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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the business and politics of French opera in the late 20th century. It describes government subsidies received by the two main Parisian houses: the Académie nationale de musique (the Opéra) and the Théâtre national de l'Opéra-Comique. It argues that at the fin de siècle, the stakes in value judgement, and the potential to touch deep-seated anxieties were particularly high at the Opéra because a fading court culture was mapped onto an institution heavily subsidized by a State which, however slowly, was reconfiguring both the remaining vestiges of the ancien régime and the more recent hegemony of the grande bourgeoisie. Richard Wagner, the composer around whom the stakes were the highest at both houses, is discussed.

This chapter focuses on d'Indy's opera, Fervaal. D'Indy's friends tried to flag Fervaal as a monument, the most significant French opera of its day. D'Indy's publisher Durand put out a compilation of press reviews shortly after the première, systematically removing negative comments to enhance its celebratory effect. It is argued that although d'Indy regularly vilified the commercialism surrounding the operas of a composer such as Massenet, Durand had business concerns from which even Fervaal could not escape.

This chapter focuses on Saint-SaËns's opera, Henry VIII. It is argued that Henry VIII became the composer's second most popular operatic work but its appearances at the Opéra were sporadic until 1917, when it fell from the repertory. Rejuvenation of grand opera through a synthesis of leitmotif and a melodic style indebted to Gounod became understood in many quarters as merely another manifestation of eclecticism.

This chapter focuses on Alfred Bruneau and Émile Zola. Bruneau was known as a musical progressive in his work as a music critic for Gil-Bias and Le Figaro and in his compositions. His orchestral pieces and songs were heard at the Colonne and Lamoureux concert series as well as at the Société nationale. Émile Zola was a political columnist who lambasted the Catholic-royalist proponents of Moral Order in the early days of the republic; an essayist who defended Impressionist painters at the first hour in 1866; a literary critic who urged writers to ‘observe and experiment’; and a novelist who created a sensation in 1877 through the unprecedented graphic description of (in his own words) ‘the authentic smell of the people’ in L'Assommoir. It is argued that Zola and Bruneau ostensibly attempted to build a healthy French order upon the legacy of Wagner. Ironically, despite widely divergent political and patriotic agendas, they shared some territory in this respect with the d'Indy of Fervaal.

This chapter analyzes Reyer's Sigurd. It argues that among the dramaturgical issues that arose in the genesis of Sigurd (and, as it turned out, in the reception of the opera twenty years later) was the relative role assigned to magic in the context of a tradition that demanded theatrical clarity and logical human motivation. Reyer's orientation towards musical organization weakened the foundation of grand opera to a greater degree than operas by Saint-SaËns and Massenet, which were tilted somewhat more towards traditional models and a synthesis between new and old.

This chapter analyzes Chausson's opera, Le Roi Arthus. It argues that Le Roi Arthus was not Chausson's first artistic contact with an Arthurian subject. It then considers the Arthurian sources Chausson used for his opera.

This chapter focuses on Gustave Charpentier's opera, Louise. It is argued that Louise was in many ways consonant with Charpentier's project of creating art readable by the masses. His very points were that father—daughter tensions can be played out in all classes of society, that myth does not bypass the urban poor, that working-class argot could be a viable operatic discourse, and that anarchist rhetoric was critically evaluated among the lower classes.

This chapter focuses on Jules Massenet's rise to pre-eminence in French operatic culture. It cites the role of his teacher, Ambroise Thomas, who assumed a position of great influence by his appointment as director of the Conservatoire in 1871. It argues that in addition to obvious musical craft and facility, sheer industry also carried Massenet a long way. Massenet's various works are considered.

This chapter focuses on Massenet's continued popularity following the opening of Esclarmonde. Massenet's success and creative powers seemed to reach a new level in the early 1890s. The brilliant 1891 reprise of Manon at the Opéra-Comique and the Vienna première of Werther formed a backdrop to the composers preoccupation with a new vehicle for Sanderson. That opera would be ThaÏs, which, together with Werther, ranks as Massenet's strongest work. ThaÏs is based on Anatole France's eponymous novel, serialized in La Revue des deux mondes in 1889.

This chapter focuses on Emmanuel Chabrier. It is shown that Chabrier may be considered among the ‘conquered’, not only by Tristan and Isolde but by Wagner's entire operatic oeuvre. The 1880 Munich Tristan seems to have been a pivotal moment in Chabrier's life because shortly after returning to Paris, he left his job at the Ministry to become a career musician. The road to the production of his opera, Gwendoline, is discussed.

