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Maestro's Essay

THE POPULAR MASSENET

Manon, composed in 1882, is a distinctly French tale of a woman seduced and eventually undone by her weakness for life in the fast lane as practiced in 18th-century Paris. It is based on Abbe Prevost’s 1731 cautionary novel, “Manon Lescaut.” The novel is about a wise man who relates the story of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon, as a warning to his young, aristocratic student. In the novel, Manon does not exist; she is an idea. The moral of Prevost’s tale was: Upper-class men should not get involved with slutty, lower class girls. Of course, Massenet could not do that in the opera.  He made both characters much more sympathetic. In the novel, des Grieux and Manon cheat at cards, in the opera they do not. In the novel, des Grieux kills someone and then makes some ridiculous excuse. In the opera, he does not. Some have been quoted as referring to Manon’s wholehearted innocence. I would add “She is tender, superficial and quite brainless. What more could a sensible man want?” It’s an amusing description, right on the money as far as it goes. But “wholehearted innocence”? Let’s not overlook this sixteen-year-old girl’s greedy streak, or the calculating cold blooded way with which she agrees to let her lover be abducted so she can move on to a courtesan’s life of luxury. Tougher, more determined, with more strings to her bow than just another bimbo.  Massenet and his librettists, Meilhac and Gille, collaborated 150 years after Prevost wrote his novel. They were more inclined to portray their main characters partly as victims of society rather than simple object lessons of the consequences of bad behavior. Manon came from the lower class. How can you be a victim if you have no rights? Massenet kept that in the opera. The opera shows the change in this girl, from the innocent 15-year-old to the woman in love, to the queen of Paris, to the greedy manipulator, to the fallen woman.  Massenet assigns motifs to announce the presence of most of the main characters. They are consistent from start to finish, except for Manon’s, which changes as she changes. The problem with Massenet is that he became unfashionable very soon after his death in 1912. He was perhaps regarded too much as stock-in-trade, and, until recently, we have rarely been able to hear the actual operas that made him one of the most popular Parisian musical figures of his time. He was to French opera what his contemporary Puccini was to the Italians - a man of immense popularity and stature, one feted by the claque and completely in tune with contemporary populist tastes. It is difficult not to view him as the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day. Massenet’s Manon is a French opera of more refined and delicate charms than Puccini’s booming, Italianate Manon Lescaut, although both are based on the same Abbé Prevost novel. It is a big opera, but for best effect it needs a production with the intimacy of opéra comique which makes it ideal for the confines of Lambert Hall.

With the death of Jules Massenet, which occurred on August 14, 1912 France lost her most popular and, besides Camille Saint-Saëns, most famous composer – a composer on whose actual merits, perhaps, exacting critics do not agree, but whose career may well be described as an almost uninterrupted series of successes. Jules Massenet was born, May 12, 1842, at Montaud, then a suburb of Saint-Etienne, the great manufacturing city of the centre of France – the youngest of twenty-one children. His biographers relate many more or less romantic anecdotes showing his early propensity for music; telling us, for instance, how his keen desire to study the art impelled him to escape from home with the intention of going to Paris and the hope of finding there the suitable teacher whom he had vainly sought for in Saint-Etienne. His father, a manufacturer ruined by the Revolution of 1848, left Montaud for Paris, and there the boy became, in 1851, a pupil of the Conservatoire, studying the pianoforte in Laurent’s class and winning the first prize in 1859. He began to learn harmony with Bazin in 1853; but after this master (a poor musician and poor teacher) had discouraged him, he became a pupil of Reber. In 1860 he entered Ambroise Thomas’s class of composition, and in 1863 he won the first prize for fugue and the Grand Prix de Rome. His first works were principally songs and short pianoforte pieces, orchestral suites of facile and unpretentious style, a short opera-comique in one act, ‘La Grand Tante’ (produced in Paris, 1867), and a ‘Requiem’ (unpublished). In 1868 he made the acquaintance of the publisher, Georges Hartmann, who from the very outset had faith in him and greatly assisted him during the first stages of his career.

