Cène des Apôtres de Wagner, qui complétait, j’allais dire le spectacle, mettons cérémonie, est une œuvre démesurée et orphéonique, qui ne serait guère digne du grand maître de Parsifal si, par instants, on n’y devinait pas sourdre les grands fleuves qui déborderont un jour. C’est une esquisse à ce point de vue intéressante.”

124 Unsigned, “Musique,” Le Petit bleu (March 1900). “La Cène des Apôtres, dont l’exécution précédait celle de La Terre promise, est une scène biblique qui fut écrite en 1843 pour une circonstance spéciale—quelque chose comme un concours d’orphéon monstre!”

232 from a potential political and religious minefield into an example of music for the people—a “people” that included Republicans and traditional Catholics alike.

Saint-Eustache, the Republic, and the Church

Despite the overall popularity of their initiative, d’Harcourt and de Bertier’s Société des

Grands Oratorios was short-lived, for “Les Grands Oratorios à l’Eglise Saint-Eustache” was the only series given under the umbrella of the larger organization. From a broader ideological perspective, however, the work of d’Harcourt and de Bertier’s society played a much more significant role. Little is known as to the motivation behind their society’s formation, but it can be argued that, given d’Harcourt’s history as the founder of the

“Concerts éclectiques populaires d’Harcourt” and the Salle d’Harcourt, the conductor’s goal was to form a successful society that could rival those of Pasdeloup, Lamoureux, and Colonne, all conductors whose successes greatly overshadowed any that d’Harcourt had previously experienced. D’Harcourt’s performance of Handel’s Messiah, Berlioz’s

Requiem, and Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion at Saint-Eustache supports this interpretation: each had been previously performed to great acclaim by either Pasdeloup, Lamoureux, or Colonne, and the potential to perform the same works to even greater praise was likely an appealing factor in d’Harcourt’s decision.125

Critics, however, did not read d’Harcourt’s short-lived society and his performances at Saint-Eustache as a ploy to outshine successful colleagues. Instead,

125 Lamoureux’s Société de l’Harmonie sacrée first performed Messiah on 19 November 1873 at the Cirque d’Hiver and revived it in 1896 at the Cirque des Champs-Elysées. Edouard Colonne programmed Berlioz’s Requiem four times in 1878 (17, 21, and 31 March and 21 April) and again on 16 December 1894 at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Pasdeloup presented excerpts from Saint Matthew Passion on 7 May 1868 at the Panthéon; on 31 March 1874, Lamoureux played excerpts from the same work (along with selections from Messiah) at the Cirque des Champs-Elysées. The first full performance of the work in Paris was given by La Concordia, Henriette Fuchs’s choral society, on 16 May 1888.

233 these concerts were hailed as an impressive effort to strengthen France’s choral tradition, and d’Harcourt was congratulated for producing a series of concerts that had rekindled the hope for a great French rival to similar concerts in Germany and England.

If Lamoureux’s attempt at revitalizing Messiah in 1896 resulted in “little more than press nostalgia,” as Katharine Ellis described it, d’Harcourt’s was much more.126 Writers often quoted critics who reviewed Lamoureux and Edouard Colonne’s concerts, including

Arthur Pougin who, after Lamoureux’s triumphant 1873 performance of Messiah, encouraged musicians to follow in the conductor’s footsteps to

…form amateur societies, men or women, teach them musically, subject them to suitable studies, compose a repertoire, and enable them to take part in the performance of great works; then, link these diverse societies through an intellectual and moral bond and the love of art. Join them together occasionally and, through their reunion, obtain educated vocal masses, capable and always ready to do well.127

Amateur music-making was, according to Pougin’s 1873 program, the remedy needed in order to elevate France to the level of its German neighbor. Twenty-seven years later, the critic R. Brunel was hopeful that d’Harcourt’s series would continue in that tradition.128

Although Suarès, the music critic for La Republique française, was generally displeased with the quality of the performance of the Saint Matthew Passion, he recognized the impact that d’Harcourt’s broader efforts could have on French music, even if the conductor had come up short in his interpretation of Bach: “The performance was

126 Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 232.

127 Quoted in R. Brunel, “Le Messie,” L’Estafette (20 January 1900). “M. Pougin se plaignait, avec raison que, faute d’éléments suffisants, nous ne puissions procéder à l’exécution régulière des grandes œuvres de musique chorale qui sont la gloire de l’école allemande. ‘Fonder des sociétés d’amateurs, hommes ou femmes, les instruire musicalement, leur faire de saines études, leur composer un répertoire et les mettre à même de prendre part à l’exécution des grandes œuvres; rattacher ensuite ces diverses sociétés par un lien intellectuel et moral, l’amour de l’art; les réunir à l’occasion et obtenir par leur réunion des masses vocales instruites, capables et toujours prêtes à bien faire.’”

128 Loc. cit. “Puisse l’entreprise de M. d’Harcourt ne pas rester isolée et produire des effets durables.”

234 certainly not as good as those that are given almost every year in Germany or those in

Brussels by Mr. Gevaert of which I spoke just now. However, we must recognize the considerable effort made by Mr. d’Harcourt and his collaborators to put on a work that goes well beyond the habits and means of musical performances in France.”129 According to Camille Bellaigue, the French choral tradition was merely “child’s play” in the shadow of the Germans.130

For Gaston Carraud, there was one primary reason as to why France’s choral societies had fallen behind those of other European countries: the oratorio as a genre had, in his opinion, been largely neglected by French composers, conductors, and musicians. According to Carraud, this gap was due in large part to a lack of proper choral education and the necessary patience that would be required to teach such large-scale works.131 Thus de Bertier and d’Harcourt’s “bold initiative” was to be praised.132 An

129 Suarès, “Les Grands concerts,” La République française (n.d.). “L’exécution ne vaut pas assurément celles qui en sont données presque chaque année, en Allemagne, ni celles de Bruxelles dont je parlais tout à l’heure à propos de M. Gevaert. Il faut cependant reconnaître l’effort considérable fait, par M. d’Harcourt et ses collaborateurs, pour monter une œuvre qui dépasse de beaucoup les habitudes et les moyens des exécutions musicales en France.”

130 Camille Bellaigue, “Les ‘Grands Oratorios’ à l’église Saint-Eustache,” Revue des deux mondes (1 March 1900): 934. “Et alors, auprès de ce qu’ils font de musique et pour la musique, il semble que ce que nous faisons nous-mêmes ne soit que jeux de petits enfants.”

131 Gaston Carraud, “Les Grands oratorios à Saint-Eustache,” La Liberté (19 January 1900). “C’est ainsi, du moins, qu’en toutes les villes d’Allemagne et d’Angleterre des exécutions fréquentes de tels chefs-d’œuvre élèvent et épurent le goût du public et rappellent les musiciens au plus haut respect de leur art. Chez nous, l’oratorio reste à peu près ignoré. Il y a deux raisons à cela, dont aucune n’est à notre honneur. A la première, nous ne saurions que faire: les organisateurs de semblables auditions ne trouvent pas, comme chez nos voisins, toutes prêtes à leur donner assistance, des sociétés chorales ou orchestrales d’amateurs, exercées et nombreuses; et l’on ne peut se faire une idée de ce que représente de patience, de volonté et de ténacité la réunion des éléments d’une exécution semblable. On aime peut-être la musique en France: mais on n’y est pas musicien. Il faudrait des siècles d’éducation pour y changer quelque chose.” Carraud went on to cite Paris’s lack of a satisfactory concert hall as a second reason for this problem; such was a frequent point of contention between Parisian critics and had been even in 1889 as that year’s World’s Fair was being planned and executed: “Nous pourrions, en revanche, supprimer aisément le second motif, qui rend si difficiles à Paris les grandes auditions musicales. Et n’est-il pas honteux, en vérité, que la Ville-Lumière ne possède pas une seule salle de concert? car nous ne saurions compter comme telles, n’est-ce pas? ni la souricière du Conservatoire, ni le gouffre du Trocadéro.”

132 Loc. cit. “Remercions donc M. Christian de Bertier de son initiative hardie.”

235 anonymous writer for Le Petit Bleu echoed Carraud’s sentiment and dreamed of the long- term impact that the Société des Grands Oratorios might have: “May its success encourage its director, Mr. Christian de Bertier, and his courageous conductor, Mr.

Eugène d’Harcourt, to continue their beautiful work of such a noble and high impact!”133

The fact that these performances took place at Saint-Eustache thus offered the potential for a sacralization of the French secular choral tradition that many French musicians, composers, and critics—Republican or otherwise—were so keen to revive.

Despite the Church’s concerns that “Les Grands oratorios à l’Eglise Saint-Eustache” signaled a threat of secularization, the narratives created by critics in the press revealed the fluidity of the Church/State binary at the end of the nineteenth century. Through their participation in the controversy unleashed by the Archbishop of Paris and Senator

Fabre, critics configured the church as a space through which musical performances could reflect a distinctly Republican identity to an ideologically diverse audience. By the same token, it was as much the music itself that contributed to this process as it was the physical space in which the concerts took place. By programming works like Messiah that had been appropriated as a symbol of the Republic alongside works such as La Terre promise, d’Harcourt’s concert programs became carefully curated displays not only of musical taste, but also of Ralliement ideology, demonstrating that France’s connection with the church was as much a part of its present as it was its heritage. Through the convergence of the “emotive force of the music”, the ‘lexical dimension” of easily politicized texts, and the physical space of the church itself, d’Harcourt’s programs were

133 “Musique,” Le Petit Bleu (n.d.). “La Société des grands oratorios a bien mérité de l’art. Puisse son succès encourager son directeur, M. Christian de Bertier, et son vaillant chef d’orchestre, M. Eugène d’Harcourt, à continuer leur belle œuvre, de portée si noble et si haute!”

236 deemed appropriately religious by traditionally conservative Catholic critics—but they simultaneously catered directly to anticlerical Republicans.134 Much to the Church’s chagrin, the church of Saint-Eustache thus became a key site in dismantling the polarizing dichotomy between Church and State as d’Harcourt’s concerts enacted a series of reconfigurations that allowed the Republic to retain its Catholic roots, embrace its modernity, and identify itself as a Republic that was simultaneously sacred and secular.

134 Here I draw from Jane Fulcher’s arguments in “The Concert as Political Propaganda in France and the Control of ‘Performative Context’,” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Spring 1998): 41–67 (at 41) and from Jann Pasler in “Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology.”

237

CHAPTER FOUR

The (Republican) Church Universal: The Official Concerts at the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris

As Paris prepared to host the 1900 Exposition Universelle, a flood of guides, pamphlets, and newspaper features inundated visitors and Parisians with advertisements for displays, theaters, and events that they could expect to encounter while there. While technological marvels, art works, and musical performances were standard fare, one writer’s sardonic account described curious pavilions that housed displays of “Paradise, Purgatory, and

Hell…Saint Bartholomew’s harquebuses, the sulfurous miters of the Inquisition, and Joan of Arc’s stake.” Amongst other attractions, , these pavilions included a shop where rosaries, indulgences, and Masses could be purchased, along with “holy liquors” at the neighboring bar, and boasted a sampling of various sorts of monks and nuns.1 The writer did not refer to satirical theatrical productions or quasi-religious street fairs. Instead, the attractions so wryly described by the author were the first official, state-sponsored

Catholic pavilions to appear at a Parisian Exposition, the opening of which—by the

1 A.G., “Œuvres Catholiques,” L’Aurore (27 April 1900). “La religion catholique a obtenu (à quel titre?) deux emplacements dans l’Exposition: un au Champ-de-Mars, l’autre au Trocadéro. Elle y exposera ses œuvres. On verra là, sans doute, le Paradis, le Purgatoire et l’Enfer. On y pourra admirer les arquebuses de la Saint- Barthélemy, les mitres soufrées de l’Inquisition, le bûcher de Jeanne d’Arc. On y montrera peut-être un échantillon de chaque sorte de moines, de nonnes, de bonnes sœurs et de chers frères…Un comptoir de dégustation sera ouvert où ne seront servies que les saintes et savoureuses liqueurs des distilleries monacales. Dans le comptoir d’à côté, on vendra des chapelets, des indulgences et des messes.”

238 Archbishop of Paris, no less—constituted a “triumph for the Holy Trinity” and a defeat for the “secular Republic.”2

But how “secular” was the Republic at the Exposition? One of the Catholic pavilions was located on the Champ de Mars, where visitors could find displays of

Catholic “treasures”—works of art, literature, and the like—as well as exhibitions that focused on Catholic education. The other, erected in the Salle des Fêtes at the Trocadéro, was dedicated to furthering the Church’s evangelical mission around the globe—or at least, in the French colonies.3 Yet both the Champ de Mars and the Trocadéro were sites that ran rife with secular Republican symbolism. The Champ de Mars had long been associated with Revolutionary celebrations and military victory—its significance as the nexus of activity at the 1889 Exposition had inscribed both the venue and the event “in the long tradition of Republican and Imperial celebrations and earlier fairs of the nineteenth century,” and its legacy was anything but lost on the Parisian public and its international visitors.4 Writing in 1900, the historian Ernest Maindron spoke of the site in an almost reverential manner, evoking memories of “reverberations of the many events in the

2 Loc. cit. “Pour l’inauguration de ces pieuses exhibitions et de ce dévot commerce, Son Éminence Monseigneur Richard, cardinal archevêque de Paris, et ses chanoines ont résolu, paraît-il, de défiler en procession, avec croix, bannières, cantiques, prières solennelles et sermon. Ce sera bien plus beau, bien plus épatant que le cortège officiel du 14 avril. Enfoncés Loubet, ses ministres et la laïque République! La vraie ouverture de l’Exposition de 1900 sera faite par des évêques accourus de tous les diocèses de France. Quel triomphe pour la sainte Trinité!”

3 The exposition of Catholic works at the Exposition was divided into three categories: Économie sociale (Classes 101, 108, 109, and 112), Enseignement (Classes 1–6), and Colonisation (Classe 113). The commission in charge of Catholic works originally hoped to have a third pavilion at Lake Daumesnil in the Bois de Vincennes, but the three categories were ultimately displayed at the Champ de Mars and at the Trocadéro. For more detailed information about the organization of Catholic works, see Les Nouvelles de l’Exposition: La participation des œuvres catholiques à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900. Rapport général et documents (Paris: F. Levé, 1900).

4 Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 9. For more on the significance of the Champ de Mars, particularly as it concerns its association with world’s fairs, see Alexander C. T. Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Exhibitions in fin-de-siècle Europe (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 65–70.

239 history of civilization that took place in the Champ de Mars [that] indissolubly link it with the nation.”5 The Trocadéro likewise had a history as a Republican symbol. Constructed for the 1878 World’s Fair, it was the venue for all musical events that took place at the 1878 and 1889 fairs, and it would again host the official musical offerings in 1900. In 1889, Alfred

Bruneau (a vocal anticleric) labeled the Salle des Fêtes the “official temple” in which the music of the Republic would be performed—a sacralization of secular art.6

Like its predecessors in 1878 and 1889, the Exposition of 1900 acted as a microcosm of Republican ideological and cultural preoccupations such that the displays functioned as much as mirrors of domestic contention as they did as beacons displaying carefully curated images of national fraternity and unity—concerns that were, in 1900, directly linked to the salvaging of the nation’s image at the height of the Dreyfus Affair.7 In 1894, the wrongful accusation of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French military, led to an indictment on charges of espionage by a military tribunal. Political, cultural, and religious divides deepened as the French took sides on the matter. Even after exculpatory evidence was introduced in 1896, the “affair” served as a flashpoint for conflicts between the political and religious left and right. Amidst this tense environment, however, the carefully crafted vision put forth by the Republic at the Exposition Universelle in 1900 relied heavily on transformations of the Catholic Church for the formation of a cohesive

Republican identity such that the Church was present in its displays, theaters, and

5 Quoted in Geppert, Fleeting Cities, 68–69. The translation of Maindron’s original French text is Geppert’s.

6 Quoted in Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 17, n. 8.

7 For an in-depth study of various ideologies at play at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, see Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. For a brief discussion of the Exposition Universelle of 1900, see Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Identity from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 35–48.

240 concerts in a way that it had not been either in 1878 or in 1889. Even the very schedule of events suggests that the Revolutionary conception of the Republic in the eleven years since the previous Exposition had been transformed: whereas the opening date in 1889 coincided with the centenary of the 1789 Estates-General, in 1900, the opening was intentionally set to take place on Easter Sunday.8

While the Church was prominently displayed at the Catholic pavilions, it had a distinct musical presence as well. On the one hand, Charles Bordes’s Chanteurs de Saint-

Gervais regularly performed at the church of Saint-Julien-des-Ménétriers as part of the reconstructed Vieux Paris. On the other hand, the stage of the Salle des Fêtes at the

Trocadéro became what Katharine Ellis has called a “secular cathedral” by aligning the ideology of the Republic with the Church through the programs of the official concerts

(concerts officiels).9 As had been the case in 1878 and 1889, the goal of the official concerts was to promote specifically Republican ideals through music. Yet in 1900, these ideals had transformed into a secular construction of Frenchness that absorbed Catholicism as a foundational trait of national identity. In this chapter, I argue that the concerts officiels promoted an unprecedented synthesis of Republican ideology and the Catholic church.

Whereas Jane Fulcher claims that the musical programs at the 1900 Exposition were chosen deliberately as a means of establishing a Republican and, by extension, anticlerical, canon of French music that stood in opposition to the Schola Cantorum, I

8 Exposition universelle Internationale de 1900 à Paris: Actes organiques, (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1895), 22. “Titre 1er. Éléments constitutifs. La date d’ouverture des précédentes expositions a varié du 1er avril au 15 mai. En 1889, des considérations d’ordre politique ont conduit à la fixer au lendemain, de la fête commémorative de l’ouverture des États généraux de 1789, c’est-à-dire au 6 mai. Pour l’Exposition de 1900, on choisirait le 15 avril, jour de Pâques, afin de profiter du mouvement de visiteurs qui se produira inévitablement à cette époque de l’année.”

9 Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 85.

241 view the programs not as nostalgic emblems of a Revolutionary past nor as attacks against the political and religious right, but rather as a site of transformation at which the

Republic coopted Catholicism as an indispensable aspect of its own French identity.10

Although the Church was not represented in any official capacity either on the musical planning commission or on the concert programs themselves, the repertoire performed throughout the ten official concerts created a narrative that centered itself around a sense of reconciliation between the Church and the State. Despite an official mandate that forbade the performance of any music with a political character on state-sponsored concerts, works like Théodore Dubois’s oratorio Le Baptême de Clovis and Gabriel Pierné’s

L’An mil, an apocalyptic “symphonic poem with choir,” situated the Church at the core of the Republican image.11 In the heart of Paris, the stage of the Trocadéro played host to a significant and unexpected portion of explicitly religious music. Mediated through actors deployed by the state apparatus on an international stage, these concerts helped transform the Catholic Church into an integrated facet of French Republicanism.

Setting the Stage: Opening Celebrations

Three years after the close of the great Revolutionary fair of 1889, a presidential decree dated 13 July 1892 proclaimed that a world’s fair would take place in Paris in 1900.12 The next year, on 9 September 1893, two additional announcements followed: one that outlined

10 Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, 35. Fulcher refers to the concerts officiels as the “Republic’s first riposte to the Schola Cantorum.”

11 Auditions musicales: Règlement général (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1899), 9. “Art. 31: Aucun morceau de musique ayant un caractère politique ne figurera sur les programmes qui seront d'ailleurs soumis à la Commission des auditions musicales...Les paroles contraires à la morale et aux convenances ou ayant un caractère politique quelconque seront un motif absolu d'exclusion pour les morceaux présentés.”

12 For thorough studies of the origins of the 1900 Exposition Universelle, see Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900: The Great World’s Fair (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), and Jean-Christophe Mabire, ed., L’Exposition Universelle de 1900 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000).

242 the administrative organization of the Exposition, and another that named Alfred Picard as its commissaire général. By 1895, official guidelines for the Exposition’s organization had been published by the government.13 In his 1895 report to the President of the Republic,

Jules Roche, the Minister of Industry and Commerce, claimed that even before the doors had been closed on the fair in 1889, exhibitors and visitors alike were already envisioning

France’s next triumph.14

As the Exposition of 1900 was set to open to the public, however, members of the press clamored to cover yet another controversy initiated by François-Marie-Benjamin-

Richard de la Vergne (Cardinal Richard), the Archbishop of Paris. The press coverage was wide-ranging and varied. While many writers reported on Cardinal Richard’s conspicuous absence from the Exposition’s inaugural Mass, held on 14 April (Holy Saturday), others focused on the presence of one Father Stéphen Coubé, a Jesuit priest who delivered the homily.15 Some writers maintained that Cardinal Richard’s absence was the product of bad timing: as the Archbishop of Paris, his numerous duties on Holy Saturday demanded that he decline the government’s invitation to preside over the inaugural ceremonies.16 But

13 Mandell, Paris 1900, 34. Alfred Picard served as the rapporteur général for the 1889 Exposition.

14 Jules Roche, “Décret instituant l’Exposition Universelle de 1900,” Actes organiques, 1. “A l’heure même où l’Exposition universelle de 1889 fermait ses portes en pleine apothéose, exposants et visiteurs se donnaient instinctivement rendez-vous à Paris pour l’année 1900. Encore sous l’impression du spectacle imposant dont ils venaient d’être les acteurs ou les témoins, ils se demandaient déjà par quelles merveilles le génie de la France et de ses hôtes pourrait, sinon faire oublier l’éclat des grandes assises du Centenaire, du moins inaugurer dignement le XXe siècle et marquer ainsi la nouvelle étape franchie dans la marche en avant de la civilisation contemporaine.”

15 See Albert Duléry-Reyval, Le Père Coubé, 1857–1938 (Paris: P. Tequi et fils, 1939). Chapter 14 (pp. 62–64) focuses on the 1900 Exposition Universelle and contains excerpts of Father Coubé’s homily. I have styled Coubé’s first name, Stéphen, after Duléry-Reyval rather than adopting the more traditional Stéphane.

16 Unsigned, “Pas de Conflit,” La Croix (29–30 April 1900). “S. Em. le cardinal Richard a été invité personnellement ainsi qu’une délégation du clergé à l’inauguration de l’Exposition. Il a eu le regret d’être obligé de se faire excuser tout en remerciant, en raison des cérémonies ou autres obligations du Samedi- Saint auxquelles ni le cardinal, ni ses prêtres ne pouvaient manquer d’officier ou d’assister. ” See also Unsigned, “Un prétend conflit,” Le Matin (28 April 1900). “Cette nouvelle est aussi inexacte que la première: le cardinal Richard avait reçu une invitation personnelle et une autre pour la délégation du clergé. Mais, en

243 numerous other commentators took the more sensational angle, claiming that Father

Coubé’s presence was a slight directed at René Waldeck-Rousseau, the Minister of

Religion, who had allegedly neglected to request the Archbishop’s attendance and participation in the first place.17 As an act of revenge, some claimed, the official opening of the Exposition by a Jesuit priest constituted an outright defiance of Waldeck-Rousseau’s recent mandate that prohibited bishops from inviting priests from unauthorized religious orders—such as the Jesuits—to speak in their respective dioceses.18

Writing in response to the organizational snafu, an anonymous critic castigated

Cardinal Richard’s decision to invite Father Coubé, claiming that his actions carried with

raison des cérémonies et des obligations religieuses que retenaient des prêtres le samedi saint—jour de l’inauguration—ni le cardinal ni les membres du clergé n’ont pu se rendre à la cérémonie et s’étaient fait excuser en remerciant de l’invitation.” Compare Unsigned, “Le Conflit entre M. Waldeck-Rousseau et le Cardinal Richard,” Le Voltaire (28 April 1900). “En effet, le journal dit: ‘l’archevêque de Paris, mécontent d’avoir été exclu de la cérémonie officielle du 15 avril, aurait, etc.’ Or, rien n’est plus faux, attendu que le cardinal a été invité officiellement, comme tous les corps constitués, et il a même accusé réception de cette invitation. Ce premier point de l’information étant faux, le reste ne doit guère être plus vrai.”

17 Unsigned, “Un Conflit,” L’Éclair (29 April 1900). “La tradition était aussi qu’il fut invité. Il a été oublié, cette fois, et volontairement, à ce qu’on assure, le gouvernement craignant de manifestations.” See also “Mgr Richard et le gouvernement,” L’Echo de Paris (28 April 1900). “Le cardinal, qui a été très affecté de son exclusion lors de l’inauguration officielle du 14 avril, se montre plus froissé encore de voir le gouvernement s’opposer au projet dont il lui a fait part.” According to a pastoral letter written by Cardinal Richard, he was in fact asked to deliver the Exposition’s inaugural mass. See Lettre Pastorale de Son Éminence Cardinal Richard, Archevêque de Paris, ordonnant des prières publiques pour la France de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900 (Paris: F. Levé, 1900), 4. “Plusieurs des représentants les plus honorables du commerce et de l’industrie sont venus nous demander de prescrire des prières à l’occasion de l’ouverture de l’Exposition.” He had, in fact, been asked to participate in the service at some point prior to 28 February 1900, as evidenced by a letter written to his secretary, Abbé Lefèvre, by an unknown author dated 28 February 1900. “Pour la messe (ou cérémonie religieuse) à l’occasion de l’ouverture de l’Exposition, quel jour, Son Eminence, la fait-elle à Paris? Est-ce le 29 Avril, ou un autre jour?” Archives historiques de l’Archevêché de Paris, Series 1 D 9.

18 This action was part of a bill that Waldeck-Rousseau had presented to Parliament on 14 November 1899 that would later be known as the famous Association Law in 1901. See, for example, Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 219, William Fortescue, The Third Republic in France, 1870–1940 (London: Routledge, 2000), 75, and Alain Boyer’s preface to Jacqueline Lalouette and Jean- Pierre Machelon, eds., Les congrégations hors de la loi? Autour de la loi du 1er juillet 1901 (Paris: Letouzet et Ané, 2002), 9. For a general discussion of the Jesuits’ relationship with both the Catholic Church and the French government, see Murat Akan, “The Institutional Politics of Laïcité in the French Third Republic,” in The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 53–56.

244 them a “hatred for our Republican institutions.”19 As an obvious supporter of Waldeck-

Rousseau’s anticlerical policies, the writer’s remark hints that this conflict might be read as a portent for Church-State relations to come at the Exposition. Despite his penchant for conservatism, however, Cardinal Richard embraced the Exposition Universelle. In his comments, he echoed the words of Pope Leo XIII, who was eager for the Catholic public to take part in the Exposition’s celebration of the Republic. According to Leo XIII, the world’s fair was an ideal opportunity to “reestablish the ancient union of Christianity.”20 To

Cardinal Richard, the unity of Christianity was an essential tool for the fight against materialistic pleasures not unlike those that would be valorized at the Exposition; he also argued that the wonders of “faith, piety, and charity” were no less great than the “marvels of science and industry.”21 He urged the faithful to work towards the Pope’s ideal of unity at the Exposition, whether at the Catholic pavilion or elsewhere, even seeking (and receiving) an exemption from the Pope from the traditional fasting during the season of

Pentecost for Catholics in the diocese of Paris so as to make their mission a bit more bearable.22

19 Unsigned, “Le Défi de l’Archevêque,” Le Signal (26 April 1900). “M. l’archevêque de Paris est un homme sage et prévoyant; il a, plus qu’aucun de ses collègues de l’épiscopat français, la haine de nos institutions républicaines, mais il ne la dépense pas, comme les autres, trop prodigues, en prônes, en lettres et en mandements: c’est pour ses actes qu’il la réserve.”

20 Cardinal Richard, Lettre Pastorale de Son Éminence Cardinal Richard, 4. “Tous, nous dit Léon XIII, apportons notre concours pour rétablir l’antique union de la chrétienté.”

21 Cardinal Richard, Lettre Pastorale de Son Éminence Cardinal Richard, 7. “Puissent les prières que nous allons faire au début de l’Exposition universelle obtenir la réalisation du vœu formé par nous, il y a quelques jours, dans Notre Lettre du Carême: que l’Exposition devienne une prédication pour beaucoup d’âmes qui, attirées à Paris par la curiosité, découvriront â côté des merveilles de la science et de l’industrie des merveilles non moins grandes de foi, de piété et de charité!”

22 Pastoral Letter from Cardinal Richard, dated 31 July 1900, AN F/19/2558. “Le Souverain Pontife, prenant en considération les graves difficultés que présente cette année à Paris l’observation de la loi du jeûne et de l’abstinence, a bien voulu m’accorder la faculté d’en dispenser la veille et les trois jours des Quatre-Temps de la Pentecôte. Le concours extraordinaire des étrangers et des habitants de la province qui avait lieu, à l’occasion de cette fête, pour la visite de l’Exposition universelle, rendait, en effet, moralement impossible le jeûne et l’abstinence à Paris. Les mêmes raisons se présentent pour la veille de l’Assomption et les trois jours

245 Father Coubé’s homily at the inaugural mass likewise branded the Exposition’s events as a means of reconciliation. Basing his words firmly in Ralliement-rich rhetoric,

Coubé was explicit in his insistence that the church was not opposed to Republican ideals of modernity. In his words, work, science, and art were each blessed by the Church: work by virtue of its redemptive and thus moralizing power, and science and art by their potential to render back to God what once was his.23 He welcomed the display of artistic and scientific riches and proclaimed that “the Church will neither be jealous nor worried, if you do not forget God!”24 For Father Coubé, then, the opening of the Exhibition provided a noteworthy opportunity for conciliation between the Church and the

Republic—here, Republican progress and a belief in God were not wholly incompatible.

Following the inaugural mass, the festivities continued at the opening ceremony, during which speeches by both Jules Roche, the Minister of Commerce and Industry, and the President of the Republic, Émile Loubet, were interspersed with performances of La

Marseillaise, Jules Massenet’s Marche solennelle, Camille Saint-Saëns’s Hymne à Victor Hugo, and Théodore Dubois’s Marche héroïque.25 Solidarity through morality was the main emphasis of Roche and Loubet’s speeches, ostensibly in an effort to allay the effects of the

des Quatre-Temps, 19, 21 et 22 septembre. Je me suis de nouveau adressé au Saint-Père qui m’a donné, par une Lettre du Cardinal Secrétaire d’État, les mêmes pouvoirs que pour les fêtes de la Pentecôte. En conséquence, nous accordons la dispense générale du jeûne et de l’abstinence dans tout le diocèse de Paris, la veille de l’Assomption, 14 août, et les trois jours des Quatre-Temps 19, 21 et 22 septembre.”

23 Unsigned, “Le Discours du P. Coubé,” Annales Catholiques (12 May 1900): 316. “L’Église bénit le travail, car c’est la grande loi de l’expiation et du rachat, qui moralise, ennoblit, réhabilite…L’Église bénit la science et l’art, car elle sait que son Dieu s’est appelé lui-même le Dieu des sciences…le grand art rend le génie plus humble en lui montrant dans la beauté finie une apparition de la beauté incréée qui le terrasse et l’éblouit.”

24 Ibid., 317. “Venez donc, ô savants, ô artistes de tous les pays du monde, élevez des pavillons magnifiques pour y exposer vos chefs-d’œuvre. C’est votre création à vous: regardez-la avec ce sourire d’amour que Dieu avait pour la sienne quand il la proclamait bonne et belle. L’Église ne sera ni jalouse ni inquiète, si vous n’oubliez pas Dieu!”

25 The program of the inaugural ceremony was printed in L’Autorité on 15 April 1900.

246 Dreyfus Affair. For Roche, the ability of opposing forces, whether political or religious, to work side by side in solidarity was the “key to moral greatness,” and his call for progress through cooperation took on a quasi-religious tone when he claimed that “death itself retreats before the victorious march of the human spirit.”26 In his words, the Exposition was an event from which not only the material but also the “moral conditions of modern life” would emerge.27 But if, according to Roche, moral virtue was a result of solidarity, then for Loubet, “moral conscience” raised human creations to the “most elevated form of beauty.”28 On that Holy Saturday, then, the tone was set for the Exposition Universelle overall. For Father Coubé, the Exposition was an opportunity for the Church and the

Republic to reconcile with one another, while for the French government, the greatest dividend to the Republic—spearheaded by the Church—would be the moral-building quality of the World’s Fair.

“L’Exposition de la Musique de 1900”

At the Exposition, musical performances fell under one of three categories: concerts by foreign choral societies; recitals given by brass bands and orphéon societies; and the state- subsidized concerts officiels, which included orchestra concerts, organ recitals, and

26 Unsigned, “L’Exposition,” Annales Catholiques (21 April 1900): 151. “Pendant que croissent à l’infini l’intensité et la puissance de la vie, la mort elle-même recule devant la marche victorieuse de l’esprit humaine.”

27 Jules Roche, “Décret instituant l’Exposition universelle de 1900,” in Actes organiques, 7. “Toutes les branches de l’activité humaine tireront un égal profit de ce bilan d’où se dégageront les conditions matérielles et morales de la vie contemporaine… L’Exposition de 1900 constituera la synthèse, déterminera la philosophie du XIXe siècle.”

28 Unsigned, “L’Exposition,” Annales Catholiques (21 April 1900): 153. “La forme la plus élevée du beau n’est pas de celles qu’on peut indiquer par des numéros sur un catalogue: visible seulement pour la conscience morale, elle se trouve réalisée, lorsque des intelligences supérieures et diverses, groupant leurs efforts, sont animées comme les machines de nos galeries par un grand moteur commun: le sentiment de la solidarité.”

247 chamber-music performances.29 For Roche and, by extension, the French government, a positive Republican image included both a strong sense of progress and an acknowledgement of the Republic’s heritage. French achievement was to be displayed both through tangible, physical objects as well as through cultural products such as music.

Thus the question of how to present and program the concerts officiels became a matter of utmost importance. According to a decree set forth on 4 August 1894, the organization of all musical concerts was to be governed by separate planning committees with their own sets of regulations, ostensibly so that they could be governed by musical specialists who would see to it that French music was represented in the best possible manner.30

Notwithstanding the significance given to the concerts officiels, the commission charged with their organization—the Commission des Auditions Musicales—was formed rather late, only in December 1899. Although Picard received numerous letters from composers and critics offering their assistance and service on the commission (among them the music historian Julien Tiersot and the composer André Wormser), a letter was sent on 27 November 1899 from Henry Roujon to Picard that listed the final commission.31

Among its twenty-three members were the Parisian musical elite: in addition to the illustrious names of Théodore Dubois, Jules Massenet, and Camille Saint-Saëns (all three

29 According to a handwritten document at the AN (AN F/12/4385), the state allotted 300,000 francs for the organization and execution of the official concerts. (“Les auditions musicales officielles, pour l’exécution desquelles un crédit de 300,000 fr. a été voté et qui formeront, pour ainsi dire, l’Exposition de la Musique de 1900.”) The concerts officiels ultimately included four concerts with vocal or instrumental solos (accompanied by orchestra) and six concerts with orchestra, soloists, and choirs.

30 “Décret du 4 août 1894 portant règlement général pour l’Exposition Universelle de 1900. Titre premier: Éléments constitutifs—organisation générale des services,” Actes organiques, 37. “Art. 5. Des exposition spéciales (exposition historique de l’art ancien, exposition anthropologique et ethnographique, etc.), des concours (concours de machines agricoles, concours d’animaux vivants, etc.), des auditions musicales et des congrès compléteront l’Exposition universelle de 1900 et feront l’objet de règlements spéciaux.”

31 Letter from Henry Roujon to Alfred Picard, dated 27 November 1899. AN F/21/4064.

248 were, by 1900, members of the Institut de France), there were three further members of the

Institut (Charles Lenepveu, Émile Paladilhe, and Ernest Reyer), nine more composers

(Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray, Alfred Bruneau, Eugène Gigout, Vincent d’Indy, Victorin

Joncières, Georges Marty, Gabriel Pierné, Samuel Rousseau, and Paul Vidal), five professors at the Paris Conservatoire (Gabriel Fauré, Alexandre Guilmant, Raoul Pugno,

Émile Réty, and Charles-Marie Widor), and various high-ranking government officials.32

The delay in forming the planning commission, however, made many composers and critics nervous. Given that a similar commission had been established two years in advance of the 1889 Exposition, the ongoing lack of an organizational body for 1900 appeared to some members of the Parisian musical scene as if music’s role had diminished in comparison to previous fairs.33 Members of the Société des Compositeurs de Musique began working as early as April 1897 to secure a space for musical performances and, on 8

March 1898, addressed a letter to Roujon that outlined the steps that already been taken and the lack of sufficient provisions on the part of Picard and other high-ranking organizational officials.34 They expressed their concern to Roujon by drawing his attention to the “perils” that would befall French music if proper provisions were not made for

32 Arrêté du Ministre de l’Instruction Publique et des Beaux-Arts, AN F/21/4064. Additional members of the commission included Adrien Bernheim, Commissaire du Gouvernement près des théâtres subventionnés, Eugène Deschapelles, chef du bureau des théâtres, and Paul Taffanel, the principal conductor of the Opéra (Académie Nationale de musique). The categories into which each member of the commission is placed above corresponds to their classification on the official decree; several of them fall into more than one category.

33 The French government created the Commission des Auditions Musicales for the 1889 Exposition in 1887, a full two years prior to its opening. See Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 15.

34 Unsigned letter to Henry Roujon, Directeur des Beaux-Arts, dated 8 March 1898, AN F/21/4064. The letter traces their steps toward securing a performance venue. In their 12 April 1897 meeting, the Société decided to request that Picard reserve the Palais des Beaux-Arts des Champs-Elysées for any official musical performance; they later decided to request a personal audience with Picard, which was granted on 17 May 1897. One week later, Léon Gastinel was scheduled to meet with the architect of the Palais, M. Girauld. According to the letter, no action had been taken as of 8 March 1898.

249 concerts and other performances.35 The composer Léon Gastinel soon followed suit, pointedly accusing Picard of valuing painting, sculpture, and architecture above musical performance at the Exposition.36 While the concerns of the Société des Compositeurs de

Musique specifically addressed the request for an officially designated space in a newly constructed hall, the fear that music’s role in the Exposition was not being taken seriously underpinned the more specific concerns about particular performance spaces.

By the time that the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts announced the final commission in 1899, numerous proposals had already accumulated for their consideration. Among the first was an ambitious program submitted by the historian

Eugène de Solenière. For de Solenière, the Exposition of 1900 constituted an apotheosis of progress in which music required a significant position.37 Not surprisingly, de Solenière’s motivation lay in the desire to position French music as superior to its German counterpart—especially when it concerned Wagner: by placing musical performance in an elevated position (much as it had been in 1889), France would be able to demonstrate that “the monopoly of serious music does not exclusively belong to Germany,” and that,

“in spite of Richard Wagner, we also have an art, and that not all redemption comes from

35 Loc. cit. “Nous venons, Monsieur le Directeur, appeler votre attention sur une situation qui, si elle se prolongeait, serait pleine de périls pour le projet que nous avons présenté, et compromettrait fatalement les espérances que nous avons formées.”

36 Excerpts of Gastinel’s letter were printed in Le Temps on 3 August 1898. “A mon avis, dans les décisions qui ont été prises jusqu’ici, on n’a pas assez compris que la musique a des titres aussi valables devant la commission d’organisation que la peinture, la sculpture et l’architecture. Sans doute, l’on y pense à ce pauvre art musical, mais c’est après avoir fait la part du lion à tout ce qui est appelé à figurer à nos expositions.”

37 Eugène de Solenière, La Musique à l’Exposition de 1900 (Paris: Ed. Sagot, 1895), 3–4. “L’Exposition Universelle de 1900 devant être une sorte d’apothéose des différents progrès faits dans toutes les branches, durant le siècle écoulé, ne conviendrait-il pas, tout en laissant aux sciences positives, à la littérature sous toutes ses formes, au commerce et à l’industrie, la place qui leur revient, de consacrer à la musique, sinon une exposition particulière, du moins, une des plus importantes sections.”

250 Bayreuth.”38 His plans were not limited to musical performances; proposals for exhibitions of theatrical costumes, galleries of artworks that represented musicians, and exhibitions of musical manuscripts were interspersed within suggestions for performances and stagings that began with recreations of the Saint-Laurent fair—what de Solenière referred to as the

“birthplace of the Opéra-Comique”—along with scale models of any building that had, at one time or another, housed the Opéra or the Opéra-Comique.39 Yet he also proposed performances of other, non-French operas, including Fidelio, Don Giovanni, Der Freischütz, and even Wagner’s Parsifal (which would be performed in a hall modeled after Bayreuth), a strategy that suggested that the genesis of French opera led organically to later operas by such German composers as Mozart, Weber, and even Wagner. Among plans tinged with obvious nationalist pride, de Solenière further recommended that the planning commission include a number of religious works in their programs. Specifically, he asked that they include a recreation of the Théâtre de la Trinité. Established in 1442, the Théâtre de la Trinité was a haven of sorts for the Confrères de la Passion, a well-known troupe of bourgeois actors and artisans whose stagings of mystery plays and, as the name suggests, reenactments of the Passion had been forbidden earlier in the fifteenth century. As one

38 Ibid., 5. “En réservant à la musique la place d’honneur, dans la grande manifestation qui se prépare, en donnant ainsi le moyen de comparer avec sincérité notre école nationale aux écoles étrangères, on arriverait à prouver, peut-être, que le monopole de la musique sérieuse n’appartient pas exclusivement à l’Allemagne, que malgré Richard Wagner, nous aussi avons un art et que toute rédemption ne vien [sic] pas de Bayreuth. Ce résultat serait une grande victoire pour nous, et ceux qui y contribueraient, auraient bien mérité de la patrie.”

