Jules Massenet

“ I received the official notice of my nomination as professor at the Conservatoire and I went to Paris. I would have hardly imagined that I had said good-by to my beloved house at Fontainebleau with no hope of seeing it again.
The life which had now begun for me transplanted my summers of work in the midst of quiet and peaceful solitude—those summers which I had passed so happily far from the noise and tumult of the city. If books have their destiny as the poet says (habent sua fata libelli) , does not each one of us follow a destiny which is just as certain and irrevocable? ”

“ I have departed from this planet and I have left behind my poor earthly ones with their occupations which are as many as they are useless; at last I am living in the scintillating splendor of the stars, each of which used to seem to me as large as millions of suns. Of old I was never able to get such lighting for my scenery on the great stage at the Opéra where the backdrops were too often in darkness. ”

“ How proud I was when I received my first notices of rehearsals and when I sat in the same place on the famous stage which had known Boïeldieu, Herold, M. Auber, Ambroise Thomas, Victor Massé, Gounod, Meyerbeer!...
I was about to learn an author's trials. But I was so happy in doing so!
A first work is the first cross of honor. A first love.
I had everything except the cross.
The first cast was: Marie Roze, in all the splendor of her youthful beauty and talent; Victor Capoul, the idol of the public; and Mlle. Girard, the spirited singer and actress, the delight of the Opéra-Comique. ”

“ In the foreground were orange, lemon, and olive trees; on the horizon the great rock rising out of the azure waves, and on the rock the old palace modernized by the Prince of Monaco.
In this quiet peaceful home—an exceptional thing for a hotel—in spite of the foreign families installed there, I was stirred to work. During my hours of freedom from rehearsals I busied myself in writing an overture for Roma. I had brought with me the eight hundred pages of orchestration in finished manuscript.
The second month of my stay at Monte Carlo I spent at the Palace of Monaco. ”

“ To my surprise I received a visit from M. Émile Réty the day after my return! He came from Ambroise Thomas to offer me the place of professor of counterpoint, fugue and composition at the Conservatoire to replace François Bazin who had died some months before. He advised me at the same time to become a candidate for the Académie des Beaux Arts as the election of a successor to Bazin was at hand.
What a contrast to the months of agreeable nonsense and applause in Italy! I thought that I was forgotten in France, whereas the truth was the direct opposite. ”

“ The staging of the windmill scene, so ingeniously invented by Raoul Gunsbourg, was more complicated at the Gaîté, although they kept the effect produced at Monte Carlo.
A change of horses, cleverly hidden from the audience, made them think that Don Quixote and the dummy were one and the same man!
Gunsbourg's inspiration in staging the fifth act was also a happy chance. Any artist, even though he is the first in the world, in a scene of agony wants to die lying on the ground. With a flash of genius Gunsbourg cried, "A knight should die standing!" ”

“ It is a fine thing to go to the theater, but it is an entirely different thing to be present at a performance and listen to it. So the evening of Thérèse I again took my accustomed place in the Prince's salon. Tapestries and doors separated it from the box. I was alone there in silence, at least I might expect to be.
Silence? The roar of applause which greeted our artists was so great that neither doors nor hangings could muffle it. ”

“ All too soon I had to leave her, for my joyous comrades awaited me in their carriage on the road of the Italian La Corniche. My tears turned to laughter. Such is youth!
Our first stop was at Loano about eight o'clock in the evening.
I have confessed that I was almost gay and this is true. Nevertheless I was a prey to indefinite thoughts; I felt myself almost a man, henceforth to be alone in life. I pondered over such thoughts, too reasonable perhaps for my years, while Italy's blossoming mimosas, lemon trees and myrtles threw around me their sweet disturbing odors. ”

“ Mme. de Nuovina at Brussels, and Mme. Verheyden and Mlle. Vuillaume at Lyons.
Notwithstanding all this, Esclarmonde remained the living memory of that rare and beautiful artiste whom I had chosen to create the rôle in Paris; it enabled her to make her name forever famous.
Sibyl Sanderson! I cannot remember that artiste without feeling deep emotion, cut down as she was in her full beauty, in the glorious bloom of her talent by pitiless Death. She was an ideal Manon at the Opéra-Comique, and a never to be forgotten Thaïs at the Opéra. ”

“ I always had the glorious good fortune to have as my interpreter of Sapho in Italy La Bellincioni, the Duse of opera. In 1911 she continued her triumphal career at the Opéra in Paris.
I have mentioned that Cavalieri was to create Thaïs in Milan. Sonzogno insisted strongly that I should let her see the part before I left. I remember the considerable success she had in the work—al teatro lirico of Milan. Her beauty, her admirable plasticity, the warmth and color of her voice, her passionate outbursts simply gripped the public which praised her to the skies. ”

“ M. Muratore, a grand opera tenor of superb appearance and generous voice, invested the rôle of Lentulus with a vigor and manly beauty which won all hearts, and which, in Paris as at Monte Carlo, will ensure him a brilliant and memorable triumph.
M. J. F. Delmas with his clear diction and lyrical declamation, which is so properly theatrical, was an incomparable Fabius and was no less applauded than his comrades from the Opéra, Muratore and Noté. The latter in fact was marvellous in the part of the slave Vestapor whose wild imprecations resounded to the utmost in his great sonorous baritone. ”

“ I was bound to be pleased at writing a work based on the great Corneille's masterpiece, the libretto due to the fellow workers I had had in the competition for the Imperial Opera, La Coup de roi de Thulé, in which, as I have said, I failed to win the first prize.
I learned the words by heart, as I always did. I wanted to have it constantly in my thoughts, without being compelled to keep the text in my pocket, so as to be able to work at it away from home, in the streets, in society, at dinner, at the theater, anywhere that I might find time. ”

