Le jongleur de Notre Dame may have been conceived initially for performance at the Opéra Comique in Paris. At the time, Massenet was the most frequently performed of French opera composers. Yet he had begun to have tensions with both its general administrator, Albert Carré (see Fig. 1.59), and its music director, André Messager (see Fig. 1.60).
thought to have been typically feminine. These types of rectitude were embodied in the Virgin, namely, chastity and humility. She was positioned perfectly to supply a quality understandably deficient in him, which is to say, maternal forgiveness.
Fig. 1.59 Albert Carré. Photograph by
Nadar, 1900. Fig. 1.60 André Messager, age 68.
Photograph by Agence Meurisse, 1921, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Messager_
Andr%C3%A9_compositeur_1921.jpg
Owing to the falling out, the musical drama about the medieval minstrel became the first of more than a half dozen operas by the French musician to premiere in the opera house of Monte Carlo. The setting may seem incongruous: the jongleur who gives up all his worldly possessions belts out his heart in the gambling capital of Europe, nowadays known to mass audiences mostly as a stylishly louche location that recurs in James Bond novels and movies. The place evokes not monasteries and their trappings but roulette wheels, gambling chips, croupier’s rakes, and card tables covered in green baize.
Although now at best a dark horse, Le jongleur de Notre Dame has a right to be rated as one of the greatest triumphs in music from the earliest years of the twentieth century. Massenet’s abandonment of Paris was a thumping coup for the Principality of Monaco, a tiny enclave at the eastern extremity of the French Riviera. Thanks to his ties with the head of the opera house and with Prince Albert I, the premiere of the opera about the jongleur began a stretch during which Monte Carlo was for the composer what Bayreuth had been and remains even today for Wagner.
Imagine the opening night, the air thick with anticipation that did not turn to ashes in anyone’s mouth. Notwithstanding the extreme mismatch between the content and the nature of the setting, the opera was a rousing success from its first night on
February 18, 1902. Not a sour note was to be heard. Afterward, the audience raised the roof. The elegant crowd broke into one standing ovation after another for the composer. We can picture the ladies in their best gowns, and the men in true top form, in top hats or stovepipe ones, topcoats, starched shirts, studs and cufflinks, and tails.
The diapason of thunderous applause, shouts of the French equivalents of “hooray”
and “huzzah,” and calls of “Bravo, bravo!” culminated when Prince Albert mounted the stage. The ruler went beyond just felicitating Massenet to pin on his chest the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Charles, the second most prestigious honor that the constitutional monarchy could award, amid the spectators’ deafening whoops of
“Long live the Prince!” and “Vive Massenet!”
The venue was the Salle Garnier, as the house was known (see Fig. 1.61). The six hundred–seat theater, formally named the Orchestre national de l’Opéra de Monte-Carlo, became a pivot point in the campaign to peddle Monaco as a cultural center (see Fig. 1.62).
Fig. 1.61 Auditorium and stage of the Salle Garnier, Monaco. Photograph by Jean Gilletta, ca.
1879, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monte_Carlo_Casino_theatre_interior_1878-79_-_
Leniaud_2003_p78.jpg
Fig. 1.62 Advertisement for Monte-Carlo, Monaco from the French railway company PLM.
Lithograph by Alphonse Mucha, 1897.
Le jongleur de Notre Dame was performed relatively early in a golden age for the Opéra.
During an extraordinarily long and accomplished directorship, Raoul Gunsbourg had charge of the house from 1893 to 1951 (see Fig. 1.63). Memory of its salad days has lingered in Monaco even to the present day. The image remains of men in tails or dinner jackets and top hats, women in frilly evening dresses that make a froufrou whenever they move. Nearly eighty years later, the heyday was even memorialized for philatelists (see Fig. 1.64). A multicolored, one-franc postage stamp suggests how the narrative as recounted in the opera fuses the story of the tumbler with other tales of jongleurs. Massenet’s leading man is depicted with a vielle in hand, like the performers in the story of Petrus Iverni of Rocamadour or the miracle of the Holy Candle of Arras.
Fig. 1.63 Raoul Gunsbourg. Engraving by Henri Brauer, 1913.
Fig. 1.64 Detail of first day cover envelope with detail of postage stamp of the juggler before the Virgin (Monaco, 1979).
The account of the juggler has been given musical expression many times since, but this opéra comique has been without doubt the most enduring. At no time was it rated more glowingly than in the twentieth-century half of the belle époque, from 1890 to 1914, which followed its opening night in Monaco. The musician’s career framed the Third Republic, and he himself epitomized the era. Le jongleur de Notre Dame may be seen as emblematic of the medievalizing trend that formed one major strain of the times. In 1921, the hanger-on and self-proclaimed “disciple” Raymond de Rigné published often fantastic and always fawning recollections of Massenet, commencing his hagiography with an anecdote about a supposed intimate whose comrades had vaunted this
“miracle” above the composer’s other operas. The (possibly imaginary) friend was himself overcome by the same musical drama, commenting over-appreciatively:
I heard then Le jongleur!… That day I communed with the soul of the French who had raised our cathedrals and Sainte-Chapelle: I regained the soul of my race, the precise, measured, concise, and limitless soul.
In experiencing the performance, this sycophant sounds chords of rapturous atavism which are in their own way reminiscent of Henry Adams’s writing on Norman cathedrals.
After premiering in a few other European cities, Le jongleur de Notre Dame was put on belatedly in Paris for the first time on May 10, 1904 in the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique (see Figs. 1.65 and 1.66).
Fig. 1.65 Postcard of the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique (Paris, early twentieth century).
Fig. 1.66 Singing monks in Massenet’s Le jongleur de Notre-Dame. Photograph by Henri Manuel, 1904. Published in Louis Schneider, Massenet: L’homme — le musicien. Illustrations et documents
inédits (Paris: L. Carteret, 1908), 254.
Adolphe Maréchal reprised the role of Jean. No recordings were made of the original performances, but we can hear later ones of both Maréchal as Jean and Lucien Fugère (who created the role in Paris) as Boniface. In 1904, the piece was presented forty-five times after its opening night, more than other such famous musical dramas of the period as Georges Bizet’s Carmen, Gustave Charpentier’s Louise, or Massenet’s own Manon. For Catholics, the year was an especially good one for the opera. It marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1854 papal bull Ineffabilis Deus, in which Pope Pius IX defined and proclaimed the doctrine of the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception. Even the month of November had a strong formal association with Mary in the Church. Within less than a decade after opening in Monaco, Le jongleur de Notre Dame had been staged on four continents. It would carry the story worldwide, corroborating and extending the impact of Anatole France’s story. The juggler went global, and the globalization had commercial aspects.