39 Dating from the Middle Ages, the Saint-Laurent Fair was held every year from 9 August to 20 September. In its earliest incarnations, the Saint-Laurent Fair was a merchant fair during which normal guild restrictions were lifted and merchants were permitted to compete with provincial and foreign merchant fairs. By the seventeenth century, music became an important aspect of the fair, along with acrobats, rope walkers, singers, and mimes. As Jacqueline Waeber points out, the music of the Saint-Laurent fair, along with that of its counterpart, the Saint-Germain Fair, was directly linked to early French opéra-comique. See Jacqueline Waeber, “Opera and Ballet to the Death of Gluck,” in The Cambridge Companion to French Music, ed. Simon Trezise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 201–21. For a more general history of the Saint-Laurent Fair, see Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680– 1791 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

251 nineteenth-century writer suggested, these actors were not jugglers or street performers.

Instead, their legitimacy as respected actors bestowed upon their religious plays a sense of sincerity that de Solenière hoped could be restaged at the Exposition “in the manner of the period.”40

De Solenière also proposed special festivals in honor of Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner that would ideally be held in a newly constructed Parisian concert hall.

Although his vision of a performance space that could rival London’s Royal Albert Hall never came to fruition (at least, not in the context of the 1900 Exposition), his desire to feature the music of Bach, Berlioz, and Wagner on a dedicated concert series was fulfilled in 1900 at Saint-Eustache by Eugène d’Harcourt (see Chapter Three). For his part, d’Harcourt had submitted his own proposal to extend his performances of Handel’s

Messiah, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and other, more modern French oratorios to Picard in

1899—a “praiseworthy idea” in the mind of the critic Arthur Dandelot.41 In a letter to

Georges Leygues, who initially showed some interest, d’Harcourt asked for official support for his concerts and offered additional assistance with other events should his proposition be rejected.42 It seems likely, then, that “Les Grands Oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache”

40 On the Théâtre de la Trinité and the Confrères de la Passion, see Louis Petit de Julleville, Histoire du théâtre en France (Paris: Cerf, 1881 ), 413–14. See also de Solenière, La Musique à l’Exposition de 1900, 7. “On y rejouerait des mystères avec l’apparat de l’époque.”

41 Arthur Dandelot, “L’Art musical religieux,” Le Monde musical (30 October 1900): 403. “La louable conception de M. d’Harcourt, d’organiser, en vue de l’Exposition, des séances exclusivement consacrées à l’art musical religieux, m’a fait ressouvenir des théories de l’auteur de Fervaal et, n’ayant pas répondu sur le moment aux opinions émises par M. d’Indy, je le fais maintenant durant l’accalmie des heures de villégiature.”

42 Letter from Eugène d’Harcourt to Georges Leygues (Ministère de l’Instruction Publique), dated 25 October 1899, AN F/21/4064. “J’ai l’honneur, suivant votre désir, de vous envoyer ci joint la copie du projet d’auditions musicales que j’ai adressé, il y a plus de trois mois, à Monsieur le Directeur de l’Exposition Universelle. Comme vous avez paru vous intéresser à mes idées et à mes plans, que vous m’avez fait l’honneur de conserver, j’espère que vous voudrez bien les appuyer, à moins que vous ne préfériez en faire votre chose, auquel cas, je mets à votre disposition ma collaboration pour l’intérêt artistique général. Veuillez agréer, Monsieur le Ministre, l’expression de mon profond respect.”

252 was originally intended to be part of the Exposition’s official calendar of events: a move that would have further highlighted the role that the Catholic church would come to play in the Exposition.

By the time that the government announced the personnel of the official

Commission des Auditions Musicales, Roche had already requested that the new commission be sent copies of the minutes from the work of the 1889 planning commission as a point of reference.43 Using the previous committee as a model, the commission set to work selecting the composers and pieces that would officially represent France on the stage of the Trocadéro. Saint-Saëns was elected president, Dubois and Massenet acted as vice-presidents, Alfred Bruneau was elected rapporteur, and Jacques Bizet (Georges’s son) was the commission’s secretary.44 During a meeting on 15 January 1900, Dubois suggested a practical and efficient method by which composers were to be selected for the concert programs: he proffered a list of names representing various eras and musical styles to which other members would add additional composers.45 The commission adopted his idea.

43 Letter from Jules Roche to E. des Chapelles, chef du Bureau des Travaux d’Art, Musées, Expositions, dated 7 September 1900, AN F/21/4064. “Le chef du Bureau des Théâtres a l’honneur de remercier son collègue du Bureau des Travaux d’Art de la communication des procès-verbaux de la Commission constituée en vue de la préparation des auditions musicales qui ont eu lieu à l’occasion de l’Exposition de 1889. Ces documents lui seront renvoyés, selon le désir qu’il lui a exprimé, dès que la commission des auditions musicales en aura pris connaissance.”

44 “X” (ancien membre de la Commission), “Rapport présenté à M. le Ministere de l’Instruction publique et des Beaux-Arts au nom de la Commission des grandes auditions musicales de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900,” Revue d’histoire et de critique musicale (March 1901), 110. Saint-Saëns received 14 out of 17 votes, and Massenet and Dubois received 15 out of 17 votes for vice-president. Bruneau’s election took two attempts but was successful in the second round with 9 votes. There is not a count given for Bizet. This article is primarily cited as a review of Alfred Bruneau’s official report on the official concerts, but it also provides valuable information regarding the selection of musical works for the concert programs. Katharine Ellis has suggested that “X” was Vincent d’Indy. See Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 254.

45 Loc. cit. “Pour répondre au désir du Ministre dans la mesure malheureusement restreinte où on le pouvait (une exposition de musique ancienne étant bien plus difficile à organiser qu’une exposition de peinture ou de sculpture), la méthode suivante—la seule rapide & pratique—fut adoptée. M. Th. Dubois (séance du 15 janvier) proposa au choix de ses confrères une liste de noms célèbres empruntés à des époques diverses, &

253 Among the forty-five composers that were included on the final ballot, Hector

Berlioz, Georges Bizet, Léo Delibes, Édouard Lalo, Charles Lefebvre, André Messager, and

Jean-Philippe Rameau received the most votes (fourteen), meaning that every voting member present cast one vote for each top-ranking composer.46 Félicien David, Christoph

Willibald Gluck, Charles Gounod, Paul Hillemacher, and Ambroise Thomas each received thirteen votes, and Daniel Auber, Emmanuel Chabrier, Gustave Charpentier, Arthur

Coquard, Henri Duparc, Alphonse Duvernoy, Camille Erlanger, César Franck, Benjamin

Godard, André Grétry, Ernest Guiraud, Ferdinand Hérold, Augusta Holmès, Georges Huë, and André Wormser each received enough votes to be included on the programs.47

Government officials had their say as well. Gaspare Spontini, for instance, was added at

Roujon’s request. And although the more contemporary composers Ernest Chausson and

Claude Debussy did not officially receive enough votes to qualify for inclusion, each ultimately had a piece on the final programs, though the selections could hardly qualify as recent: respectively, the symphonic poem Viviane (1882, revised 1887) and the Prix de

Rome-winning cantata La Damoiselle élue (1887–1889).48 In order to accommodate the fifty-

en spécifiant très correctement que chacun pouvait compléter cette liste d’après son goût personnel, il la soumit à un vote.”

46 Ibid., 112. According to the author, ten members of the commission were absent from the meeting during which the vote was taken: Fauré, d’Indy, Marty, Massenet, Pierné, Réty, Reyer, Saint-Saëns, Vidal, and Widor.

47 Loc. cit. Composers who did not make the initial cut received seven or fewer votes.

48 Ibid., 112–13. Chausson and Debussy were added to the program as the result of a vote taken on 30 March 1900. Several other composers who had not initially received the requisite number of votes were later added to the programs. During a meeting on 23 March 1900, d’Indy and Guilmant requested a second vote; François-Adrien Boïeldieu, Lucien Lambert, and Henri Maréchal were each then added to the list of approved composers: “Comme on le voit, Boïeldieu, pour n’en pas citer d’autres, était éliminé, puisqu’il n’obtenait que 7 voix, la majorité étant de 8 voix sur 14 votants. Le suffrage universel n’a pas le monopole des surprises. Il faut dire qu’à cette séance étaient absents: MM. Saint-Saëns, Marty, Pierné, Vincent d’Indy, Massenet, Fauré, Paul Vidal, Reyer, Réty, Widor. L’auteur de la Dame Blanche dut être ‘repêché’ à la séance du 23 mars (en même temps que MM. Lambert et Maréchal, sur une observation MM. Th. Dubois, Vincent d’Indy & Guilmant qui demandèrent un second vote). On se rapprochait du but (31 symphonistes à trouver!) mais on n’y touchait pas encore. Dans la séance du 25 janvier, M. Vincent d’Indy regretta vivement l’absence,

254 nine composers who had been selected, the five official concerts of the 1889 Exposition were doubled to ten in 1900. On 7 May 1900, Roujon sent ten dates to Picard that he approved ten days later.49 Thus the ten concerts officiels in 1900 would take place on 31 May,

14 June, 28 June, 12 July, 26 July, 9 August, 23 August, 6 September, 20 September, and 4

October.50

Shifting Ideologies: The concerts officiels in 1889 and 1900

After all of the composers had been determined, the task of selecting representative repertoire fell to the commission—subject to final approval by Picard himself.51 Newly available papers, held privately by the family of Paul Taffanel until 2018, suggest that the

President of the planning commission, Théodore Dubois, gave composers a choice as to which of their works would be featured at the Exposition. Composers were asked to submit a list of three works (or fragments of works) from which the commission and

dans les programmes de musique symphonique, des noms de Ropartz, A. Magnard, Dukas, Rabaud. A la séance du 30 mars (certains nos. des programmes restant inoccupés, pour les 7e, 8e et 9e concerts), M. Henri Roujon attira l’attention sur Chausson, et M. Réty sur un autre oublie: Spontini. Un tour de scrutin ne donna la majorité qu’à Dukas (10 voix sur 13 votants), Debussy (8 voix) et Chausson (7 voix). MM. Fauré et Vincent d’Indy rompirent encore une lance pour M. G. Ropartz, et M. Réty insista sur Spontini. Un dernier tour de scrutin ne donna la majorité qu’à M. Ropartz (8 voix); sur la demande de M. Roujon, le nom de Spontini fut ajouté, par un vote à mains levées. On le voit, la Commission eut quelque peine à remplir le cadre que lui était offert.”

49 Letter from Roujon to Picard, dated 7 May 1900, AN F/12/4385. “Monsieur le Commissaire Général,/ J’ai l’honneur de porter à votre connaissance que les dix grands concerts officiels de l’Exposition, sous la conduite de M. Taffanel, auront lieu les jeudis 31 mai, 14 et 28 juin, 12 et 26 juillet, 9 et 23 août, 6 et 20 septembre, et 4 octobre.” Picard’s response to Roujon, dated 17 May 1900, notes his approval: “J’ai l’honneur de vous informer que je suis d’accord sur les dates fixées pour l’occupation de la Salle des Fêtes du Trocadéro.”

50 The programs for each of the concerts officiels are kept at BnF-Mus., Programs, Exposition Universelle de 1900.

51 Typescript of “Auditions Musicales,” governing regulations, AN F/12/4385. “Art. 13: “Les programmes définitifs seront fixés par le Commissaire Général, sur la proposition du Directeur Général de l’Exploitation.”

255 Picard would make the final choice.52 In the end, the 1900 programs shared notable features—and boasted striking differences—with the five official concerts in 1889 (see

Appendix C for the complete programs). Whereas the concerts of the 1900 Exposition bore a closer resemblance to their counterparts from eleven years prior than they did to either de Solenière’s or d’Harcourt’s rejected propositions, the differences between them point to marked ideological shifts in the eleven years that separated the two fairs, especially in terms of the Republic’s relationship with the Catholic Church.

Thirty-three among the forty-two composers who were featured on the programs of the Auditions officielles de Musique française in 1889 reappeared eleven years later. Given that the number of concerts had doubled between 1889 and 1900, however, it is unsurprising to note that the number of composers had also increased, from forty-two to fifty-nine—yet over half of the music performed in 1900 had been written by composers represented in 1889. This too is unremarkable when we consider that the planning commission relied heavily on materials from the previous exposition and that multiple members of the commission had served in the same capacity in 1889. According to

52 Form letter from Théodore Dubois, dated 1 February 1900. BnF-Mus., Fonds Taffanel, VM FONDS 152 TAF-5(3) (Exposition Universelle de 1900, Courriers officiels administration, ministre). “Monsieur et cher confrère, La Commission des Auditions musicales s’occupe en ce moment d’élaborer les programmes des Concerts officiels de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900. Elle a décidé que votre nom y figurerait./Ainsi que cela s’est fait aux Expositions précédentes et d’après l’article II [de règlement général des Auditions musicales] chaque compositeur ne devant avoir qu’une seule œuvre exécutée, je viens vous prier de vouloir bien nous désigner trois de vos œuvres ou fragments d’œuvres (on nous indiquant la durée d’exécution de chacune d’elles) parmi lesquelles la Commission choisira celle qui lui semblera entrer le plus utilement et le plus facilement dans les programmes./Vous pouvez nous désigner des œuvres, ou purement symphoniques, ou avec soli, chœurs et orchestre, ou avec solo et orchestre avec ou sans accompagnement d’orgue./Votre réponse devra nous parvenir avant le 15 février./Agréez, Monsieur et cher confrère, l’expression de mes sentiments les plus distingués./Th. Dubois. I am immensely grateful to Dominique Taffanel and to Marie- Gabrielle Soret for allowing me access to these materials prior to their processing by the BnF. Despite Dubois’s explicit instruction that each composer would only be allowed one work on the program, Saint- Saëns nevertheless asked that his Hymne à Victor Hugo be added to the programs alongside his cantata Le Feu céleste. BnF-Mus., L.a. Saint-Saëns (C.) 207. Letter from Saint-Saëns to Dubois, dated 5 March 1900. “J’ai terminé la Cantate destiné aux concerts de Trocadéro. S’il est possible d’exécuter dans ces concerts une autre œuvre de moi, je délire que l’on choisirait l’Hymne à Victor Hugo. […]”

256 Annegret Fauser, the Auditions officielles de Musique française in 1889 had two goals: one, to present a selection of French music that would celebrate the centennial of the French

Revolution and, two, to highlight the major Parisian orchestras, one on each concert.53

Their programs were predominantly comprised of music by dead (or recently deceased)

French composers, and several of them, including Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, Georges

Bizet, and Hector Berlioz, were featured twice. This was all in an effort to create a canon of

French masterworks that exemplified a patriotic and overtly Republican spirit steeped in

Revolutionary heritage.

Of five official concerts in 1889, three included excerpts from sacred or religiously- themed works: the first section of Massenet’s oratorio Eve (1875) was performed on the first concert, the following one included an excerpt from Franck’s Les Béatitudes (No. 8, 1880) and the Dies irae from Berlioz’s Requiem (1837), and the third ended with a performance of multiple movements from Gounod’s oratorio Mors et vita (1885). Music by Massenet,

Berlioz, and Gounod was also performed in 1900, but this time, the commission chose secular works: Massenet’s newly composed Marche solennelle was replayed on the second concert, while Berlioz and Gounod’s religious works were replaced by operatic excerpts.54

By contrast, when the music of Dubois, Fauré, Paladilhe, and Pierné reappeared at the

Trocadéro in 1900, sacred vocal music replaced the orchestral and operatic music of 1889.55

In 1900, the programs contained excerpts from Fauré’s Requiem (1887–90), Paladilhe’s Les

53 Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 18–27.

54 Excerpts from Gounod’s Ulysse (1852) were performed on the first official concert, while the “Fête chez Capulet” from Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette (1839) brought the same concert to a close.

55 In 1889, Charles Lamoureux led performances of the Andante from Fauré’s Symphony in D minor (1884) and the overture to Paladilhe’s Patrie! (1873); excerpts from Pierné’s Première Suite d’orchestre (1883) were conducted by Edouard Colonne; and the Act III duet from Dubois’s opera Aben-Hamet (1884) appeared on the second concert (6 June 1889). See Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 313–17.

257 Saintes Maries de la Mer (1892), Pierné’s L’An mil (1898), and Dubois’ oratorio Le Baptême de

Clovis (1899).

Comparing the nature of the religious works performed in 1889 with those programmed in 1900 begins to reveal the Republic’s changing relationship with the

Catholic church and the ideological shifts at play therein. Even works that did not make the cut are suggestive in this regard. While there is little extant material that indicates which works were submitted for consideration by each composer, there is evidence that, in some cases, the commission’s first choice was later replaced by a work with an obvious connection to the Catholic Church. From Alfred Bruneau’s list, for example, the commission originally selected excerpts from L’Attaque du Moulin (1893), a drame lyrique with a libretto by Louis Gallet and Émile Zola. On the final program, however, audiences were presented with the “Tableau symphonique de la Cathédrale d’Or” from Bruneau’s opera Messidor (1897) instead. Selecting Messidor might have caused enough of a scandal; while Bruneau’s association with Zola and their vocal support of Dreyfus had had an adverse effect on the opera’s initial popularity, it also firmly aligned the opera with the

Republican cause, especially on the international stage of the Exposition—notably, its appearance at the Trocadéro elicited only positive comments from critics. And though the

Church’s position on the Dreyfus Affair was anything but favorable, the opera’s portrayal of a young girl’s obsession with La Légende dorée emphasized the continued repurposing of the medieval Church as an integral facet of Republicanism.56

56 A handwritten draft of the third official concert program lists L’Attaque du Moulin as the second piece on the program; specific excerpts are not included. The printed program of the same concert, however, lists the excerpts from Messidor. BnF-Mus., VM FONDS 152 TAF-1 (2); the printed program is located at BnF-Mus., Programmes, Exposition Universelle de 1900. For more on Messidor, see Steven Huebner, French Opera at the Fin-de-Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 403–11.

258 Less controversial works like Dubois’s Le Baptême de Clovis and Pierné’s L’An mil also positioned themselves in the particular cultural space of Third Republic France at the turn of the twentieth century. These are works that, at the time of their composition, premiere, and subsequent performance at the 1900 Exposition, recalled and refashioned a particular moment in French history: a time during which the Catholic Church played a seminal role in the foundation of the country itself. While proponents of each side may have been working toward different ends, stories like the baptism of Clovis and the apocalyptic thousandth year were heralded by both sides as the basis of France’s claim that she was, indeed, the eldest daughter of the Catholic church. The shared points of reference offered commonalities between the Catholic right and the Republican left and emphasized the fact that this medieval past was an immensely significant factor in creating a historically-grounded French identity. As a result, Le Baptême de Clovis and L’An mil—the selection of which was ultimately subject to final approval by a government official— hinted at a relationship between Church and State that had seen significant shifts in the eleven years between the 1889 Exposition that celebrated the French Revolution and the one in 1900 that bore the mark of the Ralliement.

“Vive Dieu qui aime les Francs!” Théodore Dubois’s Le Baptême de Clovis

Four years prior to the 1900 Exposition Universelle, the country as a whole was in the midst of commemorating the baptism of Clovis in Reims in 496 CE. The story of Clovis and his famous conversion to Catholicism was widely considered to be one of the most significant events in French history. In the fifth century, Gaul had been overrun and partitioned by Germanic tribes: while the Visigoths had taken hold in the southwest and the Burgundians in the southeast, the Franks still controlled territories in the north. Upon the death of his father, Childeric, in 481, Clovis inherited these territories and planned to

259 conquer more for the Franks. According to Gregory of Tours’s famous (and often exaggerated) account of the event, Clovis—at the behest of his devoutly Catholic wife,

Clotilde—promised to convert to Catholicism if God granted his army victory. After the

Frankish armies were victorious at the Battle of Tolbiac, Clovis traveled to Reims, where he was baptized by Saint Remi and crowned the first king of the Franks in 496. As the story goes, once converted to Christianity, Clovis was exponentially more successful in his military exploits, unifying the Frankish tribes and rapidly spreading Catholicism throughout their lands—not only as a new system of religious beliefs but also as a reminder of their victory over their Germanic foes.

Of course, modern historians disagree about the questions of where, when, how, and why Clovis converted to Catholicism. The conversion of the Gallic lands to

Christianity was the result of complex and gradual changes that saw Roman control of their provinces change hands, first to regional emperors and then to the Franks.57 As

Carole M. Cusack points out, the idea that Clovis was the first to expose the Franks to

Catholicism is up for debate. She notes that the territories under Clovis’s control were already introduced to Catholicism after Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313—a full 183 years prior to Clovis’s baptism and conversion.58 The French in 1896, however, uncritically accepted as historical fact the account passed down by Gregory of Tours: Clovis and, by extension, France, was baptized in Reims in 496. His baptism served as an ideal symbol for

57 See Carole M. Cusack, Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (London: Cassell, 1998), 63–73. Nonetheless, a number of many modern historians continue to propagate an uncritical acceptance (albeit to a lesser extent) of the legend of Clovis. See Eugène Boissonnade, Le Baptême de Clovis: naissance de la nation Française (Paris: Godefroy de Bouillon, 1996), and Joël Schmidt, Le Baptême de France: Clovis, Clotilde, Geneviève (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996). Note that these studies were published in 1996, the date of the fifteenth centenary of Clovis’s baptism.

58 Ibid., 63. Cusack further complicates the “legend” of Clovis’s baptism from pages 72–73.

260 the French to express their status as a people chosen by God and, in the process, solidifying the Catholic Church. According to many nineteenth-century writers, the event marked the “baptism of the French nation in the person of its king, Clovis.”59 For many

Frenchmen, the birth of France as a natural offshoot of the Catholic church marked its people as a “chosen race.” An anonymous author echoed similar sentiments when he heralded Clovis’s baptism as the creation of the first Catholic nation in the world.60 It was, as the priest Charles Cerf proclaimed, the event that changed the destiny of France.61

According to the art historian Donna L. Sadler, Clovis’s baptism often served as an implicit substitution for that of Christ—whose Sadler refers to as the “prototype of every baptism”—affording Reims and France a national miracle.62 The slippage between Christ and Clovis was so strong that the anonymous writer who celebrated France as the world’s first Catholic nation felt justified to claim that “when Jesus died, he did not look at

Jerusalem—he looked at France.”63

Organized by Cardinal Benoit-Marie Langénieux, the Archbishop of Reims, in collaboration with Pope Leo XIII, the centennial festivities in 1896 took on a great deal of

59 “Lettre de S. E. le Cardinal [Benoit-Marie] Langénieux à Sa Sainteté le Pape Léon XIII,” La France à Reims en 1896: Bulletin des Fêtes du XIVe centenaire, No. 7 (1 February 1896): 73. “Le moment est venu de mettre à exécution le projet que Votre Sainteté a béni déjà et encouragé, de célébrer solennellement à Reims, l’an prochain, le 14e Centenaire du Baptême de la Nation française, en la personne de son roi, Clovis.”

60 Unsigned, Nos origines racontées à des Français à l’occasion du XIVe centenaire du Baptême de Clovis par un petit prédicateur (Abbeville: C. Paillart, 1897), 27–28. “Vous venez d’entendre l’histoire du plus florissant des rois et de la première nation catholique du monde.”

61 Charles Cerf, Baptême de Clovis: en quel endroit de Reims, au Ve siècle était placé le baptistère? (Reims: Imprimerie de l’Académie, 1891), 2. “Laquelle de ces églises fut témoins du grand évènement qui allait changer les destinées de la France?” Charles Cerf (1824–1898) was a priest in the diocese of Reims and a member of the Académie nationale de Reims.

62 Donna L. Sadler, Reading the Reverse Façade of Reims Cathedral: Royalty and Ritual in Thirteenth-Century France (New York: Routledge, 2017), 93.

63 Unsigned, Nos origines racontées à des Français, 25. “Quand Jésus mourut il ne regardait pas Jérusalem, il regardait la France.”

261 cultural significance that was equally religious and patriotic. While Cardinal Langénieux encouraged France to renew its baptismal covenant with the Church, he also drew on explicitly political language as a way to emphasize the importance of the event for the nation. As the Dreyfus Affair was heating up—in 1896, evidence came to light that the

Jewish officer was innocent—Cardinal Langénieux’s move was potentially calculated not only to highlight the role of the Church in Clovis’s string of successful military conquests in the name of the Gauls, but also to divert negative attention away from the Church’s controversial anti-Dreyfusard stance. This connection was an easy one to fashion:

Thus the source of our nation’s glories, the point of departure of the most beneficial political transformations—not only for France, but for Europe and all Christianity—is the baptism conferred to Clovis by Saint Remi after Tolbiac at the baptistery in Reims on Christmas Day 496.64

Pope Leo XIII’s words echoed those of Cardinal Langénieux. He was quick to assert that the Cardinal’s “holy and patriotic enterprise” should serve as a reminder that the French nation had been chosen as a powerful instrument not only for the defense of the church, but also for the ideals of true social progress. He reiterated the sentiment expressed by one writer that the French should raise their voices in the “famous call of our ancestors’ national song: ‘Long live Christ who loves the Franks!’”65 For the Pope, the memory of Clovis’s baptism and conversion was an opportunity for the French nation to remember its own status as a “powerful instrument for the defense of the church” by

64 Cardinal Langénieux, La France chrétienne à Reims en 1896: 14e centenaire du baptême de Clovis et des Francs (Paris: Maison Didot, 1897), ii. “Ainsi la source des gloires de notre nation, le point de départ des transformations politiques les plus bienfaisantes non seulement pour la France, mais pour l’Europe et la Chrétienté tout entière, est dans le baptême conféré à Clovis, après Tolbiac, par saint Remi, au baptistère de Reims, le jour de Noël, 496.”

65 Unsigned, Nos origines racontées à des Français, 25. “Elevons donc nos voix, et, dans le transport de nos cœurs reconnaissants, répétons ce cri fameux du chant national de nos ancêtres: ‘Vive le Christ qui aime les Francs!’” See also “Lettre de Sa Sainteté le Pape Léon XIII à Son Éminence le Cardinal Langénieux, Archevêque de Reims,” La France à Reims en 1896: Bulletin des fêtes du centenaire, No. 7 (1 February 1896): 75.

262 reproducing what he called the “marvelous fruits of the past: social unity under a wise, respected authority and sincere faithfulness to the Catholic church.”66

One of the most publicized contributions to the celebration in Reims was a Latin ode that not only celebrated the events surrounding Clovis’s baptism and conversion, but also the glory of Catholic France around the world through various military victories— including, but not limited to, the expulsion of the English by Joan of Arc. The text, attributed to the Pope himself, was published in full in the 1 January 1897 issue of the centenary bulletin. Printed side by side with a French translation, the ode occupied a three-page spread (beginning on the front page) under a header that read “in commemoration of the very fortunate event that led the nation of the Francs, along with

Clovis, her king, to consecrate herself to Christ.”67 Its nineteen strophes begin with an allusion to the text of the Magnificat: God, as the “master of the nations” will strike down the powerful (in this case, the Teutons) and exalt the weak (Clovis).68 Soon thereafter, the roles are reversed: having asked for and been given divine assistance, “France finds herself ready for battle…and disperses her cruel enemies.”69 The ode refers to Rome as a mother

66 Pope Leo XIII, “Lettre de Sa Sainteté le Pape Léon XIII à Son Éminence le Cardinal Langénieux, Archevêque de Reims,” La France à Reims en 1896: Bulletin des fêtes du centenaire, No. 7 (1 February 1896): 75. “…il faut que le baptême de Clovis et de ses guerriers se renouvelle en esprit et reproduise, à quatorze siècles de distance, les fruits merveilleux d’autrefois: l’union sociale sous un pouvoir sage, respecté, et la fidélité sincère envers l’Eglise catholique.”

67 Pope Leo XIII, “Vive Christ qui aime les Francs!,” La France à Reims en 1896: Bulletin des fêtes du centenaire, No. 29 (1 January 1897): 377. “En mémoire du très heureux événement qui amena la nation des Francs à la suite de son roi Clovis, à se consacrer au Christ.”

68 “Le Maître des nations, c’est Dieu. Soudain Il abat les puissantes, Il exalte les humbles; Il tient dans sa main les événements, Il les gouverne au gré de sa justice. On dit que Clovis, accablé par les armées teutonnes, voyant ses soldats éperdus devant le péril, s’est écrié les yeux levés au Ciel…” This excerpt from the Magnificat comes from Luke 1:52.

69 “‘O Dieu, toi que Clotilde dans ses prières appelle souvent Jésus, sois-moi propice! Si tu m’accordes un prompt et puissant secours, je me donnerai à toi sans réserve!’ L’effroi se dissipe aussitôt; les âmes réconfortées reprennent une nouvelle ardeur; le France se retrouve pour le combat: il s’élance et disperse ses cruels ennemis.”

263 and France as her firstborn daughter. Clovis’s baptism and subsequent conquests indelibly marked France as an organic offspring of Rome: in a sense, this appropriated and

Catholicized the Republican concept of translatio studii from a Papal perspective.70

The ode then continues with a joyful contemplation of French heroes through history. Beginning with Astolphe, the Pope celebrated Joan of Arc (whom he called the

“noble child”), as well as the “valiant souls who overthrew the Hydra of Calvinism”—a problematic recasting of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.71 He then warned the

French to take care so as to not to let perfidious advice besmirch their glorious past. The final lines, overwrought with colonialist ambitions, sing praises to France, her global power, and her immortal glory—all in the name of the Catholic Church:

Even in distant lands, the French name becomes more powerful each day. It is helpful to the people of the Orient themselves, and it aids the expansion of our holy faith. Faith in Christ is above all. Without it, there is no lasting prosperity! It is through faith that the ancient honor of your nation was so highly raised; it is also through faith that the glory of France will remain immortal.72

The Pope’s ode, although written at Cardinal Langénieux’s request, marked his clear alliance with France, yet constituted simultaneously a thinly veiled statement on the

French political and religious climate during the Dreyfus Affair. By framing the Church as an ally of France through explicit praise of its military might—especially over the

70 “O Rome trois fois heureuse! Reine de l’humanité régénérée, étends ton empire; car voici que la France vient d’elle-même déposer à tes pieds les lauriers de ses victoires. Elle t’honorera comme une Mère; elle sera fière d’être ta Fille première-née; elle grandira par un principe de vie supérieur, et sa fidélité au Pontife suprême la portera à la gloire.”

71 “O légions d’âmes vaillantes qui ont terrassé l’hydre du calvinisme et préservé par leur énergie, d’un affreux désastre, et la nation et son trône!” For a brief discussion of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, see Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1569, second edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 92–99.

72 “Jusque sur les terres lointaines le nom français devient chaque jour plus puissant. Aux peuples de l’Orient eux-mêmes qu’il soit secourable et qu’il seconde l’expansion de notre foi sainte: La foi au Christ est au- dessus de tout. Sans elle, pas de prospérité durable! C’est par elle que s’est élevé si haut l’antique honneur de votre nation; c’est par elle aussi que la gloire de la France restera immortelle.”

264 Germans—and its continued Catholic faith, Pope Leo XIII appealed at once to conservative Catholic traditionalists and left-leaning, “secular” Republicans, both of whom saw French superiority over its Prussian neighbors as a defining aspect of the nation’s image. Through his ode, Pope Leo cleverly positioned Clovis as an attractive symbolic figure imbued with the potential to glorify Catholicism as a Republican virtue.

Though it was not an official part of the centenary commemorations in Reims,

Théodore Dubois’s oratorio was a direct result of the collaboration between Cardinal

Langénieux and the Pope.73 For the Cardinal’s part, his choice of Dubois to set the Pope’s text to music was ingenious; the composer’s Catholic and Republican credentials were equally sound. Dubois was born in a village just beyond the Reims city limits, and as a child, he studied piano with Louis Fanart, the choirmaster at Reims Cathedral. Following his acceptance at the Paris Conservatoire in 1854 and his tenure at the Villa Medici in

Rome as the winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome, Dubois was, for the city of Reims, the local standout who had gone on to success in Paris.74 While in Paris, his multiple positions as organist at the churches of Saint-Louis des Invalides, Sainte-Clotilde, and La Madeleine, his stint as choirmaster at Sainte-Clotilde (1863–69), and his reputation as a composer of

73 Music did, however, play a prominent role in the celebrations. A national contest to write a national religious hymn in modern French based on the text “Vivat qui diligit Francos Christus” was announced in 1895 by the Société des Fastes eucharistiques de Paray-le Monial, and Charles Gounod’s posthumous Messe dite de Clovis (1895), which was claimed to have been composed specifically for the centenary celebrations, was performed on 4 October 1896 in the Reims Cathedral. See “La Presse et le Centenaire,” La France à Reims en 1896: Bulletin des fêtes du centenaire (n.d., numéro-spécimen): 10, and “La Messe du Centenaire de Ch. Gounod,” La France à Reims en 1896: Bulletin des fêtes du centenaire, No. 25 (1 November 1896): 332. According to Christine Collette-Kleo’s edition of Dubois’s journals, the ode was the result of Langénieux’s request to the Pope. See Théodore Dubois, Souvenirs de ma vie, ed. Christine Collette-Kléo (Lyon: Symétrie, 2009), 161. “J’avais l’honneur insigne d’être, pour cette œuvre, son collaborateur. Voici comment: le cardinal Langénieux, plein de bienveillance pour moi, voulait commémorer dans la belle cathédrale la baptême de Clovis par saint Rémi. À cette occasion, il avait demandé à Léon XIII, latiniste remarquable, une ode en vers latins.”

74 Jann Pasler, “Théodore Dubois,” Grove Music Online.

265 liturgical and sacred music all closely aligned him with the Catholic Church. Yet as the director of the state-subsidized Conservatoire—the educational institution that stood at ideological odds with the staunchly Catholic curriculum propagated by Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum—and a committed Republican to boot, Dubois was also a prime candidate to make pointed religio-political statements on behalf of the Republic as the figurehead for the nation’s official musical establishment.75

It is unclear who first suggested that the text of the Pope’s ode be set to music, or that Dubois might be the ideal composer to whom the task should be entrusted, but it was

Cardinal Langénieux who approached Dubois about the possibility at some point prior to

30 July 1897. After having been given the text by Langénieux, Dubois originally tried to decline the offer by claiming that the text was not well suited to music:

After having very much contemplated and studied the Latin text of the magnificent Ode by our Holy Father Leo XIII that your Eminence wanted to entrust to me, I find myself powerless to translate the thought musically. The form, although very noble, very poetic, and very colorful, is unfortunately not lyrical, and I feel that I could only make a colorless and monotonous work where it necessitates something very beautiful and very vibrant. The length and symmetry of his verses hardly permit balance in the musical architecture or rhythmic variety. Allow me, Father [Langénieux], to thus express my profound regret that I have in declining the great honor that you wanted to give me by inviting me to compose the music to these venerable words.76

75 The often-ultramontane ideology of the Schola Cantorum has been the focus of numerous musicological studies. For a particularly nuanced examination of its role in French politics at the fin-de-siècle, see Catrina Flint de Médicis, “The Schola Cantorum, Early Music, and French Political Culture from 1894 to 1914” (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 2006). See also Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, esp. 105–16; Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music, 28–34; and Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 620.

76 Théodore Dubois, draft of a letter to Cardinal Langénieux, dated 30 July 1897. Collection Marcelle Dubois (collection privée). “Après avoir beaucoup médité et étudié le texte latin de la magnifique Ode de notre S.P. Père Léon XIII, que votre Eminence a bien voulu me confier, je me trouve impuissant à traduire musicalement [] à en exprimer traduire musicalement la pensée. La forme, quoique très belle, très noble, très poétique et très colorée, n’est malheureusement pas lyrique, et je sens que je ne ferais qu’un œuvre incolore et monotone là où il faudrait une œuvre très belle et quelque chose de très beau et très vibrant. La longueur et la symétrie de ses strophes ne permettent ni la variété ni guères la pondération dans l’architecture musicale/ni la variété des rythmes.—Permettez-moi donc, Monseigneur, de vous exprimer le profond regret que j’éprouve en déclinant le grand honneur que vous aviez voulu me faire en m’invitant à composer la musique de ces augustes paroles.” All editorial markings in the transcriptions are original to the manuscripts. I am deeply grateful to the Dubois family for allowing me access to these private letters.

266 By late April 1898, however, Dubois changed his mind, and he had made sufficient compositional progress by November that he was able to ask Father Maurice Landrieux, the parish priest at Reims Cathedral, if his dedicatory text to the Pope would be satisfactory.77 At that time, Father Landrieux suggested, for his part, to divide the original ode into three parts, with the headers “Le Baptême” (The Baptism), “L’Epopée” (The Epic), and “Le Réveil” (The Awakening). There was also a question as to whether or not the phrase “Vivat Christus qui Francos diligit” should appear in the work’s title or subtitles.

Father Landrieux’s comment made the purpose of the work clear: it was “solely about

France” and the use of the hymn text in the subtitle was sufficient to make that point obvious.78 Regardless of these details, Father Landrieux was confident that Pope Leo would be satisfied with the work, at this point two years in the making.79

According to Cardinal Langénieux, the score was completed at some point between

April and December 1898. In a letter dated 21 December, he announced to Dubois that the

Pope had looked over “our oratorio” and admired it—so much so that the Pope named the composer a Commander of the Order of Saint Gregory; this honor was, apparently, meant as a surprise for Dubois but had been divulged prematurely by the press in both Rome

77 Dubois’s change of heart is noted in a letter from Langénieux dated 24 April 1898 (Collection Marcelle Dubois) that expresses the Cardinal’s pleasure at Dubois’s support for the Pope’s work. “Votre bonne lettre m’a réjoui plus que je ne puis dire et j’ai hâte de vous remercier du concours que vous allez donner au triomphe de l’œuvre de notre grand Pape Léon XIII. J’ai chargé une commission à la tête de laquelle se trouve Mgr l’abbé Landrieux de préparer la réponse aux questions que vous m’avez posées. Mais j’avais besoin de vous remercier de suite. Je le fais avec le cœur d’un admirateur de votre talent et d’un pasteur qui vous est tout dévoué.” As for the dedication, see the letter from Father Maurice Landrieux to Dubois, dated 4 November 1898 (Collection Marcelle Dubois). “Je crois que la dédicace sera très bien formulée ainsi et le Cardinal se fera un plaisir d’offrir lui-même cet hommage au S. Père.” Father Maurice Landrieux was the parish priest at the Reims Cathedral in 1898.

78 Loc. cit. “Il s’agit de la France uniquement, et la parole Vivat Christus qui Francos diligit suffit à spécifier l’œuvre sans qu’il soit besoin d’y revenir dans les titres.”

79 Loc. cit. “Léon XIII verra avec satisfaction la réalisation d’un projet dont S.E. lui avait parlé dès 1896.”

267 and Paris.80 Less than one year later, in March 1899, Dubois traveled to Rome to offer the score to Pope Leo XIII and to express his gratitude for having been granted the opportunity to act as his collaborator.81 Although he was unable to see the Pope himself, he was received by his Secretary of State, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, who presented him with the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Saint Gregory.

Le Baptême de Clovis: From Reims to the Trocadéro

Le Baptême de Clovis premiered under Dubois’s direction on Thursday, 11 May 1899 at

Reims Cathedral. Although the anniversary celebrations of Clovis’s baptism had taken place three years earlier, vestiges of the commemorative rhetoric remained: the motto that had been so ubiquitous in its French translation (“Vive Christ qui aime les Francs”) during the centenary celebrations was prominently emblazoned on the front cover and third page of the concert program, along with a statement that made the Pope’s “gift” to France explicit.82 The performance of Le Baptême de Clovis, with solos sung by the tenor Léon

80 Letter from Cardinal Langénieux to Dubois, dated 21 December 1898, Collection Marcelle Dubois. “Les feuilles publiques se sont emparées, à Rome et à Paris, du secret que j’avais combiné avec le Saint-Père pour donner plus d’éclat au présent qu’il me chargeait de vous faire et vous ménager une surprise le jour même de l’exécution de votre œuvre à Reims ou à Rome. Je viens donc sans plus de mystère vous annoncer officiellement que Léon XIII vous a nommé Commandeur de l’Ordre de St. Grégoire. Il vous donne les raisons qui l’ont déterminé à vous faire cet honneur et vous verrez en les lisant dans le Bref que je vous envois avec quelle précision. Sa Sainteté énumère les titres qui vous ont voulu sa haute bienveillance. A travers le texte de votre diplôme on sent la joie percer et l’on peut dire que le Pape a lu notre Oratorio et qu’il a admiré la composition.” Established in 1831, the Order of Saint Gregory is one of the five Orders of Knighthood by the Pope. It is awarded to Catholic men and women to recognize personal service to the Pope and to the Catholic church. See James-Charles Noonan, Jr., The Church Visible: The Ceremonial Life and Protocol of the Roman Catholic Church (New York: Viking, 1996).

81 Dubois’s trip to Rome (2 March–11 April 1899) also included a stop in Marseille to hear a performance of his oratorio Les Sept Paroles du Christ (1867) and visits with the current French composers at the Villa Médicis in Rome. See Dubois, Souvenirs, 158, 161. A letter from Cardinal Langénieux dated 3 March 1899 expressed Langénieux’s wishes for a successful audience with the Pope. (Collection Marcelle Dubois) It is unclear whether Dubois’s offering to Pope Leo XIII was a manuscript or printed score.