“ I cannot think of Verdi without recalling that famous phrase of Nietzsche, who had come back from Wagnerism and had already turned against the composer: 'Music must be Mediterraneanized.' Certainly not all music. But to-day as the old master has departed, that glorious host of the Doria palace, from which each winter his deep gaze soared over the azure of the Ligurian sea, one may well ask who is to preserve the rights and influence of the Mediterranean in music? ”

“ Mme. Viardot took a lively interest in the reading. She followed it like an artist well acquainted with the composition. She was a marvellous singer and lyric tragedienne and more than an artist; she was a great musician, a woman marvellously endowed and altogether unusual.
On the eleventh of April the Odéon received the public which always attends dress rehearsals and first nights. The theater opened its doors to All Paris, always the same hundred persons who think it the most desirable privilege in the world to be present at a rehearsal or a first night. ”

“ So Ariane was finished. My illustrious friend, Jules Claretie, learned of this and recalled to me the promise I had made him of writing Thérèse, a lyric drama in three acts. He added:
"The work will be short, for the emotion it lets loose cannot be prolonged."
I went to work on it, but I will deal with that presently.
I have alluded to the pleasure I felt at every rehearsal at the constant happy discoveries in scenery or in feeling. Ah, with what constantly alert and devoted intelligence our artists followed the precious advice of Gailhard! ”

“ But if I accuse myself, it is to excuse myself—for leaving the piano so often to get a bite at a table laden with exquisite food spread out on a plentiful buffet in the same foyer. Every time I got up, the artists stopped me as if to say, "Have pity.... Keep on.... Continue.... Don't stop again." I ate almost all the food which had been prepared for us all. The artists were so much pleased that they thought more of embracing me than of eating. Why should I complain?
I lived at the Hotel de la Poste, Rue Fossé-aux-Loups, beside the theater. ”

“ This city of the popes, the terre papale, as Rabelais called it, attracted me almost as much as that other city of the popes, ancient Rome.
We lived at the excellent Hotel de l'Europe, Place Grillon. Our hosts, M. and Mme. Ville, were worthy and obliging persons and were full of attention for us. That was imperative for I needed quiet to write La Navarraise, the act which Jules Claretie had entrusted to me and my new librettist Henri Cain.
Every evening at five o'clock our hosts, who had forbidden our door all day with jealous care, served us a delicious lunch. ”

“ When such voices occur, it is fortunate that they have the theater in which to display themselves; the world is their domain. I ought to say that I had recognized in that future artiste, together with the rarity of that organ, intelligence, a flame, a personality which were reflected luminously in her admirable face. All these qualities are of first importance on the stage.
The next morning I hurried to my publisher's to tell him about the enthusiasm I had felt the previous evening.
I found Hartmann preoccupied. "It concerns an artist, right enough," he said. ”

“ The answer I received was so poetically turned that I can never forget it, "Sono le sette, l'aria ne treme ancor!..."
"It is seven o'clock. The air still trembles from the sound."
I left Florence to continue my trip by the way of Pisa.
Pisa seemed to me as depopulated as if it had been swept by the plague. When one considers that in the Middle Ages it was a rival of Genoa, Florence, and Venice, one feels puzzled by the comparative desolation that envelops it. ”

“ Ambroise Thomas introduced me to wealthy friends who gave famous musical evening entertainments. I saw there for the first time Léo Delibes, whose ballet La Source had already won him a great reputation at the Opéra. I saw him direct a delightful chorus sung by fashionable ladies and I whispered to myself, "I, too, will write a chorus. And it will be sung." Indeed it was, but by four hundred male voices. I had won the first prize in the Ville de Paris competition. ”

“ But for our part what an inspiring joy it is to write works and parts for artists who realize our very dreams!
It is in gratitude that in speaking of Esclarmonde I dedicate these lines to her. The many people who came to Paris from all parts of the world in 1889 have also kept their memories of the artiste who was their joy and who had so delighted them.
A large, silent, meditative crowd gathered at the passing of the cortège which bore Sibyl Sanderson to her last resting place. A veil of sorrow seemed to be over them all.
Albert Carré and I followed the coffin. ”

“ I admired him and loved him deeply. It seems to me that our work together is not finished, but that some day we shall be able to take it up again in that mysterious realm whither we go but from which none ever returns.
I was entirely led astray by the silence which followed the sending of my letter and I was going to abandon the project of writing Roma, when a master poet came into my life. He offered me five acts—Ariane—for the Opéra, as I have said already.
Five years later, in 1907, my friend Henri Cain asked me if I intended to resume my faithful collaboration with him. ”

“ My wife has just put Marie Magdeleine under lock and key!
That detail is eloquent, is it not?
The devil! You've become singularly disturbing.
As to that, believe me that no one is more sincere in his admiration and in his affection than your,
BIZET.
That is the testimony of my excellent comrade and affectionate friend, George Bizet—a friend and comrade who would have remained steadfast had not blind destiny torn him from us in the full bloom of his prodigious and marvelous talent. ”

“ Here I had still more remarkable artists: the tenor Barbaccini, the baritone Kashmann, both singers of great merit; then Signorina Mariani, an admirable singer and tragedienne, and her younger sister who was equally charming. M. Giacovacci, the director at the Apollo, was a strange old fellow, very amusing and gay, especially when he recalled the first performance of The Barber of Seville at the Argentine Theater in the days of his youth. He drew a most interesting picture of the young Rossini and his vivacity and charm. ”