This chapter focuses on the opera, L'Attaque du Moulin. L'Attaque du Moulin was first published in 1880 as the lead-off novella to Les Soirées de Médan, an anthology of war stories by a group of young writers, including Maupassant, who had gathered around the naturalist banner — metaphorically and even almost literally, since Médan was the location of Zola's country home. It is argued that L'Attaque strikes a more precarious balance between symbol and strong melodramatic situations than either Le RÊve or Messidor. The allegory is more thoroughgoing in the latter, with its foundation that groans under the weight of a massive collection of symbolic leitmotifs.

This chapter focuses on Massenet's ThaÏs. According to Louis Gallet's preface to the first edition of the ThaÏs libretto, Massenet made an exceptional request when they started the project: he asked for a prose libretto. The composer thereby threw his hat into the ring of a polemic that attracted enough attention in the press at the fin de siècle to warrant an overview of the main positions here; text setting, moreover, inevitably had implications for the definition of national musical territory.

This chapter focuses on Pierre Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys. In the mid-1870s, Lalo took up Édouard Blau's libretto about the mysterious flooding of the medieval Breton city of Ys (Is). He advanced with circumspection, drafting the entire opera in 1875 but then mainly orchestrating it piecemeal as opportunities for extract performances at concert societies presented themselves in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Le Roi d'Ys earned wild applause at its première on 7 May 1888, and the first 100 performances occurred within a little over a year. At age sixty-five, Lalo finally achieved an operatic triumph.

This chapter focuses on Massenet's Werther. It argues that Werther exhibits a remarkable blend of stageworthiness and fidelity to the epistolary antecedent, including borrowings of many of Goethe's expressions. In its final form, the work follows the events of its model more closely than any of Massenet's previous operas, including Manon. A substantial distortion of Goethe at the end has cast a long enough shadow to obscure this fact for many critics since the première. Whereas in the novel Werther dies alone, in the opera Charlotte rushes into his room for a final heart-wrenching duet after the suicidal gunshot: David Garrick's version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, as well as Gounod's operatic adaptation, are revisited.

This chapter focuses on Saint-SaËns's opera, Samson et Dalila. Relatively early on the composer had a premonition that this opera would be his finest accomplishment in the theatre. Like Massenet, he sought to achieve musical and dramatic continuity across operatic acts, as well as a marriage between developmental techniques and number opera with voice-dominated, cantabile phrases. In this respect, the second act is a remarkable achievement: the imbrication of the symphonic-developmental and number-operatic is particularly tight and worked out with cogent dramatic effect. It is among the most successful examples of this synthesis in the fin-de-siècle repertory, all the more striking because of its early date of composition and a relatively limited use of leitmotifs in the opera as a whole.

This chapter focuses on Chabrier's Gwendoline. It is shown that because Gwendoline appeared to lean towards the avant-garde when it was conceived and drafted in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Chabrier at first appeared to elbow Saint-SaËns and the pre-Manon Massenet on the front lines. However, by the 1886 Monnaie première mainstream critical opinion — as well as the composer's self-image — placed him in a more progressive position than either of those two figures. At the same time, from the Symbolist corner Édouard Dujardin's short review of Gwendoline in the Revue wagnérienne sounded a note of impatience by remarking that one-half the opera was given over to conventional number types; the other half was a more sustained effort truly to communicate, ‘a poor attempt for anyone who remembers twenty bars of Parsifal or the Missa Solemnis’, but nonetheless it presented a brave face in the context of the general decrepitude of French operatic culture. Fourcaud praised Chabrier's independence of spirit and detected some passages that evoked Wagner. Unfortunately, others reminded him of Gounod.

This chapter focuses on American soprano, Sibyl Sanderson. By the beginning of 1884 Massenet's pre-eminence on the French operatic stage was established. Manon drew well after its premiere on 19 January. Less than two weeks later, Hérodiade appeared in Paris for the first time during a season organized by the singer-impresario Victor Maurel at the Théâtre-Italien. However, the Hérodiade performances soon became smothered by a contract dispute between Fidès Devriès, the Salomé of the production, and Maurel. Manon was given seventy-eight times at the Opéra-Comique in 1884, but then disappeared long enough for Massenet to refer to performances in the late autumn of 1885 as a ‘reprise’ in a letter to Philippe Gille. Marie Heilbronn sang the title role ten more times at the house before the end of the year and then left for vacation. She died suddenly on 31 March 1886, after a brief illness, and Manon promptly fell from Opéra-Comique playbills. It took a performer of real star status to resurrect the work in Paris — American soprano Sibyl Sanderson — whom Massenet prided himself in his memoirs on having discovered at a musical soirée in 1887.