82 The program of the premiere of Le Baptême de Clovis is kept at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Reims, RBG 1550. The text “Vivat Christus qui diligit Francos” appears in bold, underlined typescript in the upper right- hand corner of the front page; the phrase “Oratorio composé par M. Th. Dubois sur L’ODE DE LÉON XIII A LA FRANCE” appears directly under the title of the work. “L’Ode de Léon XIII à la France” appears in a larger font size than the rest of the sentence and is capitalized.

268 Escalaïs and the baritone Jean Noté, comprised the first half of the program, while the second half consisted of three motets also composed by Dubois: “Panis angelicus,” “Tu es

Petrus,” and “Tantum ergo.”83 The programming of the motets was, unsurprisingly, liturgically appropriate, given that 11 May fell shortly before the Feast of Corpus Christi;

“Panis angelicus” and “Tantum ergo” both come from Corpus Christi hymns by St.

Thomas Aquinas.84 “Tu es Petrus,” however, refers to a particular scenario—Christ’s identification of Peter as the rock upon which the Church is built—and that takes on a different and more specifically French context when paired with Le Baptême de Clovis.85

Christ’s naming of Peter as the Church’s foundational rock had, from the Middle Ages onward, designated the apostle not only as the “prince of the apostles,” but also as Christ’s direct vicar.86 Programming the two works on the same concert was an inspired move, for just as Peter, Christ’s own vicar, served as the early church’s earthly foundation, so too did

Clovis simultaneously symbolize the medieval foundation of the French Catholic church and, by extension, the nation itself: at Reims, the text may well have read “Tu es Clovis.”

Moreover, given that the text of “Tu es Petrus” is almost always associated with the

83 According to a short notification in Le Ménestrel, Albert Vaguet was originally listed as the tenor soloist, but was replaced by Escalaïs at some point prior to 11 May. See “Nouvelles diverses,” Le Ménestrel (23 April 1899): 135.

84 Thursday, 11 May was three weeks before the Feast of Corpus Christi (2 June, assuming that Trinity Sunday was 28 May) in 1899 and was thus well within the timeframe during which Corpus Christi hymn texts are sung.

85 Found in the New Testament (Matthew 16: 18–19), the text of “Tu es Petrus” is as follows: Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram/Aedificabo Ecclesiam meam,/Et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam:/Et tibi dabo claves/Regni coelorum./Quodcumque ligaveris super terram,/Erit ligatum et in coelis;/Et quodcumque solveris super terram/Erit solutum et in coelis. (You are Peter, and on this rock/I will build my church,/And the gates of hell will not prevail against it:/And I will give you the keys/to the kingdom of heaven./Whatever you bind on earth/Will be bound also in heaven;/And whatever you release on earth/Will be released also in heaven.)

86 Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150–1350: A Study on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty, and Tradition in the Middle Ages (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1988), 262.

269 papacy, Dubois’s musical connection with Pope Leo XIII was made that much more explicit: Dubois was clearly pinning his colors to the papal mast.

The music of Dubois’s oratorio is traditional in every sense of the word. Alternating between hymn-like homophony, Handelian fugue, and occasional text painting (for example, an abrupt tonal shift from G-sharp major to C major at the text “The French name becomes more powerful each day to distant lands”), the score is every bit what might be expected from a composer who was already strongly associated with the music of the

Church. Dubois was so pleased with the Reims premiere that he sent a collection of press clippings to his editor, Henri Heugel, so that he would be able to publish an article about the premiere in Le Ménestrel, the editor’s publicity organ. According to Dubois, it was the perfect moment: since the premiere of Jules Massenet’s newest opera, Cendrillon, would not be playing in Paris that week (its opening performance was not scheduled until 24

May), Le Baptême de Clovis had the opportunity to take the spotlight—and indeed, it did.87

The premiere, although held in Reims, attracted a large number of important members of the Parisian music scene as well as notable figures from all over France, among whom were major critics who were virtually unanimous in their praise of Dubois’s latest work.88

For Hugues Imbert, Le Baptême de Clovis was “one of the beautiful religious pages by the erudite director of the Paris Conservatoire” by virtue of its striking stylistic contrasts.

87 Letter from Dubois to Henri Heugel, dated 17 May 1899 (Collection Marcelle Dubois). “Voici des extraits des journaux sur le “Baptême de Clovis”—Vous pouvez faire avec cela un joli petit article. Puisque Cendrillon ne joue pas cette Semaine, vous avez de la place; c’est le moment.” Heugel was also Jules Massenet’s editor; Dubois’s comments hardly mask his envy of Massenet’s exponentially greater theatrical successes.

88 Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, Revue de Champagne et de Brie (1899), 530: “Cette solennité musicale avait attiré un grand nombre de notabilités du monde artistique de Paris et de divers points de la France.” Though this review was written by one of Leo XIII’s closest associates who had welcomed Dubois two months earlier in Rome and could thus easily be read as “planted,” the volume of positive critical reactions supports Rampolla’s assessment.

270 Whereas Imbert compared Clovis’s impassioned prayer in Part One, sung by the tenor, to a Meyerbeerian aria, he described the music of Part Two as that of “Christian heroism,” and, interestingly enough, claimed that its orchestral introduction reminded him of

Richard Wagner’s Siegfried-Idyll (1870).89

Writing in Le Ménestrel, Eugène de Bricqueville expressed his surprise that the

Pope, having “taken refuge in an ivory tower” because of old age and declining health, would attempt to revive a long-forgotten poetic genre (the ode) that had always shifted fluidly between jesting and the epic, and one in which Charles de la Rue (1643–1725) and

Jacques Vanière (1664–1739)—both of whom were Jesuits, perhaps not coincidentally—had excelled. Yet he urged his readers not to question, or to complain about, the decision, because if not for the Pope’s Ode, Dubois would not have had the opportunity to compose the score that, in his opinion, would come to figure amongst his most successful works.90

According to de Bricqueville, the oratorio exuded a sense of “classical purity” and “sober elegance,” but he echoed Dubois’ private criticism that the ode had the potential to yield boring music. Like Imbert, he applauded Dubois for avoiding the trap of monotony.

Through the composer’s “art of blending voices and of part-writing,” Le Baptême de Clovis

89 Hugues Imbert, “Le Baptême de Clovis,” Le Guide musical (1899): 457–58. “Elle est une des belles pages religieuses du savant directeur du Conservatoire de Paris…Mais, tout en se maintenant dans les grands principes d’unité, il a su éviter la monotonie en établissant des contrastes frappantes contre les diverses parties de son œuvre…le ténor solo fait à Dieu une prière d’un caractère doux et suppliant, dont l’accompagnement orchestral, avec son rythme très particulière, sa note de hautbois avec appogiature qui domine, et sa couleur rappelant un peu celle de telle page de Meyerbeer, amènent une opposition des plus heureuses…Voici la préface orchestrale de ‘l’Epopée’ avec les accompagnements lies des contrebasses, puis des cordes, se terminant par la phrase délicieuse et pianissimo nous donnant un écho d’une des gracieuses inspirations de Wagner dans Siegfried-Idylle.”

90 Eugène de Bricqueville, “Le Baptême de Clovis à Reims,” Le Ménestrel (14 May 1899): 156. “…c’est une chose inattendue de voir le souverain Pontife accablé d’ans, de soucis et de labeurs, se réfugier dans une tour d’ivoire pour faire revivre, en des sujets qui touchent indifféremment au badinage et à l’Épopée, l’art où excellèrent en dernier lieu le Père la Rue ou le Père Vanière. Ne nous en plaignons pas; nous devons à cette auguste fantaisie un ravissant poème, notre pays y voit un témoignage de sympathie, et M. Th. Dubois y trouve l’occasion d’écrire une partition qui comptera parmi ses œuvres les mieux réussies.”

271 demonstrated the “best” of Dubois’s talent and created a suitable sense of religious music.91 For another reviewer, it was the simplicity of the choral writing and the lack of polyphonic excess that imbued the score with religious simplicity and, in the words of

Georges Clément, the oratorio was so truly religious that nothing could adequately express its effect on the audience. For Abel Maurice, Dubois’s combination of “good faith” with “all the resources of modern art” yielded a work that would be inexorably linked with the Papacy, one that another observer confidently claimed would become the composer’s

Missa Papae Marcelli.92

The work’s religious appropriateness was a common thread among the critics: an unsurprising feature, especially given the contemporary debates amongst pedagogues and critics as to what types of music could and should be classified as religious. Whereas conservative proponents of the Schola Cantorum’s blatantly Catholic curriculum idolized plainchant and Palestrinian counterpoint and praised the overtly politicized revival of plainchant by the Benedictine monks at Solesmes, other equally invested Catholics

(including the maître de chapelle at Notre-Dame de Paris) had argued that only modern

91 Ibid., 157: “Inutile de faire ressortir la force singulière que revêt la pensée dans cette éclatante brièveté de la strophe saphique. Quant à la langue, elle est d’une pureté classique, la versification, d’une élégance sobre, ne trahit nulle part la recherche ou l’effort: c’est vraiment du latin de la meilleure époque. La facture du poème, la coupe obstinément symétrique des strophes, créaient au musicien une difficulté que M. Th. Dubois a su éviter: en un mot, sa partition n’est pas monotone…L’art de faire sonner les voix, l’habileté à superposer les parties, le sentiment précis de la musique religieuse sont qualités qu’il est devenu banal de signaler, quand il s’agit d’une œuvre de M. Th. Dubois…Et à coté de ces pages d’ordre relevé, que de petits ‘coins’ seraient à signaler dans cette Ode où M. Théodore Dubois a mis le meilleur de son talent.”

92 Excerpts of these reviews were printed together in Le Ménestrel. They are, in all likelihood, part of the collection of reviews that Dubois sent to Heugel on 17 May 1899, only four days before the publication of the 21 May issue of Ménestrel. Unsigned, “Nouvelles diverses,” Le Ménestrel (21 May 1899): 167. “La partition de M. Dubois vise à une simplicité toute religieuse. Des idées très simples; des effets de masse; nul excès de polyphonie.” (Fourcaud, Le Gaulois); “Rien ne peut donner une idée de l’effet produit par l’ensemble de cette œuvre sereine et grave et d’une inspiration réellement religieuse.” (Georges Clément, Les Débats); “Sur ce riche canevas, M. Th. Dubois a écrit une partition digne de lui-même, digne du texte qu’il interprétait. On sent que l’oratorio a été travaillé à loisir, écrit de bonne foi, utilisant toutes les ressources de l’art moderne…Un érudit près de nous disait: ‘Cet oratorio sera sa missa papæ Marcelli’ et nous estimons le rapprochement judicieux.” (Abel Maurice, Indépendant rémois).

272 religious compositions could successfully function as sacred in the contemporary religious climate.93 For one reviewer, it was the simplicity of the choral writing and the lack of polyphonic excess à la Palestrina that imbued the score with French classicism and other such praiseworthy characteristics as simplicity, clarity, and the aforementioned “classical purity” and “sober elegance.” As Steven Huebner has shown, these (and other) adjectives were frequently code words for “French” at the turn of the century, so much so that the very act of recalling Hellenistic precepts and political readings that emphasized classical values, along with the categorization of a work as “classical,” often marked the transformation of aesthetics into ideology.94 While Clovis himself—honorable, virile, and strong—appealed greatly to the Republic’s self-identification as an organic offshoot of

Classical culture, Dubois’s “classicist” musical depiction of his conversion could thus be perceived simultaneously as French and appropriately religious in a Catholic context.

Even as the dispute about what constituted “appropriate” religious music waged on,

Dubois’s oratorio was indeed a work whose musical merits garnered praise from

Republican and Catholic musical critics alike.

But for de Bricqueville, it was precisely the sincerity of the work’s religious expression that demanded its performance in a church. Its performance in Reims was so

93 On the Schola Cantorum and its cultural politics, see, for example, Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 105–16; Catrina Flint de Médicis, “The Schola Cantorum, Early Music, and French Political Culture from 1894 to 1914” (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 2006); Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 310; 617; and Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music, 15–56. For more on the revival of plainchant at Solesmes, see especially Katharine Ellis, The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2013), as well as Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). The maître de chapelle in question here is Félix Huet, a devout Catholic who nonetheless argued that plainchant was, by the end of the nineteenth century, a “dead” art and that modern religious music must necessarily replace it for proper worship in the Catholic Church. See Félix Huet, La Musique liturgique. L’art moderne dans ses rapports avec le Culte (Chalons-sur-Marne: Imprimerie Martin Frères, 1886), 62–5; 84.

94 Steven Huebner, “Classical Wagnerism: Alberic Magnard’s Bérénice,” The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 34, No. 1 (January 2017): 115–147.

273 successful that, for him, it proved that the church was the natural environment for sacred art.95 In his opinion, the effect that Le Baptême de Clovis produced in the Reims Cathedral would be difficult to reproduce in a “cold” concert hall or theater.96 Yet when the work was performed on 14 June 1900 at the Exposition, critics found the work to be equally successful to its premiere in Reims. Many critics who reviewed the concerts officiels had also been in attendance at the premiere. Writing for L’Événement, Julien Torchet stated that the performance at the Trocadéro produced the same grand effect as the one that he had experienced the previous year, and Hugues Imbert also reported a positive outcome for

Dubois at the Exposition.97

The performance of Le Baptême de Clovis at the Exposition Universelle on the stage of the Trocadéro was significant, especially given the explicit guidelines put out by the

Commission des Auditions Musicales that mandated that political music would not be included on any official program and that any text that stood in contradiction to “morals and conventions” would be summarily rejected.98 Though precisely what the commission

95 De Bricqueville, “Le Baptême de Clovis à Reims,” 157. “Et c’est là [Reims] la meilleure preuve que la musique religieuse est faite pour être entendue dans l’église, que ce soit une basilique, un temple, peu importe…Mais nous pouvons demander qu’une forme spécial de l’art sacré—cantate, oratorio—trouve un large accès dans le temple, qui est son cadre naturel.”

96 Loc. cit. “Cette audition de l’ode superbe de M. Th. Dubois, dans un des plus beaux monuments de l’architecture gothique, a causé à tous ceux qui y assistèrent une impression qui se renouvellera difficilement dans une froide salle de concert, cirque ou théâtre.”

97 Julien Torchet, “Les Grands concerts: Deuxième concert officiel au Trocadéro,” L’Événement (16 June 1900). “Les deux premières parties du Baptême de Clovis sont franchement applaudies. L’œuvre de Théodore Dubois est là bien dans son cadre, et, en l’écoutant, nous sommes heureux de retrouver l’impression de grandeur qu’elle nous a produite, l’an dernier, dans la cathédrale de Reims.” See also Hugues Imbert, “Deuxième concert officiel,” Le Guide musical (24 June and 1 July 1900): 508. “Les auditeurs ont pris, au contraire, plaisir à ouïr la première et la deuxième partie du Baptême de Clovis, écrit par M. Théodore Dubois sur les paroles de Léon XIII. Voilà, au moins, de la musique bien construite, qui n’est pas que littéraire, dont les belles lignes s’accusent et se maintiennent sans faiblesse. Les contrastes y sont habilement ménagés; l’œuvre devait retrouver au Trocadéro le succès qu’elle avait obtenu dans la cathédrale de Reims, le 11 mai 1899.”

98 Auditions musicales: Règlement général, 9. “Art. 31. Aucun morceau de musique ayant un caractère politique ne figurera sur les programmes qui seront d'ailleurs soumis à la Commission des auditions musicales...Les paroles contraires à la morale et aux convenances ou ayant un caractère politique quelconque seront un motif absolu d'exclusion pour les morceaux présentés.”

274 meant by “political” is unclear—consider that any of the “heroic” or “solemn” marches performed at the Exposition’s opening could easily be read as political statements— audiences at the Trocadéro heard the Catholic church’s role in French politics take center stage in Le Baptême de Clovis. As the seat of the French Catholic church, Reims was widely characterized as the nation’s “cradle of faith” or, as Ferdinand Tournier described it in

1898, the “cradle of our national history.”99 While the political connotations of the oratorio were made explicit in Reims, they took on a substantially different meaning in Paris— especially as part of the Exposition Universelle. If Reims was the seat of the French church, then Paris was the seat of the French nation, and the performance of the work on one of the most overtly Republican stages in the city inexorably connected the history of the church with the heritage of the Republic itself.

In keeping with the planning commission’s stipulation that no concert exceed two and a half hours, and perhaps also as a way to temper some of the work’s political statements, only parts one and two were performed as part of the concerts officiels.100

Though the omission of Part Three—“Le Réveil”—removed what was arguably the Pope’s most colonialist text, the consequent transfer of the dramatic climax to Part Two focused the political message even more clearly on France by further emphasizing the focus on

French military might, conquest, and superiority, especially over their Prussian neighbors’

Teutonic ancestors. The fraught nature of Franco-Prussian relations would have been no secret to either Parisian or international audiences in 1900: the wounds of the French defeat thirty years prior were still festering and had been reopened only recently in the

99 Ferdinand Tournier, Clovis et la France au baptistère de Reims (Lille: Desclée, Brouwer et Cie, 1898), 19. “Voilà le berceau de notre histoire nationale.”

100 Auditions musicales: Règlement général, 7. “La durée maximum de chaque concert sera de deux heures et demie.”

275 Dreyfus Affair. Yet as the head of the French musical establishment and a “traditional” composer in every sense of the work, Dubois and his music were primed to obtain widespread exposure without the risk of inciting critical controversy from either end of the political spectrum. On its own, Le Baptême de Clovis stood poised to demonstrate that the Catholic Church had come to play a substantially greater role in the image that the

Republic groomed for display on the 1900 Exposition Universelle’s international stage than it had in 1889. In combination with works like Gabriel Pierné’s L’An mil, however, the

Catholic church’s musical presence at the Exposition grew even stronger—despite the fact that these works’ blatant political messages flew in the face of everything that the

Exposition’s planning commission was instructed to avoid.

Gabriel Pierné’s L’An mil, Apocalyptic Fools, and the Church’s Triumph

Whereas Le Baptême de Clovis celebrated France’s military and political triumph in the name of the Catholic church, Gabriel Pierné’s L’An mil glorified the Church’s victory over human immorality—a key concern for the organizers of the Exposition—through, as one of the composer’s later biographers described it, a combination of a bit of academicism, a lot of objective truth, and some religious sentiment.101 As was the case in Dubois’s oratorio, the Catholic Church in medieval France and its correlations to more modern matters took center stage once again at the Trocadéro in Pierné’s L’An mil. In contrast to the commemoration of the sainted Clovis’s foundation of Catholic France in Le Baptême de

Clovis, however, Pierné’s symphonic poem with choir paints a more humanistic portrait of the Church, one in which its fallible members seem to straddle a precarious position

101 Georges Masson, Gabriel Pierné, musicien lorrain (Nancy: Éditions Serpenoise, 1987), 131. “Sa force, nous y venons: L’An mil est peint comme une fresque à la Géricault. C’est-à-dire qu’on y lit tous les détails de l’action et de la pensée. Un peu d’académisme. Beaucoup de vérité objective. Du sentiment aussi: le sentiment religieux.”

276 between fear of apocalyptic doom and “sinful” licentiousness, and one that could be read as an allegory of contemporary French society.

The published score’s epigraph drew from the book of the Apocalypse

(Revelation), describing Satan’s release from his thousand-year prison and his harrowing mission to “seduce” the nations in all four corners of the Earth.102 Written in three parts,

Part One (“Miserere mei”) opens with an impassioned plea for God’s mercy on the doomed of the earth; brief interspersions of “Miserere mei” from the choir punctuate the otherwise wholly symphonic movement. Part Two, “Fête des fous et de l’âne,” represents those who, in Pierné’s words, “considered the threats of the Apocalypse to be purely symbolic”; it represents their rowdy celebration of the medieval Feast of the Fools and the

Ass—one that the composer dismissed as a “rude parody of the ceremonies of worship.”103

Part Three serves as a repentant apotheosis to the crowd’s sacrilegious feasting. Entitled

“Te Deum,” the once unruly crowd praises God in penitence and gratitude when the new day breaks and the threat of Satan’s rule has been vanquished.

L’An mil’s premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 27 February 1898, under the direction of Edouard Colonne, was situated in a cultural environment in which the Middle

Ages, and particularly the Feast of the Fools and the Ass, was coming to possess a

102 Pierné printed the following verse, taken from the book of the Apocalypse (Revelation 20: 7–8), on the first page of the score: “Quand les mille ans seront accomplis, Satan sera délié de sa prison, et il en sortira pour séduire les nations qui sont aux quatre coins de la terre.” Gabriel Pierné, L’An mil (Paris: Enoch, 1898).

103 Loc. cit. “Cependant, malgré la terreur envahissante, ceux qui tenaient pour purement symboliques les menaces de l'Apocalypse célébraient la fête des Fous et de l'Âne, grossière parodie des cérémonies du culte. Un âne, magnifiquement paré, suivi de son cortège de fous, est introduit processionnellement dans l’église: on le conduit tantôt du côté de l’Épître, tantôt du côté de l’Évangile; les clercs et sous-diacres officient; les chantres entonnent le Kyrie, aussitôt interrompu par les quolibets du peuple et les danses sacrilèges. Comme une grande plainte, une voix du dehors clame: Quid, homo, sequeris ineptam tœtitiam! Heu miseri! Heu miseri! (Prose du Xe siècle sur ‘le Dernier jour’) ‘Hommes, pourquoi vous livrer à ces joies ridicules! Hélas! malheureux! Hélas! malheureux!’ Mais la fête reprend plus bruyante; l’âne sort de l’église dans les acclamations de la foule et le vacarme des cloches.”

277 noteworthy amount of cultural capital.104 On the morning of 29 May 1898, for instance, residents of Paris’s Latin quarter awoke to the raucous beginning of a two-day recreation of the medieval festival, put on by students at the nearby Sorbonne.105 The celebrations, as documented through prose, poetry, and illustration in a commemorative album, were bawdy and full of ribald humor: the cover image displays a topless female seated atop a hapless donkey, followed by crowds of drunken revelers (Figure 4.1)

104 On medievalism in nineteenth-century France, see Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), and Elizabeth Emery, “The ‘Truth’ About the Middle Ages: La Revue des Deux Mondes and Late Nineteenth-Century French Medievalism,” in Medievalism and the Quest for the Real Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Simmons (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 99–114.

105 See Elizabeth Emery, “Staging La Fête des fous et de l’âne in 1898: A Commemoration of the Literary Middle Ages,” in Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, ed. Susan Harrow and Andrew Watts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 37–59. According to Emery, the students chose the Feast of Fools and the Ass as their subject for recreation in March 1898, shortly after L’An mil was premiered at the Concerts Colonne. What she misses, however, is that 29 May 1898 fell between Pentecost and the Feast of Corpus Christi and that the processus prophetarum—one origin of the Feast of the Ass—later became associated with the Pentecost/Corpus Christi season; though likely unintentional, the Sorbonne students’ recreation was thus planned with some sense of liturgical accuracy. See Mary Chilton Callaway, “Medieval Reception of the Prophets,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Prophets, ed. Carolyn J. Sharp (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 423–46.

278

Figure 4.1: “La Fête des Fous et de l’Âne,” drawing by Henri Pille106

In his contribution to the volume, Frédéric Loliée described the scene on the Boulevard

Saint-Michel:

Here come the gang of Fools, in bright red helmets, waving their puppet and performing in play-acting, blunders, mockeries, and suggestiveness...for the number of fools is infinite. They are expected at Notre-Dame, all these featherbrains. The vast cathedral opened its double doors to them. They arrive; they arrive; they rush into the holy temple in great tumult... He approaches; a thousand joyous cries salute him. They surround him; they fuss over him; they do not have enough of the humblest demonstrations to honor him. Who is he, then, whom they welcome and venerate in such a way? It is master Aliboron himself. His stupid eye surveys the clergy’s ceremonious genuflections and would prefer a field of thistles to this spectacle; his nostrils sniff with displeasure the strange odor of the incense burned for him; he opens his ears to the maximum to the concert of hee haw that resounds, and is surprised that he recognized none of his own among so many brothers and sisters.107

106 Published in Fête des fous et de l’âne (Paris: Nouvelle Imprimerie, 1898): n.p.

107 Frédéric Loliée, “La Fête des Fous,” Fête des fous et de l’âne (Paris: Nouvelle Imprimerie, 1898): 30. “Voici venir la bande des Fous, en casaque vermeille, agitant leur marotte et se jouant en force simagrées, bourdes, railleries et grivoiseries…Car le nombre des fous est infini. Ils sont attendus à Notre-Dame, tous ces écervelés. La vaste cathédrale leur a ouvert ses portes à deux battants. Ils arrivent; ils arrivent; ils s’engouffrent à grand tumulte dans le temple saint….Il approche; mille cris joyeux le saluent. On

279 Loliée’s account resonates strongly with the one popularized by Victor Hugo in his 1831

Notre-Dame de Paris; indeed, Hugo’s famous hunchback, Quasimodo, the gypsy Esmerelda, and the rowdy troublemaker Jehan Frollo all made appearances in the students’ recreation of the feast.108 What the depictions of Hugo, Loliée, and many of their nineteenth-century contemporaries miss, however, is an awareness of the festival’s liturgical origins and the concomitant process of secularization that their artistic and recreational products perpetuated. But while Pierné’s own descriptions of the feast implies that the composer was influenced by the same secular narrative, the music of L’An mil suggests that the work returns to the feast’s sacred—even liturgical—context that had become lost over the centuries.

The Fête des fous et de l’âne has a rich and complicated history that, according to the medievalist Max Harris, has merged widely varying source materials into a single “twelfth- century narrative.”109 In its simplest form, the festival centered on a priest-led procession of “fools” consisting of participants such as shopkeepers, fishmongers, and schoolboys toward cathedrals; the priests (or “fools” representing priests) flanked a donkey that, in certain cities, bore on its back a young woman holding a baby. Upon entering the church, the procession was led to the altar, where Mass was said and the Prose de l’âne was sung.

l’environne; on s’empresse ; on n’a pas assez des démonstrations les plus humbles pour l’honorer. Quel est-il donc celui qu’on accueille et vénère de telle sorte? C’est maître Aliboron lui-même. Son œil hébété contemple les génuflexions cérémonieuses du clergé et préférerait à ce spectacle un champ de chardons; ses narines hument sans plaisir l’encens d’une étrange odeur qu’on fait fumer devant lui; il ouvre les oreilles plus larges au concert des hi han qui résonnent, et s’étonne de ce que parmi tant de frères et de sœurs il ne reconnaît aucun des siens.” Aliboron refers to the name of the donkey in Les Fables de La Fontaine.

108 Emery, “Staging La Fête des fous et de l’âne in 1898,” 63.

109 Max Harris, Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 80.

280 Following Mass, the parade of fools left the church and continued their lively procession through the streets.110

Early accounts suggest that this festival was first celebrated in Beauvais in the second half of the twelfth century and, as Harris argues, these first extant accounts place its celebration firmly within a liturgical rather than a secular framework. Celebrations of the Fête des fous et de l’âne originally occupied an important space in the Christmas liturgy.

According to an unknown nineteenth-century author, different dioceses held celebrations on or around Christmas (Rouen), the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ (Sens), or

Epiphany (Beauvais).111 While Harris argues that the allegories of fools and donkeys represented Christ’s “foolish” willingness to humble himself into human flesh through circumcision, or God’s professed love for “fools” of lowly status, later commentators provided other allegorical readings of the feast from the donkey’s perspective: the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem, or one in which the donkey represents Christ as bearing the burden of human sin.112 Even following Pope

Innocent III’s (1198–1216) complaints that such celebrations were dangerously reminiscent of pagan rituals, French bishops deliberately introduced reforms into their respective dioceses that attempted to accommodate the festival within acceptable liturgical frameworks. For example, priests replaced the Ite misse est with three shouts of “hi han,” after which the crowd responded likewise in place of the traditional text, Deo gratias.113

110 Simonetta Cochis provides another brief summary of this festival in “The Bishop of Fools,” in Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History, ed. Vicki K. Janik (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998), 97–105.

111 Unsigned, “La Musique,” (n.d.). BnF-Arts du Spectacle Ro-4046. “Selon les diocèses, cette fête se célébrait, soit à la Noël (Rouen), soit à la Circoncision (Sens), soit à l’Epiphanie (Beauvais).”

112 See Félix Clément, Histoire générale de la musique religieuse (Paris: Adrien Le Clere, 1860), 153–58, and Gustave Desjardins, Histoire de la cathédrale de Beauvais (Beauvais: Victor Pineau, 1865), 127–34. See also Harris, Sacred Fools, 68.

113 Harris, Sacred Fools, 6.

281 Notwithstanding the sonic recreation of a donkey’s braying in church, Harris contends that the Feast of Fools and the Ass “had, at its heart, an expanded, but still dignified, festive liturgy that, contrary to modern sensibilities, included a processional ass.”114

Victor Hugo’s vivid account of the festivities cemented nineteenth-century views that echoed ecclesiastical claims that the feast was nothing more than a cluster of pagan customs shrouded by a thin mantle of liturgy. Claims of drunken revelry, promiscuous women, and trouble-making schoolboys were often coupled with descriptions of altars laden with grilled sausages and wine, along with accusations that pleasure was the

Church’s chosen tactic in their mission to convert “fools:”

An easy mother, she understood that it is not suitable at all to repel simple souls through excess of austerity; that sometimes it is good to know how to keep them in the right place by the appeal of pleasure, and that on occasion it is prudent to play the Devil’s part so that he does not do it himself at God’s expense.115

The nineteenth-century archaeologist and historian Jacques-Xavier Carré de Busserolle

(1823–1904) took a similar stance. While he acknowledged that the clergy’s adoption of the festival had good intentions at its core, he maintained that the Church had gone too far— celebrating and honoring the central tenets of Catholicism would have borne better results if church officials had shown better judgment. The Church, he claimed, was too successful in its efforts to ease pagan converts into Catholic doctrine. Falling victim to

“fatal exaggeration,” mystery plays and festivals “in a manner of speaking, humanized divine things and defiled them through pagan reminiscences.” When the French

Parliament abolished the celebration of the Fête des fous et de l’âne in 1580, Carré de

114 Ibid., 85.

115 Loliée, “La Fête des Fous,” 30. “Mère facile, elle a compris qu’il ne convient point de rebuter les âmes simples par des excès d’austérité; qu’il est bon, parfois, de savoir les retenir à propos par l’attrait du plaisir, et qu’il est prudent, à l’occasion, de faire la part du diable pour qu’il ne se la fasse pas lui-même aux dépens de Dieu.”

282 Busserolle asserted that “the dignity of the Catholic religion and religious morality gained considerably.”116

Historians Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz emphasize this dissonance between sacred and secular interpretations of the Fête des fous et de l’âne in fin-de-siècle

France. They distinguish between two conflicting strands of medievalism in the period following the Franco-Prussian War, after which point the nation began to view the Middle

Ages as a balm for moral, patriotic, and political wounds. On the one hand, Emery cites

François-René de Chateaubriand as the driving force behind a “Catholic” brand of medievalism that valued piety, simplicity, and pure faith. On the other hand, “Republican” medievalism, as propagated by Hugo and the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, favored medieval narratives that foregrounded battle, revolt, and military conquest for obvious political reasons.117 While Emery and Morowitz cast Catholic and Republican responses as two mutually exclusive conceptions of the same period, these differing viewpoints find a rapprochement of sorts in Pierné’s L’An mil, a work that resituated the medieval celebration of the fools and an ass as an element within Catholic liturgy.

Though Pierné described Part Two (“Fête des fous et de l’âne”) as a parody of ceremonial worship, the movement’s central focus is the celebration of the Mass rather than a musical revelry in sacrilegious excess and a secularized parody of sacred rites.

116 Jacques-Xavier Carré de Busserolle, Notice sur les fêtes des ânes et des fous qui se célébraient au moyen âge dans un grand nombre d’églises, et notamment à Rouen, à Beauvais, à Autun et à Sens (Rouen: D. Brière, n.d.). 1. “Adoptée dans une intention louable, cette manière d’honorer les actes fondamentaux du catholicisme aurait certainement porté d’heureux fruits, si elle eût été appliquée avec toute la prudence et tout le discernement désirable. Malheureusement, l’exécution ne répondit pas toujours au bon vouloir, et, comme il arrive souvent dans les entreprises humaines, en voulant trop bien faire, on dépassa le but pour tomber dans une exagération funeste. Les organisateurs des mystères mirent l’histoire sainte en action avec une fidélité trop scrupuleuse; ils humanisèrent en quelque sorte les choses divines, et les souillèrent par des réminiscences païennes. Puis, la superstition du peuple aidant, on arriva à donner en spectacle d’ignobles trivialités, dont le souvenir subsiste encore comme une tache dans les annales de l’Église… la dignité de la religion catholique et la morale religieuse y gagnèrent considérablement.”

117 Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in fin-de-siècle France, 16–19.

283 Amidst a lively orchestral scherzo, the choir of fools enters with shouts of laughter. Despite cries of “Eho!” and the donkey’s “hin-han” accompanied by dissonant, chromatic clusters, both music and text correspond directly to their early thirteenth-century source, Pierre de

Corbeil’s “Prose de l’âne,” which liberally mixes medieval French in the refrain with Latin in the stanzas.

Orientis partibus From the East Adventavit Asinus the donkey came; Pulcher et fortissimus pretty and strong, Sarcinis aptissimus. fit for burden.

(Refrain) Hez, sire Asne, car chantez Up, Sir Ass, because you sing, Belle bouche rechignez, your beautiful mouth brays, Vous aurez du foin assez you will have enough hay Et de l’avoine à plantez. and oats to plant.

Hic in colibus sichen Bred in the hills of Sichem, Enutritus sub Ruben. nourished under Reuben, Transiit per Jordanem, crossed the Jordan, Saliit in Bethleem. sped into Bethlehem.

Ecce magnis auribus See the enormous ears Subjugalis filius. of the subjugated son. Asinus egregius. Egregious ass, Asinorum Dominus.118 Lord of the asses.

Critics frequently referred to the presence of liturgical song or melody in Part Two. In his review of the work’s premiere at the Concerts Colonne, one P. D. noted the presence of liturgical melodies “rich in character.”119 Alfred Bruneau, on the other hand, described the movement as one in which “parodied religious songs blend with the crowd’s sacrilegious

118 The text of Corbeil’s “Orientis partibus” can be found in its entirety in Carré de Busserolle’s notice on the festival, and also in Félix Clément’s Histoire générale de la musique religieuse (Paris: Librairie Adrien le Clere, 1860), 126. Corbeil was the Archbishop of Sens in the early thirteenth century and added his Prose de l’Ane (text and music) to that diocese’s Office of the Feast of Circumcision. It later became standard in celebrations of the feast.

119 P.D., “Revue musicale,” La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité (5 March 1898), 86. “La Fête des fous et de l’âne forme le second fragment. Ce morceau, construit sur des mélodies liturgiques riches de caractère et dont M. Pierné s’est servi avec beaucoup d’habileté, est, du moins dans son début, plein de mouvement et de couleur.”

284 laughter.”120 Save for an anonymous critic in Les Annales politiques et littéraires, whose shaky account credited a twelfth-century manuscript as Pierné’s source, critics on the whole did not recognize Pierné’s melody as the thirteenth-century original—nor have modern commentators to this date.121 (Examples 4.1 and 4.2)

Example 4.1: Pierre de Corbeil, “Orientis partibus”122

120 Alfred Bruneau, “Les Concerts: Concerts Colonne et Lamoureux,” Le Figaro (28 February 1898). “La seconde partie est pleine du tumulte de la fête des Fous et de l’Âne. Les chants religieux parodiés se mêlent aux rires sacrilèges de la foule.”

121 Unsigned, “Concerts Colonne,” Les Annales politiques et littéraires (13 March 1898), 169. “Le compositeur a tiré de la ‘Prose de l’Ane’, emprunté à un manuscrit du douzième siècle, un parti très adroit.”

122 The manuscript of Corbeil’s “Orientis partibus,” held in Sens, was published in facsimile by Didron Ainé in Annales archéologiques, Vol. 7 (1846): 26. A transcription for four voices and organ was published by Félix Clément in the same volume (27). The complete office was published in facsimile and transcription by Abbé Henri Villetard, Office de Pierre de Corbeil (Office de la Circoncision) (Paris: Librairie Alphonse Picard et fils, 1907).

285 Example 4.2: Gabriel Pierné, L’An mil, Part Two, “Orientis partibus”123

123 Music examples from Pierné’s L’An mil are derived from the piano-vocal score, published in Paris by Enoch in 1898. Instrumental indications are taken from the orchestral score, also published by Enoch in 1898.

286 Though commentators recognized a vague resemblance to “liturgical song,” undoubtedly aided by Pierné’s setting of “Orientis partibus” in unison, their oversight of the presence of the “authentic” source only supported their perception of Part Two as a musical depiction of self-indulgent—and entirely secular—debauchery. Writing in La Revue comique normande, Henri Eymieu described the theme of Part Two as having “one of the most sarcastic characters; all the unbelief and lack of respect of the atheists of the Middle Ages makes this song sacrilegious.”124

As the crowd continues to sing, a bass voice intones the text of the “Kyrie eleison.”

The plea for mercy, however, is quickly interrupted by the choir’s interjected cries of

“Eho!” and “hin-han” that are accompanied by dissonant, half-step rich, chords. The bass’s continuation of “Christe eleison” joins, but is eventually overtaken by, the text of “Orientis partibus.” Soon thereafter, a distant voice chants texts taken from another medieval source, the “prose for the end of the world:”125

Audi tellus, audi magni maris limbus, audi homo, audi omne quod vivit sub sole: veni prope est dies iræ supreme. Heu, miseri! Quid homo ineptam sequeris lætitiam?

Hear land, hear edge of the great sea; hear man, hear all who live beneath the sun: the day of wrath is near and coming. Alas, miserable one! What unfit man pursues pleasure?

According to Remy de Gourmont’s Le Latin mystique, an 1892 anthology of (and commentary on) liturgical medieval poetry, the sequence “Audi tellus” was an eleventh- century variant of the “Libera me,” a responsory sung during the Requiem mass that

124 Henri Eymieu, “Chronique musicale Parisienne,” La Revue comique normande (19 March 1898): 6. “Le thème de la Prose de l’âne a un caractères des plus sarcastiques; c’est toute l’incroyance et l’irrespect des athées du moyen-âge que rend cette chanson sacrilège…”

125 An early extant source of this text is found in an eleventh-century manuscript by Johannes Fiscannensis (Jean de Fécamp, d. 1078) that contains excerpts from Saint Augustine’s Epistolae along with hymns signed with the name “Bède.” BnF-Département des manuscrits, Latin 1928, 178r.

287 sought mercy for the souls of the dead.126 Gourmont, a Symbolist poet and widely read critic, was fascinated with the rhythm of Latin verse and, in the case of “Audi tellus,” its frequent associations with the apocalyptic connotations of the thousandth year. With a foreword by the decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, the text of Le Latin mystique was popular enough that it was reprinted in 1895, only three years prior to the premiere of L’An mil. Huysmans’s preface claimed that at times, liturgical forms were applied to “human passions,” much like the accusations leveled by critics who opposed the “secular” celebration of the Fête des fous et de l’âne. 127 Here again, however, Pierné directly quotes the chant melody in an a cappella, “liturgical” manner and, as with “Orientis partibus,” both nineteenth-century critics and modern musicologists failed to recognize Pierné’s quotation, thereby missing another opportunity to link the work to its liturgical sources.

Though “Audi tellus” does not form part of the texts associated with the Feast of Fools and the Ass, Pierné’s quotation, in combination with his utilization of texts from the

Ordinary of the Mass, further situates the framework of the supposedly “secular” second movement within its original liturgical context (Examples 4.3 and 4.4).128

126 Remy de Gourmont, Le Latin mystique (Paris: Édition du Mercure de France, 1892), 289. Other sources classify the text as an Advent hymn dating from the eleventh century. See Songs of Praise and Poems of Devotion in the Christian Centuries, ed. Henry Coppée (Philadelphia: E.H. Butler and Co., 1866), 147. Félix Raugel’s Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Montpellier identifies the text’s source as Ms. 6, held at the Bibliothèque de Montpellier. See Raugel, “Note sur ‘l’Audi tellus’ et le ‘Miles xristi’ du manuscrit no. 6 de la Bibliothèque Municipale de Montpellier,” in Mémoires de la Société archéologique de Montpellier (Montpellier: Imprimerie du Midi, 1920), 1–6.

127 Huysmans, foreword to Le Latin mystique, 1.

128 Though he did not mention “Audi tellus” by name, one anonymous critic identified a section of Part Two as “authentic” by virtue of the fact that its manuscript was kept at the Bibilothèque de Montpellier. See “Chronique musicale,” L’Attaque (6 March 1898). “...elle est authentique, et conservée dans les Archives de Montpellier.”

