Massenet and Women : A Love Story by Sylvia L’Écuyer
T
he career path of Jules Massenet was picture-perfect. Admitted to the Paris Conservatoire in 1853 at the age of eleven, at twenty he was awarded the Grand Prix de Rome, and at twenty-five was invited to write a one-act opera for the Opéra-Comique. In 1878, he became the youngest person ever to be elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and in the same year began teaching composition at the Conservatoire,
memoirs, My Life (translated by Rosamond Gilder, New York, Arno Press, 1977). ‘His witticisms were widely quoted, his epigrams passed from mouth to mouth. He was agreeable, entertaining, a charming individual and a true Frenchman’. The distorted perception of his music as either saccharine or insipid, propagated under the influence of the Franckistes, d’Indystes and Wagnerian circles, is now slowly fading away. The fierce intensity of the two short operas presented this season in Wexford, Thérèse and La Navarraise, will surely serve to rectify this blanket assessment of Massenet’s extremely diverse production.
There is no doubt that Massenet was a ladies’ man. The titles of almost half of his twenty-six operas consist only of female names: Hérodiade, Manon, Esclarmonde, Thaïs, La Navarraise, Sapho, Cendrillon, Grisélidis, Ariane, Thérèse, Cléopâtre. These works offer a wildly diverse gallery of feminine portraits, from the seductive and intimate to the tragic and grandiose. Before becoming the most prolific lyric composer of his time – and one of the most frequently performed – Massenet had been inspired by a trio of female religious figures to compose three oratorios which contributed to his early success in the 1870s: Marie-Madeleine, Eve Portrait of Massenet, drawing by Rudolf Lehmann. British Museum, London and La Vierge. a post he held until his death in 1912. During his lifetime his operas were produced all over Europe and the Americas, but after his death the majority of his works almost disappeared from the repertoire. Unsympathetic critics accused him of merely writing to please and seduce a female audience. ‘Massenet was a very popular figure in his day’, writes famed soprano Emma Calvé in her 1922
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Thérèse / La Navarraise
Even when he names an opera after a male character, a woman almost always steals the show. What aria in Le Cid is more famous than Chimène’s ‘Pleurez, pleurez mes yeux?’ The most complex and endearing character in Werther is Charlotte, and I would even go so far as to suggest that the Virgin Mary is the central character in Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, an opera set in a monastery with an all-male cast. The voice of Mary is never heard but the off-stage voices of