Massenet’s first ambitious work, the opéra-comique in four acts, ‘Don César de Bazan’ (Paris, 1872), was an absolute failure. But in 1873 the young composer scored two decisive successes with the incidental music to Leconte de Lisle’s tragedy, ‘Les Erynnies,’ and with the dramatic oratorio, ‘Marie-Magdeleine,’ both of which were performed at the Théâtre de l’Odéon. As early as 1876 he was decorated with the Légion d’Honneur. In 1877, ‘Le Roi de Lahore,’ one of his best operatic scores (although comparatively little known), was produced at the Paris Opéra; the following year he was elected professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire and member of the Institut, thus succeeding his former teacher and vituperator François Bazin. Since then, and until the end of his life, honours, fame and fortune came to him in profusion. The absolute failure of a comparatively great quantity of his works passed unperceived under the favour of several radiant and protracted triumphs, the most memorable of which are those of ‘Manon’ (Paris, Opéra-Comique, 1884), ‘Werther’ (Vienna, 1892; Paris, Opéra-Comique, 1893), and ‘Thaïs’ (Paris, Opéra, 1894). ‘Esclarmonde,’ which, when produced in 1889 at the Opéra-Comique, had a very satisfactory run of performances, has never since been revived until the Met presented it in November 1976 for 10 performances with Joan Sutherland and Giacomo Aragal conducted by her husband Richard Bonygne. Massenet has certainly been one of the most prolific of French composers. He has written no less than twenty-four operas or opéra-comiques (three of which, ‘Panurge,’ ‘Amadis,’ and ‘Cleopâtre,’ are as yet unknown, but we are told, are ready for publication), incidental music for several plays, pianoforte pieces, a great quantity of songs, choruses, and a few specimens of church-music. Besides ‘Marie-Magdeleine,’ he has composed the oratorios ‘Eve’ (1875), ‘La Vierge’ (1880), ‘La Terre Promise’ (1900), and the lyric scenes, ‘Narcisse’ (1878), and ‘Biblis’ (1887). His instrumental music is neither very abundant nor very pregnant, consisting chiefly of picturesque suites and other minor works. He never attempted to deal with the more earnest types of instrumental forms except once, and this attempt (a Pianoforte concerto written in 1903) was pronounced a failure even by his most enthusiastic devotees. The last opera of his performed during his lifetime, ‘Roma’ (Paris, Opéra, 1911), is also an isolated and not particularly felicitous attempt towards classical severity and grandeur. Massenet’s prolonged and widespread success,’is one of the puzzling phenomena of modern musical history. While those who look a little below the surface find his music inexpressibly monotonous, casual hearers are surprised by his superficial versatility . . . few of the real lovers of music will expect any of his works to remain among the compositions that keep their popularity after the death of the author. Harsh as it may appear, I believe this verdict to be a sound one. The chief idiosyncrasy of Massenet, as a man and as an artist, was an overwhelming desire to court success. His object was to seduce; and from the time when he found that his music proved effective and became popular he carefully avoided changing his manner. The characteristic melody ‘à la Massenet,’ graceful and elegant enough, but almost stereotyped, runs through all his scores, doing duty for Manon and Thaïs alike, for Roman Vestal or for gay Spanish lady, for dreamy German maiden and for haughty princess of yore. His early scores are, for the greater part, his best, with the one exception of the very pleasing and chaste ‘Jongleur de Nôtre-Dame’ (1902). Later, and for the plain reason that he never attempted to renovate his style, he sank into sheer mannerism. Indeed, one can but marvel that so gifted a musician, who lacked neither individuality nor skill, should have so utterly succeeded in throwing away his gifts. Success spoiled him. As M. Claude Debussy once humorously remarked, ‘he fell a victim to the butterfly-play of fascinating lady admirers.’ Hence the monotony of works in the greater part of which he sedulously resorts to his favourite never-failing devices. Hence, also, the ‘superficial versatility.’ For if the actual progress of musical art during the past forty years left Massenet unmoved (and indeed he has taken no part in the evolution of modern music), the success of certain works appears to have influenced him not inconsiderably, inducing him to attempt a number of changes in manner if not in style. Thus, at a time when Wagner’s dramas were becoming the order of the day in Paris, he wrote ‘Esclarmonde,’ in which the example of ‘Lohengrin’ is easily traceable. The popularity of Italian ‘veristic’ opera helps to account for the appearance in 1894 of ‘La Navarraise,’ and in 1897 of ‘Sapho’; and Humperdinck’s ‘Hansel und Gretel’ seems to have prompted him to write ‘Cendrillon’ (1899). The earnest ideals, the thirst for progress that are inseparable from genius remained unknown to him. He directed his ambitions towards a less distant goal. He wrote for this time, and his time has repaid his labours well, as appears from the history of his life and deeds. Avoiding arduous roads, well satisfied with what was within his grasp, he remained untormented by doubt or by longing. As a man he was not only kind, but courteous and eager to court favour, lavish in praise upon all young composers or artists who came into contact with him. He held the position of Professor of Composition at the Paris Conservatoire until 1896, his principal pupils being Alfred Bruneau, Gustave Charpentier, Gabriel Pierné, Xavier Leroux, Paul Vidal, Georges Marty, Lucien Hillemacher, and Augustin Savard. He can hardly be said to have exercised a wholesome influence as a teacher, and generally speaking, such of his pupils as have displayed more than ordinary merits as composers did not follow his example. In the works of M. Alfred Bruneau, for instance, no trace of Massenet’s methods is to be found, except for a few melodic mannerisms. Not even as much remains in those of M. Pierné or M. Savard. In addition to the works mentioned above, Massenet wrote the following: ‘Bérangère et Anatole’ (1876), ‘Hérodiade’ (1881; London Opera House, 1911), ‘Le Cid’ (1885), ‘Le Mage’ (1891), ‘Le Carillion’ (1892), ‘Grisélidis’ (1901), ‘Chérubin’ (1905), ‘Ariane’ (1906), ‘Bacchus’ (1909), ‘Don Quichotte’ (1910; London Opera House, 1912). The funeral of M. Massenet took place at Egreville on August 17, and in accordance with the composer’s wishes, was simple in character. Only members of the family were invited. Wreaths were sent by the Prince of Monaco, M. Gunsbourg (director of the Monte Carlo Opera), and by M. Carré (for the Opéra-Comique).