288 Example 4.3: L’An mil, Part Two, “Audi homo”

Example 4.4: “Audi tellus”129

Notwithstanding the liturgical basis of Part Two, multiple critics praised the final movement as the most religious of the three. For one writer, it took on a religious character through its “pious canticles of the faithful.”130 Another critic cited the profound

129 Paulin Blanc and Abbé L. Tesson, Prose de Montpellier, ou Chant du dernier jour (Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1863), 11. Indeed, many sources published “Audi tellus” under its French name, “Chant du dernier jour (Chant for the Last Day).” See also Michel Huglo, “Les chants liturgiques tirés de l’Apocalypse dans les liturgies hispaniques et romano-franques,” in El canto mozárabe y su entorno. Estudios sobre la música de la liturgia viejo hispánica, ed. Rosario Álvarez Martinez, Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta, and Ana Llorens Martin (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2013), 214–15.

130 Unsigned, “L’An Mil” (n.d.), BnF-Arts du Spectacle Ro-4046. “…la dernière, tout en gardant un certain côté descriptif, revêt un caractère religieux et fait surgir de la terre vers le ciel les pieux cantiques des fidèles, l’hymne de louanges au Seigneur.”

289 impression that the movement’s liturgical and powerful form left with the audience.131

Such classifications no doubt were based on the movement’s text. Comprised of fragments from various hymns, liturgical texts, and patristic prose, Pierné’s “Te Deum” is a veritable compendium of religious texts:

Table 4.1: Texts found in “Te Deum,” L’An mil (Part Three)

Text (in order of appearance) Source

“Alleluia”

“Jesu benigne, O Jesu qui tenes claves Pauline Blanc, ed. Nouvelle Prose sur le mortis et vitae. Arbiter vivorum qui es dernier jour (Montpellier: Jean Martel et mortuorum. Rex Christe, nostra Ainé, Mémoires de la Société posside corde.” Archéologique de Montpellier, 1847), 54. Adaptation of the tenth-century text. “Te Deum laudamus, te Deum First line of the Te Deum, hymn sung at confitemur” Matins on all days when the Gloria is sung. “Credo in unum Deum” First line of the Credo, Ordinary of the Mass. “Gloria in excelsis Deo” First line of the Gloria, Ordinary of the Mass “Adoro te devote latens Deitas” Eucharistic hymn written by Saint Thomas Aquinas132

The third part of L’An mil, described by one anonymous writer as a “vast religious composition,” carries all the hallmarks of “religious” music.133 Following an extended orchestral introduction, the movement begins with the impression of angelic voices sung

131 Unsigned, “Premières représentations” (15 June 1900), BnF-Arts du Spectacle Ro-4046. “La troisième partie de l’An Mil de Gabriel Pierné fit une grande impression avec ses chœurs, de forme liturgique, larges et puissantes.”

132 See Paul Murray, Aquinas At Prayer: The Bible, Mysticism, and Poetry (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 241.

133 Unsigned, “Concerts Colonne,” Les Annales politiques et littéraires (13 March 1898): 169. “Le Te Deum final est une vaste composition religieuse, rempli de sonorité et de magnificence.”

290 at a barely audible ppp: while the sopranos render the Alleluia “comme un murmure,” the contraltos are instructed to hum with closed mouths—all accompanied by harp glissandi.

The angelic sopranos also introduce the next segment of text (“Jesu benigne”) and its melodic motive; this soon becomes the subject of a short fughetta. Homophonic chorales abound: the first statement of “Te Deum” comes in a fully homophonic choral setting that recurs in alternation with an orchestral echo of the same melodic and harmonic unit. And just as he had done in Part Two, Pierné quotes chant, setting the text and melody of

“Adoro te devote latens Deitas” as a chorale. (Examples 4.5 and 4.6)

Example 4.5: “Adoro te devote latens Deitas”134

134 Liber usualis missæ et officii (Rome and Tournai: Desclée, Lefebvre et Cie, 1904), 1855.

291 Example 4.6: L’An mil, Part Three, “Adoro te devote latens Deitas”

In a Baroque-inspired progression of musical events, homophony gives way to a contrapuntal orchestral interlude serving as an introduction to a fugue that begins with the opening line of the Credo and continues with the text of the “Te Deum.” Following a return to the chromatic orchestral introduction, the choir intones “Credo in unum Deum” as a chorale, before ascending arpeggios bring the piece to an end. Just as in Le Baptême de

Clovis, the church is ultimately triumphant.

Though Pierné likely sourced his medieval materials from nineteenth-century publications whose claims to authenticity were sketchy at best, the work’s strong connection with Catholic medievalism through the use of specifically French chants imbued it with an equally strong sense of political urgency at the 1900 Exposition. By the final years of the nineteenth century, the Benedictines of Solesmes, under the leadership of Dom Joseph Pothier and Dom André Mocquereau, were well known throughout France

292 for their advocacy of chant reform through publication of “authentic” musical sources and the revival of “authentic” performance practices. At the heart of their restorative mission, however, was the publication of chant editions that would be recognized by the Vatican as the official volumes to be used by the Catholic Church worldwide. But as Katharine Ellis has shown, the Solesmes movement and, by extension, plainchant itself took on an entirely political character as French church-based publishers battled their German counterparts for the rights to the Vatican-based monopoly.135 Ellis’s analysis demonstrates that, in the right conditions, the publication and performance of chant in late nineteenth- century France “neutralized, reversed, circumvented, or subverted” governmental anticlericalism of the 1890s and early 1900s. “Touch the correct Republican buttons,” she points out, and “anticlericals could find their loyalties split.”136 By 1900, the “secular”

French government and the Catholic Church had found a common cause in plainchant.

The “politics of plainchant,” coupled with the apocalyptic nature of L’An mil, engendered a striking juxtaposition of religious ideologies at the 1900 Exposition. At the same time that the country was working to solidify its musical dominance within the

Vatican, decades of political, military, and cultural tension—especially at the height of the

Dreyfus Affair—rendered the apocalyptic nature of L’An mil particularly appropriate. Yet on the second official concert (14 June 1900), audiences heard only Parts Two and Three.

Through the omission of the opening movement (“Miserere mei”) and its apocalyptic epigraph, this truncated performance of L’An mil at the Exposition focused less on collective pleas for mercy than it did on highlighting the triumph of the Church, whether

135 Katharine Ellis, The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2013). See also Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

136 Ellis, The Politics of Plainchant, xv–xvi.

293 through situating an admittedly hedonistic French feast within its sacred and liturgical origins through plainchant, or by way of music and text that was unquestionably received as religious.137 Save for Pierné’s insertion of an excerpt from “Audi tellus,” all reference to

Satan’s earthly reign was lost, though audience members may have been aware of the meaning of the work’s title.

The final two movements most effectively represented the Republic’s conception of the Church as a valuable asset at the turn of the twentieth century and spoke directly to the French historical moment. Essentially “French” by virtue of its origin in the French

Middle Ages and yet also essentially Catholic, given its particularity within a distinctly

Catholic liturgical context, the work spoke to the possibilities for—and even necessities of—a rapprochement between the realms of the sacred and the secular. Thus even though the temporal and historical distance between the Middle Ages and the turn of the nineteenth century likely rendered the work’s liturgical and musical content more palatable and thus less overtly political (a necessity, given the commission’s guidelines), the performances of Le Baptême de Clovis and L’An mil on the second official concert at the

Exposition Universelle —with the President of the Republic, Émile Loubet, in the audience, no less—nevertheless signaled that the triumphant church could be invaluable to a triumphant Republic.

Official Concerts, Critical Responses

In his review of the performances of Le Baptême de Clovis and L’An mil on the Exposition’s second official concert, the irreverent Henry Gauthier-Villars claimed that he could only come to one of two conclusions regarding that concert’s program: it was either a strategic

137 The epigraph was printed on the concert programs.

294 move through which its organizers wanted to assert “respectable religious convictions,” or the end result was “awkwardly authentic” by virtue of the amount of “church music” that appeared on the program.138 Despite the potential awkwardness that he sensed, however, he considered programming works like Le Baptême de Clovis and L’An mil an acceptable choice for the context. In a swipe at the concert audience, Gauthier-Villars deemed that

“this clerical clutter was not detrimental to success.”139

Not every critic shared Gauthier-Villars’s opinion that the concerts were successful.

As each program was unveiled to the public, composers, critics, and musicians active in

Paris at the time took the opportunity to air their grievances one by one. Even though, as

Lesley Wright has noted, many prominent musicians did not engage in the critical debates surrounding the concerts, there was still a strong—and primarily negative—response to the programs at the Trocadéro.140 Many complaints dealt with the widely held notion that the programs were skewed unfavorably in the direction of the establishment. Critics called out the commission’s preference for older composers over their younger counterparts.

Julien Torchet claimed to have received protests from young musicians who asserted to have been purposefully overlooked, and Pierre Lalo bemoaned the fact that “only the dusty ghosts of the most defunct works” returned to the Trocadéro. In his opinion, the

138 Gauthier-Villars, “Musique: Trocadéro—Deuxième grand concert officiel,” L’Écho de Paris (16 June 1900). “Ou l’organisateur de ce concert a voulu affirmer de respectables convictions religieuses, ou il s’est avéré maladroit authentique en entassant sur un seul programme tant de musique d’église, les Te Deum et les Kyrie de M. Pierné, l’ode baptismale de M. Dubois, et, entre deux œuvres pieuses, la Marche solennelle de M. Massenet, d’un pompiérisme quelque peu ecclésiastique.”

139 Loc. cit. “Cet encombrement clérical n’a pas nui au succès: le public a fort applaudi le Baptême de Clovis, et même l’entrée de M. Loubet, effectuée au milieu de l’Ouverture du Pré aux Clercs (sans doute, ce haut fonctionnaire n’avait pas été prévenu par les ouvreuses qu’il est interdit de pénétrer dans la salle pendant l’exécution des morceaux).”

140 Lesley Wright, “Music Criticism and the Exposition Internationale Universelle de 1900,” Context: A Journal of Music Research, 22 (Spring 2001): 19–30, 21.

295 concerts officiels constituted the “exhibition of the ruins of French music.”141 Other critics voiced similar objections by basing their observations on the exceedingly “official” nature of the concerts. Although he attempted to deflect his negativity by citing an unnamed

“colleague,” Gaston Carraud accused the commission of “profiting from the supremacy that they owe to their official position in order to carve out the lion’s share—if it is allowed to speak like this without offending this noble animal—in this exhibition of our national art.” Carraud blasted the members of the commission for their “fierce ostracism of young musicians who have talent but are out of favor.”142 Similarly, for Henri de Curzon, the term

“official” was a hallmark of mediocrity, though, in his opinion, the banality of each concert was alleviated by works by younger composers; he cited the fragments from Charles

Lenepveu’s Jeanne d’Arc (1892) and the overture to Victorin Joncières’s Dimitri as welcome highlights in an otherwise dull set of programs (though Joncières’s opera had premiered already in 1876).143

141 Julien Torchet, “Les Grands concerts: Deuxième concert officiel au Trocadéro,” L’Événement (16 June 1900). “J’ai reçu des protestations de jeunes musiciens qui se prétendent méchamment oubliés; d’autre part, deux membres de ladite Commission m’écrivent qu’on a fait l’impossible pour n’omettre personne. Qui a tort? Qui a raison? J’ai peur que le silence gardé sur les œuvres choisies ne soit un aveu,” and Pierre Lalo, “La Musique,” Le Temps (12 June 1900). “On verra donc revenir au Trocadéro les fantômes poussiéreux des œuvres les plus défuntes: ce sera l'exposition des ruines de la musique française.”

142 Gaston Carraud, “Les Concerts: Premier concert officiel,” La Liberté (2 June 1900). “Un de nos plus distingués confrères nous a déjà révélé qu’il s’était passé d’étranges choses au sein de la commission officielle chargée d’élaborer les programmes; que certains de ses membres ont profité de la suprématie qu’ils doivent à leur situation officielle pour se tailler la part du lion—s’il est permis d’ainsi parler sans offenser ce noble animal—dans cette exhibition de notre art national; qu’ils ont prononcé l’ostracisme le plus féroce contre de jeunes musiciens qui ont du talent, mais qui sont mal en cour...”

143 Henri de Curzon, “Le Quatrième concert officiel au Trocadéro,” Le Guide musical (22 and 29 July 1900): 552– 53. “Les concerts se suivent et se ressemblent. Pourquoi ce mot d’officiel semble-t-il toujours exiger, spectacle ou concert, que la médiocrité y coudoie la banalité et que l’une et l’autre distillent l’ennui, l’ennui solennel, l’ennui des galas et des fêtes légales?... Heureusement que chaque concert a du moins un ou doux morceaux auxquels on peut rattacher son attention et respirer à l’aise. Le dernier concert ne comportait pas seulement l’ouverture de Dimitri (de M. V. Joncières: voilà vraiment de quoi représenter son talent!) et un fragment important de la Jeanne d’Arc de M. Lenepveu.” Neither Lenepveu nor Joncières were particularly young in 1900.

296 The most frequent criticism leveled at the planning commission was the overwhelming dominance of vocal music (including extracts from operas and oratorios) on the programs at the expense of symphonic music. According to Adolphe Jullien, who openly questioned the lack of the latter, the commission’s glaring omission rendered the official French concerts devoid of interest.144 In response to the preponderance of excerpts from well-known ballets, another writer opined “if foreigners gain a high opinion of

French music based on the samples presented to them at the Trocadéro on 28 June, they have a generous soul and a simple admiration,” and argued that Berlioz, Saint-Saëns,

Franck, d’Indy, and Lalo—the names that, for him, signified the art of the French symphony—should figure more prominently in a showcase of French music than disparate fragments from various ballets.145

For the most part, these critics were not incorrect in their assessments of the concerts officiels. Of fifty-nine composers represented across the ten programs, twenty-two were dead by 1900, although seven of those twenty-two had died in the previous decade

144 Adolphe Jullien, “Revue musicale: Concerts officiels français,” Le Moniteur universel (2 July 1900). “Occupons nous d’abord des concerts officiels français. Ce n’est pas qu’ils présentent un grand intérêt pour nous, car, à deux exceptions près: une cantate d’inauguration, composée par M. Saint-Saëns à la gloire de l’Électricité—qui, d’ailleurs, fonctionne assez mal—et une marche instrumentale écrite par M. Massenet pour le jour de l’ouverture, il n’y aura dans ces programmes officiels que des fragments d’œuvres théâtrales ou de compositions de concerts que nous avons eu déjà l’occasion d’entendre ailleurs. C’est une revue, en quelque sorte, de ce que la musique française a produit, en fait d’œuvres vocales—car je ne sais pourquoi les œuvres symphoniques ont été rayées de ces programmes—durant ces cent dernières années, et même un peu plus.”

145 J. d’Offoël, “Concerts officiels au Trocadéro,” Le Guide musical (8 and 15 July 1900): 527. “Si les étrangers prennent une haute opinion de la musique française d’après les échantillons qu’on leur en a servis le 28 juin au Trocadéro, c’est qu’ils auront l’âme généreuse et l’admiration facile… Attendra-t-on les concerts supplémentaires, mais aléatoires, pour s’apercevoir que les noms de Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Franck, Lalo, d’Indy, etc., sont des noms français qui signent des symphonies françaises, et que ces œuvres, réellement conçues pour l’orchestre seul, seraient plus à leur place en cette exposition musicale que tel ou tel ballet?” Pierre Lalo expressed similar feelings in his article in Le Temps (12 June 1900).

297 and were still, for the most part, considered “modern.”146 And while many younger composers had been added to the roster, including Gustave Charpentier, Claude Debussy, and Henri Duparc, multiple critics argued that the works chosen from their output were inadequate representations of their individual talents; Jullien went so far as to suggest that

“the amount of time allotted to each composer stood in inverse proportion to his personal merit.”147 Critics were also correct in identifying the planning commission and the programs as an assembly of elite musicians. Of the fifty-nine composers whose works were performed, sixteen were members of the Institut de France and twenty-two were previous winners of the Prix de Rome. Moreover, of the twenty-three members of the Commission des Auditions Musicales, eighteen had works selected for the concerts.148

While these criticisms reveal that comparable aesthetic fault lines remained intact from one Exposition to the next, critics were at least able to reach a consensus about two works: Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem and the eighth movement from César Franck’s Les

Béatitudes.149 These were, by far, the most popular works on the programs with critics and audiences alike, so much so that the audience demanded an encore of Fauré’s “Pie Jesu.”150

146 The seven composers who died between 1890 and 1900 were César Franck (1890), Ernest Guiraud (1892), Charles Gounod (1893), Emmanuel Chabrier (1894), Benjamin Godard (1895), Ambroise Thomas (1896), and Ernest Chausson (1899). Composers who were still considered “modern” included Chabrier and Chausson.

147 Adolphe Jullien, “Revue musicale,” Journal des débats (2 September 1900), translated by Lesley Wright in “Music Criticism and the Exposition Internationale Universelle de 1900,” 22.

148 The only members of the Commission des Auditions Musicales who were not represented on the programs were those who served in an administrative capacity: Bernheim, des Chappelles, and Réty. Paul Taffanel was both a committee member and the conductor of the concerts. None of these complaints were new, however, given that similar criticism had appeared frequently in reviews of the official concerts in 1889. See Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 20–21.

149 Fauré’s Requiem was performed (in its entirety) on the fourth official concert (12 July 1900), and the excerpt from Franck’s Béatitudes appeared on the tenth concert (4 October 1900).

150 Julien Torchet, “Les Grands concerts: quatrième concert officiel au Trocadéro,” L’Événement (14 July 1900). “On a bissé le Pie Jesu, qu’a d’ailleurs soupiré délicieusement Mlle Torrès.”

298 For many, Fauré’s presence on the program served as a counterbalance to the academicism that seemed to be the dominating aesthetic framework. After bemoaning the fact that the works on the fourth official concert were nothing more than ordinary,

Torchet praised Fauré’s Requiem as an exception that “makes one want to die in order to hear such music at one’s funerals.”151 According to another critic, there was only one work in the otherwise “gray” official concerts that “shone with a very pure brightness and had consecrated the mastery of the one who had written it: it was the beautiful and poetic

Requiem by Gabriel Fauré.”152 Even the notoriously pessimistic Pierre Lalo was able to praise the Requiem as a work by a “true musician” that rightly delighted the audience.153

Ralliement at the Exposition Universelle de 1900

According to Lesley Wright, the consensus among critics was that “politics within the musical world and the wish to placate all factions had damaged the effort to present the nation’s musical image to the Exposition’s tourists.”154 Yet even if the commission failed to shape a cohesive portrait of French music to the Exposition’s visitors, they were successful in presenting an image of the Republic’s configuration of the Catholic church through the concerts. Although the planning commission had demanded that politics remain outside

151 Loc. cit. “Rien de fin, de délicat, d’onctueux comme cette musique! Sévère par endroits—au début surtout—elle finit par dégager un charme, un attendrissement, une émotion douce, qui donnent envie de mourir rien que pour entendre à ses obsèques une musique pareille.”

152 L.P., “Septième grand concert officiel,” Le Guide musical (2 September 1900): 616. “En ces grands concerts officiels de l’Exposition de 1900, d’une teinte généralement grise et monotone, une œuvre seule avait brillé d’un éclat très pur et avait consacré la maîtrise de celui qui l’avait écrite: ce fut le beau et poétique Requiem de M. Gabriel Fauré.”

153 Pierre Lalo, “La Musique: Au Trocadéro—quatrième concert officiel,” Le Temps (17 June 1900). “Le Requiem de M. Fauré n’a, par bonheur, rien de commun avec Jeanne d'Arc. C’est ici l’œuvre d’un vrai musicien, et c’est de la musique…Le Pie Jesu, entre autres, invocation murmurée tout bas par une voix de femme, et le In Paradisum, chœur final d’une pureté, d’une légèreté aériennes, ont l’autre jour ravi la foule. Et la foule n’avait point tort de se laisser ravir.”

154 Wright, “Music Criticism and the Exposition Internationale Universelle de 1900,” 22.

299 the Trocadéro, the frequency with which religious music with obvious political connotations appeared on the programs of the concerts officiels suggests that the overwhelmingly Republican (and “secular”) commission considered the Catholic church to be a defining factor of the Republican image. In addition to Le Baptême de Clovis and

L’An mil, audiences at the Trocadéro heard numerous additional works that brought the issue into full relief. The fourth official concert, for example, featured excerpts from

Charles Lenepveu’s Ode triomphale à Jeanne d’Arc—a work that possessed Catholic and

Republican credibility in equal parts through its portrayal of the simultaneously Catholic saint and martyr for the patrie. The origin of Lenepveu’s “drame lyrique” adds yet another layer: the work was premiered in Rouen in 1886, having been commissioned by clergymen for that city’s first explicitly religious fête in honor of its most famous saint. Yet such civic celebrations had been wholly secular earlier in the 1880s, organized by various patriotic societies whose ideological allegiances were indebted to the positivist philosophies of

Auguste Comte.155 Like Fauré’s Requiem, featured on the same program, Lenepveu’s contribution straddled the precarious divide between church and concert hall, Church and State.

In a similar fashion to Le Baptême de Clovis, the fourth part of Émile Paladilhe’s oratorio Les Saintes Maries de la Mer (“En Provence”), featured on the seventh program, celebrated the early Church in France. The title refers to a well-known Provençal legend in which three holy Marys—Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome, and Mary of Cleopas—flee

Jerusalem by boat after finding Jesus’s tomb empty. “En Provence” details the events

155 See Sylvie Bausseron, “Les positivistes et les fêtes civiques de Jeanne d’Arc: le cas de Rouen, 1880–1894,” Annales de Normandie, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2003): 99–111. See also Yannick Simon, “Music and the Vichy Regime Through Jeune France’s Three Joan-of-Arc Productions,” in Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth- Century Dictatorships, ed. Esteban Buch, Igor Contreras Zubillaga, and Manuel Deniz Silva (Abingdon (U.K.): Ashgate, 2016), 19. Though Joan of Arc was not canonized by the Church until 1920, she was nevertheless a powerful symbol for the Church during the last decades of the nineteenth century, particularly in France.

300 following their landing (or shipwreck) in the Camargue. The women, along with their travel companions Maximin, Sidoine, and Lazare (Lazarus), find themselves in the midst of a “fête rustique” celebrating the pagan god Pan. They then witness an instrumental

“sacrifice rustique” and a raucous bacchanale. Maximin, Lazare, and the three Marys beseech the pagans to convert and use their own stories as their testimonies: Mary-

Magdalene’s repentance and forgiveness and Lazarus’s resurrection eventually convince the crowd to renounce their pagan ways. Having been successfully converted, the work ends in a robust choir of thanks to God, sung by the newly confirmed French Catholics.

This Provençal legend proved doubly significant at the Trocadéro: just as the three Marys were key to the spread of Catholicism within pagan France, the work’s obvious affinities with the increasingly popular secular regionalist movement afforded it the important skill of appealing to audiences of varying political and religious persuasions.156

Consider also that Franck’s eighth Béatitude (“Bienheureux ceux qui souffrent persécution pour la justice”), in which morality and the Church triumph over Satan’s persecution, acted as the apotheosis of the concerts officiels, and that Les Béatitudes was the only work to figure on the programs both in 1889 and in 1900. While in 1889, the promise that those who suffer persecution for the sake of justice will be blessed might have been construed as a purely political statement in the face of the revanchiste Georges Boulanger and his threat of a coup d’état, in 1900, it may have signaled a more conciliatory approach in the face of Pope Leo XIII’s Ralliement politics, especially given its appearance on the same program as Charles Lefebvre’s La Messe du Fantôme and Félicien David’s Herculanum

(1859), an opera whose plot revolves around the plight of two Christian martyrs.

156 The same might also be said of Charles Lefebvre’s La Messe du Fantôme whose premise was borrowed from Paul Sebillot’s Contes de la Haute-Bretagne. Unfortunately, there is virtually no extant information on this work.

301 Alongside popular and frequently performed compositions like Fauré’s Requiem or

Franck’s Les Béatitudes, works like Le Baptême de Clovis and L’An mil put the goals of the

Ralliement on a national—and distinctly Republican—stage by dismantling polarized nineteenth-century perceptions of the medieval era and transforming the ways that the

Catholic Church could be advantageously enfolded into Republican ideology, not only as valuable sites of national memory, but also as powerful emblems of French progress.

The strong tendency toward historicism at the turn of the century, however, might suggest that the Church’s place in the history of Western art music was not negligible, especially when relativizing the discipline of learned music that arose from the Church in the first place. While French history certainly had its place at the 1900 Exposition

Universelle (consider Vieux Paris), the drive toward the future ultimately took center stage, especially given that the primary mandate of the Commission des Auditions Musicales was to showcase French musical progress. In this sense, the concept of progress was not, as

Jann Pasler has argued, congruent with what she terms the linear Republican model of progress, a version of evolutionary progress that builds on the post-Revolutionary accomplishments of the Republic. Instead, the planning commission favored what Pasler has termed the spiral model of progress, or a configuration of progress in which modern culture looks back on its distant past in order to propel itself forward in a transformative manner.157 At the 1900 Exposition Universelle, however, the programs of the concerts officiels embodied both models: spiral in the sense that new, modern music harkened back to a medieval Catholic past that extended well beyond the confines of the Revolution’s

157 Jann Pasler, “Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress,” in The Late Romantic Era: From the Mid-19th Century to World War I, ed. Jim Samson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 398–416. While both models of progress depend on the past to some degree, each look to a different past for inspiration. Pasler describes linear progress as adaptive (i.e. issuing new editions of already published texts) and spiral progress as model in which “yesterday’s values can underlie today’s” (i.e. the early music revival).

302 legacy and simultaneously linear, given that the same past was ultimately coopted as a

Republican achievement. The “past” in Pasler’s formulation, however, is not limited to the

Church, and the conflation of the country’s medieval Catholic past with the Republic’s musical future at the Exposition suggests that the Church had become an integral part of the international French image.

Yet if we are to recognize the French medieval period as the source of modern

Republican process at the Exposition, we must also confront Emery and Morowitz’s configuration of a pious and pure “Catholic” Middle Ages set against a militaristic, indulgent, and wholly secularized “Republican” understanding of the same period—only then we can see how the committee’s musical selections simultaneously catered to both factions at the Exposition. Found on the same program as Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, for example, are fragments from Georges Marty’s Merlin enchantée, a work in which choirs of the fairies and the goblins portray an obviously secularized perception of the Middle Ages.

Such works as Le Baptême de Clovis, Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, L’An mil, and Jeanne d’Arc, however, function on a deeper and more significant level: the first two as transitions from secular to sacred, L’An mil as a reconfiguration of the secular as sacred, and Jeanne d’Arc as simultaneously secular and sacred. Though the concerts failed from a purely critical point of view, they spoke directly to the Exposition’s highlighting of the Church overall. Acting simultaneously as a Catholic “musical treasure” and a pointed directive to fulfill the

Church’s evangelical mission through its celebration of France’s Catholic heritage, such musical works ultimately functioned as musical equivalents to the Catholic pavilions. In the end, what audiences encountered through the official programs was a greater preoccupation with French history, particularly a history that engaged with the Catholic

303 Church more than anything else, whether through a French king’s military conquest over the Teutons, holy Marys, a sainted martyr, or a parade of donkeys and fools.

304

CHAPTER FIVE Jules Massenet’s Redemption: Grisélidis, The Righteous Republican Woman, and an Operatic Ralliement

On the evening of 20 November 1901, seats at the Opéra-Comique were occupied by an audience eager to see the premiere of Massenet’s newest opera: Grisélidis. It had been two years since Massenet had brought out a new work. Cendrillon, a setting of Charles

Perrault’s famed fairy tale, had been rather successful on the same stage, enjoying forty- nine performances in 1899 and another twenty in 1900.1 But its continued popularity with audiences at the Opéra-Comique could not outshine Gustave Charpentier’s Louise, the cause célèbre of the 1900 season. Charpentier, who had been Massenet’s student at the

Conservatoire in the early 1880s, scored a massive victory with his new work at the Opéra-

Comique. Louise was a clear statement against the established bourgeois moral code. But with its anarchist undertones and its emphasis on individualism and free love,

Charpentier’s opera ignited a flurry of negative responses from critics due to its “immoral” subject matter and its allegiance to realism. However, Charpentier’s success amongst the predominantly bourgeois audiences at the Opéra-Comique was quite puzzling: a subversive opera, set in a lower-class neighborhood, became one of the greatest hits of the state-sponsored Opéra-Comique.2 Indeed, at the same time that Massenet was preparing

1 Demar Irvine, Massenet: A Chronicle of His Life and Times (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1994), 317.

2 Steven Huebner,“Between Anarchism and the Box Office: Gustave Charpentier’s Louise,” 19th-Century Music, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Autumn 1995): 137. See also Steven Huebner, French Opera at the fin-de-siècle, 436–55. For a dramatically different reading of the opera and its impact, see Jane Fulcher, “Charpentier’s Operatic ‘Roman Musical’ as Read in the Wake of the Dreyfus Affair,” 19th-Century Music, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Autumn 1992): 161–80.

305 for the premiere of Grisélidis, Charpentier was celebrating the fact that his opera had reached one hundred performances within the surprisingly short span of a single year.3

Five months after the first performance of Grisélidis, the stage of the Opéra-

Comique saw yet another controversial premiere, this time Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et

Mélisande. Far from the realism of Louise, the Symbolist aspects of Pelléas et Mélisande and the composer’s attendant “scorn of tradition” launched a controversy in the press that echoed the one which had sprung up around Louise—though, as Jann Pasler notes, the debates surrounding Debussy and his opera continued for at least a decade.4 Whereas the raw naturalism of Louise had offended the critics’ sensibilities, the esoteric nature of

Maeterlinck’s Symbolist text rendered the opera too incomprehensible for many of them, a number of whom described the work as overly naïve, obscure, or complicated.5 It also raised moral questions. Some had to do with the nature of the plot: several reviewers were especially upset by the fact that the jealous Golaud would send his own son to spy on the lovers. Others had to do with the perceivedly “decadent” nature of the storyline and of

Debussy’s own life. Henri de Curzon found the music to be so shaped by the composer’s decadence that he argued that the mere act of listening to Debussy’s score would ruin one’s character.6 Like Louise, however, Pelléas et Mélisande was a box-office success.

Though its premiere only brought in a miserable sum of 1,131 francs, by 8 May its nightly

3 As a means of comparison, Claude Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande reached one hundred performances at the Opéra-Comique on 28 January 1913—nearly eleven years after its premiere on 30 April 1902. See Jann Pasler, “Pelléas and Power: Forces Behind the Reception of Debussy’s Opera,” in Writing Through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 182.

4 Pasler, “Pelléas and Power,” 181.

5 Ibid., 195.

6 Ibid., 201–03.

306 receipts totaled over 7,000—more than perennial favorites that season such as Massenet’s

Manon, Georges Bizet’s Carmen, and even Louise.7

Sandwiched between what were arguably two of the most forward-looking operas that Albert Carré had hitherto staged at the Opéra-Comique, Massenet’s Grisélidis was an ostensible step backward. It could not have been more different from either Louise or

Pelléas et Mélisande. Set in medieval Provence, the plot revolves around Grisélidis, a chaste shepherdess and devout Catholic who, upon marrying a nobleman (known only as Le

Marquis), pledges her unwavering obedience and faithfulness to him. They have a child,

Loÿs, and soon thereafter, Le Marquis is called to fight in the Crusades. As he leaves his wife and child behind, he is confronted by the Prior, who doubts Grisélidis’s capacity to remain faithful to her spouse in his absence; he claims that Le Marquis is tempting God in trusting thus his wife, and that the Devil’s wiles are cunning in such matters.8 Le Marquis is confident, however, and exalts his wife’s fidelity—even to the Devil himself, who promptly appears and takes Le Marquis’s wedding ring as a symbol of his certainty that

Grisélidis will remain steadfast (Figure 5.1). In the Marquis’s absence, the Devil embarks on a series of tests to prove him wrong. Disguised as a Byzantine merchant, the Devil appears, along with his wife, Fiamina, who is dressed as a slave, and he tells Grisélidis that this young slave girl is to be the Marquis’s wife. Grisélidis, believing this to be true, takes her son and leaves the manor. When she meekly accepts her “fate,” the Devil uses magic to lure her childhood friend, Alain—who is desperately in love with Grisélidis—to a nearby island in order to tempt her with her former friend’s charms. The couple are on the brink

7 Ibid., 183.

8 Act I, Scene III: “C’est tenter Dieu que tant croire à la femme...Mais le Diable est malin.”

307 of adultery when Loÿs appears. The Devil, whose plans have once again been foiled, kidnaps the child, leaving Grisélidis to return to the manor in despair.

Figure 5.1: Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique: Grisélidis, Act 1 (BnF–Arts du Spectacle, 4-ICO THE-3111)

As Grisélidis prays to Saint Agnes, the Devil reappears with the news that her son is being held by a pirate, who will either sell him into slavery or kill him unless Grisélidis boards the ship as a glorified prostitute. At the same moment, the Marquis returns, only to see his wife going toward the harbor. His confidence in her faithfulness remains strong, and she returns to his side without Loÿs. The Devil’s trickery is soon revealed; the faithful

308 couple prays at the base of Saint Agnes’s statue which becomes flooded with light. The triptych at the altar opens, and Loÿs appears in the arms of his saintly protector. In essence, it was Grisélidis’s obedience and fidelity—virtues strengthened by her unwavering faith in the Catholic Church—that saved her son, preserved the sanctity of her family, and defeated the dark powers of the Devil.

At the center of what the critic Louis de Fourcaud called a “heavenly fairy tale,” stood Grisélidis, an operatic heroine whose bourgeois sense of morality, devout Catholic faith, and inviolate virtue was situated in stark contrast not only to the working-class

Louise and the fragile and mysterious Mélisande, but also to the character traits of any of

Massenet’s other female characters, save perhaps for Charlotte in Werther (1892). By counterbalancing Massenet’s otherwise “troublesome” women—such as Salomé,

Esclarmonde, and Thaïs—Grisélidis could also serve as a model to which modern French

Republican and Catholic women should aspire. By 1901, the “woman question,” to borrow

Karen Offen’s words, was one of the Republic’s most pressing social issues: Le Gaulois— one of Paris’s most widely distributed daily newspapers—devoted its New Year editorial to the question of women’s rights and their role in Parisian culture: “What will become of you, the New Eve,” asked the author, invoking not only the timeworn portrait of woman- as-temptress through his connection of modern woman with the Biblical Eve, but also the predominant social consciousness of the time.9 Though feminist thought had been steadily on the rise during the last decade of the nineteenth century, the political journalist

9 See Karen Offen, Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 268.

309 Édouard de Pompéry’s 1864 indictment of woman as “sin, Satan, and the enemy” still shaped the misogyny that dominated Parisian social, cultural, and religious life.10

Amidst the widespread mistrust of women by both Republicans and Catholics, however, Grisélidis embodied all that a good Parisian bourgeois woman should be: she was an exemplary mother and an ardently faithful wife—in Armand Silvestre’s words, she was a “faithful woman, a righteous beloved of God.”11 In the minds of many Parisian males, she was not the norm but the exception—and the ideal exception at that. And so

Grisélidis did not repel Parisian audiences of its time: it appealed to them precisely because of its traditionalism. While the dangerous and demoralizing threats of Eve’s daughters loomed large over Paris—indeed, the entirely modern La Parisienne had been showcased at the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris—the patient, righteous, and ever-faithful

Grisélidis represented the paragon of womanhood that could appease both the Church and the State and alleviate their shared mistrust of women. Grisélidis plays a dual role. On the one hand, she symbolizes a “New Eve,” or perhaps Eve’s redemption. On the other,

Grisélidis functions as the ideal French Catholic. Close analyses of both text and music reveal, in effect, that the system of traditional moral values epitomized in Grisélidis crossed party lines: Grisélidis was everything that both the Church and Republic thought a French woman—even citizen—should be.

10 Édouard de Pompéry, La Femme dans l’humanité: sa nature, son rôle et sa valeur sociale (Paris: Hachette, 1864), 14. “La femme, c’est le péché, c’est Satan, c’est l’ennemi!”

11 Unsigned, “Courrier des théâtres,” L’Estafette (8 January 1900). “Une femme fidèle, un Juste aimé de Dieu..” This quotation is taken from a poem written by Silvestre and published in L’Estafette. It was dedicated to the actors in the 104th performance of his play, Grisélidis, that had taken place the previous evening. For more on Grisélidis (co-authored with Eugène Morand), see Chapter 2.

310 From Griselda to Grisélidis

The story of Grisélidis would not have been unfamiliar to early twentieth-century audiences. Griselda (Grisélidis) and Gualtieri (Le Marquis) first appeared in literature in the concluding tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353). Twenty years later, Petrarch had translated the story into Latin and, by the end of the fourteenth century, his Latin translation had made its way to France having been incorporated into two French prose versions. It had also, according to Ruth Bottigheimer, been “infused with misogynist views.”12 The contemporary critic Edmond Stoullig even created a French lineage when he claimed that her story had been performed by the Clercs de la Basoche before King

Charles VI in 1395.13 It seems, however, that this was a somewhat spurious ancestry.

Rather, the earliest known dramatization of the tale took place in 1550, in France. Grisélidis appeared again in French in 1691, this time by way of Charles Perrault. Perrault, the

“modern fairytale’s fairy godfather,” was well-known during the nineteenth century for his numerous fairy tales—counting among them such perennial favorites as Cendrillon

(Cinderella), Le Petit chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), and La Belle au bois dormant

(Sleeping Beauty).14

Two hundred years after the publication of Perrault’s Grisélidis, Armand Silvestre and Eugène Morand—the two playwrights who would tackle the life of Christ two years later in their Drames sacrés (discussed in Chapter 2)—prepared their own version of the

12 Barbara M. Craig, L’Estoire de Grisélidis (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1954), 1. See also Ruth Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales Frames: Early Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 113.

13 Edmond Stoulling, “Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique,” Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique (1901): 123. “Dès le XIVe siècle, le théâtre s’emparait de la légende, fort populaire au Moyen-âge. En effet, à Paris, en l’an mil trois cent quatre-vingt-quinze, devant le roi Charles VI, les clercs de la Basoche représentaient ‘l’estoire de Grisélidis, la marquise de Saluce et de sa merveilleuse constance, le miroir des dames mariées’.”

14 Alison Flood, “Charles Perrault: The Modern Fairytale’s Fairy Godfather,” The Guardian (12 January 2016).

311 story. On 15 May 1891, their play Grisélidis premiered at the Comédie-Française and, though

Perrault’s version of the story was frequently cited as the writers’ source of inspiration, there were major editorial interventions that set the new dramatization apart from its predecessors. Unlike in Perrault’s Grisélidis, the Church was on full display in Silvestre and

Morand’s play. Classified as a mystère (mystery), the pair added prayers, supplications to

Saint Agnes, and a cross-turned-sword to the hitherto secular tale. Indeed, it is that cross/sword—imbued with the power of the Church—that becomes the answer to the couple’s impassioned prayers for Loÿs’s safe return.

The playwrights’ most significant modification, however, was the addition of the

Devil and his wife, Fiamina. Here, it is he and not Le Marquis who is to blame for

Grisélidis’s hardships. Critics noted that this editorial intervention resulted from the authors’ understanding that staging a marriage such as that of Gaultieri and Griselda simply would not work for audiences in 1891, who would not accept a husband such as

Gaultier de Saluces, an unconditionally submissive spouse such like Grisélidis, or a story of a marriage built on unconditional obedience.15 Nor would it have worked ten years later in the opera, the libretto of which closely followed the play. In his review of Massenet’s operatic version, for example, Arthur Pougin noted that the work would have likely lost the audience’s interest had Gaultier remained the source of Grisélidis’s trials.16 And

15 Brigitte Olivier, J. Massenet, itinéraires pour un théâtre musical (Arles: Actes Sud, 1996), 198. “Silvestre et Morand avaient déjà compris l’impossibilité de mettre en scène avec quelque vraisemblance en 1891 un mari tel que Gaultier de Saluces, une épouse telle que sa Griselda, une histoire de mariage dans laquelle le mot amour n’apparaît pas une seule fois sauf à être confondu avec celui d’obéissance.” Emphasis original.

16 Arthur Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale: Grisélidis,” Le Ménestrel (24 November 1901): 370–71. “Les auteurs du ‘mystère’ de la Comédie-Française transformé en livret d’opéra n’ont emprunté à la légende que son point de départ…Ils ont introduit le fantastique dans l’action, en y plaçant le diable, et même la femme de celui-ci, et ils ont supprimé la persécution de l’époux sur l’épouse, en remplaçant, pour conserver l’intérêt de la situation, cette persécution par celle du diable en personne.” See also Adolphe Jullien, “Grisélidis à l’Opéra- Comique,” Le Théâtre (January 1902): n.p. “C’est ce qu’ont très bien senti MM. Silvestre et Morand, quand ils ont porté ce vieux conte, il y a juste dix ans, sur la scène de la Comédie-Française, et le succès leur a dû montrer qu’ils avaient eu raison de ménager les susceptibilités du public actuel. ”

312 Boccaccio’s Gualtieri, as Adolphe Jullien wrote, was written to “amuse and captivate people in a semi-barbarous society” who took pleasure in the moral suffering that was inflicted upon an innocent woman at the hands of her husband.17 Indeed, the addition of the Devil and his wife—along with Alain, Bertrade, Gondebaud, and the Prior—ensured that Gautier’s image of a beloved (and loving) spouse would not be tarnished, would remain worthy of Grisélidis’s love, and would continue to reflect a moral code befitting

Republican men.

In 1891 (and also ten years later), the appearance of the devil on French stages was nothing new. By that point, audiences would have been well-acquainted with the character as he appeared Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (1831) or in Hector Berlioz’s or Charles Gounod’s versions of Goethe’s Faust (1846 and 1859, respectively).18 Writing shortly after the premiere of Grisélidis at the Comédie-Française, the critic and playwright

Émile Blémont noted that “Satan is in fashion...more than all the lions of the Hippodrome, he is the lion of the day.”19 Morand and Silvestre’s Devil, however, did not portray the philosophical character of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, nor did he embody Bertram’s mysterious darkness. Instead, this was a comic devil whose buffoonery came closer to the

17 Adolphe Jullien, “Grisélidis à l’Opéra-Comique,” Le Théâtre (January 1902): n.p. “De telles tortures étaient bien faites pour amuser et captiver les gens d’une société encore à demi barbare, et ceux qui assistaient à la représentation de ce ‘mystère’ ou qui lisaient ce conte éprouvaient, à voir tant d’horribles souffrances morales frapper une femme innocente, une sorte de jouissance et de plaisir qui nous échappe complètement aujourd’hui.”

18 See Hugh Macdonald, “Passez-vous donc du diable, que diable!,” L’Avant-Scène Opéra, No. 148 (October 1992): 120. Macdonald lists nine works in which the devil features prominently at the Opéra-Comique alone. For a comprehensive study of the devil on French stages, see Mia Tootill, “Leaping Off the Page: Diabolical Technologies on the Parisian Musical Stage, 1827–1859” (Ph.D. Diss., Cornell University, 2017). Tootill notes that over seventy works that featured the devil appeared on French stages between 1827 and 1859. Numerous contemporary critics also noted the frequency with which the devil appeared on French stages.

19 Émile Blémont, “Courrier de Paris: Le Diable sur la scène,” L’Événement (16 May 1891). “Satan est à la mode. Plus que tous les lions de l’Hippodrome, il est le lion du jour.”

313 mischievous trickery of a clown than it did to the dark machinations of the Prince of

Darkness. Such a reconfiguration of the devil and the idea of Hell, however, was not limited to the stage, for a similar conceptual shift took place within the doctrinal teachings of the Church. Though popular thought regarding the devil and Hell had undergone numerous transformations during the Middle Ages, the Church remained steadfast in its obsession with judgment in the afterlife and the promise of fiery retribution for sinful behavior well into the eighteenth century. Images of hell as a blazing pit of fire were especially effective in the aftermath of the Revolution, at which point sermons based on themes of death, judgment, and hell proved particularly popular with clergy who wanted to reconvert post-Revolutionary France; Ralph Gibson cites an example of a priest who moved his homily to the parish cemetery, where he exhumed skulls in order to illustrate his point about death and the necessity for a moral existence.20 By mid-century, however, the possibility of the devil and hell as metaphorical states had emerged in French society—especially in metropolitan Paris—though it coexisted with the more hardline view among conservative traditionalists for some time. Only one year following the publication of Ernest Renan’s La Vie de Jésus (1863), essays began to circulate among

Catholic clergy that suggested that images of God as loving, kind, and less retributive were just as effective tools through which to encourage moral behavior as perpetuating a fear of infernal punishment had been just sixty years earlier.21 The end of the nineteenth century saw concentrated attacks on the Church’s earlier dogmatic allegiance to the devil and Hell.

Though the threat of hellfire and damnation still persisted, especially when directed

20 Ralph Gibson, “Hellfire and Damnation in Nineteenth-Century France,” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 74, No. 3 (July 1988): 390–91.

21 Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989), 398.

314 toward the behavior of women, doctrinal praxis had subsumed the metaphorical state of

Hell into its fold.22 Given its medieval heritage—one that was rediscovered in the nineteenth century—and the Church’s reshaping of its teachings on the subject of Hell and its demons, Silvestre and Morand’s devil made sense in a fin-de-siècle context. After all, who other than the devil himself could have been responsible for the sadistic torture inflicted on the “hapless bourgeois protagonists” of Grisélidis?23

The Devil and Eve

Critics of Massenet’s Grisélidis might have preferred that the devil had not shown his face in the first place—or at least not as a comic character. Instead, their nearly unanimous opinion was that a philosophical, serious devil à la Mephistopheles would have been much more appropriate—or, at least, more preferable. Though not unusual by any means, numerous critics complained of the Devil’s buffoonery in Grisélidis that it would have been better suited to the boulevard theaters where performances of féeries and similar genres were more frequent, notwithstanding the fact that many writers conceded the fact that a comical devil was perfectly in line with the play’s medieval heritage.24 (Figure 5.2)

22 Gibson, “Hellfire and Damnation in Nineteenth-Century France,” 383–402.

23 David Lawrence Pike makes this argument for the frequent appearance of the devil or similar characters in féeries; his claim is equally applicable to Grisélidis. See Pike, Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–1921 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 91. Comic devils were particularly notable in Hervé’s Le Petit Faust, for example, and in other derivative Fausts and Méphistos in 1869. See Clair Rowden, “‘Du grand au petit’: Faust on Parisian Stages in 1869,” in Musical Theater in Europe 1830–1945, ed. Michela Niccolai and Clair Rowden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 115–38.

24 Adolphe Jullien, “Grisélidis à l’Opéra-Comique,” Le Théâtre (January 1902). “ce Diable, qui fait le farceur, ne prend personne aux pièges qu’il tend et se raille lui-même de ses insuccès, rentre assez dans la tradition des diableries du moyen âge, avec une nuance de gaminerie et de gouaillerie toute contemporaine.”

315

Figure 5.2: Le Diable (Lucien Fugère) and Fiamina (Mlle Tiphaine) (BnF-Arts du Spectacle, 4-ICO THE-3111)

One writer complained that this “buffoon devil,” despite representing the “true devil of the

Middle Ages,” had nothing whatsoever in common with Goethe’s Mephistopheles and instead resembled “fools or idiots who have been charged with livening up the somber feudal residence of the lords of old.”25 The critic Fourcaud denounced him as little more than a prankster, while Émile de Saint-Aubin, following on a similar theme, complained that the devil’s “escape from Hell to laugh is only an escape from the circus: his gaiety does

25 Unsigned press clipping, dated 20 November 1901. BnF-Mus., Fonds Montpensier (Jules Massenet). “Il est le vrai diable du moyen âge, le diable bouffon et à grimaces dont témoignent—il suffit de les regarder, à Reims ou à Notre-Dame—les bas-reliefs et les gargouilles des cathédrales; il n’a et ne peut avoir aucun rapport avec la conception philosophique du Méphisto de Goethe; il se rapprocherait beaucoup plus de ‘fous,’ ou des ‘sots,’ qui étaient chargés d’égayer la sombre demeure féodale des seigneurs d’autrefois.”

316 not have the mocking spirit of perfidious vagabonds that brush up against us and threaten us; it only has the wit of clowns.”26

Underlying these critiques was the reviewers’ desire for a character with a more complex dramatic personality that was closer to the devils of Meyerbeer, Gounod, Berlioz, and Weber: “Where are you, Shakespearean, Weberian, Berliozian elves? Where are you, mischievous breaths, match-making breezes, malicious energies of space and of the soil?”27

Henri de Curzon’s review declared that the “burlesque is distressing, and the buffoonery made no one laugh,” and claimed that a bit of dignity would restore the Devil to his

“Mephistophelian allure.”28 This type of devil was, in the words of one anonymous critic, the “most gratuitously bad, the most fundamentally and ominously black”:

For of all the devils that we have seen at the theater, the one from Grisélidis is the most gratuitously bad, the most fundamentally and ominously black. Joker, funny, if you like, but of an essential malice that has no other reason for being than itself, that does not find itself mitigated, or compensated for, by any other feeling of another order. It is certainly no longer Bertram from Robert le Diable, such a good father; it is no longer Goethe’s Mephisto, nor Berlioz’s, who at least had some attachment to Faust. It would rather recall Caspar from Freischütz, who is only a man connected to the infernal powers, it is true, but in ironic or joyous accents, for whom Weber knew to maintain a somber and evil color so well.29

26 Fourcaud, “Musique: Grisélidis.” BnF-Mus., Fonds Montpensier (Jules Massenet). “Le diable de Grisélidis est un simple pitre.” This clipping is likely from Le Gaulois. See also O’Divy [Émile de Saint-Aubin], “Chronique musicale,” BnF-Mus., Fonds Montpensier (Jules Massenet). “Cet échappé de l’Enfer pour rire n’est qu’un échappé de cirque: sa gaîté n’a pas l’esprit moqueur des vagabondes perfidies qui nous frôlent et nous guettent; elle n’a que l’esprit des clowns.”

27 O’Divy [Émile de Saint-Aubin], “Chronique musicale.” “Où êtes-vous, farfadets shakespeariens, wéberiens, berlioziens? Où êtes-vous, souffles farceurs, brises entremetteuses, malicieuses énergies de l’espace et du sol...”

28 Henri de Curzon, “Courrier des théâtres: Grisélidis,” La Gazette de France (23 November 1901). “mais on y a insisté comme à Plaisir, on l’a développé, on n’a pas redouté le burlesque et le bouffon, et ce burlesque est navrant, et ce bouffon ne fait rire personne...Un diable sautillant, grimaçant, griffant; un diable de féerie enfin. Et quand on songe en plus que c’est un artiste émérite, un maître, comme M. Lucien Fugère, qui est chargé de ces gentillesses, vraiment c’est pitié ! Ne serait-il donc pas possible qu’on le dépouillât de toute défroque et lui rendit quelque allure Méphistophélique avec un peu de dignité?”

29 This quotation comes from an unsigned and undated clipping from Le progrès Artistique. BnF-Mus., Fonds Montpensier (Jules Massenet). “Car de tous les diables que nous ayons vus au théâtre, celui de Grisélidis est bien le plus gratuitement mauvais, le plus foncièrement et sinistrement noir. Farceur, rigolo, si l’on veut, mais d’une méchanceté essentielle qui n’a d’autre raison d’être qu’elle-même, qui ne se trouve atténuée ou compensée par aucun sentiment d’un autre ordre. Ce n’est certes plus le Bertram de Robert le Diable, si bon père ; ce n’est plus le Méphisto de Goethe, ni de Berlioz, qui a du moins quelque attachement pour Faust. Il

317

Critics readily recognized the bourgeois nature of this devil. Henri de Curzon thought it odd that a “modern melodrama” and its “sad, tragic, and bourgeois” characters had been inspired by a fourteenth-century mystery play—a genre that he mistakenly characterized as the “only specimen of a play without any fantastical, diabolical, or divine intervention.”30 Hugues Imbert likewise found the Devil to be “rather bourgeois” in its departure from Goethe’s model.31 De Curzon and Imbert were not far off the mark. The

Devil lives together with his wife in a charming villa, situated on the Provençal seashore and surrounded by orange groves and flowering lilies; the libretto suggests that they have enough means to allow the two of them to pass their time plucking blooms from their gardens.32 There was, however, only one obstacle to the ideal bourgeois existence: conjugal bliss and marital fidelity had long since disappeared from their relationship.

Apart from gathering flowers, the Devil complains that his only happiness comes from being away from Fiamina and implies that he can “play” in her absence; “absence is

rappellerait plutôt le Caspar du Freyschütz, qui n’est, il est vrai, qu’un homme lié avec les puissances infernales, mais dans les accents ironiques ou joyeux duquel Weber a si bien su maintenir pourtant une couleur sombre et menaçante.” It is unclear as to which performance of Grisélidis the writer is referring: the 1891 performance of the play at the Comédie-Française, or the 1901 performance of the opera at the Opéra- Comique.

30 Curzon, “Courrier des théâtres: Grisélidis.” “Et pourtant—qu’on me permette cette remarque en passant— il est assez bizarre dans l’affaire, que cette Histoire de Grisélidis dont Armand Sylvestre s’était inspiré et dont il a fait un ‘mystère’ se trouve être justement, à une époque où le théâtre ne comportait que des ‘miracles’ et des ‘mystères’ (quatorzième siècle), le seul spécimen d’une pièce dramatique sans aucun fantastique ni intervention diabolique ou divine, et ayant au contraire, comme l’a dit M. E. Faguet, les caractères de notre mélodrame moderne, douloureux, tragique et bourgeois.”

31 Hugues Imbert, “Grisélidis,” Le Guide musical (24 November 1901): 859. “Au Théâtre français, lorsque Grisélidis fut donnée le 15 mai 1891, Coquelin cadet força le coté facétieux du diable; il est vrai que ce diable, passablement bourgeois, s’éloigne tout à fait du type créé par Marlow ou par Goethe.”

32 Grisélidis, Act II, Scene 1. “Jusqu’ici, sans dangers, j’ai pu vivre invisible au fond de ces vergers et parfumer mon âme aux fleurs des orangers. Cueillir des fleurs! Avoir des papillons pour proie. Idylliques plaisirs! Pure et décente joie! Quel sort adorable est le mien!”

318 perfect bliss” for this devil.33 For her part, Fiamina is no fool. She is well aware of her husband’s adulterous wanderings, yet she is far from innocent herself. Fiamina caustically declares her marital boredom and, when the Devil asks her what she needs, her response is clear:

Fiamina: Fiamina: C’est bien ce qui m’assomme It really bores me to tears d’avoir un tel mari! to have such a husband.

Le Diable: The Devil: Que vous faut-il? What do you need?

Fiamina: Fiamina: Un homme! A man!

Le Diable: The Devil: Pour me tromper? To be unfaithful to me?

Fiamina: Fiamina: Certes. Indeed.

The vast majority of the scene contains nothing but a volley of biting insults between the couple; clearly such behavior was in no way befitting of a bourgeois French Republican couple. It was, in fact, the polar opposite of what it should be—but the implications that came with it ran deeper than mere appearances and appropriate behavior. The critical assertion that the devil in Grisélidis was somehow darker or more malicious than its predecessors was perhaps based in an unstated fear that this devil was a threat to modern, bourgeois Parisian men, more so than Mephistopheles or Bertram had ever been.

Conjugality and the preservation of marital fidelity were not simply issues of morality during the Third Republic. Heterosexual marriage was regarded as a

33 Grisélidis, Act II, Scene 1: “Loin de sa femme qu’on est bien! Il n’est qu’un bonheur sur mon âme et tous les autres font pitié: c’est vivre loin se sa moitié. On est si bien, loin de sa femme! L’absence est le supreme bien...Quand les chats n’y sont pas, les souris...”

319 foundational aspect of Republican social order and progress, since it served as a metaphor for social integration and moral progress: not only did strong and faithful marriages create strong, moral societies, but they also fostered an increase in a birth rate that had been in decline after the end of the Franco-Prussian War in the early 1870s. According to Judith

Surkis, the socialization of citizens through marriage took on particular significance to the

Republican bourgeoisie and elite, who strove to guarantee the strength of the nation’s population and, in particular, the moral character of the men who held the lion’s share of political and civil rights at the time.34 Debates over the form of the state and that of the family were inseparable.35 Because such an understanding hinged on the function of marriage as a symbol of the social order, the Republic’s fixation on it also viewed sexual deviance and adultery as a distressing symptom of social disorder—particularly so for women, but also for men, albeit to a lesser extent. The damaged and childless union between the Devil and Fiamina, therefore, posed a direct threat to the Republican conception of marriage as a necessity to its desired social order. Notably, Pougin and de

Curzon’s critiques of the Devil’s bourgeois nature lacked any reference to, or critique of,

Fiamina. Though equally unfaithful to her marital vows, her transgressions seemed less threatening to bourgeois Republican sensibility than did her husband’s—perhaps a female devil was simply expected to behave in such ways. The power of the Republic in political, cultural, and even military contexts, however, was directly related to the moral strength of its men: a strength of character that the Devil lacked.36 As a member of the

34 Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1–17. See also Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

35 Offen, Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 3.

36 Edward Berenson writes that “The French concern with gender resulted in large part from a perceived decline of French power that commentators related to moral decay and to changing relations between the

320 bourgeoisie (at least as Pougin and de Curzon labeled him), then, the Devil was essentially a failure within—and perhaps even a threat to—the Republic’s established social and moral order.

Perhaps the greatest perceived danger to the Republic’s moral fiber originated from its own women, however. Though the State continued to proclaim its secularity and touted an individualistic view of human rights—both byproducts of Revolutionary thought—its views on marriage nevertheless perpetuated the belief in an innate sexual difference between the Republic’s male and female citizens exemplified through paternal authority and maternal obedience.37 Such a distinction was written into law with the

Napoleonic Civil Code in 1804, which denied women the right to vote, relegated married women to the same civil status as a minor, and all but ensured that a married woman’s position in society would be confined to the home and the family.38 In this social model, a woman’s role as a Republican mother was of utmost importance, given that the woman could bear and raise healthy sons and decorous daughters, all the while fostering a love of the patrie within her family.39 This gender formation was to be achieved not only by limiting woman’s social, intellectual, and political interactions, but also through distancing her from the Church and what the Republic perceived as its nefarious

sexes. If France was weak, writers commonly asserted, its weakness stemmed from a growing demographic deficit caused by the emancipation of women, the legalization of divorce, and the emasculation of men.” See Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 11. See also Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in fin-de-siècle France,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 648–76.

37 Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 105. See also Olwen H. Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution. The Donald G. Creighton Lectures 1989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). See also Surkis, Sexing the Citizen, 21–69, and Offen, Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 94–133.

38 James McMillan, France and Women, 1789–1914: Gender, Society, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), 36.

39 See Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in fin-de-siècle France,” 675.

321 influence. New legislation, including the possibility for divorce introduced in 1884, and a secular education system through the establishment of state-sponsored schools for girls in

1882 were but some of the measures taken by the Republic not in an effort to promote women’s rights, but rather to loosen the Church’s control over public life.40

In the increasingly secular society of the Third Republic, many women—though not all—turned toward what McMillan terms the “consolations of religion.”41 Given their subordination to men in both society and the home, religion allowed these women to foster a sense of self-identity outside of the secularized patriarchy (but not the sacred patriarchy) of French society and culture—so much so that the historian Eugen Weber once quipped that “attendance at Mass was a secondary sexual characteristic of women.”42

Notwithstanding the Church’s similar advocacy of moral order and paternal authority, however, the Republic resented the amount of control that the Church had over women, primarily through the act of confession. Because of their privileged role as spiritual and moral guides, clerics were feared to have more power over women than did their

Republican husbands, and thus the root of the “woman problem” in Third-Republic

France was grounded in the fight over control between the Church and the State.43

40 On the relationship between the Church, women’s rights, and laïcité, see Caroline Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 138–49. See also Clair Rowden, Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera (Weinsberg: Musik-Edition Lucie Galland, 2004), 27–29, and McMillan, France and Women, 1789–1914, 154.

41 McMillan, France and Women 1789–1914, 154.

42 Eugen Weber, France: fin-de-siècle (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986), 92. See also Richard D.E. Burton, Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1970 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), xx–xxv.

43 See Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 117; John McManners, Church and State in France, 1789– 1914 (London: S.P.C.K. for the Church Historical Society, 1972), 14–15; and McMillan, France and Women, 1789– 1914, 145. Gibson cites the issues of sex and contraception as a key complaint against clerical authority and claims that women had fewer issues with confession, given that they were already used to submitting to male authority.

322 Whereas women viewed the Church as a sort of haven of independence from male control—notwithstanding the control of male priests—Republicans viewed the clergy and the Church as an interloper in the private family life over which they claimed to hold exclusive authority.

Despite the obvious ideological differences in their perception of women, the

Church and the Republic both took part in the process of developing what Carol E.

Harrison calls a “monolithic image of the Catholic woman.”44 She was similar in many ways to the archetypical Republican woman: she was married, she accepted the authority of her husband, and she was a mother who actively participated in the educational and moral upbringing of her young. Just as Church and State agreed on what the ideal

Catholic woman looked like, they also agreed on the characteristics of her antithesis.

Personified by the figure of Eve, this woman and her dangerous powers of seduction had long been viewed as a threat to a moral society by both the Church and by Republican males. Péchery’s idea that women were equivalent to sin, though penned nearly forty years prior to Grisélidis’s first performance, remained pervasive among male thought. In one sense, all women were thought to be Eve’s descendants—les filles d’Ève, or Eve’s daughters.45

44 See Carol E. Harrison, Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 276–97, at 277.

45 Elizabeth K. Menon, “Les filles d’Ève in Word and Image,” in Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image, ed. Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fatima Lambert (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 157. See also Holly Morse, “The First Woman Question: Eve and the Women’s Movement,” in The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field, ed. Yvonne Sherwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 61–77; Michele Perrot, “New Eve and the Old Adam: Changes in French Women’s Condition at the Turn of the Century,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 51–61; and James McMillan, France and Women, 1789–1914: Gender, Society, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), 141–151.

323 A frequent motif throughout literature and art, the term “les filles d’Ève” was popularized by Honoré de Balzac in a two-part essay (published in the newspaper Le Siècle on 31 December 1838 and 1 January 1839). The provocative moniker referred to women with loose morals who were, as his own character had been, unable to avoid the temptations of the forbidden fruit. Eve and her daughters possessed fatal traits—most notably, seduction, and weakness in the face of temptation—that rendered her culpable for the fall of man.

Once shared by her companion, Adam, the blame became hers alone in mid-nineteenth- century France.46 As the collective of women’s voices increased and feminist activism became more visible at the end of the century, the “daughters of Eve” gained significantly more power to threaten the preservation of the patriarchal Republican social order.

Writers and artists responded in due course, and Eve and her daughters remained a popular subject for French authors, many of whom often portrayed Eve as a prostitute. In

1882, for example, Armand Silvestre published a collection of stories about courtesans entitled Le Péché d’Ève, and four years later, the Symbolist writer Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-

Adam published L’Ève future, a science-fiction novel in which a scientist creates a

Stepford-like female robot in response to a woman’s infidelity. The robot—the future

Eve—lacks freedom of thought and speech and is controlled by a man in an attempt to overcome the flaws of real women. As Menon points out, the robot, being “completely under the control of man, the Eve of the future was free of the problems associated with either the Biblical Eve or her nineteenth-century daughters.”47 The final twist, however, reveals that the robot had never been controlled by a man. After the protagonist commits

46 Menon, “Les filles d’Ève in Word and Image,” 163.

47 Ibid., 168.

324 suicide, it is divulged that a living woman had been pulling the strings all along; woman’s control of man’s downfall thus confirmed in many minds that contemporary women were in fact dangerous—a trait that had been passed down for centuries through Eve and her daughters.48

Eve’s alleged status as an easily duped sexual deviant posed problems for the

Republic, not the least of which was its threat to the structure of the family. Eve’s greatest transgression, at least as it related to Republican ideology, was her disobedience in the face of temptation—not only did she eat the apple, but she also enticed Adam to do the same. Central to this narrative, however, is the devil, for without him, Eve’s attraction to the apple might well have abated altogether. The devil achieves a transformation that, in effect, completely Catholicizes the story of Grisélidis. Though buffoonish, he was still capable of tempting even the most holy individuals through supernatural means. Brought face to face with the archetypical tempter, Grisélidis’s religious devotion remains steadfast.

Their clash thus establishes context of good versus evil as the driving force behind the action that was, according to Hugh Macdonald, precisely what validated Silvestre,

Morand, and Massenet’s inclusion of the Devil.49 Grisélidis—spurred on by her faith—has the final word over the Devil as she and her husband reunite with their son at the base of

Saint Agnes’s statue. The Marquis, equally devout, declares the Holy Spirit victorious over the Devil’s infernal powers, and Grisélidis follows, boldly proclaiming that “the Devil is chased from these places forever.”50 Alongside the Devil, Grisélidis stood in for Eve who,

48 A similar novel was published in 1890 by Henri Desmarest. Entitled La Femme future, the plot reveals Desmarest’s fear that traditional gender roles were well on their way to becoming reversed.

49 Macdonald, “‘Passez-vous donc du Diable,” 123.

50 Armand Silvestre and Eugène Morand, Grisélidis: Mystère en trois actes, un Prologue et un Épilogue en vers libres (Paris: Ernest Kolb, 1891), 196–97. “[Le Marquis] De l’esprit infernal, l’Esprit Saint est vainqueur!...[Grisélidis] Le diable de ces lieux est chassé pour jamais.”

325 in Massenet’s opera, was faced with, yet ultimately triumphed, over temptation. By virtue of her obedience, fidelity, and Catholic devotion, however, Grisélidis simultaneously symbolized the saintly women who did not follow Eve’s sinful path. In the process, she thus became a more palatable—even ideal—version of Eve: a model for women’s behavior that could be utilized by both the Church and the Republic.

Massenet’s Two Eves

Shortly after the premiere of Grisélidis, Claude Debussy wrote that in Grisélidis, Massenet had reworked “something of the story of Eve, one of his earliest compositions.” This retelling of Eve’s story through Grisélidis, Debussy wrote, constituted a “complete history of the female soul.”51 In Massenet’s oratorio Ève (1875), her sin is not just that of eating the forbidden fruit—her transgression is magnified by her seduction of Adam in Paradise.

Indeed, in Massenet and Louis Gallet’s version of the Biblical story, the forbidden fruit is none other than Love itself: the Voices of the Night exhort Eve to follow them to the “tree of science whose fruit is love.”52 After having eaten from it, Eve sings a sensuous duet with

Adam after having successfully seduced him with her newfound sexual allure. When the pair is cursed for their disobedience, the couple’s only concern is that they remain together in love:

Voix de la Nature: Voices of Nature: Hommes, soyez maudits! Men, be cursed! La main du Dieu vivant The hand of the living God pèsera sur vos fils! will weigh heavily on your sons!

51 Claude Debussy, “D’Ève à Grisélidis,” Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer Claude Debussy, ed. François Lesure and Richard Langham Smith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988 [1977]), 56. Debussy’s essay was originally published in La Revue bleue on 1 December 1901.

52 Jules Massenet, Ève (Paris: Heugel, 1875). Libretto by Louis Gallet. “(Part Two) Viens! Nous te montrerons l’arbre de science dont l’amour est le fruit!”

326 Adam, Ève: Adam, Eve: Pour avoir écouté les esprits de l’abime, If we are cursed for Si nous sommes maudits!... listening to the spirits of the abyss... Frappe nous! Strike us! Mais du moins laisse nous notre ivresse! But at least leave us our intoxication! Ne nous sépare pas! Do not separate us!

Massenet’s Eve was everything that the Church and the Republic feared. Unable to resist the allure of worldly temptation, she defied the control of both the Church and the State.

Having been unfaithful to the pledge that she not partake of the forbidden fruit, Eve then used her newly discovered “knowledge” to lead Adam—the man made in God’s image— astray toward the more secular pleasures of carnal desire. For the critic Octave Foque,

Massenet’s portrayal of Eve rendered the oratorio devoid of religious sentiment, and

Edmond Stoullig’s review emphasized the work’s erotically charged nature, writing that “it is a completely theatrical work, or better yet—sensual, progressing through the seduction of the first man by the first woman and ending in a scene of condemnation.”53 According to

Georges Servières, whose study on Massenet was published over thirty years after the premiere of Ève, the “sensualist form created by Massenet in his very wordly oratorio is exaggerated in Ève.”54

Grisélidis, however, represents an entirely different Eve than the one portrayed in

Massenet’s oratorio—one much more appropriate to Catholic and Republican

53 Octave Foque, “Société de l’harmonie sacrée: Ève,” La Revue et gazette musicale de Paris (21 March 1875): 91. “Pour MM. Massenet et Louis Gallet, la Genèse et l’Évangile n’ont pas le caractère de livres saints: la Bible n’est pas le fondement d’un dogme, le résumé d’une religion…Quand donc ils en tirent un drame on un poëme musical, ce n’est pas la foi du chrétien qu’ils chercheront à exprimer dans leurs ouvrages, mais un tout autre ordre des sentiments.” See also Edouard Noël and Edmond Stoullig, “Concerts de l’Harmonie Sacrée,” Annales du théâtre et de la musique (1875): 532. “Le poème ne rappelle en aucune sorte les anciens mystères du myen [sic] âge et n’a rien de biblique; c’est une œuvre toute théâtrale, ou, pour mieux dire, sensuelle, roulant sur la séduction du premier homme par la première femme et se terminant par une scène de malédiction.”

54 Georges Servières, La Musique française moderne (Paris: G. Harvard fils, 1897), 133. “Cependant, la forme sensualiste imaginée par Massenet, dans son très profane oratorio s’exagère encore dans Ève. L’épisode de la tentation notamment est saturé comme d’un parfum troublant...”

327 sensibilities. When Debussy referred to Grisélidis as a reworking of Massenet’s older oratorio, he could base his conclusion on numerous signposts in the opera. Indeed, the parallels between Grisélidis and the Eve story are made clear from its very beginning. Set in a Provençal forest, Grisélidis opens with a prologue in which Alain, Grisélidis’s childhood friend, stands alone extolling the virtues of his Paradise:

Ouvrez-vous sur mon front, Open before me portes du Paradis! gates of Paradise! Les grands cieux où The great heavens where descend le soir, evening falls, Les cieux tendus The heavens stretched d’or et de soie, with gold and silk, Les grands cieux sont The great heavens are comme un miroir: like a mirror: Ils reflètent toute ma joie. they reflect all of my joy. Ouvrez-vous! Open! Je vais revoir Grisélidis! I am going to see Grisélidis again!

Alain’s words could easily be read as a generic praise of his natural surroundings: descriptions of evening skies and of nature as paradise are frequent evocations of pastoral settings. Yet Massenet’s manuscript of Alain’s aria clearly indicates that “Paradis” is intended to be capitalized, notwithstanding the fact that in Heugel’s published score, the word appears as “paradis.”55 The capitalization of “Paradis” thus indicates a specific paradise: Alain’s Paradise evokes Eve’s Garden of Eden—the original Paradise.

This Paradise in Grisélidis, however, bears a distinct resemblance to that in

Massenet’s oratorio Ève. Here, Massenet primed Grisélidis to symbolize Eve not only from a textual point of view, but also through references to his earlier composition. The

55 Massenet, Grisélidis, Prologue. GEN MSS MUSIC MISC VOL 3, Frederick R. Koch Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. An annotation in Massenet’s hand at the bottom of the third page indicates that this version of the manuscript was in process during July 1894. Another manuscript, held at the BnF and dated September 1894, also shows “Paradis.” BnF-Mus. A. 744a. [I]. This capitalization is unusual compared to Massenet’s usage of capitals in his typical handwriting.

328 composer’s musical evocation of Paradise is strikingly similar in both instances.

Massenet’s musical Paradises utilize undulating sixteenth-note figures paired with a generally static harmonic motion to depict peacefulness, calm, and an as of yet undisturbed sense of purity in the garden (Examples 5.1 and 5.2):

Example 5.1: Jules Massenet, Ève, Prologue: “La Naissance de la femme”

Example 5.2: Jules Massenet, Grisélidis, “Prologue”

329

Massenet’s depiction of the Garden in both Ève and Grisélidis depends on clichéd tropes to represent nature.56 Although these hallmarks are hardly novel from a compositional point of view, Massenet’s depictions of both Biblical landscapes and Christian characters, as Erik

Goldstrom has demonstrated, are heavily dependent on similar constructions of musical pastorals (at least when Massenet codes them as divine). Goldstrom credits Massenet’s consistency to the sense of spiritual realism that had been popularized by Ernest Renan’s own idyllic descriptions of the Holy Land and Biblical environs.57 In the case of Ève, he writes, Massenet’s pastoral images create a picture not only of woman—“nature’s fairest creature”—but of nature itself.58

When Adam sees Eve for the first time, he declares that her creation stands as the fulfillment of divine work: whether she was sent from heaven, the sky, or the earth, it is through Eve that work has found its completion. He sings about the “seductive mystery” of

Eve’s creation in a series of ascending melodic gestures that rise increasingly higher until their climax on the word “divine” (Example 5.3):

56 On the musical representation of nature, see Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006): 207–71, and Elaine Sisman, “Symphonies and the Public Display of Topics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 90–118. See also V. Kofi Agawu, Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

57 Erik Goldstrom, “A Whore in Paradise: The Oratorios of Jules Massenet” (Ph.D. Diss., Stanford University, 1998), 93–4. On Massenet’s relation to Ernest Renan and his writings, see Chapter 2.

58 Goldstrom, “A Whore in Paradise,” 70.

330 Example 5.3: Jules Massenet, Ève, Part One, “Prélude, scène et duo”

Alain nearly duplicates Adam’s phrase as he implores the gates of Paradise to open themselves and reveal to him his beloved Grisélidis (Example 5.4):

Example 5.4: Grisélidis, Prologue, Scene 1, “Ouvrez-vous sur mon front”

Though set in different keys, the intervallic content and melodic contour are nearly identical between analogous moments in Ève and Grisélidis. Just as Paradise has revealed

331 Eve to Adam, so too will the gates of Paradise open to return Grisélidis to Alain—though not without complications. Eve’s weakness in the face of temptation eventually negates her once divine status, and Alain’s first glimpse of Grisélidis ends in his heartbreak, as she accepts the Marquis’s proposal of marriage. The musical similarities between Adam and

Alain as wells as those between Eve and Grisélidis continue, reflecting in each case the trials to come through corresponding deceptive cadences at the end of the aforementioned musical phrases; Adam’s phrase comes to rest on a C-sharp half-diminished chord, and

Alain’s on what is notated as a second-inversion fully diminished chord on A (see

Examples 5.3 and 5.4).59

Following from the Biblical narrative, Eve was a divine creation of God, formed in his image as a companion for Adam—at least prior to her encounter with the devil (or, in the case of Massenet’s Ève, the irresistible song of the Voices of the Night) at the infamous tree. In the first part of the oratorio, “La Naissance de la femme” (The Birth of Woman), she remains as such. Adam sings of her sea-blue eyes and her golden hair in an unaccompanied recitative in C major, and she responds, extolling the reflection of heaven that she sees in his face: at this point, Adam and Eve remain pure. Under the flowering trees, they declare their love for each other and pledge never to depart from one another through music that Goldstrom describes as “naïve and pure.”60 Their vow is also written in the key of C major. Indeed, as the woman sent by heaven to Adam’s side, their union— portrayed musically by the association of C major with Massenet’s most religious writing—was ordained by God.

59 Goldstrom also notes further foreshadowing on Massenet’s part that occurs between two melodic themes in Ève that are first presented in the Prelude and do not reappear until Eve’s seduction of Adam in Part Three. He writes that “by announcing these melodies at the beginning of the oratorio, Massenet leaves no doubt as to the intention of his work.” See Goldstrom, “A Whore in Paradise,” 114.

60 Loc. cit.

332 So too was Grisélidis’s marriage to the Marquis the product of divine design.

Though their union was, at least on the Marquis’s part, the result of love at first sight, the

Prior, Gondebaud, and the Marquis all believe Grisélidis’s presence in the forest to be celestial providence. Finding Grisélidis was, in Gondebaud’s words, a “miracle,” and as for the Marquis, he is certain that she has been led to him by God’s own hand:

Le Prieur: The Prior: Interrogeant l’espace, Questioning space, que cherche-t-il à l’horizon? what is he looking for on the horizon?

(Le Marquis entre. Il semble suivre du regard dans la (The Marquis enters. He seems to be profondeur de la forêt une scène invisible pour tous.) watching a scene invisible to everyone in the depths of the forest.)

Le Marquis (comme en extase): The Marquis (in ecstasy): Regardez! regardez! Look! Look! C’est une ange qui passe. It is an angel who passes by. Quel rêve prend mon âme What dream takes my soul et trouble ma raison? and troubles my reason?

(Entre les arbres du fond, sur le champ d’or du ciel a (Between the distant trees, on the field paru Grisélidis. Elle s’avance lentement dans la clarté lit golden by the sky, Grisélidis has appeared. du soir, qui semble un rayonnement sorti d’elle.) She advances slowly in the evening glow, which seems to radiate from her.)

Le Marquis: The Marquis: D’or éclatant le ciel autour d’elle se teinte... The sky around her is tinged with gold!

Gondebaud (avec veneration): Gondebaud (with veneration): O miracle! Oh, miracle!

Le Prieur (avec dévotion): The Prior (with devotion): On dirait Geneviève la sainte! She resembles Saint Genevieve!

Le Marquis: The Marquis: J’en crois mon cœur: My heart, I believe it: c’est pour moi qu’en ce lieu It is for me that to this place cette enfant est conduit this child has been led entre les mains de Dieu! between God’s hands!

Like Eve to Adam, Grisélidis is given to the Marquis by God to be man’s companion. Yet

Grisélidis begins to distinguish herself from Eve, recognizing (unlike Eve) that her

333 espousal to the Marquis is indeed the will of Heaven. Though it may have been contrary to her own wishes, she takes on this new mantle of obedient servanthood and accepts her new role as wife, after which a “mysterious voice from Heaven” rings out in choruses of

“Hallelujah”:

Grisélidis: Grisélidis: La volonté du ciel The will of Heaven, sans doute étant la vôtre, undoubtedly being yours, Désormais je n’en from now on aurai d’autre I will have no other will que vous obéir sans merci!... than to obey you without mercy!... Disposez de votre servant. Use your servant as you wish.

Voix mystérieuse sous le ciel: Mysterious Voice from Heaven: Alleluia! Alleluia! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

It is ultimately Grisélidis’s unfaltering obedience in the face of temptation that sets her apart from—or even redeems—Eve. Here again Massenet portrays Grisélidis musically as a symbol of Eve. Just as Eve is lured toward love in the Garden by the Voices of the Night, so too is Alain led to Grisélidis by similar songs. As in Ève, nature is the source of the tempter’s power over its subject in Grisélidis. Eve sings of the power of the night’s penetrating perfume and the sparkling moonbeams on the forest’s plants as the source for the unfamiliar shiver that courses through her flesh.61 Alain is similarly drawn to Grisélidis by the “sighs of kisses and dreams” that inhabit the dark woods, the white beaches, and the broad meadows.62 The women, each left to wander alone (Eve in the garden; Grisélidis on the shore), must navigate the “seductive” terrain without their men to

61 Massenet, Ève, Part II (“La Tentation”). “[Eve] O nuit, douce nuit pleine de murmures...quels parfums pénétrants...quels parfums jusqu’à moi sont venus! Quels souffles éveillés dans les sombres ramures font passer sur ma chair des frissons inconnus?”

62 Massenet, Grisélidis, Act II, Scene V. “[The Devil/Voices of the Night] Des bois obscurs, des blanches grèves, des monts aigus, des larges près, levez-vous, venez, accourez, souffles des baisers et des rêves.”

334 guide them. Tempted by the tree, Eve questions the Voices of the Night, who implore her to eat of the fruit that promises love as the pinnacle of human power and knowledge. The

Devil, working to tarnish Grisélidis’s purity, transforms the shoreline from a garden of lilies to a bed of roses and summons Alain into it, directly contravening her previously established virtue as a lily rather than a rose. It is precisely this temptation—the temptation of love—through which the Devil comes the closest to success.

Though left as an implication in Ève, it is clearly the Devil’s handiwork that is the driving force in Grisélidis’s temptation. Alain, pushed by the Devil and his spirits, cleverly plays on Grisélidis’s faith as a means of seducing her into marital infidelity. After flatly rejecting his advances, Grisélidis’s resolve is weakened when she and Alain are surrounded by an enchanted rosebush, the branches of which encircle the would-be lovers.63 Grisélidis begs for pity: “If this is love, have pity on me!” Alain—much like Jean-

Baptiste in Hérodiade—urges her on, singing that “the path of love is the way to

Heaven!...Come, let us fly to Heaven!” He speaks of a new dawn in their hearts that is “full of faith.” To Alain, “love is the supreme law.”64 Their music reflects her hesitancy and her desire to remain obedient, both to her husband and to her faith. It begins haltingly, firmly in the key of E flat major with little modulation and slow harmonic motion. As she sings of the growing emotion in her heart, she attempts to temper it. Her melody is a bit like chant: beginning with the range of little more than an octave, she remains on the same pitch for

63 Massenet, Grisélidis, Act II, Scene VII (Stage directions). “A nouveau dans le ciel, l’ombre s’est faite...les rosiers rapprochent leurs rameaux pour enlacer les amants, et le cœur des roses et les branches des orangers s’éclairent au vol ardent des lucioles.”

64 Massenet, Grisélidis, Act II, Scene VII. “[Grisélidis] Si c’est l’amour, ayez pitié de moi! [Alain] Fuyons, Grisélidis, fuyons! Viens Grisélidis! Des ombres de la nuit le voile tombe...Mais une aube se lève en nos cœurs pleins de foi! Tout répète: l’amour est la suprême loi!...O ma Grisélidis! Le chemin de l’amour est le chemin du ciel!...Viens! viens, fuyons vers le ciel!”

335 an extended period of time and, when she moves, her melodic line is conjunct and contains small intervallic leaps and scalar motion; accompanied by arpeggiated harp, the melody takes on an additional religious quality. As Alain continues to play on her religious sensibilities, however, her phrases become more and more disjunct, take on a greater intervallic range, move into an expanded tessitura and, at the brink of submission, her melody becomes that of Alain’s. Though they sing different texts, their union is reflected by frequent chromatic modulation and unison singing: it is only Loÿs’s appearance—a tangible reminder of her maternal duty—that stops the inevitable in its tracks. For Camille

Bellaigue, it was Loÿs alone who saved Grisélidis’s maternal honor.65

Like with Massenet’s first Eve, it was the tempting promise of love that nearly enticed the virtuous Grisélidis into infidelity. The Devil, in his final attempt to lure

Grisélidis into disobedience and adultery, is confident that he will prove victorious in the end. After informing Grisélidis that the pirate who is holding Loÿs captive is “besotted by her beauty,” he senses that her desire to be reunited with her son is slowly overtaking her vow of conjugal fidelity. Speaking to the audience, the Devil praises his own adept skills of trickery and deception: “Attention!,” he says, “It’s working. This is what it means to have the Devil’s mind. Let us remember the day that I offered the apple to Lady Eve in

Paradise!”66 Yet Grisélidis could not possibly be Eve—at least in the traditional sense— given that she ultimately proves triumphant over the Devil’s continued tests. Grisélidis, through her marital faithfulness, her fierce sense of maternal and familial duty, and her devout faith in the Catholic Church was no Eve—she was Eve redeemed, a figure who

65 Camille Bellaigue, “Revue Musicale: Grisélidis,” Revue des deux mondes (November 1901): 704. “Un enfant la lui fait perdre: le petit Loÿs, qui survient à propos et sauve l’honneur maternel.”

66 Massenet, Grisélidis, Act III, Scene II. “Attention! a prend. C’est le cas d’avoir un esprit du diable! Souvenons-nous du jour où je tendis la pomme à Madame Ève au Paradis.”

336 possessed great appeal to both the Church and the State. As Gérard Condé observed,

“Grisélidis agreed to hear these voices from the shadow, but she also knew how to get rid of her demons.”67

Grisélidis, or Massenet’s New Eve

Elizabeth Menon notes that in Armand Silvestre’s Le Péché d’Ève, the “demon” of original sin is identified as “the sin of love.” This is, according to Menon, love in its most seductive and erotic aspects that became, over time, indistinguishable from prostitution.68 The popularity of the image of Eve as a femme fatale in art and literature during the final decades of the nineteenth century was concurrent with the rise of feminism: for every image of Eve coupled with a serpent or Baudelairian fleurs du mal, the nascent image of a

“New Eve” was equally visible. This New Eve, as James McMillan explains it, was “ready to turn her back on the traditional domestic ideal in favour of a career and the pursuit of individual self-fulfillment.”69 She sought employment outside of the home and challenged traditional nineteenth-century gender norms: she smoked, dressed like a man, cut her hair short, rode a bicycle, and expanded her sexual visibility by openly expressing homosexual desires.70 The new Eve’s seeming masculinization struck fear in the hearts of Republican males and Catholic clergy alike for, along with her newfound independence came political and sexual emancipation, a trend toward secularization, and a generalized threat to the dominant social and moral order. Perhaps McMillan most accurately expressed the threat

67 Gérard Condé, “Argument,” L’Avant-Scène opéra, No. 148 (October 1992): 90. “Grisélidis a accepté d’entendre ces voix de l’ombre mais elle a su aussi se débarrasser de ses demons...”

68 Menon, “Les filles d’Ève in Word and Image,” 165.

69 McMillan, France and Women, 1789–1914, 141.

70 Ibid., 141–2. See also Morse, “The First Woman Question,” 72.

337 posed by the New Eve when he writes that she “aroused fear, not to say panic, in the breast of old Adam.”71

Though the figure of the New, more modern, Eve was quickly taken up by feminist thinkers as a formidable symbol of their cause, other fin-de-siècle writers reevaluated—and even challenged—the “New Eve” paradigm. While most male critics used Eve as a means through which to justify the subjugation of women and the patriarchal model of society, other writers such as Jules Bois linked her to the continued oppression of women in

French society. In L’Ève nouvelle (published 1894–1897), Bois suggested that the historic characterization of Eve as the cause of humankind’s fall led women to become slaves within their homes—which were, according to Bois, the symbol of woman’s unjust domestication.72 Women, as the “first slaves,” hardly saw the light of day through all of their domestic duties: “asphyxiated by the smoke of cooking, breathing the heavy atmosphere of the bed and of kitchens, she staggers, blinded by the sun, stunned by fresh air.”73 Bois did, however, make an important distinction in his construction of woman’s primary captor: it was not marriage to a man, but the process of male domination over women at home that had led to the situation in which French women currently suffered.

In the second part of L’Ève nouvelle, Bois traced the development of a new Eve that, paradoxically, led to a greater love of family and of moral rectitude. Bois had “heard the tears of woman fall,” and wished to hear them no longer. They were, in his mind, “a grand

71 McMillan, France and Women, 1789–1914, 141.

72 Jules Bois, L’Ève nouvelle (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1895), 23–26.

73 Bois, L’Ève nouvelle, 24. “Hèlas! elle a perdu l’habitude de la course: asphyxiée par les fumées des cuissons, respirant l’atmosphère lourde du lit et des cuisines, elle chancelle, aveuglée de soleil, étourdie par l’air pur.”

338 river that formed a river of purification for all of humanity.”74 New Eve was that purification and was epitomized by the ordinary French woman: she kept on a moral path, loved her family above all else, and following Auguste Comte’s “religion of humanity,” she was a citizen whose virtue could be extolled by Republican men.75 Feminine virtues such as motherhood were praised by Bois, as were the religious aspects of being a woman.

According to Bois, woman “dreamed of Gods,” but was excluded “from the sanctuary and relegated amongst the servants of religion.” Instead, Bois alluded to his belief that woman—Eve herself—was at the heart of religion, writing that “wherever an ideal is born, woman appears; she is its mother and advocate; wherever a tyranny seizes this ideal, woman is persecuted and hunted.” 76

In order to fulfill this prescription for the New Eve, especially as it concerned distancing herself from the New Woman (la femme nouvelle) and the Fashionable Woman

(la femme à la mode), Bois asked his ideal woman to abandon such banal worldly pleasures as makeup and fashionable clothing—“theatrical props” as he calls them—and to return to the home and to the hearth for her pleasure. Debora Silverman describes this type of

74 Bois, L’Ève nouvelle, 101. “J’ai écouté tomber les larmes de la femme...Je n’ai plus entendu qu’elles. Et il m’a semblé qu’un grand fleuve s’en formait, un fleuve de purification pour toute l’humanité.”

75 Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was a positivist (and openly anticlerical) philosopher whose ideas regarding the formation of a secular “science of society” remained influential throughout the Third Republic. Though his earlier writings reinforce conceptions of female inferiority, his Système de politique positive (1848) and Catechisme positiviste (1851) reposition woman as the vehicle for a system of morality that overrode politics in the social order. Through their virtue, Comte explained, women possessed great potential to act as the redemption of an otherwise corrupt society. See Susan G. Bell and Karen Offen, eds., Women, The Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 219. Judith Surkis explains that Comte’s thought was based on the “principles of love, association, and union, rather than conflict or the ‘struggle for like’” as the basis of social order. Exemplified through sexual reproduction and motherhood, these were the sociological elements of morality. See Surkis, Sexing the Citizen, 162. See also Offen, Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 9.

76 Bois, L’Ève nouvelle, 275. “La femme a rêvé les Dieux, nous l’avons raconté, et la ruse de l’homme consiste à s’élire lui-même, à mettre ‘le vieillard à la grande barbe’ sur l’autel, puis à exclure la femme du sanctuaire, à la reléguer parmi les servants du culte. Partout où naît un idéal la femme apparaît, elle est sa mère et son avocate; partout où une tyrannie s’empare de cet idéal, la femme est persécutée et chassée.”

339 woman as a “de-aestheticized female” suffering from “sensual impoverishment.”77 She identifies Bois’s New Eve as a quintessential example of familial feminism, a concept that was, according to Rhonda K. Garelick, a less radical form of feminism to which many bourgeois society women adhered.78 This brand of feminism glorified women as the keeper of the home and family, capitalized on their allegedly innate sense of nurturing, and reaffirmed the sense of sexual difference inherent in the concept of separate but equal spheres for men and women. Rather than throwing themselves into the workforce or riding a bicycle through the streets of Paris, these women embraced conventional though admittedly stereotypical ideas about femininity, the family, and motherhood.79 And though Charles Sowerwine has rightly argued that it is nearly impossible to assert that all bourgeois women were confined to the home at all times, it was to this ideal that both the

Republic and the Church aspired.80

Though there are numerous connections between Massenet’s hyper-sexualized version of Eve and the venerated Grisélidis, it is perhaps to the virtues of Bois’s New Eve— especially that of maternal and familial duty—that Grisélidis adheres the most literally.

Gérard Condé notes that her status as a mother distinguishes her from all of Massenet’s

77 See Debora Silverman, “The New Woman: Modernism and the Decorative Arts in fin-de-siècle France,” Eroticism and the Body Politic in Modern France, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 150.

78 Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance at the Fin-de-Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 121. Karen Offen refers to this same type of family-based feminism as “bourgeois feminism.” See Offen, Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 7, n. 13.

79 A similar version of this New Eve was fashioned by Jean Herrère in Une Ève nouvelle (Paris: Paul Olendorff, 1888). Written as a series of diary entries, the protagonist, Suzanne, goes through a series of moral temptations before realizing that her potential is better fulfilled as a wife and mother.

80 See Sowerwine, “Revising the Sexual Contract: Women’s Citizenship and Republicanism in France, 1789– 1944,” in Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France: Bodies, Minds, and Gender, ed. Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo (Houndmills (U.K.): Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 25.

340 female heroines. Indeed, her “maternal conscience” drives many of her decisions throughout the opera.81 It is the appearance of Grisélidis’s child that prevents her near infidelity, and it is likewise an equal devotion to Loÿs and by extension, to her family unit as a whole, that facilitates her decision to abandon her sense of honor by giving in to the fictitious pirate’s demands. When the Devil first alerts Grisélidis to the pirate’s “ransom” request, her instinctive response is to refuse outright: “Never! Never! If I go...what danger for me!” Almost immediately, however, her thoughts shift to her son’s safety and well- being, as she questions what danger he might face if she refuses. 82 Sensing her momentary hesitation, the Devil bombards Grisélidis with a laundry list of horrors that might await

Loÿs should she not take her place aboard the ship. According to the Devil, Loÿs might be sold as a slave in Algiers, or worse yet, might be hanged from the ship’s mast in order to see what he would look like dangling lifelessly in the moonlight.83 Grisélidis’s maternal instinct kicks in, and she agrees to go—but only after sprinkling herself with holy water for protection.84 She leaves the manor and The Marquis, having returned from the Crusades, happens upon the Devil, spots his wedding ring on his finger, and slowly unravels the

Devil’s master plan.

By virtue of her devotion to her family, Grisélidis was the ideal personification of the New Eve. Having denied Alain and the promise of new love, she remains faithful to her husband and to their marital vow, so much so that she pledges a crown of her shorn

81 Condé, “Argument,” 90. “Ce qui distingue en effet Grisélidis de toutes les héroïnes de Massenet, c’est quelle est mère; c’est même cette conscience maternelle qui l’emporte dans un premier temps...”

82 Massenet, Grisélidis, Act III, Scene II. “Jamais! Jamais! Si je vais...pour moi quel danger! Hélas! quel danger pour mon fils si je reste.”

83 Massenet, Grisélidis, Act III, Scene II. “Sans vouloir vous désobliger, l’heure est grave: il peut bien l’emmener esclave en Alger ou le pendre à la grande hune, pour voir l’effet que cela fait au clair de lune.”

84 Loc. cit. “Soit! J’irai donc.”

341 hair to Saint Agnes in exchange for Loÿs’s safe return.85 In both religious and secular histories, women’s hair carried with it a not only strong sexual attraction, but also a connection to Saint Agnes herself whose hair, in medieval French versions of her hagiography, instantly grew to conceal her nudity from her would-be rapists.86 Indeed, to cut her hair would have symbolized a great loss of erotic appeal and divine protection— perhaps Grisélidis’s bargain was a means toward penance for her close call with Alain.87

By the same token, her decision to place her child and her family above her sense of honor reaffirms her position as the “keeper of the hearth.” She becomes the model to which the

Republic aspired: a mother driven by honor and maternal duty who would forsake all else in order to maintain the integrity of her family unit and the well-being of her son. Though the character of the Devil and his temptations played directly into the hands of

Republican portrayals of modern women as untrustworthy and dangerous, Grisélidis’s constancy acted as a model of how women could—and should—behave.

Grisélidis: A Sainted Heroine

As the New Eve, Grisélidis appealed directly to the Republic. Though her actions (and inactions) aligned with Republican visions of how a woman should behave, her obedience and faithfulness were largely products of her Christian faith in the first place—her countenance, bearing “Heaven’s peace,” was the first of her many virtuous characteristics

85 Massenet, Grisélidis, Act III, Scene I. “O dame Agnès, ô sainte patronne de ces lieux, je te veux implorer à genoux. Et mettrai, si mon fils revient auprès de nous, de mes cheveux coupés à tes pieds la couronne!”

86 Brigitte Cazelles, The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 89–101.

87 See, for example, Odon Vallet, Le Honteux et le sacré (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), 40, for a discussion of the eroticism of women’s hair in ancient Jewish civilization. See also Elizabeth Gitter, “The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, No. 99 (1984): 936–54, and Lawrence Kramer, “Culture and Musical Hermeneutics: The Salome Complex,” Cambridge Opera Journal Vol. 2, No. 3 (November 1990): 277.

342 that the Marquis described.88 As the Prior and Gondebaud search for their master in the forest, they bemoan the great shame of the fact that he has not yet found a wife.

Overhearing Alain’s aside that they have not yet discovered Grisélidis and her beauty, they are now privy to the knowledge of the existence of a woman who, according to Alain, epitomizes womanly grace and charm: she is not a rose, but rather a lily.89 As the symbol of purity, Grisélidis is thus primed to function as the ideal French Catholic woman. In

Christian symbolism, the lily sprang from the tears of Eve as she learned that she was bearing a child; originally yellow in color, it was later said that it became white after the

Virgin Mary plucked it from the ground.90 Representing purity, chastity, and innocence, it lacks the association with seduction, desire and danger that the rose carries with it—the rose was, after all, one flower of Venus.91 The rose’s thorns, said to have only appeared after the fall of man as a reminder of original sin, likewise stood in contrast to the lily.92

Alain’s music further marks Grisélidis as pure and even saintly. His praise of her beauty, grace, and charm is set at first as a hymn: accompanied only by chordal strings, his melody is firmly rooted in the key of C major. As Alain sings the phrase “to see her is to love her,” his melody cadences simultaneously with yet another allusion to the sacred realm: the

88 Massenet, Grisélidis, Prologue, Scene III. “Toi qui portes la paix du ciel sur ton visage, je ne sais devant toi, mystèrieuse image, quelle force inconnue a plié mes genoux.”

89 Massenet, Grisélidis, Prologue, Scene I. “[Alain] Elle est au jardin des tendresses non pas la rose, mais le lys.”

90 Ernst and Johanna Lehrer, Folklore and Symbolism of Flowers, Plants, and Trees (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003 [1960]), 33.

91 Ibid., 77–79. While the white rose symbolizes charm and innocence, the red rose represents desire and carnal love. Though Alain does not specify the color of the rose to which he refers, it is likely that in pointing out that Grisélidis is not a rose, he was referring to the connotations that come with a red rather than a white rose. See also George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 47– 48.

92 Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art, 48.

343 harp’s arpeggiated C major chord. (Example 5.5) The end of the aria marks a return to the opening melodic material, yet its reprise replaces the chordal string accompaniment with an accompaniment dominated by arpeggiated harps. (Example 5.6) Grisélidis is thus not just any woman. She is marked as virtuous and unadulterated by temporal matters, not only through Alain’s words, but also Massenet’s music.

Example 5.5: Jules Massenet, Grisélidis, Prologue, Scene 3: “Voir Grisélidis”

344 Example 5.6: Prologue, Scene 3: “Voir Grisélidis” (Reprise)

Gondebaud’s first sight of Grisélidis only confirms Alain’s fulsome description of his distant beloved. Upon seeing her, Gondebaud praises her saint-like appearance and notes her likeness to Saint Genevieve.93 But Grisélidis also bears a striking resemblance to

Saint Agnes, who plays a significant role in the opera. Agnes, like Grisélidis, was known for her beauty; and like the lovesick Alain, numerous prospective suitors hoped that Agnes would give in to their entreaties. She denied them all, claiming that she had consecrated her life and her virginity to Christ. Her would-be suitors exposed Agnes as a Christian and, when she refused to worship the Roman gods, she was tortured as a means to compel a renunciation of her Christian faith. Agnes defied the temptations put before her and was subsequently condemned to live in a brothel where any man could use her how they

93 Grisélidis, Prologue, Scene III. “[Le Marquis] D’or éclatant le ciel autour d’elle se teinte...[Gondebaud] O miracle! [Le Prieur] On dirait Geneviève la sainte!”

345 wished. Yet her refusal to denounce Christ proved to be her salvation—at the brothel, she was rendered untouchable and her vow of chastity remained intact. In the end, she was executed for her defiance. After she was canonized, she became, among other things, the patron saint of chastity and engaged couples.94

Upon the Marquis’s departure to the Crusades, the Prior suggests that he and the

Marquis pray to Saint Agnes in order to ensure that Grisélidis and Loÿs would never be able to leave the manor, suggesting that if she were to transgress its boundaries in her husband’s absence, she would also be tempted to break the promise of fidelity made in her marital vows. The Prior’s prayer to Saint Agnes insinuates thus that the intervention of a spiritual power was needed to ensure Grisélidis’s fidelity. Yet the Marquis counters the

Prior, claiming that it was instead God to whom she vowed her faithfulness: “it is God whom she invoked in a sacred vow, and today I swear by all its power that I shall never doubt two things: her fidelity and her will to obey.”95

As numerous contemporary critics noted (as have modern scholars), Massenet characterized the competing worlds of Catholic faith and worldly temptation with vastly differing musical styles. Whereas Massenet wrote the Devil and his wife as traditional buffo characters, he translated Grisélidis’s piety through a musical language that was inspired not only by the medieval era, but also by the teachings of Louis Niedermeyer and the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse (École Niedermeyer).96 Niedermeyer

94 Robert Ellsberg, Blessed Among all Women: Women Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for our Time (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2005), 216–17. See also Ruth Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 127–29.

95 Massenet, Grisélidis, Act I, Scene III. “C’est Dieu qu’elle invoqua dans un serment sacré et j’en jure aujourd’hui par sa toute puissance, de deux choses jamais, non! je ne douterai: c’est sa fidélité, c’est son obéissance.”

96 The subject of Massenet’s musical treatment of the Devil and Fiamina as comic characters has been thoroughly treated by Hugh Macdonald and Gérard Condé. See Macdonald, “Passez-vous donc du Diable, que Diable,” 123–25, and Gérard Condé, “Argument,” L’Avant-Scène Opéra, No. 148 (October 1992): 88–119.

346 founded his school in 1853 partially as a response to the growing need for skilled professional church musicians that had become more pressing after the 1831 closure of the only existing program geared to such training, Alexandre Choron’s Institution Royale de

Musique Religieuse.97 Niedermeyer was especially interested in the revival of music dating from the sixteenth century and earlier through a philosophy and curricula centered on his belief that the best modern church musicians were those with a considerable knowledge of plainchant and the polyphonic music of Palestrina and his contemporaries.98

Niedermeyer’s ideas were well-known throughout France, and his numerous treatises— especially the Traité théorique et pratique de l’accompagnement du plain-chant (1857)—were, according to Gustave Lefèvre, “universally accepted and enormously influential” in the realms of church music and its composition.99

Jacques Chailly described the style of accompanied plainchant at the École

Niedermeyer as the “Parisian plainchant of the nineteenth century, with its almost note- against-note harmonization and a rather perfunctory modal analysis.” This, he explained, was quite unlike the style at Solesmes, where the Benedictine monks pushed for a return to the “true” art of unaccompanied plainchant.100 Chailly’s description was not far off the

97 For more on the founding of the École Niedermeyer, see Donna di Grazia, “Concert Societies in Paris and Their Choral Repertoires, c. 1828–1880,” Vol. 1 (Ph.D. Diss., Washington University, 1993), 201–2. See also Ikuno Sako, “Louis Niedermeyer and Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Music Research: New Directions for a New Century, ed. Michael Ewans, Rosalind Halton, and John A. Philipps (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004), 84–93.

98 Di Grazia, “Concert Societies in Paris and Their Choral Repertoires,” 203.

99 Gustave Lefèvre and Mme. Veuve Henri Heurtel, “L’École de Musique Classique Niedermeyer,” Encyclopédie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire, Vol. 6 (Paris: Librairie Ch. Delagrave, 1913–31), 3619. Cited in Di Grazia, “Concert Societies in Paris and Their Choral Repertories,” 203.

100 Jacques Chailly, Traité Historique d’analyse musicale (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1951), 122. Cited in James C. Kidd, “Louis Niedermeyer’s System for Gregorian Chant Accompaniment as a Compositional Source for Gabriel Fauré” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago, 1973), 43. See also Katharine Ellis, The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2013).

347 mark. Niedermeyer’s six-step system for accompanying plainchant was based on the exclusive use of notes that were specific to any given mode. To that end, the accompaniment was governed solely by the chant melody itself. Cadences were to be created only through the use of the harmonic formulae proper to that mode’s natural cadences, any chord other than consonant triads in their first inversion were banned, and the laws governing the structure of plainchant melody had to be followed in every voice of the accompaniment. Any cadence that hinted toward common-practice tonality was forbidden. Niedermeyer’s system dictated that the outer harmonic voices combine standard chant cadential formulae, after which any tonal allusions were then eliminated from the inner voices. Under no circumstances were dominant seventh chords allowed:

“the dominant seventh chord, which belongs exclusively to modern harmony and whose adoption marked the birth of dramatic music and of sensual expression, must be rigorously proscribed, as well as its inversions.”101

As scholars such as James C. Kidd and Carlo Caballero have noted, this style of accompanied plainchant heavily influenced the compositional style of such composers as

Gabriel Fauré, who had been a student at Niedermeyer’s school during the 1850s and

1860s.102 This style can also be seen to have played a role in the composition of Grisélidis:

Clair Rowden has highlighted the Niedermeyerian style in Massenet’s frequent usage of parallel chords, plagal harmonic movements, and modal mixtures within a single key area

101 Louis Niedermeyer, Gregorian Accompaniment: A Theoretical Treatise Upon the Accompaniment of Plainsong, trans. Wallace Goodrich (New York: Novello, Ewer, and Co., 1905), 16.

102 Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 71. See also Kidd, “Louis Niedermeyer’s System for Gregorian Chant Accompaniment as a Compositional Source for Gabriel Fauré.”

348 as accompanimental figures to chant-like vocal lines.103 Though Massenet himself never studied at the École Niedermeyer, much of the music in Grisélidis—especially that of

Grisélidis herself—does indeed reflect this late-nineteenth-century style of composition, thereby further marking Grisélidis as an exemplar of the Church. Though these devices could easily be explained as common musical expressions of medieval church music, they were also the topic of frequent debate at the time during which Grisélidis was composed.

As the Solesmes movement was gaining currency (especially with the Schola Cantorum in

Paris), the question of “appropriate” chant performance brought Niedermeyer’s system back into current discourse some forty years after its original publication.104

As noted by Rowden, Grisélidis’s melodic lines are often inspired by plainchant.

And though an abundance of parallel harmonic motion and melodic modality—standard medievalist musical tropes—occurs in the music that Massenet used for her music in particular, the idiom he deploys for her is significantly closer at times to Niedermeyer’s prescriptions for chant accompaniment than has previously been acknowledged.

According to Chailley, Niedermeyer’s “perfunctory modal analysis” is frequently confined to a VII-I cadential motion as a device through which to avoid tonally-based cadences.105

When Grisélidis first enters the stage, she sings of Heaven’s will in an unaccompanied, chant-like melody. Though it is not modal, its range, being confined to one octave,

103 Clair Rowden, “Grisélidis,” Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIXe siècle, Joël-Marie Fauquet, ed. (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 538. “La ligne mélodique de Grisélidis est souvent inspirée du plain-chant (par exemple sa première entrée ‘La volonté du ciel sans doute étant la vôtre’) et harmonisée d’après l’enseignement de Niedermeyer avec des séries d’accords parallèles, des mouvements harmoniques plagaux et des accords mineurs dans une tonalité (ou un mode) majeure.”

104 On the debate surrounding plainchant performance and the Solesmes revival, see Ellis, The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France and Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

105 Cited in Kidd, “Louis Niedermeyer’s System for Gregorian Chant Accompaniment as a Compositional Source for Gabriel Fauré,” 43.

349 conforms to traditional modal guidelines. The accompaniment, consisting exclusively of homophonic strings, enters after five measures. Massenet avoids all usage of tonal cadential formulae. The melody is set in the key of E major, yet within the accompaniment, the first cadences occur between the supertonic in its first inversion and the tonic: the leading tone is completely absent, and any hint at a dominant-tonic relationship is erased. When the leading tone does appear, only once in the span of sixteen measures, it lasts only briefly. Hereafter, the D-sharp could function as a leading tone, both in the accompaniment and in Grisélidis’s vocal line, yet the perfect authentic cadence is avoided, moving instead to an A major chord. The final cadence, occurring between the lowered-seventh scale degree of D major and E major, yet again avoids the tonal cadence.

(Example 5.7)

Example 5.7: Jules Massenet, Grisélidis, Prologue, Scene 3, “La volonté du ciel”

350

Following the Marquis’s departure, Grisélidis and Loÿs pray for his safety at the beginning of Act 2. Perhaps signaling that their prayers have been heard, bells from a distance peal out the Angelus—an invitation to the faithful to pray in honor of the mystery of the Incarnation—as they end their prayer.106 Massenet’s music is faithful to the bells’ call. Women’s voices, drifting from the castle, intone an Ave Maria. Accompanied only by a violin pedal point and intermittent bells (remnants from the Angelus), the women sing an entirely modal melody and again invoke plainchant. Following Niedermeyer’s prescription for instrumental accompaniment, an organ and a harmonium soon join the voices, replete with parallel chords and modal mixture. As the Ave Maria draws to a close with the affirmation “Ainsi soit il,” (So be it), Massenet employs a similar modal cadence: the leading tone is lowered, creating a v-I cadential figure. Grisélidis and Loÿs respond in an ascending, a cappella, unison vocal line that affirms their belief in the prayers that have been offered on the Marquis’s behalf. (Example 5.8)

106 Joël-Marie Fauquet, “Angélus,” Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 44. “Dans le rite catholique, signal donné par la cloche d’une église, le matin, à midi et le soir, pour inviter les fidèles à réciter une prière en l’honneur du mystère de l’Incarnation.”

351 Example 5.8: Jules Massenet, Grisélidis, Act 2, Scene 3 “Je vous salue, Marie”

In the final act, at the moment during which Grisélidis and the Marquis discover that the perpetrator of all of her hardship was indeed the Devil himself, the Marquis swears his vengeance by way of the sword—he has, after all, just returned from the

Crusades. Yet Grisélidis, ever motivated by her faith, implores Heaven to arm them against the Devil’s infernal powers. For her, it is God and not the sword that will ultimately vanquish the Devil:

Le Marquis: The Marquis: Des armes! des armes! To arms! To arms! que j’aille l’arracher I am going to rescue him à ces vils scélérats!... from these vile scoundrels!...

352

Grisélidis (fervente): Grisélidis (fervently): Oui, Dieu! Yes, God! Prions d’un cœur fervent. Let us pray with a fervent heart. À l’heure où le Malin At the time in which the Evil One accumule ses charmes, is building up his spells, Au Ciel seul to heaven alone demandons des armes. let us ask for arms.

Kneeling together, Grisélidis and the Marquis pray at the altar of Saint Agnes, atop which sits a cross. The cross is their only hope in their quest to find their son: they pray that it will rekindle hope in their disconsolate hearts and that it will act as an “immortal flame” through which their son might be returned to their safekeeping. As a final supplication, the couple cries “O spes unica, crux ave!” (“Hail the Cross, our only hope!”) in unison. Perhaps as an answer to their prayer, or perhaps as a reward for Grisélidis’s faithfulness, the cross on the altar immediately transforms into a flaming sword—a sword which, sent by Heaven, will defeat the evil ways of the Devil. Mediated through

Niedermeyer’s system, Massenet’s music thus marks Grisélidis as a Catholic heroine who expresses her devout faith in the Church through an appropriate and sincere religious musical style.

Much like in the stories of Saints Agnes and Genevieve, it was Grisélidis’s faith in

Christ and in the Church that ensured her steadfastness in the face of temptation.

Considered in this way, there was never really any question as to how the opera’s dénouement could unfold. There is, however, another, perhaps more Republican, ingredient to the opera’s happy ending—the men. Throughout the opera, neither

Gondebaud nor even the Church’s Prior respond to Grisélidis’s musical Catholicism in an equally Catholicized (or even medievally-influenced) musical style, a fact that is unremarkable given the fact that they disappear from the action after the first scene of Act

353 One. The Marquis’s musical style, however, is thoroughly modern, and its complementarity to Grisélidis’s musical characterization only highlights his Republican nature. Grisélidis alone is unable to secure her son’s return: Loÿs’s safety was only ensured upon the Marquis’s return from battle. After learning that his son had been kidnapped, his first instinct was to take up his sword in an attempt to save his child. Having been convinced by his wife to resort instead to prayer, the Marquis and Grisélidis join hands, kneel at St. Agnes’s altar, and begin to pray together, their music alternating between a cappella homophony and chant-like recitative set in parallel thirds. Together, the steadfast wife and protective husband realize the restoration of their complete family—perfect by both Republican and Catholic standards—the woman, faithful as she was, required her husband for complete success.

Eminently French: Grisélidis and Medievalism

In his autobiography, Massenet reflected on his stylistic and topical redirection that began with La Terre promise and Grisélidis. He wondered how the public might react to his newfound interest in religious heroines, writing “what would be the feelings of those who were used to seeing me put on the stage Manon, Sapho, Thaïs, and other lovable ladies?”107

Though the contrast was great between Grisélidis and Massenet’s other “loveable ladies,”

Grisélidis was quite the box office hit. It brought record receipts to the Opéra-Comique’s coffers—a total of 9,716 francs at the premiere which was, at that point, unheard of—and all subsequent performances of the opera that season (save for performances given exclusively for the press) garnered totals exceeding 9,000 francs each.108 These sums

107 Jules Massenet, My Recollections, trans. H. Villiers Barnett (Boston: Small, Maynard, and Co. Publishers, 1919), 232.

108 Henri Heugel, “Nouvelles diverses,” Le Ménestrel (8 December 1901): 391. “Avec Grisélidis l’Opéra-Comique a réalisé dernièrement la plus forte recette qu’il ait jamais encaissée: 9.716 fr. 50! D’ailleurs, depuis le

354 suggest that not even the high-profile premiere of Louise had attained such stellar sales.

Charpentier’s realist drama had been unable to surpass Massenet’s unexpected and wholly “traditional” medieval tale—Grisélidis, as the model French woman, functioned as a corrective to Louise’s dangerous independence.

Critical responses to Massenet’s newest foray into the world of medievalism were not unlike those garnered by the premiere of Esclarmonde some twelve years earlier.

Representing both a distant past and a future to which audiences could aspire, the medieval worlds of Esclarmonde and Grisélidis were prime vehicles through which critics could simultaneously champion the French medieval heritage and utilize it to reflect on the healthy state of the nation.109 (Figure 5.3)

commencement des représentations de cette œuvre charmante, il n’y a jamais eu de recette au-dessous de 9.000 francs sauf pour les soirées qui comportaient ‘service de presse’.” An unsigned account in Le Temps (26 November 1901) corroborates these numbers; they were likewise cited (to the exact franc) in a letter sent to Massenet from the Grande Chancellerie de la Légion d’Honneur, dated 3 December 1901: “Dans ma longue carrière le contrôleur j’avais déjà fait une magnifique recette: c’était avec “Manon”= 9,666. Ma dernière soirée n’a [illegible] la samedi 30 novembre 1901, avec “Grisélidis,” de mon cher maître Massenet j’ai encaissé le plus forte recette que j’ai fait en 25 ans: 9,716 francs.” BnF-Opéra NLAS-119 (70).

109 On the premiere of Esclarmonde and the significance of medievalism in this context, see Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 62–78. For more on the significance of the Middle Ages to nineteenth- century Republican ideology, see Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in fin-de-siècle France, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

355

Figure 5.3: François Flameng’s poster for Grisélidis at the Opéra-Comique (1901)

Wagner had left behind the lingering notion that operatic subjects required a depth that went beyond mere entertainment in order to be considered adequate fodder for high- minded music dramas, and idealized medieval worlds from which universal truths could be gleaned provided the ideal inspiration for composers who were looking to grapple with the German composer’s enormous influence.110 Esclarmonde’s medieval source—Denis

110 Fauser discusses this in relation to Esclarmonde in Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 69. She also cites Jens Malte Fischer, “Singende Recken und blitzende Schwerter: Die Mittelalteroper neben und nach Wagner—Ein Überblick,” in Mittelalterrezeption: Ein Symposium, ed. Peter Wapnewski (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986): 511–30.

356 Pyramus’s epic tale—had been celebrated as a truly French response to more problematic texts such as the Table ronde. The opera was thus heralded as one of the first French music dramas whose medievalist source material could hold its own in a nationalist context when it came to questions of its French origin.111 This same process of appropriation took place in the reception of Grisélidis. Critics praised the accuracy of Massenet’s medieval portrait, citing its “lively evocation of the distant heroic eras of the Middle Ages,” and its musical depictions of medieval illuminations. Other commentators celebrated the composer for selecting a heroine who was truly French, despite her Provençal birth.112

Léon Kerst wrote that Grisélidis “undoubtedly reunites all the primordial qualities of our race: clarity, invention, valor, and charm.”113 Arthur Pougin took Kerst’s observation a step further when he claimed that the legend itself was of an “essentially French birth.”114 On another occasion, Pougin asserted that Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Geoffrey Chaucer had each been inspired by a tale that had been “born on French soil.”115 For Paul Porthmann, it

111 Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 71.

112 René d’Aral, “Soirée Parisienne,” Le Gaulois (21 November 1901). “Oh! le délicieux cadre dont il a su entourer la poétique figure de Grisélidis, et quelle vivante évocation des lointaines époques héroïques du moyen âge: on dirait les enluminures agrandies et détachées de quelque précieux missel…!” and Henry Gauthier-Villars, “Les Premières: Grisélidis” (21 November 1901). “...qui présente, au vrai, une série d’enluminures de missel simili-médiéval enjolivées de strophes agréables et de sonorités délicates.” This press clipping is from an unknown newspaper. Fonds Montpensier (Jules Massenet), BnF-Musique.

113 Léon Kerst, “Premières Représentations” (n.d.). “Depuis quelque temps on parle beaucoup d’‘ouvrages français’—il faut bien parler de quelque chose—or, en voici un qui réunit, à n’en pas douter, toutes les qualités primordiales de notre race, la clarté, l’invention, la vaillance et le charme.”

114 Arthur Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale: Grisélidis,” Le Ménestrel (24 November 1901): 370. “Mais le sujet lui- même, bien que de naissance essentiellement française, était loin d’être inédit, puisqu’on en fait remonter l’origine à plus de neuf cents ans, c’est-à-dire en plein moyen âge.”

115 Arthur Pougin, “Critique musicale: Grisélidis,” L’Evénément (22 November 1901). “On sait ce que les deux auteurs ont fait et le parti qu’ils ont tiré de l’ancienne et populaire légende de Grisélidis, vieille aujourd’hui de près de dix siècles et qui, née sur notre sol, a inspiré tour à tour tant de poètes non seulement français, mais étrangers: Marie de France, Boccace, Pétrarque, Geoffrey Chaucer, puis le bonhomme Perrault, Hamilton et Imbert.”

357 was Silvestre and Morand whose revisions had rendered the tale undeniably French. In

Porthmann’s mind, the earlier versions of the tale in which Grisélidis’s hardships came from her husband’s hand appealed more to other foreign nations, given that their social forms were products of feudal social systems.116 Silvestre and Morand’s version, on the other hand, exuded a more “Southern” charm:

They transported the scene to Provence in the fourteenth century... there is a reciprocal faith and a confidence between Grisélidis and her husband; the Devil acts as provocateur and, if he is vanquished at the end of the tale, it is above all thanks to the protection of Saint Agnes. This more Southern understanding, however, has its charm.117

Asserting Grisélidis’s Frenchness as a product of its Provençal setting—via the notion of translatio studii—was an important step in the critics’ appropriation of the medieval legend.118 With Grisélidis, however, there was no sense of stated difference between Paris and its southern cousin. Indeed, for Porthmann, the opera’s plot, as it was written by Silvestre and Morand, was best suited to a Provençal setting—a location which rendered the opera truly French. By 1901 (or even 1891, for that matter), Provence had become the ur-French locale, not only by way of its connection with the Latin world, but also through the sense of regional francité that had been celebrated by the poet Fréderic

Mistral (1830–1914) and the Félibrige, the influential regionalist movement, some fifty years

116 Paul Porthmann, “Grisélidis,” L’Art du théâtre (January 1902): 7. “Grisélidis, qui, au temps où florissait le sous- titre explicatif, aurait pu s’adorner de ou le Miroir des femmes vertueuses, n’est point un conte. Grisélidis, marquise de Saluces, vivait au commencement du XIe siècle. Les extraordinaires épreuves que lui fit subir son mari treize ans durant, ont profondément impressionné l’époque médiévale, et, plus principalement, les nations du Nord, encore que ses infortunes aient eu pour premiers narrateurs Boccace et Pétrarque. De ceux-ci, l’histoire, devenue légende, fut relatée en français, puis en allemand, en tchèque, en danois, en anglais et même en islandais!—(Saga de Grishilda)—Un sentiment intense de l’organisation féodale et chrétienne, alors dans toute sa force, la domine et motive la prédilection des races septentrionales pour un phénomène résultant d’une forme sociale issue d’elles.”

117 Ibid., 8–9. “Ils ont transporté la scène en Provence, au XIVe siècle… Il y a foi et confiance réciproques entre Grisélidis et son époux; le Diable agit comme provocateur, et si, en fin de compte, il est vaincu, c’est surtout grâce à la protection de sainte Agnès. Cette compréhension plus méridionale a toutefois bien son charme.”

118 For more on translatio studii, see Chapter 2.

358 earlier.119 As the work of the Félibrige gained currency in Paris at the turn of the century,

French identity became inseparable from an innate sense of latinité that was part and parcel of Provençal history. In this frame of reference, Provence was no longer considered to be what Katharine Ellis has termed an “internal other,” but was linked with Paris as two significant parts of the Latin world—so long as Parisians understood that their Latin heritage was a product of Provence’s proximity to Mediterranean and older Latin cultures and religion, a link that was validated in no small measure through the Avignon papacy during the thirteenth century.120 Grisélidis thus conjured up an imagined utopia for its audience, a distant world through which its ideal Republican familial—and female— model could be touted as a formula to be followed by Parisian men and women. Though the religious aspects of Grisélidis were Silvestre and Morand’s nineteenth-century additions, the claim that the opera, as a product of its medieval origin, represented something essentially French in character suggests that religion, and Catholicism in particular, played a role in determining what “Frenchness” ought to mean.

By 1901, the French art historian Émile Mâle (1862–1954) had come to a similar conclusion. Mâle’s work showed that religious arts of the Middle Ages—music, art, religious iconography, and the like—were not monuments to be preserved and worshipped. Rather, they were to be conceived of as, to borrow Pierre Nora’s famous

119 The Félibrige was an association of regionalist writers that was formed in 1854 to promote the preservation of Occitan amidst the increasing prevalence of spoken French in Provence. The group was thrust into the national spotlight after the publication of Mistral’s epic poem Mireille in 1859. Five years later, the Félibrige gained additional currency when Mireille became the basis of Charles Gounod’s opera of the same name. See Katharine Ellis, “Mireille’s Homecoming? Gounod, Mistral, and the Midi,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Autumn 2012): 463–509. For more on regionalism as it pertains to Provençal-Parisian relations, see Andrea Musk, “Regionalism, Latinité, and the French Musical Tradition: Déodat de Séverac’s Héliogabale,” in Nineteenth Century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference, ed. Jim Samson and Bennett Zon (Abingdon (U.K.): Ashgate, 2002), 226–49.

120 On the Avignon papacy, see Norman Housely, The Avignon Papacy and the Crusades, 1305–1378 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

359 formulation, lieux des mémoires—places of memory in which citizens could visualize both the country’s past and future.121 According to Joseph F. Byrnes, such work acted as the

“bridge across the divide that separated secular intellectual life in the Third Republic from the Catholic religious experiences and expressions of medieval France.”122 For Mâle and supporters of his work, who spanned varying political, ideological, and aesthetic allegiances, the French medieval past was an undeniable element of the modern national patriarchy: it was, in his own words, “France, by the intermediary of the theater, that created the new Christian iconography.”123

Though his work concentrated primarily on the history of art, and although there is no evidence to suggest that Massenet was familiar with Mâle or his work, the latter’s belief in the eminent value of France’s medieval Catholic heritage and its importance for modern France can be seen reflected in Grisélidis. As a source of artistic inspiration, medievalism was thoroughly in vogue at the turn of the twentieth century, yet Grisélidis presented a brand of medievalism that was unique to Massenet and his collaborators.

French operagoers would see two major premieres in the years following Grisélidis:

Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, and Ernest Chausson’s Le Roi Arthus in 1903. Debussy and Chausson each capitalized on the mystical and legendary aspects of the medievalist trend, though with varying artistic and aesthetic results. For Debussy, it was his opera’s heavy Symbolist overtones that prevented any linkage of Pelléas with a national past, and in the case of Chausson’s opera, the problematic connections between Arthurian legend

121 See Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol. 1, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

122 Joseph F. Byrnes, “Reconciliation of Cultures in the Third Republic: Émile Mâle (1862–1954),” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 3 (July 1997): 405.

123 Cited in Byrnes, “Reconciliation of Cultures in the Third Republic,” 414.

360 and Wagner—not to mention the plot’s obvious similarities to Tristan und Isolde—likewise rendered the medievalism of Le Roi Arthus ineffective, at least in terms of its status as a lieu de mémoire.124 Even Massenet’s own Esclarmonde had failed in that regard. Though the opera’s medieval source had been appropriated as “French,” the unease surrounding the composer’s Wagnerian tendencies overshadowed such otherwise praiseworthy qualities.125

In effect, the Catholicization of Grisélidis’s medieval milieu rendered the work a more successful site for reconstructing the nation’s past than Pelléas, Le Roi Arthus, or

Esclarmonde could ever offer.126 Indeed, the combination of her Provençal birth, her championing of overtly Republican family values, and her Catholic faith ensured that

Grisélidis could serve as an idealized model to which French women should aspire: what is more, she was French by her very nature and had always been such. Ultimately,

Massenet’s treatment of Grisélidis throughout the opera—both as a new Eve or and as a sainted heroine—mirrored the transformations of the Church that had been set into action in the early years of the 1880s. As Church and State edged closer to legal separation, the unexpected success of Massenet’s traditionalism continued to enact the Ralliement on one of the nation’s preeminent operatic stages and, in doing so, highlighted the significant roles played by music in the complex—yet decidedly non-binary—relationship between the Catholic Church and the French Republic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

124 On the Wagnerian aspects of Le Roi Arthus, see Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis, Ernest Chausson, Le Roi Arthus et l’opéra wagnérien en France (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012).

125 Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, 78.

126 Rowden makes a similar observation. See Rowden, “Grisélidis,” 538.

361

CONCLUSION

The Ralliement’s steadfast architect, Pope Leo XIII, died on 20 July 1903. His successor,

Pope Pius X, took an entirely different tack in the matter of how the increasingly volatile relationship between the Catholic Church and the French State should be managed, such that the historian Steven Schlosser has argued that Pope Pius’s abrogation of his predecessor’s conciliatory rhetoric led directly to the law of separation.1 But the official separation of Church and State, passed into law on 9 December 1905, registered as merely a blip on the Republic’s radar. Though reluctantly, French bishops, lay leaders, and faithful Catholics accepted law’s mandate that church control (property and the payment of clerical salaries) be transferred to small, self-governing groups of parishioners that represented each French parish (associations cultuelles).2 The Vatican, however, responded in force: every French deputy who had voted in favor of the separation was excommunicated, and, in 1906, the new Pope forbade French Catholics from participating in the newly formed associations cultuelles.3

Whereas Pope Leo XIII had tried in vain to reconcile the Church’s precepts with the State’s modernizing spirit, Pope Pius X’s papacy was marked with a distinctly anti- modernist spirit and a penchant for theological conservatism that all but destroyed any

1 Steven Schlosser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 53.

2 James F. McMillan, “Catholic Christianity in France, 1815–1905,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. VIII, ed. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 231.

3 Maurice Larkin, Church and State After the Dreyfus Affair: The Separation Issue in France (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1974), 207–8.

362 vestiges of hope for reconciliation. On 3 July 1907, for example, Pius X issued the encyclical

Lamentabili sane that outlined sixty-five dangerous “errors” concerning the interrelationship between the Church and the natural sciences. Two months later, in

September, he followed suit with Pascendi, an edict that catalogued condemnable characteristics of modernism. Things got increasingly worse for more liberally-inclined

French Catholics when, in 1909, Pius X established what Schlosser termed a “secret international anti-Modernist network” and in the following year, required all active

French priests to sign an “Oath Against Modernism.”4 In the years leading up to World

War I, the Church, shaped by Pius X’s conservative rhetoric, became increasingly allied with the Ligue de la Patrie Française, a right-wing, anti-Dreyfusard, and ultranationalist faction that strove for an integral union between Church and State.5

The new Pope’s hidebound traditionalism extended to the realm of music. Within three months of his election to the papal seat, the new Pope announced a series of prescriptive reforms for sacred music in his Moto proprio (Tra le sollecitudini; 22 November

1903) that echoed the ideology of the Schola Cantorum. Gregorian chant was declared the supreme model of sacred music, and Palestrinian counterpoint (along with that of his sixteenth-century contemporaries) was named as plainchant’s most admirable offshoot.

The Moto proprio also sanctioned the liturgical use of contemporary religious music in churches on the condition that it contained nothing profane either in form or in content.

Shortly thereafter, on 8 January 1904, the Sacred Congregation of Rites decreed that

4 Schlosser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 54–56.

5 The Ligue de la Patrie Française was founded on 31 December 1898 by three young academics (Louis Dausset, Gabriel Syveton, and Henri Vaugeois); it later gained the support of leading right-wing intellectuals such as François Coppée, Charles Maurras, and Jules Lemaitre. On the alliance between the Church and the Ligue, see Michael Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

363 plainchant replace current practices as quickly as possible within Catholic churches and, four months later, on 25 April 1904, Pius X issued a second Moto proprio (Col nostro) that outlined the terms for a new Vatican Edition of plainchant that would be prepared by the

Benedictine monks of Solesmes.6

The 1903 Moto proprio effected a strong response from Parisian musicians and composers on both sides of the aisle who weighed in on the new Pope’s quick succession of musical reforms. In an account of his audience with the Pope, published in Le Figaro,

Charles Bordes (a founder of the Schola Cantorum) unsurprisingly praised the new mandates and agreed with the Pope’s claim that the music of Bach, that of great symphonists, and operatic masterworks had no place in the Church. Rehashing a tired and hackneyed trope, the two spoke of the theater’s encroachment into the embattled

Church’s musical domain. 7 For their part, Le Figaro solicited a response to Bordes’s essay from the Republican-minded Camille Saint-Saëns who, by 1904, had established his reputation as a founder of the Société Nationale de Musique in 1871 and as a well-known figure within Parisian churches, having been the organist at La Madeleine from 1857–1877 and a teacher at the École Niedermeyer for a brief stint in the early 1860s.8 Though he did not necessarily disagree with the need for reform—indeed, he congratulated Pius X for his interest in music—Saint-Saëns insisted that Papal restrictions and compositional

6 Katharine Ellis, The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2013), 87. For a full translation of the Papal encyclicals, see Mgr Robert Hayburn, Papal Legislation on Sacred Music, 95 A.D. to 1977 A.D. (Harrison, NY: Roman Catholic Books, 1979), 223–31; 253–57.

7 Charles Bordes, “Pie X et la musique d’église: Conversation avec le Saint-Père,” Le Figaro (25 April 1904). “Le Pape revint encore sur les coutumes détestables qui règnent dans les maîtrises d’Italie et d’ailleurs.—J’aime toutes les musiques, continua Sa Sainteté; j’aime Bach, les grands symphonistes, et même les chefs-d’œuvre de l’opéra, mais je veux que l’opéra reste au théâtre: ces musiques-là sont admirables, mais ce n’est point leur place à l’église; elles l’ont envahie peu à peu.”

8 Sabina Teller Ratner, James Harding, and Daniel M. Fallon, “Camille Saint-Saëns,” Grove Music Online. See also Jann Pasler, Camille Saint-Saëns and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

364 prescriptions would hardly be effective in improving what he saw to be the mediocrity of contemporary French religious music.9 He took issue with the popular notion that plainchant, in its “restored” version, embodied a sense of authenticity and “primitive purity” and, echoing his forbears Félix Huet and the critics Albert Soubies and Charles

Malherbe, Saint-Saëns concluded that plainchant was a dead language that was beyond the point of revival. In contrast, however, Palestrinian counterpoint clung to life, yet it was, according to Saint-Saëns, in desperate need of resuscitation. The problem, he claimed, was bound up in the issue of individuality in performance, that is to say, that prescriptions for the composition of sacred music from any source—including the Pope himself—would ultimately prove to be a failure by way of the fact that individual interpreters “flaunt the pretention of possessing the true manner of performance [of sacred music].”10

Though Saint-Saëns seemed to be wholly opposed to the mandates laid out in the

1903 Moto proprio, in reality, he was not—especially when it concerned the performance of secular theatrical music in parish churches. In 1913, for example, the composer recalled a confrontation with one of the curates of La Madeleine who, in his efforts to regulate the church’s music, explained that the affluent attendees of the parish “often go to the Opéra-

Comique; they have acquired musical habits there that we are well advised to respect.”

Saint-Saëns’s response hardly masked his disdain for the prospect of catering the music of

9 Camille Saint-Saëns, “La Réforme de la musique religieuse,” Le Figaro (7 May 1904). “Avant tout, il convient de se montrer profondément reconnaissant à S. S. Pie X pour l’intérêt qu’il porte, de façon si ostensible, à la musique religieuse.”

10 Loc. cit. “Chacun l’interprète à sa guise, en affichant la prétention de posséder la vraie manière de l’exécuter.” See also Megan Elizabeth Sarno, “Symbolism and Catholicism in French Music at the Time of the Separation of Church and State (1888–1925),” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2016), 98–99.

365 the church to the taste of its clientele: “when I hear dialogues from the Opéra-Comique coming from the pulpit,” he wrote, “I shall provide appropriate music, but not before.”11

Théodore Dubois, the acting director of the Paris Conservatoire (and Saint-Saëns’s successor as organist at La Madeleine), responded to Le Figaro’s inquiry by throwing the full weight of his institutional support behind Saint-Saëns. He agreed that the quest to define a specific religious style in music was futile at best and questioned why Palestrina was the only model from which “good” religious music could be brought forth. Just as

Palestrina had expressed his faith and piety through the artistic means of his time, Dubois argued, so too should composers of modern religious music have the right to do the same through the idioms of their own time. Dubois’s implication was clear: the expression of modern religious sensibilities via contemporary compositional methods and styles was equally valid and valuable.12

Gabriel Fauré also weighed in on the matter, yet he was hesitant to believe that the

Moto proprio would have any real and lasting effect in Parisian churches. On the one hand, he noted, clergy already thought that their musical choices complied with Papal prescriptions and, on the other, their good faith coupled with their equally bad musical taste resulted in an “unconscious complicity” between the bourgeois faithful and the clergy who were eager to accommodate their desires so as to ensure their continued attendance.13 Another critic, though not a composer, took a similar tack. Given that secular

11 Saint-Saëns, “L’Orgue,” École buissonnière: Notes et souvenirs (Paris: Pierre Lafitte, 1913), 176. Quotation and translation given in Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics, 181.

12 Théodore Dubois, “Une lettre de M. Théodore Dubois sur la réforme de la musique religieuse,” Le Figaro (2 June 1904). “Et pourquoi faudrait-il que cette musique s'inspirât exclusivement du style palestrinien? Ne pouvons-nous exprimer notre foi, notre piété, notre ferveur avec l'art et les procédés de notre époque ainsi que l'ont fait les artistes du seizième siècle, ainsi que le font et le feront les artistes de tous les temps?”

13 Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics, 182–83.

366 music had infiltrated the sacred realm as early as the twelfth century, secular (or secular- sounding) music in churches was nothing to raise eyebrows. In fact, the critic wrote, the periodic interspersion of “secular chords” into the profusion of “serious chants” during

Mass served to prevent the congregation from becoming bored.14

The comingling of the sacred with the secular continued to be a frequent point of contention following the official separation of the Catholic Church and the French State.

In a letter to Bordes, Vincent d’Indy outlined what he felt the implications of the impending separation might be on musical art. The problem that d’Indy foresaw would befall young composers in particular who, as he wrote, “trusted papal encouragement,” drew their inspiration from the “clear sources of tradition,” and “attempted to graft a new and boldly modern branch onto the old tree.” D’Indy was quick to quip that the new law would have no effect whatsoever on those composers who wrote “religious music in opera;” in his opinion, their dramatic music would continue to be as bad as their religious music.15 Curiously, however, Camille Bellaigue took a different and entirely unexpected view on the matter of church music at the theater. Like Bordes and d’Indy, Bellaigue was sympathetic to those who opposed any secularization of church music. But his ideas on the sacralization of theatrical music diverged significantly from those of d’Indy. The theater,

14 Georges Tausend, “Musique sacrée,” L’Évenément (17 January 1904). “Non, il n’est pas possible de limiter la musique d’église aux seules mélodies rituelles. Si, dans les longues cérémonies du culte, quelques accords profanes n’éclataient pas de temps en temps au milieu des graves mélopées, l’ennui, qui résulte de la monotonie, endormirait les fidèles et c’est au milieu des ronflements que tinterait la sonnette de l’élévation, et que le prêtre prononcerait la formule conclusive: Ite missa est.”

15 Vincent d’Indy, “Lettre de Charles Bordes,” Tribune de Saint-Gervais (11 June 1905): 201. “Qu’arrivera-t-il de cela pour notre art musical? Les compositeurs qui écrivaient de la musique religieuse d’opéra n’en souffriront évidemment pas. Transportant à la scène les œuvres qu’ils pondaient précédemment pour l’église, ils continueront à faire de la mauvaise musique dramatique comme ils faisaient précédemment de la mauvaise musique religieuse...mais les jeunes, ceux que leurs généreuses aspirations portaient vers la renovation de ce bel art vocal que nos ancêtres franco-flamands enseignèrent à l’Italie, ceux qui, confiants en l’encouragement papal et puisant leur science aux claires sources de la tradition, tentaient déjà de greffer sur le vieil arbre toute une frondaison nouvelle et hardiment modern, que va-t-il advenir de ceux-ci?...”

367 he claimed, had assimilated the music of the Church with equal parts taste and respect; this process ultimately resulted in a peculiar exchange (or reversal) in which church music became more at home on the theatrical stage than at the cathedral—indeed, it was not only Christianity but the Catholic Church itself that had found its comfortable home on the dramatic stages of the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique. Meyerbeer, Auber, and Rossini: these were the forerunners of this new trend in which religious scenes were treated with such sincerity that they could have fit within the office itself.16

In order to bolster his surprising argument, Bellaigue attempted to do what Saint-

Saëns, Dubois, and Fauré did not by formulating an answer to the question of what precise musical qualities could render theatrical music sacred. Melody took center stage in

Bellaigue’s formulation. In essence, the melody in question had to resemble plainchant. It had to have a certain rhythmic liberty and it must be performed a cappella.17 Unexpectedly,

Bellaigue cited Massenet as the composer par excellence of this hybrid dramatic-liturgical style. One could find an “irreproachable Magnificat” on the steps of Saint-Sulpice in Manon

(1884), for instance. But Massenet’s pièce de résistance was his newest opera: Le Jongleur de

Notre-Dame. Here, Bellaigue found a “truly religious musician” entirely unlike that of

16 Camille Bellaigue, “La musique d’Église au théâtre,” Tribune de Saint-Gervais (January 1905): 4–5. “Mais on sait—les instructions pontificales en témoignèrent hautement—que l’église aujourd’hui ne craint pas d’imiter le théâtre. On sait peut-être moins bien que le théâtre, toutes les fois qu’il a figure des sujets ou des actions religieuses, n’a rien négligé pour ressembler à l’église. Il en a pris le ton ou le style avec autant de goût que de respect. Ainsi, par un échange ou plutôt par un renversement bizarre et fâcheux, la musique d’église au théâtre est d’église plus qu’à l’église même.”

17 Ibid., 8. “Elle est mélodie: en d’autres terms, une forme définie et plastique; elle a ses contours et son relief arrêté. Mais elle est mélopée aussi, ou récitatif. Elle parle aussi bien qu’elle chante et qu’elle prie. Elle est récitatif, et rien qu’à ce titre elle jouit d’une certaine liberté dans le temps: cela signifié qu’elle obéit moins aux lois de la mesure qu’à celles, beaucoup plus larges, du rythme, et du rythme oratoire. Enfin, elle est purement vocale: pas un seul instrument ne la soutient. De tout cela que résulte-t-il? Que la phrase en question, par ses différents caractères—le chromatisme excepté—se rapproche sensiblement d’une phrase de plain-chant...vous aurez en elle un exemplaire accompli d’oraison grégorienne et purement liturgique.” D’Indy’s letter, discussed above, seems to have been a response to Bellaigue’s positive reaction to Massenet’s Le Jongleur de Notre Dame; it was published six months after Bellaigue’s essay.

368 Marie-Magdeleine, Hérodiade, or Thaïs. Indeed, the famous Méditation de Thaïs had, by 1905, become the underscoring for a setting of the Ave Maria that, as Bellaigue disapprovingly noted, had become popular fare for performance in bourgeois wedding masses. But the score of Le Jongleur was different. Comparing the composer to the most orthodox

Scholiste, Bellaigue praised the music of the overtly Republican composer for its sincerely religious qualities and hailed the score as a “half-Gregorian, half-Palestrinian sketch.” 18

The theater, Bellaigue concluded, constituted a space in which the representation of sacred subjects took on a mantle of truth—it was a realm in which the “fiction of holy things has become holier and truer than their reality.”19

That one of the most ultramontane Parisian critics could acquiesce to the notion that there were indeed moments of sincerely sacred—even liturgical—music in otherwise secular musical works indicates the extent to which a sonic Ralliement had integrated the

Catholic Church into a defining aspect of a fin-de-siècle “secular” musical life. The visibility surrounding the debates of Pius X’s musical reforms likewise speaks to this phenomenon.

Rather than being relegated to the specialist musical press, essays concerning the enmeshment of sacred and secular styles and its ramifications for musical life writ large dominated Le Figaro and other leading Republican newspapers, often bumping international and domestic political matters to the second and third pages in order to take a coveted spot on the front page. In his monograph Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism

18 Ibid., 8–9. “Il n’est pas jusqu’à M. Massenet...Après tout, ce n’est pas sa faute si la fameuse ‘méditation’ que vous savez est entrée dans l’’ordinaire’ de la messe de marriage, au moins des mariages élegants...D’autant plus qu’à l’occasion, il a su faire autrement, et très bien, pour le Seigneur. Les échos d’un irréprochable Magnificat arrivent jusqu’au parloir de Saint-Sulpice (quatrième acte de Manon), et récemment encore le musicien vraiement religieux du Jongleur de Notre-Dame a tracé finement une esquisse, à demi grégorienne et palestrinienne à demi, de la plus orthodoxe Schola.”

19 Ibid., 13. “Ainsi la representation ou la fiction des choses saintes est devenue plus sainte et plus vraie que leur réalité.”

369 in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933, Stephen Schlosser argues that the interwar years signaled a new and hitherto unseen synthesis of Catholicism and modernity. Schlosser positions World

War I as a rupture and highlights what he classifies as a radical departure from the pre- war era in which Catholicism not only came to be seen as compatible with modernism, but was treated as its truest expression.20 As I have shown, however, the synthesis of

Catholicism and Republican modernity began decades earlier. This process began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—a similar time during which the wounds of wartime trauma were soothed by the refashioning of the Catholic Church’s heritage into a constructive and conciliatory component of virile Republicanism.21 This is not to argue that the aftermaths of the Franco-Prussian War and of World War I are comparable in either scope or historical context—indeed, they are not. But the decades following the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the founding of the Third Republic both witnessed profound redefinitions of the relationship between the Church and the State in which composers, performers, and critics deployed traditional Catholicism as a means of revitalizing the relationship between religion and Republican culture. This process of renewal and transformation that, as I have argued, defined fin-de-siècle Republicanism found an echo in the 1920s in the form of the renouveau catholique: a “second Ralliement” between Church and State that led on the heels of the Church’s condemnation of the right-wing Action Française and its concomitant separation from the French political

20 Stephen Schlosser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 4–5.

21 Here I draw from Barbara Kelly’s monograph Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913–1939 (Woodbridge (U.K.): The Boydell Press, 2013) in which she argues that there is no rupture through World War I. Instead, Kelly refutes the idea of a decisive break between pre-and post-war musical France and argues instead for a continuation of certain musical and ideological discourses and traditions that took place before, during, and after the war. Throughout the monograph, she relies heavily on the idea of consensus amongst composers and critics who disagreed on the surface. Though she does not feature Catholicism as a major focal point of the work, her larger points nevertheless transfer well to this project.

370 right.22 Much like Ralliement politics of the early 1890s the renouveau catholique attracted prominent musical figures; André Caplet, Francis Poulenc, and Olivier Messiaen were but a few well-known composers who embraced the postwar revitalization of Catholicism. But to follow Schlosser in relegating the Church’s rapprochement with the “secular” Republic to the renouveau catholique of the interwar years is to ignore an equally significant—and heretofore overlooked—process that began in force some forty years earlier. Similar models of thinking ultimately reinforce historiographical binaries that, in the end, prove to be counterproductive.

The Ralliement proved, in effect, a failure, at least by Vatican standards. It did, however, generate a reformulation of Catholicism as a viable and multifaceted mode of cultural expression, particularly through music. Hérodiade put the question of the

Church’s compatibility with modern Republican ideology on full display and engendered an institutional predicament that resulted in its “excommunication” from Parisian theaters. In the early 1880s, such an obvious reconfiguration of Catholicism was too much too soon; the legislative push toward official secularization simultaneously found an analogy in Massenet’s opera and stood at odds with the image of cohesion that the

Republic wanted so desperately to display. Here, Massenet showed himself to be perfectly in tune with the times. In the case of mystery plays at Paris’s most “popular” theaters, authors and composers confronted the complex task of rendering Catholic subjects appropriately religious in decidedly avant-garde settings. Though they were largely successful in their efforts, productions of marionette plays and live-action portrayals of the life of Christ during the late 1880s and early 1890s revealed the high stakes at work,

22 For more on the renouveau catholique, see Harry W. Paul, The Second Ralliement: The Rapprochement Between Church and State in France in the Twentieth Century (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1967).

371 especially when the deployment of Catholicism as a mode of cultural expression went wrong. At the turn of the twentieth century, a series of seemingly innocuous performances of sacred music’s “greatest hits” at the church of Saint-Eustache flipped the question on its head. Reigniting age-old fears that “secular” musical works morphed churches into theaters, the concert series played a pivotal role in transforming a decidedly sacred locale into a space that catered equally to Catholic and Republican ideologies. The concerts officiels at the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris featured the Republic’s refashioning of the Church on an international stage, cultivating in the process a carefully curated

Republican musical image that integrated the nation’s Catholic heritage into an inclusive vision of post-Dreyfus reconciliation. Using the Church as its basis, Grisélidis foregrounded the interconnections between gender, the Republic, and Catholicism in its shaping of an archetypal woman whose virtue befitted both Church and State.

Critics played a vital role in the process of legitimizing Catholicism as a vehicle for

Republican musical expression, often crossing aesthetic, ideological, and religious fault lines in the process of reporting on key musical events. Writers for the specialist and non- specialist press alike often understood secular productions as inherently sacred events and, conversely, critics with an explicit allegiance to the Church were able to acknowledge that secular music often embodied a sacred essence, even when that essence was ambiguously defined. Republican composers and critics likewise took a special interest in defining sacredness in music, even when they had no personal or religious stake in the matter. In doing so, these writers—in conjunction with the composers, librettists, and performers in question—actively contributed to the construction of the Catholic Church as an invaluable lieu de memoire: a site of memory in which the heritage of the Church could be repurposed as an advantageous emblem of Republicanism, even in the midst of

372 secularization—not so much as a static locus of memorialization than as an avenue through which a dynamic process of active transformation could be—and indeed was— enacted.

The Third Republic, like many of its European counterparts, accorded great privilege to heritage and tradition. Alexander Rehding, for example, outlines the complexities of the nineteenth-century obsession with monumentality and its attendant focus on history as one of its hallmark features. In addition to physical size, Rehding argues, historical greatness was a defining feature of such memorialization.23 The idea of

“historical monumentality,” or the belief that “each successive step implies its predecessor and could not have happened as it did without that earlier step” was sacralized in Third-

Republic France, not simply by the numerous ways in which Republican ideology was propagated through and, in some cases, legitimized by the country’s Catholic history, but also through communally-recognized memories of the Catholicism of the Second Empire and a Catholic educational system through which many composers and critics matriculated.24 In this sense, history and memory can be considered equal partners in the processes of reconfiguration that participated in dialogue with the past and the meaning of the past for the Republic at the fin-de-siècle. At the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette,

Bouchor and Vidal capitalized on the power of memory through their revitalization of the crèche tradition and its sonic evocation through their repurposing of Provençal folk tunes.

The church of Saint-Eustache likewise functioned as a lieu de memoire, albeit one that was

“endangered” by the threat of Republican secularization. In numerous other cases,

23 Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8.

24 Ibid., 27. Rehding credits this model of “historical monumentality” to Alois Riegl (1858–1905), an Austrian art historian who theorized ideas of historicity and progress. Riegl’s model is similar to Pasler’s spiral, a concept that she credits to Vincent d’Indy.

373 including those of Dubois’s Le Baptême de Clovis, Pierné’s L’An mil, and Massenet’s

Grisélidis, Republicans looked to their medieval past as a site of Catholic memory—the

Catholic pavilions and the concerts officiels at the Exposition Universelle were themselves sites of memory that were cultivated by the Republic as valuable aspects of its international image. Even the echoes of Niedermeyer’s teachings in Massenet’s Grisélidis acted as a metaphorical lieu de memoire in their evocation of an idealized sacred musical aesthetic.

During the fin-de-siècle, the relationship between the Church and the Republic was an obvious site of contestation, a clash of ideological agendas that, despite earnest attempts at reconciliation, eventually ended in official separation. Yet these sites of

Catholic and French memory, broadly construed and deployed in myriad ways, found an extraordinary ally in the Republic as it collectively harnessed the power of memory. From its “origin” in the French medieval era to its transformations throughout the fin-de-siècle, the Catholic Church provided a new mode of expression for the embattled French

Republic. We can now see the numerous ways in which so-called “secular” Republican musicians skillfully enfolded traditional Catholicism into effective responses to pressing political and cultural crises. In effect, the success of the twentieth-century renouveau catholique was set in motion by its nineteenth-century forbear: the path was paved by the

Republic’s musical Ralliement and the memorialization of its Catholic past as a fundamental cornerstone of its modern existence.

374 APPENDIX A “Les Grands oratorios à l’Église Saint-Eustache”: Programs

Thursday, 18 January 1900

Le Messie George Frederic Handel (1685–1759)

Soprano Solo...... Mlle Eléonore Blanc Alto Solo...... Mlle Jenny Passama1 Ténor Solo...... Emmanuel Lafarge Basse Solo...... Juste Nivette

Le solo de cor anglais de Fernand Gillet Le solo de trompette de Merri Franquin Le Grand Orgue sera tenu par M. Henri Dallier

Dirigés par M. Eugène d’Harcourt Chef des chœurs: M. Charles Bordes Sous-chef d’orchestre: M. Steenman

Version nouvelle par Eugène d’Harcourt

Première Partie Deuxième Partie 1. Prélude: Grave. Alla brève. (Orchestre et orgue) 16. Chœur: “Voici l’Agneau de Dieu, qui porta nos péchés”

2. Récit et air (Ténor): “Triste était le saint 17. Air (Contralto): “Il est victime très sainte” peuple!”

3. Chœur: “Et la Gloire de Dieu se manifeste” 18. Chœur: “Vraiment ce Dieu a souffert tous les maux de la vie”

4. Récit et air (Basse): “Fils d’Israël, lui dit Dieu 19. Récit et air (Soprano): “Jésus pour nous se Sabaoth” meurt”

5. Quatuor et Chœur: “Il va vous soutenir, vous 20. Chœur: “Hosannah! Gloire à Jésus!” qui l’aimez”

6. Récit et air (Contralto et chœur): “O peoples! une 21. Mélodie (Soprano): “Tendresse, amour, voici Vierge est bénie!” les noms”

7. Air (Basse): “Le people marchait dans la nuit 22. Air (Basse): “Pourquoi l’impie païen frémit immense” de rage?”

1 Replaced by Mme Telska due to illness.

375 8. Quatuor et Chœur: “Vois cet enfant qui vient de 23. Chœur: “Détruisons ce honteux joug” naître”

9. Symphonie pastorale (Orchestre) 24. Récit et air: (Ténor): “Cependant le divin Maître”

10. Récit (Soprano): “En ce temps-là, les bergers 25. Air (Soprano): “Je sais que le Christ sauva le dans la plaine” monde!”

11. Chœur: “Gloire au Seigneur! Gloire! Puissance 26. Chœur: “Par Adam vint la mort!” éternelle!

12. Air (Ténor): “Debout! Proclame ta joie et 27. Air (Basse): “Au son du buccin qui reveille chante, ô fille de Sion!” les morts”—Le solo de trompette par M. Franquin, professeur au Conservatoire

13. Récit et Cantilène (Soprano): “Dieu garde ses 28. Duetto (Contralto et Ténor): “La mort fuit, ouailles en bon pasteur” vaincue par le Christ!”

14. Quatour et Chœur: “Sa loi si tendre, chaîne 29. Air (Soprano): “Aimés du Christ, qui peut légère” nous nuire!”

15. Interlude: Largo. (Grand Orgue, harpes, chœur 30. Chœur: “Alleluia! et orchestre).—Le solo de cor anglais par M. F. Gillet.

Postlude: Fugue de l’Amen (Grand Orgue)

376

Thursday, 15 February 1900

Grande Messe des Morts Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) Dans le Dies irae, les quatre orchestres de trompettes seront placées aux quatre points cardinaux de l’Église

Mors et Vita Charles Gounod (1818–1893) Resurrectio Mortuorum Judex

Thursday, 15 March 1900

La Cène des Apôtres Richard Wagner (1813–1883)

La Terre promise Jules Massenet (1842–1912) Part One: Moab (“L’Alliance”) Part Two: Jéricho (“La Victoire”) Part Three: Chanaan (“La Terre promise”)

Soprano solo...... Lydia Nerville Baryton solo...... Jean Noté

Thursday and Friday, 12 and 13 April 1900

La Passion Selon Saint-Mathieu (Saint Matthew Passion) J.S. Bach (1685–1750) Traduction nouvelle de MM. Henri de Curzon et Eugène d’Harcourt

Jésus...... M. Numa Auguez L’Évangeliste...... M. Warmbrodt Soprano Solo...... Mlle Eléonore Blanc Contralto Solo...... Mlle Berthe Soyer Ténor Solo...... M. Lafitte Basse Solo...... M. René Fournets

Les soli de violon par M. Th. Laforge (professeur au Conservatoire) Le solo de violoncelle par M. Ronchini Le Grand Orgue sera tenu par M. Henri Dallier

377 APPENDIX B JULES MASSENET’S LA TERRE PROMISE: BIBLICAL REFERENCES

No. Performer Incipit Scriptural Reference

PART ONE: Moab 1 La Voix (baritone “Les Israélites étant au deçà du Deuteronomy 1:5; 5:1-2, solo) Jourdain” 4

2 Chœur d’Israël “Nous avons entendu sa voix” Deuteronomy 5:24 La Voix “Je fus alors le Médiateur” Deuteronomy 5:5, 22

3 La Voix “Écoutez, écoutez, Israël. Vous Deuteronomy 9:1; 1:7-8 passerez le Jourdain.”

4 Chœur d’Israël “Le Seigneur passera lui-même Deuteronomy 9:3, 11:29 devant nous”

5 La Voix “Alors Moïse et les prêtres de la race de Lévi” Deuteronomy 27:9-10, 6 Chœur de Lévites “Maudit celui qui n’honore point 14, 16-18, 24, 26 son père”

7 La Voix “Et Moïse ajouta: De vos yeux vous Deuteronomy 8:2, 29:3, avez vu” 5, 20

8 Chœur d’Israël “Il l’accablera de malédictions” Deuteronomy 29:20

9 La Voix “Obéissez et vous serez béni” Deuteronomy 28:2-3; 29:9

10 Chœur d’Israël “Seigneur Dieu! Permettez que Deuteronomy 3:25 j’aille au-delà du Jourdain” PART TWO: Jéricho

Prelude 1 Chœur d’Israël “Cependant Jéricho était fermée” Joshua 6:1-2

2 La Voix (tenor “Lors Josué: Vous, prêtres, prenez Joshua 6: 6-7, 3, 10, 4, 5 solo) l’arche”

3 Orchestral “Marche du septième jour” Joshua 6:17, 26 4 Chœur d’Israël “Que cette ville soit anathème”

PART THREE: Chanaan

Pastorale 1 Chœur d’Israël “Voici la Terre promise!” Joshua 21: 41-43

2 La Voix (soprano “Peuple béni de Dieu” Joshua 22: 8, 5 solo)

3 Chœur d’Israël “Gloire à Dieu!” Joshua 22: 5

378 APPENDIX C Programs of the Ten Official Concerts of the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris

Exposition Universelle de 1900 Auditions Musicales Salle des Fêtes. Palais du Trocadéro

Premier Grand Concert Officiel Jeudi 31 May 1900

Le Feu Céleste, Cantate Camille Saint-Saéns (1835–1921) (Première audition) Poème de M. Armand Silvestre

Soprano solo.....Mlle Ackté Le Récitant...... M. Leitner

LES ANCIENS MAÎTRES Le Chant des Oiseaux Clément Jannequin (XVIe siècle) Chœur à 4 voix sans accompagnement

Alceste Jean-Baptiste Lully (1633–1687) a. Air b. Scène des Enfers

Caron...... M. Delmas

Quam Dilecta, Motet Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) Solistes...... Mmes. Lovano, Mathieu M. Auguez

Silvain, Ariette André Grétry (1741–1813) Solo...... M. Lovano

Alceste, Scène religieuse Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) Alceste...... Mlle Ackté Le Grand Prêtre....M. Delmas

Ulysse (Fragments) Charles Gounod (1818–1893) a. Chœur des Naïades b. Deuxième Chœur des Porchers c. Chœur du Festin

Ténor solo...... M. Cazeneuve

Roméo et Juliette Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) a. Féte chez Capulet

379 Deuxième Grand Concert Officiel Jeudi 14 Juin 1900

Ouverture du Pré aux Clercs Ferdinand Hérold (1791–1833)

L’An mil (fragments) Gabriel Pierné (1863–1937) a. Deuxième Partie: Fête des Fous et de l’Âne Une voix: M. Noté b. Troisième Partie: Te Deum Laudamus

Marche Solennelle Jules Massenet (1842–1912)

Le Baptême de Clovis (fragments) Théodore Dubois (1837–1924) Première et Deuxième Parties

Solistes...... MM. Escalaïs et Noté

L’Arlésienne, première suite Georges Bizet (1838–1875) a. Prélude en ouverture b. Menuet c. Adagietto d. Carillon

La Vestale (final du deuxième acte) Gaspare Spontini (1774–1851)

380 Troisième Grand Concert Officiel Jeudi 28 Juin 1900

Ouverture de Lestocq Daniel François Esprit Auber (1782–1871)

Messidor Alfred Bruneau (1857–1934) a. Tableau symphonique de la Cathédrale d’Or

Erostrate Ernest Reyer (1823–1909) a. Introduction et Air du 2me acte

Solo...... M. Delmas

Symphonie Espagnole, pour violon et orchestre Édouard Lalo (1823–1892) a. Scherazando b. Andante c. Finale

Solo...... M. Sarasate

La Burgonde (Fragments du ballet) Paul Vidal (1863–1931) a. Entrée; les Bayadères b. Les Kazares c. Les Bysantines d. Les Italiotes

Antar (Tableaux symphoniques) Henri Maréchal (1842–1924) a. Marche au Désert b. Le Songe d’Antar c. Entrée triomphale

381 Quatrième Grand Concert Officiel Jeudi 12 Juillet 1900

Troisième Symphonie Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937) a. Introduction—Allegro—Andante b. Scherzo—Final

Jeanne d’Arc, Drame lyrique (Fragments de la 3me partie) Charles Lenepveu (1840–1910) Poème de M. P. Allard

a. Cortège funèbre b. Arioso c. Les Voix d. L’Extase

Jeanne...... Mme Auguez de Montalant Récitants...... Mlles Grandjean et Féart MM. G. Dubois et Baer

Ouverture de Dimitri Victorin Joncières (1839–1903)

Requiem Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924)

Solistes...... Mlle Torrès et M. Vallier

España, Rapsodie pour orchestre Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–1894)

382 Cinquième Grand Concert Officiel Jeudi 26 Juillet 1900

Françoise de Rimini (Prologue) Ambroise Thomas (1811–1896)

Francesca...... Mlle Pacary Paolo...... M. Cazeneuve Virgile...... Mlle Flahaut Le Dante...... M. Auguez

Mérowig (Fragments du 2me acte) Samuel Rousseau (1882–1955)

Brunehild...... Mlle Pacary Mérowig...... M. Muratet Prétextatus...... M. Auguez Un Envoyé...... M. Lambert des Cilleuls

Tanger, le Soir Lucien Lambert (1858–1945)

Le Chant de la Cloche (l’Incendie) Vincent d’Indy (1851–1931)

Wilhelm...... M. Cazeneuve Johann...... M. Auguez

Carnaval Ernest Guiraud (1837–1892)

383 Sixième Grand Concert Officiel Jeudi 9 Août 1900

Symphonie (Op. 42), pour orgue et orchestre Alexandre Guilmant (1837–1911)

Orgue...... M. Alexandre Guilmant

La Tempête, Récit, Duo et Trio Alphonse Duvernoy (1842–1907) Poème symphonique Paroles de MM. Armand Silvestre et Pierre Breton, d’après Shakespeare

Miranda...... Mlle Ackté Ferdinand...... M. Vaguet Prospero...... M. Delmas

Claudie, Suite d’orchestre Paul-[and]Lucien Hillemacher (1852–1933) Musique composée pour les representations du drame de George Sand, à l’Odéon

a. Ouverture b. Entr’acte c. Variations et Finale sur un thème populaire berrichon

Air de Stratonice Étienne Nicolas Méhul (1763–1817)

Solo...... M. Vaguet

Symphonie sur un Choral breton (Final) Guy Ropartz (1864–1955)

Coppélia Léo Delibes (1836–1891) a. Ballade b. Thème slave varié

384 Septième Grand Concert Officiel Jeudi 23 Août 1900

La Fête du Village voisin (Ouverture) François-Adrien Boieldieu (1775–1834)

Merlin enchanté (Fragment) Georges Marty (1860–1908) Poème dramatique d’Émile Moreau

a. Chœur des Fées b. Chœur de Luttins

Merlin...... M. Bouvet Ganiéda...... Mme Marty

Les Deux Pigeons (Suite d’orchestre) André Messager (1853–1929)

a. Entrée des Bohémiens b. Thème et variations c. Danse hongroise d. Final

Les Saintes Maries de la Mer (Légende de Provence) Émile Paladilhe (1844–1926) Poème de Louis Gallet Quatrième partie

Marie Madeleine...... Mme Bosman Marie Salomé...... Mme Palasara Mmes Dress-Brun et Dupuy; MM. Guignot, Derivis et Boussagol

Méditation pour violon et orchestre Eugène Gigout (1844–1925)

La Damoiselle élue Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

La Damoiselle élue...... Mlle Marot Une Récitante...... Mlle Beauvais

Irlande, Poème symphonique Augusta Holmès (1847–1903)

385 Huitième Grand Concert Officiel 6 Septembre 1900

Thamara (Fragment du 2me acte) Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray (1840–1910) a. Airs de ballet b. Chœur d’Almées c. Rêve de Nour-Eddin

Nour-Eddin...... M. Vaguet

La Belle au Bois dormant Georges Hüe (1858–1948) Musique pour une Féerie dramatique a. Sommeil—Le Prince Charmant b. Le Rouet—L’Oiseau bleu c. La Fée du mal—L’apparition—Scène d’amour—Douleur du Prince d. Épilogue—Sommeil

Vénus et Adonis (Scène lyrique) Xavier Leroux (1863–1919) Poème de L. de Gramont

Vénus...... Mme Héglon Adonis...... Mlle Hatto

L’Apprenti Sorcier Paul Dukas (1865–1935) Scherzo d’après une ballade de Gœthe

Messe de Requiem Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842) a. Agnus Dei b. Sanctus

386 Neuvième Grand Concert Officiel Jeudi 20 Septembre 1900

Ouverture d’Esther Arthur Coquard (1846–1910)

“Invitation au Voyage” (Charles Baudelaire) Henri Duparc (1848–1933) “Phidylé” (Leconte de Lisle)

Solo...... Mlle de Larouvière

Impressions d’Italie (suite pour orchestra) Gustave Charpentier (1860–1956) a. Sérénade b. À la Fontaine c. À Mules d. Sur les Cimes e. Napoli

Duo de Tasse Benjamin Godard (1849–1895) Poème de M. Charles Grandmougin

Léonora...... Mlle Lina Pacary Tasso...... M. Émile Cazeneuve

Viviane (Poème symphonique) Ernest Chausson (1855–1899)

Les Misérables (Épisodes symphoniques) André Wormser (1851–1926) a. Synthèse (Misère—Fatalité—Souffrance—Miséricorde—Rédemption b. L’Enfant dans les Bois (Cosette) c. Jean Valjean—La Chasse à l’Homme—Le Refuge (Picpus) d. L’Idylle de la rue Plumet e. Matin d’émeute (Paris en fièvre)

387 Dixième et dernier Grand Concert Officiel Jeudi 4 Octobre 1900

Herculanum Félicien David (1810–1876) a. Récit b. Vision c. Bacchanale

Lilia...... Mme Chrétien-Vaguet Hélios...... M. Vaguet Satan...... M. Bartet

Kermaria (Suite pour orchestra) Camille Erlanger (1863–1919) a. Prélude b. Entr’acte c. Les Fileuses d. Ballet fantastique

La Messe du Fantôme Charles Lefebvre (1843–1917) Légende pour Chant et Orchestre, tirée des Contes de la Haute-Bretagne, par P. Sebillot Poème de M. Paul Collin

Solo...... M. Auguez

Concertstück pour piano et orchestra Raoul Pugno (1852–1914)

Piano...... M. Raoul Pugno

Prélude de Beaucoup de Bruit pour rien Paul Puget (1848–1917)

Les Béatitudes César Franck (1822–1890) a. Prélude b. No. 8

Solistes...... Mme Chrétien-Vaguet MM. Vaguet, Bartet, Auguez

388

ARCHIVAL AND PRIMARY SOURCES

Archives and Libraries

Archives Historiques de l’Archevêché de Paris Archives Nationales de France Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Frederick R. Koch Collection Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris Bibliothèque Municipale de Reims Bibliothèque Nationale de France Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra Département des Arts du Spectacle Département des Manuscrits Département de la Musique Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University Memorial Library of Music, Stanford University University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections Demar Irvine Papers Jules Massenet Papers

Private Collections

Collection Marcelle Dubois Fonds Paul Taffanel

Newspapers and Periodicals

Annales archéologiques Annales Catholiques Annales du théâtre et de la musique Art et critique Fête des fous et de l’âne Impressions de Théâtre Journal des débats L’Année musicale L’Art moderne L’Art musical L’Art du théâtre L’Attaque L’Aurore L’Autorité L’Éclair L’Écho de Paris L’Encyclopédie L’Estafette L’Événement

389

L’Observateur français L’Univers La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité La Croix La France La France à Reims en 1896: Bulletin des fêtes du XIVe centenaire La Gazette de France La Lanterne La Journal de musique La Justice La Liberté La Libre parole La Nation La Paix La Patrie La Petite république La Petite République française La République française La Révolution française La Revue bleue La Revue et gazette musicale de Paris La Revue comique normande La Revue illustrée La Revue nouvelle La Tribune de Saint-Gervais La Vérité Le Cri de Paris Le Courrier de Lyon Le Courrier du Soir Le Figaro Le Gaulois Le Gaulois supplément Le Gil Blas Le Guide musical Le Matin Le Ménestrel Le Monde artiste Le Monde illustré Le Monde musical Le Moniteur universel Le Pays Le Petit bleu Le Petit journal Le Petit parisien Le Progrès artistique Le Radical Le Signal Le Soir

390

Le Soleil Le Temps Le Théâtre Le Voltaire Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique Les Annales politiques et littéraires Revue de Champagne et de Brie Revue d’histoire et de critique musicale Revue de l’art dramatique Revue des deux mondes Revue des traditions populaires Revue encyclopédique Semaine religieuse de Paris Semaine religieuse du diocese de Lyon

391

SCORES

Aulagnier, Antonin. 60 Noëls de Saboly. Paris: A. Aulagnier, 1863.

Baille, Casimir. Tobie, Légende biblique en vers, en cinq tableaux (piano-vocal). Paris: E. Flammarion, 1899.

Chausson, Ernest. La Légende de Sainte-Cécile. Autograph piano-vocal score. BnF-Mus. MS 8781.

–––––––. La Légende de Sainte-Cécile. Paris: Ph. Maquet & Cie., 1892.

Dauphin, Léopold, and Claudius Blanc. Sainte-Geneviève de Paris. Paris: Heugel, 1893.

Dubois, Théodore. Le Baptême de Clovis. Autograph piano-vocal score. BnF-Mus. MS 7131.

–––––––. Le Baptême de Clovis (piano-vocal). Paris: Heugel, 1899.

Liber usualis missæ et officii. Rome and Tournai: Desclée, Lefebvre et Cie., 1904.

Massenet, Jules. Ève, mystère en trois parties (piano-vocal). Paris: Heugel, 1878.

–––––––. Grisélidis (full score). Paris: Heugel, 1901.

–––––––. Grisélidis (piano-vocal). Paris: Heugel, 1901.

–––––––. Grisélidis. Autograph full score (1894). BnF-Mus. A. 744a [1].

–––––––. Grisélidis. Autograph piano-vocal score (1891). Frederick R. Koch Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. GEN MSS MUSIC MISC VOL 3.

–––––––. Hérodiade (full score). Paris: Heugel, 1909.

–––––––. Hérodiade (piano-vocal). Paris: Heugel, 1884.

–––––––. Hérodiade. Autograph full score (1880–1882). BnF-Opéra Rés. A. 736a (I-IV).

–––––––. La Terre promise, oratorio en trois parties (full score). Paris: Heugel, 1900.

–––––––. La Terre promise, oratorio en trois parties (piano-vocal). Paris: Heugel, 1900.

–––––––. La Terre promise, oratorio en trois parties. Autograph full score (1900). Memorial Library of Music, Stanford University. MLM 665.

–––––––. La Terre promise, oratorio en trois parties. Autograph full score (1897–1899). Frederick R. Koch Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. GEN MSS 601, Box 277, Folder 1619.

392

Pierné, Gabriel. L’An mil, poème symphonique avec chœurs (full score). Paris: Enoch, 1898.

–––––––. L’An mil, poème symphonique avec chœurs (piano-vocal). Paris: Enoch, 1898.

Tiersot, Julien. Noëls français. Transcrits et harmonisés par Julien Tiersot. Paris: Heugel, 1901.

Vidal, Paul. Noël, ou le mystère de la Nativité (piano-vocal). Paris: G. Hartmann, 1890.

Weckerlin, Jean-Baptiste. Chansons populaires du pays de France. Paris: Heugel, 1903.

393

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agawu, V. Kofi. Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

–––––––. Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Agulhon, Maurice. Marianne Into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789– 1880, translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, 85–132.

Akan, Murat. The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

Applegate, Celia, and Pamela Potter, editors. Music and German National Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Armenteros, Caroline. The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Ayers, Andrew. The Architecture of Paris: An Architectural Guide. Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2004.

Bausseron, Sylvie. “Les positivistes et les fêtes civiques de Jeanne d’Arc: le cas de Rouen, 1880–1894.” Annales de Normandie, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2003): 99–111.

Bell, Susan G., and Karen Offen, editors. Women, The Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983.

Benoit-Otis, Marie-Hélène. Ernest Chausson, Le Roi Arthus et l’opéra wagnerien en France. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012.

Berenson, Edward. The Trial of Madame Caillaux. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Bergeron, Katherine. Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

–––––––. Voice Lessons: French Mélodies in the Belle Epoque. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Bernheimer, Charles. Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the fin-de-siècle in Europe, edited by T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

394

Birnbaum, Pierre. The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898, trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.

Blanc, Paulin and L. Tesson. Prose de Montpellier, ou Chant du dernier jour. Paris: Jacques Lecoffre, 1863.

Bois, Jules. L’Ève nouvelle. Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1895.

Boissonnade, Eugène. Le Baptême de Clovis: naissance de la nation Française. Paris: Godefroy de Bouillon, 1996.

Bokenkotter, Thomas. Church and Revolution: Catholics in the Struggle of Democracy and Social Justice. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

Bottigheimer, Ruth. Fairy Tales Framed: Early Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012.

Bouchor, Maurice. La Légende de Sainte-Cécile. Paris: Ernest Kolb, 1892.

–––––––. Noël, ou le Mystère de la Nativité. Paris: Ernest Kolb, 1892.

–––––––. Tobie, Légende biblique en trois actes. Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1899.

Boulanger, Karine. “Introduction aux cahiers des charges de la IIIe République (1871– 1914).” In La Législation de l’Opéra de Paris, edited by Vincent Giroud and Solveig Serre (forthcoming).

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In Readings in Economic Sociology, edited by Nicole Woolsey Biggart. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2002 [1986], 280–92.

Bovet, Marie Anne de. Charles Gounod: His Life and His Work. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1891.

Branger, Jean-Christophe. Manon de Jules Massenet ou le crepuscule de l’opéra-comique. Metz: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2017.

–––––––. “‘L’Opéra parlé’ dans les théâtres Parisiens: les musiques de scène de Chausson.” Ostinato rigore, No.14 (2000): 161–66.

Branger, Jean-Christophe, and Alban Ramaut, editors. Opéra et religion sous la IIIe République. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2006.

Brèque, Jean-Michel. “Loin de Flaubert, très loin des Évangiles.” L’Avant-Scène Opéra, No. 187 (1998): 116–21.

Brooks, Jeanice. “Italy, the Ancient World, and the French Musical Inheritance in the Sixteenth Century: Arcadelt and Clereau in the Service of the Guises.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 121, No. 2 (1996): 147–90.

395

Buch, Esteban, Igor Contreras Zubillaga, and Manuel Deniz Silva, editors. Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships. Abingdon (U.K.): Ashgate, 2016.

Burton, Richard D. E. Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1970. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Busserolle, Jacques-Xavier Carré de. Notice sur les fêtes des ânes et des fous qui se célébraient au moyen âge dans un grand nombre d’églises, et notamment à Rouen, à Beauvais, à Autun et à Sens. Rouen: D. Brière, n.d.

Byrnes, Joseph. Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

–––––––. “Reconciliation of Cultures in the Third Republic: Émile Mâle (1862–1954).” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 3 (July 1997): 401–27.

Caballero, Carlo. Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

–––––––. “Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1996.

Cahm, Eric. The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics. London and New York: Longman, 1996.

Callaway, Mary Chilton. “Medieval Reception of the Prophets.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Prophets, edited by Carolyn J. Sharp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 423–46.

Carlen, Claudia, editor. The Papal Encyclicals 1878–1903. New York: McGrath Publishing Company, 1981.

Carlson, Marvin. The French Stage in the Nineteenth Century. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1972.

Cazeaux, Isabelle. “One Does Not Defend the Sun: Some Notes on Péladan and Wagner.” In Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang, edited by Edmond Strainchamps and Maria Rika Maniates. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984, 93–101.

Cazelles, Brigitte. The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Cerf, Charles. Baptême de Clovis: en quel endroit de Reims, au Ve siècle était place de baptistère? Reims: Imprimerie de l’Académie, 1891.

Chailly, Jacques. Traité Historique d’analyse musicale. Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1951.

396

Chaminade, Eugène. La musique sacrée telle que la veut l’Église. Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1897.

Charle, Christophe, and Jennifer Boittin. “Opera in France, 1870–1914: Between Nationalism and Foreign Imports.” In Opera and Society in France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu, edited by Victoria Johnson, Jane Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 245–50.

Charlton, David. “Paul Antonin Vidal.” In Grove Music Online.

Chausson, Ernest. Écrits inédits, journaux intimes, roman de jeunesse, correspondance, edited by Jean Gallois and Isabelle Bretaudeau. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1999.

Christiansen, Rupert. Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

Chimènes, Myriam. “Elites sociales et pratiques wagnériennes: de la propagande au snobisme.” In Vom Wagner zum Wagnérisme, edited by Annegret Fauser and Manuela Schwartz. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1999, 155–98.

–––––––. Mécènes et musiciens: du salon au concert à Paris sous la IIIe République. Paris: Fayard, 2004.

–––––––. “Le Salon des Girette. Un modèle exemplaire de collaboration entre musiciens amateurs et professionnels à Paris vers 1900,” Revista de musicología, Vol. 16, No. 6 (1993): 3692–3704.

Clark, Christopher, and Wolfram Kaiser, editors. Culture Wars: Secular—Catholic Conflict in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Clément, Felix. Histoire générale de la musique religieuse. Paris: Adrien Le Clere et Cie, 1860.

Cochis, Simonetta. “The Bishop of Fools.” In Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History, edited by Vicki K. Janik. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998, 97–105.

Cole, Joshua. The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth- Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Condé, Gérard. “Argument.” L’Avant-Scène Opéra, No. 148 (October 1992): 88–119.

–––––––. Charles Gounod. Paris: Fayard, 2009.

–––––––. “Commentaire musical.” L’Avant Scène-Opéra, No. 187 (1998): 74–115.

Coppée, Henry, editor. Songs of Praise and Poems of Devotion in the Christian Centuries. Philadelphia: E. H. Butler and Co., 1866.

397

Corbin, Alain. “Paris–Provence.” In Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol. 1, edited by Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman. New York: Columbia University Press, 428–64.

Craig, Barbara M. L’Estoire de Grisélidis. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1954.

Cusack, Carole M. Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples. London: Cassell, 1998.

Daughton, James Patrick. An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Davie, Grace. Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Deak, Frantisek. Symbolist Theater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993.

Debussy, Claude. “D’Ève à Grisélidis.” In Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer Claude Debussy, edited and translated by François Lesure and Richard Langham Smith. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988 [1977], 56–58.

Desjardins, Gustave. Histoire de la cathédrale de Beauvais. Beauvais: Victor Pineau, 1865.

Di Grazia, Donna. “Concert Societies in Paris and Their Choral Repertoires, c. 1828– 1880.” Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University, 1993.

Dubois, Théodore. Souvenirs de ma vie, edited by Christine Collette-Kléo. Lyon: Symétrie, 2009.

Duffy, Eamon. Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, fourth edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

Duléry-Reyval, Albert. Le Père Coubé, 1857–1938. Paris: P. Tequi et fils, 1939.

Ellis, Katharine. Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

–––––––. “Mireille’s Homecoming? Gounod, Mistral, and the Midi.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Autumn 2012): 463–509.

–––––––. “Olivier Halanzier and the Operatic Museum in Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Music & Letters, Vol. 96, No. 3 (August 2015): 390–417.

–––––––. The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France. Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2013.

–––––––. “Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris: Who Cares if You Listen?” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 37–54.

398

Ellsberg, Robert. Blessed Among All Women: Women Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2005.

Emery, Elizabeth. “The Golden Legend in the Fin-de-Siècle: Zola’s Le Rêve and Its Reception.” In Medieval Saints in Late Nineteenth-Century French Culture, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Laurie Postlewaite. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004, 83– 116.

–––––––. “Staging La Fête des fous et de l’âne in 1898: A Commemoration of the Literary Middle Ages.” In Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, edited by Susan Harrow and Andrew Watts. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012, 37–59.

–––––––. “The ‘Truth’ About the Middle Ages: La Revue des Deux Mondes and Late-Nineteenth-Century French Medievalism.” In Medievalism and the Quest for the Real Middle Ages, edited by Clare A. Simmons. London: Frank Cass, 2001, 99–114.

Emery, Elizabeth, and Laura Morowitz. Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in fin-de- siècle France. Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2003.

Engelhardt, Jeffers. “Arvo Pärt and the Idea of a Christian Europe.” In Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual, edited by Philip Bohlman and Jeffers Engelhardt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 215–32.

Everist, Mark. Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Aldershot (U.K): Ashgate, 2005.

–––––––. “Reception Theories, Canonic Discourses, and Musical Value.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 378–402.

–––––––. “Wagner and Paris: The Case of Rienzi (1869).” 19th-Century Music, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Summer 2017): 3–30.

Everist, Mark, and Annegret Fauser, editors. Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009.

Fauser, Annegret. “Cette musique sans tradition: Wagner’s Tannhäuser and its French Critics.” In Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914, edited by Mark Everist and Annegret Fauser, 228–55.

–––––––. “Debacle at the Paris Opéra: Tannhäuser and the French Critics, 1861.” In Richard Wagner and His World, edited by Thomas S. Grey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, 347–71.

–––––––. “Gendering the Nations: Ideologies of French Discourse on Music.” In Fauser, The Politics of Musical Identity: Selected Essays, 71–102.

399

–––––––. “Le rôle de l’élément érotique dans l’œuvre de Massenet.” In Massenet et son temps, edited by Patrick Gillis and Gérard Condé. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 1999, 156–79.

–––––––. Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005.

–––––––. The Politics of Musical Identity: Selected Essays. Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2015.

–––––––. “Wagnerism: Responses to Wagner in Music and the Arts.” In The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, edited by Thomas S. Grey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 221–34.

Fauquet, Joël-Marie. “Angelus.” In Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIXe siècle, edited by Joël-Marie Fauquet. Paris: Fayard, 2003, 44.

Ferchault, Guy, and Jaqueline Gachet. “Louis Niedermeyer.” Grove Music Online.

Ferguson, George. Signs and Symbols in Christian Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954.

Ferguson, Margaret W. “The Exile’s Defense: Du Bellay’s La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, No. 93 (March 1978): 275–89.

Fieschi, Michèle. “The Santons of Provence.” In Christmas in France. Chicago: World Book Inc., 1996, 58–64.

Fischer, Jens Malte. “Singende Recken und blitzende Schwerter: Die Mittelalteroper neben und nach Wagner—Ein Überblick.” In Mittelalterrezeption: Ein Symposium, edited by Peter Wapnewski. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986, 511–30.

Flint de Médicis, Catrina. “Charles Gounod, Religious Music, and the Essence of the Sacred.” Unpublished paper delivered at the conference “L’Abbé Gounod: French Sacred Music During the Romantic Era,” 6 October 2018.

–––––––. “Little Wooden Actors and Symbolism at the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette.” In Musical Theater in Europe 1830–1945, edited by Michela Niccolai and Clair Rowden. Turnout: Brepols, 2017, 269–85.

–––––––. “The Schola Cantorum, Early Music, and French Political Culture from 1894 to 1914.” Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University, 2006.

Flood, Alison. “Charles Perrault: The Modern Fairytale’s Fairy Godfather.” The Guardian, 12 January 2016.

Ford, Caroline. Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.

400

Fortescue, William. The Third Republic in France, 1870–1940: Conflicts and Continuities. London: Routledge, 2000.

France, Anatole. “Les Marionnettes de M. Henri Signoret.” In idem, La Vie littéraire, Vol. 2. Paris: Calmann Levy, 1894, 145–50.

Franklin, Peter. “Die Rose vom Liebesgarten.” Grove Music Online.

Fulcher, Jane. “The Concert as Political Propaganda in France and the Control of ‘Performative Context’.” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Spring 1998): 41–67.

–––––––. “Charpentier’s Operatic ‘Roman Musical’ as Read in the Wake of the Dreyfus Affair.” 19th-Century Music, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Autumn 1992): 161–80.

–––––––. French Cultural Politics and Identity from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

–––––––. The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

–––––––. “The Orphéon Societies: ‘Music for the Workers’ in Second Empire France,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 10, No. 9 (June 1979): 47–56.

–––––––. “Wagner in the Cultural Politics of the French Right and Left Before World War I.” In Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme, edited by Annegret Fauser and Manuela Schwartz. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1999, 137–54.

Gallois, Jean. Ernest Chausson. Paris: Fayard, 1994.

Garelick, Rhonda K. Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance at the Fin-de-Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Garratt, James. Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Geertz, Clifford. “Religion as a Cultural System.” In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973, 87–126.

Geppert, Alexander C. T. Fleeting Cities: Imperial Exhibitions in fin-de-siècle Europe. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Gerhard, Anselm. The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Mary Whittall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Gibbons, William. Building the Operatic Museum: Eighteenth-Century Opera in fin-de-siècle Paris. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013.

401

Gibson, Ralph. “Hellfire and Damnation in Nineteenth-Century France.” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 74, No. 3 (July 1988): 383–402.

–––––––. A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914. London: Routledge, 1989.

–––––––. “Why Republicans and Catholics Couldn’t Stand Each Other in the Nineteenth Century.” In Religion, Society, and Politics in France Since 1789, edited by Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin. London: The Hambledon Press, 1991, 107–20.

Gildea, Robert. France 1870–1914. London: Routledge, 1996.

–––––––. The Past in French History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

Gilley, Sheridan, and Brian Stanley, editors. The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. VIII: World Christianities c. 1815–c.1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Gillis, Patrick. “La Terre promise.” L’Avant-Scène Opéra, No. 148 (September–October 1992): 133–35.

Gitter, Elizabeth. “The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination.” Publications of the Modern Language Association, No. 99 (October 1984): 936–54.

Goldstrom, Erik. “A Whore in Paradise: The Oratorios of Jules Massenet.” Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1998.

Gosselin, Guy. “La Tempête, musique de scène pour la pièce de Shakespeare.” Ostinato rigore, No. 14 (2000): 167–75.

Gough, Austin. Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign, 1848– 1853. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Gourmont, Remy de. Le Latin mystique. Paris: Édition du Mercure de France, 1892.

Grayson, David. “Finding a Stage for French Opera.” In Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914, edited by Mark Everist and Annegret Fauser. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009, 127–54.

Gribenski, Fanny. “L’Église comme lieu de concert. Pratiques musicales et usages de l’espace ecclésial dans les paroisses parisiennes, 1830–1905.” Ph.D. dissertation, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2015.

Harris, Max. Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Harrison, Carol E. Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.

402

Hartog, François. La Nation, la religion, l’avenir: sur les traces d’Ernest Renan. Paris: Gallimard, 2017.

Hayburn, Robert. Papal Legislation on Sacred Music, 95 A.D. to 1977 A.D. Harrison, NY: Roman Catholic Books, 1979.

Herlihy, David. “The Making of the Medieval Family: Symmetry, Structure, and Sentiment.” In Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children, edited by Carol Neel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 2004, 192–213.

Herrère, Jean. Une Ève nouvelle. Paris: Paul Olendorff, 1888.

Heywood, Colin. Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France: Work, Health, and Education Among the ‘classes populaires’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Heywood, Sophie. “The Apostolate of the Pen: Mgr de Ségur and the Mobility of Catholic Opinion in Second Empire France.” French History, Vol. 26, N0. 2 (Spring 2012): 203– 21.

Hirschkind, Charles. “Religion.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, 165–74.

Hoffmane, Simone. “La carrière du Père Didon, Dominicain. 1840–1900.” Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1995.

Holt, Mack P. The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1569, second edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Housely, Norman. The Avignon Papacy and the Crusades, 1305–1378. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Hubert, J. D. “Representations of Decapitation: Mallarmé’s ‘Hérodiade’ and Flaubert’s ‘Hérodias’.” French Forum, Vol. 7, No. 3 (September 1982): 245–51.

Huebner, Steven. “Between Anarchism and the Box Office: Gustave Charpentier’s Louise.” 19th-Century Music, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Autumn 1995): 136–60.

–––––––. “Classical Wagnerism: Alberic Magnard’s Bérénice.” The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 34, No. 1 (January 2017): 115–47.

–––––––. French Opera at the fin-de-siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

–––––––. “Opera Audiences in Paris, 1830–1870,” Music & Letters, Vol. 70, No. 2 (May 1989): 216.

403

Huet, Félix. La Musique liturgique. L’Art modern dans ses rapports avec le Culte. Chalons-sur- Marne: Imprimerie Martin Frères, 1886.

Hufton, Olwen H. Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution. The Donald G. Creighton Lectures 1989. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

Huglo, Michel. “Les chants liturgiques tirés de l’Apocalypse dans les liturgies hispaniques et romano-franques.” In El canto mozárabe y su entorno Estudios sobre la música de la liturgia viejo hispánica, edited by Rosario Álvarez Martinez, Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta, and Ana Llorens Martin. Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2013, 201–16.

Imbert, Hugues. Profils d’artistes contemporains. Paris: Fischbacher, 1897.

Irvine, Demar. Massenet: A Chronicle of His Life and Times. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1994.

Jannarone, Kimberly. “Puppetry and Pataphysics: Populism and the Ubu Cycle.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 3 (August 2001): 239–53.

Jeanne, Paul. Les Théâtres d’Ombres à Montmartre de 1887 à 1923. Paris: Les Éditions des presses modernes au Palais-Royal, 1937.

Johnson, James. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

De Julleville, Louis Petit. Histoire du théâtre en France. Paris: Cerf, 1881.

Kahan, Sylvia. “Fauré’s Prelude to La Passion (1890): A Re-examination of a Forgotten Score.” In Regarding Fauré, edited by Tom Gordon. Newark, NJ: Gordon and Breach, 1999, 239–72.

–––––––. Music’s Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003.

Kalman, Julie. Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Kaplan, Zvi Jonathan. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: French Jewry and the Problem of Church and State. Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2009.

Karras, Ruth. Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Kelly, Barbara. Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913–1939. Woodbridge (U.K): The Boydell Press, 2013.

–––––––. “(Paul-)Henri Büsser [Busser].” Grove Music Online.

404

Keuss, Jeffrey F. “David Friedrich Strauss and Myth in Das Leben Jesu.” In The Sacred and the Profane: Contemporary Demands on Hermeneutics, edited by Jeffrey F. Keuss. Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2003, 53–61.

Kidd, James C. “Louis Niedermeyer’s System for Gregorian Chant Accompaniment as a Compositional Source for Gabriel Fauré.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1973.

Kramer, Lawrence. “Culture and Musical Hermeneutics: The Salome Complex.” Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3 (November 1990): 269–94.

Lacombe, Hervé. The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Edward Schneider. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Lalouette, Jacqueline, and Jean-Pierre Machelon, editors. Les Congrégations hors de la loi? Autour de la loi du 1er Juillet 1901. Paris: Letouzet et Ané, 2002.

Lamothe, Peter. “From Mélisande to Marionettes: The Importance of Incidental Music in Marionette Plays.” Unpublished paper delivered at the meeting of the American Musicological Society, South Central Chapter, 18 March 2017.

–––––––. “Theater Music in France, 1864–1914.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008.

Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Langénieux, Benoit-Marie [Cardinal]. La France chrétienne à Reims en 1896: 14e centenaire du baptême de Clovis et des Francs. Paris: Maison Didot, 1987.

Larkin, Maurice. Church and State After the Dreyfus Affair: The Separation Issue in France. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1974.

–––––––. Religion, Politics, and Preferment in France Since 1890: La Belle Epoque and its Legacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

–––––––. “The Vatican, France, and the Roman Question, 1898–1903: New Archival Evidence.” Historical Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1 (March 1984): 177–97.

Lebrun, François. Histoire des catholiques en France: du XV siècle à nos jours. Paris: Hachette, 1985.

Lefèvre, Gustave, and Mme. Veuve Henri Heurtel. “L’École de Musique Classique Nierdermeyer.” In Encyclopédie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire, Vol. 6. Paris: Librairie Ch. Delagrave, 1913–1931, 3619.

Lehrer, Ernst, and Johanna Lehrer. Folklore and Symbolism of Flowers, Plants, and Trees. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003 [1960].

405

Locke, Ralph. Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

–––––––. Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Loliée, Frédéric. “La Fête des Fous.” In Unsigned, Fête des fous et de l’âne. Paris: Nouvelle Imprimerie, 1898, n.p.

Lyon, David. “Rethinking Secularization: Retrospect and Prospect.” Review of Religious Research, Vol. 26, No. 3 (March 1985): 228–43.

Mabire, Jean-Christophe, editor. L’Exposition Universelle de 1900. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000.

Macdonald, Hugh. “From Opéra-Comique to Opéra-sérieux,” Revista de musicología, Vol. 16, No. 6 (1993): 3113–21.

–––––––. “Passez-vous donc du diable, que diable!.” L’Avant-Scène Opéra, No. 148 (October 1992): 120–25.

Magnin, Charles. Histoire des marionnettes en Europe depuis l’antiquité jusqu’a nos jours. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1852.

Mandell, Richard D. Paris 1900: The Great World’s Fair. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967.

Mankovskaya, Nadezhda B. “French Symbolism: Aesthetic Dominants.” Russian Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 53, No. 1 (January 2015): 54–71.

Margueritte, Paul. Le Petit théâtre (Théâtre des marionnettes). Paris: Librairie illustrée, 1888.

Massenet, Jules. Jules Massenet: Mes Souvenirs et autres écrits, edited by Jean-Christophe- Branger. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2017.

–––––––. Massenet: Mes souvenirs, edited by Gérard Condé. Paris: Éditions Plume: 1992.

–––––––. My Recollections, translated by H. Villiers Barnett. Boston: Small, Maynard and Co. Publishers, 1919.

Masson, Georges. Gabriel Pierné, musicien lorrain. Nancy: Éditions Serpenoise, 1987.

Maurrus, Michael. The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Mayeur, Jean-Marie. Léon Gambetta: la patrie et la République. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2008.

406

McCormick, John, and Bennie Pratasik, editors. Popular Puppet Theater in Europe, 1800–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

McGonigle, Thomas C., and Phyllis Zagano. The Dominican Tradition: Spirituality in History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006.

McManners, John. Church and State in France, 1789–1914. London: S. P. C. K. for the Church Historical Society, 1972.

McMillan, James. “Catholic Christianity in France from the Restoration to the Separation of Church and State, 1815–1905.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. VIII: World Christianities c. 1815–c.1914, edited by Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 217–32.

–––––––. France and Women, 1789–1914: Gender, Society, and Politics. London: Routledge, 2000.

Menon, Elizabeth K. “Les filles d’Ève in Word and Image.” In Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image, edited by Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fatima Lambert. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, 157–73.

Minor, Ryan. Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity, and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Monelle, Raymond. The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Montersino, Isabella. “Saint-Eustache des Halles au XIXe siècle: portrait musical d’une église parisienne.” Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1994.

Morse, Holly. “The First Woman Question: Eve and the Women’s Movement.” In The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field, edited by Yvonne Sherwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 61–77.

Mukherjee, Madhuri. “When the Saints Go Marching In: Popular Performances of Tentation de Saint-Antoine and Sainte-Geneviève de Paris at the Chat Noir Shadow Theater.” In Medieval Saints in Late Nineteenth-Century French Culture, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Laurie Postlewaite. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2004, 25–44.

Murray, Paul. Aquinas at Prayer: The Bible, Mysticism, and Poetry. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.

Musk, Andrea. “Regionalism, Latinité, and the French Musical Tradition: Déodat de Séverac’s Héliogabale.” In Nineteenth Century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference, edited by Jim Samson and Bennett Zon. Abingdon (U.K.): Ashgate, 2002, 226–49.

407

Niccolai, Michela. “Le religieux ‘populaire’. Cabaret, théâtre d’ombres et maisons d’education (1850–1914 environ).” Unpublished paper delivered at the conference “L’Abbé Gounod: French Sacred Music During the Romantic Era,” in Lucca, Italy, 7 October 2018.

Niedermeyer, Louis. Gregorian Accompaniment: A Theoretical Treatise Upon the Accompaniment of Plainsong, translated by Wallace Goodrich. New York: Novello, Ewer, and Co., 1905.

Noonan, James-Charles. The Church Visible: The Ceremonial Life and Protocol of the Catholic Church. New York: Viking, 1996.

Nora, Pierre. Présent, Nation, Mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 2011.

Nora, Pierre and Lawrence Kritzman, editors. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Noske, Frits. French Song from Berlioz to Duparc, translated by Rita Benton. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012 [1970].

Oakley, Francis. The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300– 1870. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Oberthür, Mariel. Le Cabaret du Chat Noir à Montmartre (1881–1897). Geneva: Éditions Slatkine, 2007.

Offen, Karen. Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

–––––––. “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France.” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 648–76.

Olivier, Brigitte. J. Massenet, itinéraires pour un théâtre musical. Arles: Actes Sud, 1996.

Orwicz, Michael. “Anti-Academicism and State Power in the Early Third Republic.” Art History Vol. 14, No. 4 (December 1991): 571–92.

Partin, Malcolm O. Waldeck-Rousseau, Combes, and the Church: Politics of Anticlericalism, 1899–1905. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1969.

Pasler, Jann. Camille Saint-Saëns and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

–––––––. Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third-Republic France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

–––––––. “Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology.” In eadem, Writing Through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 365–416.

408

–––––––. “Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress.” In The Late Romantic Era: From the Mid- 19th Century to World War I, edited by Jim Samson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991, 389–416.

–––––––. “Pelléas and Power: Forces Behind the Reception of Debussy’s Opera.” In eadem, Writing Through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 181–212.

–––––––. “Théodore Dubois.” Grove Music Online.

Passmore, Kevin. The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Paul, Harry W. The Second Ralliement: The Rapprochement Between Church and State in France in the Twentieth Century. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1967.

Peña-Ruiz, Henri. “Laïcité and the Idea of the Republic: The Principles of Universal Emancipation.” In Secularism on the Edge: Rethinking Church-State Relations in the United States, France, and Israel, edited by Jacques Berlinerblau, Sarah Fainberg, and Aurora Nou. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2014, 95–102.

Perrot, Michele. “New Eve and the Old Adam: Changes in French Women’s Condition at the Turn of the Century.” In Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, edited by Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, 51–61.

Pike, David Lawrence. Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–1921. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.

Pompéry, Édouard de. La Femme dans l’humanité: sa nature, son rôle et sa valeur sociale. Paris: Hachette, 1864.

Pougin, Arthur. “Crèche.” In Dictionnaire Historique et pittoresque du théâtre. Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1885, 257.

Powell, Matthew. The Christmas Creche: Treasure of Faith, Art, and Theater. Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1997.

Price, Roger. Religious Renewal in France, 1789–1870: The Roman Catholic Church Between Catastrophe and Triumph. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Priest, Robert D. The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth- Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Pym, Anthony. “The Importance of Salomé: Approaches to a fin-de-siècle Theme.” French Forum, Vol. 14, No. 3 (September 1989): 311–22.

409

Ratner, Sabina Teller, James Harding, and Daniel M. Fallon. “Camille Saint-Saëns.” Grove Music Online.

Raugel, Félix. Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Montpellier. Montpellier: Imprimerie du Midi, 1920.

Ravel, Jeffrey S. The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Ravitch, Norman. The Catholic Church and the French Nation, 1589–1989. London: Routledge, 1990.

Rehding, Alexander. Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Renan, Ernest. Life of Jesus, translated by William G. Hutchison. London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 2014 [1897].

Renaud, Jérome, and Sylvain Riquier, editors. Le spectacle à l’impôt: inventaire des archives du Droit des pauvres à Paris, début XIXe siècle–1947. Vélizy: Doin, 1997.

Revuluri, Sindhumathi. “French Folk Songs and the Invention of History.” 19th-Century Music, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Spring 2016): 248–71.

Rowden, Clair. “Choral Music Making in France.” In Nineteenth-Century Choral Music, edited by Donna Di Grazia. New York: Routledge, 2013, 205–12.

–––––––. “‘Du grand au petit: Faust on Parisian Stages in 1869.” In Musical Theater in Europe 1830–1945, edited by Michela Niccolai and Clair Rowden. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017, 115–38.

–––––––. “Hérodiade: Church, State, and the Feminist Movement.” In Nineteenth Century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference, edited by Jim Samson and Bennett Zon. Aldershot (U.K.): Ashgate, 2002, 250–78.

–––––––. “L’Homme saint chez Massenet: l’amour sacré et le sacré de l’amour.” In Opéra et religion sous la IIIe République, edited by Jean-Christophe Branger and Alban Ramaut. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2006, 257–84.

–––––––. “Grisélidis.” In Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIXe siècle, edited by Joël- Marie Fauquet. Paris: Fayard, 2003, 538.

–––––––. Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera: Massenet’s Hérodiade and Thaïs. Weinsberg: Musik-Edition Lucie Galland, 2004.

Rowden, Clair, editor. Performing Salome, Revealing Stories. London: Routledge, 2016.

Rowell, Diana. Paris: The “New Rome” of Napoleon I. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.

410

Roza, Joseph P. “French Languages and French Nationalism: The Félibrige, Occitan, and the French Identity of Southern France, 1854–1914.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 2003.

Sadler, Donna L. Reading the Reverse Façade of Reims Cathedral: Royalty and Ritual in Thirteenth-Century France. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Saint-Saëns, Camille. École buissonnière: Notes et souvenirs. Paris: Pierre Lafitte, 1913.

Safran, William. “Religion and Laïcité in a Jacobin Republic: The Case of France.” In The Secular and the Sacred: Nation, Religion, and Politics, edited by William Safran. London: Frank Cass, 2003, 54–81.

Saint-Saëns, Camille. “L’Orgue.” In École buissonnière: Notes et souvenirs. Paris: Pierre Lafitte, 1913.

Sako, Ikuno. “Louis Niedermeyer and Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France.” In Music Research: New Directions for a New Century, edited by Michael Ewans, Rosalind Halton, and John A. Philipps. London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004, 84–93.

Sala, Emilio. “Petit-Théâtre de marionnettes de la Galerie Vivienne.” In Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIXe siècle, edited by Joël-Marie Fauquet. Paris: Fayard, 2003, 961–62.

Sankovitch, Anne-Marie. The Church of Saint-Eustache in the Early French Renaissance. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015.

Sarno, Megan Elizabeth. “Symbolism and Catholicism in French Music at the Time of the Separation of Church and State (1888–1925).” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2016.

Sedgwick, Alexander. The Ralliement in French Politics, 1890–1898. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.

Segel, Harold B. Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Servières, Georges. La Musique française moderne. Paris: G. Harvard fils, 1897.

Schlosser, Steven. Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Schmidt, Joël. Le Baptême de France: Clovis, Clotilde, Geneviève. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996.

Shershow, Scott Cutler. Puppets and “Popular” Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

411

Silverman, Debora. “The New Woman: Modernism and the Decorative Arts in fin-de- siècle France.” In Eroticism and the Body Politic, edited by Lynn Hunt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, 144–63.

Silvestre, Armand and Eugène Morand. Les Drames sacrés. Poème dramatique en un prologue et dix tableau en vers. Paris: Ernest Kolb, 1893.

–––––––. Grisélidis, mystère en trois actes, un Prologue et un Épilogue en vers libres. Paris: Ernest Kolb, 1891.

Simon, Yannick. “Music and the Vichy Regime Through Jeune France’s Three Joan-of-Arc Productions.” In Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships, edited by Esteban Buch, Igor Contreras Zubilaga, and Manuel Deniz Silva. Aldershot (U.K): Ashgate, 2016.

Sisman, Elaine. “Symphonies and the Public Display of Topics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, edited by Danuta Mirka. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, 90–118.

Smith, Anthony D. Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Solenière, Eugène de. La Musique à l’Exposition de 1900. Paris: Ed. Sagot, 1895.

Sowerwine, Charles. “Women’s Citizenship and Republicanism in France, 1789–1944.” In Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France: Bodies, Minds, and Gender, edited by Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo. Houndmills (U.K.): Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 19–42.

Spies, André Michael. Opera, State, and Society in the Third Republic, 1875–1914. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

Stanley, Glenn. “Parsifal: Redemption and Kunstreligion.” In The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, edited by Thomas S. Grey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 151–75.

Strauss, David Friedrich. Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet. Tübingen: Verlag von C. F. Osiander, 1837.

Surkis, Judith. Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Sutton, Michael. Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Syer, Katherine R. “Unseen Voices: Wagner’s Musical-Dramatic Shaping of the Grail Scene of Act I.” In A Companion to Wagner’s Parsifal, edited by William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005, 177–215.

412

Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. “Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 3 (June 2001): 906–22.

Taxidou, Olga. Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht. Houndmills (U.K): Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Tierney, Brian. Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150–1350: A Study on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty, and Tradition in the Middle Ages. Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1988.

Tootill, Mia. “Leaping off the Page: Diabolical Technologies on the Parisian Musical Stage, 1827–1859.” Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 2017.

Tombs, Robert. The Paris Commune, 1871. London: Routledge, 2013 [1999].

Tournier, Ferdinand. Clovis et la France au baptistère de Reims. Lille: Desclée, Brouwer et Cie, 1898.

Tribble, Keith. “European Symbolist Theater: Conventions and Innovations.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1990.

–––––––. “The Rod Puppet in the Symbolist Era.” In Marionette Theater of the Symbolist Era, edited by Keith Tribble. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002, 1– 75.

Unsigned. Auditions musicales: Règlement général. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1899.

Unsigned. Exposition universelle Internationale de 1900 à Paris: Actes organiques. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1895.

Unsigned. Les Nouvelles de l’Exposition: La participation des œuvres catholiques à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900. Rapport général et documents. Paris: F. Levé, 1900.

Unsigned. Nos origins racontées à des Français à l’occasion du XIVe centenaire du Baptême de Clovis par un petit prédicateur. Abbeville: C. Paillary, 1897.

Vallet, Odon. Le Honteux et le sacré. Paris: Albin Michel, 1997.

De la Vergne, François-Marie-Benjamin Richard. Lettre Pastorale de Son Éminence Cardinal Richard, Archevêque de Paris, ordonnant des prières publiques pour la France de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900. Paris: F. Levé, 1900.

Villetard, Henri. Office de Pierre de Corbeil (Office de la Circoncision). Paris: Librairie Alphonse Picard et fils, 1907.

413

Waeber, Jacqueline. “Opera and Ballet to the Death of Gluck.” In The Cambridge Companion to French Music, edited by Simon Trezise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 201–21.

Wardman, H. W. Ernest Renan: A Critical Biography. London: The Athlone Press, 1964.

Weber, Eugen. France: Fin-de-Siècle. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986.

Whiting, Steven Moore. Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Wright, Lesley. “Music Criticism and the Exposition Internationale Universelle de 1900,” Context: A Journal of Music Research 22 (Spring 2001): 19–30.

“X.” “Rapport présenté à M. le Ministère de l’Instruction publique et des Beaux-Arts au nom de la Commission des grandes auditions musicales de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900,” Revue d’histoire et de critique musicale (March 1901): 110–19.

414