The composer has captured the simple, naïve, eminently spiritual feeling of those times and the result is a delicately beautiful work of art.
The tale of Le jongleur de Notre Dame entered the medium of music as an opera by way not of Wagner but of an archetypical French composer, Jules Massenet (see Fig. 1.15).
Fig. 1.15 Jules Massenet. Photograph from A Gallery of Music Masters (New York: Irving Squire, 1908).
What can we say about this musician from France? First, he was prolific. To his credit he had hundreds of songs, a substantial oeuvre of orchestral, chamber, and solo music, and four oratorios. Despite all this bounty, his reputation rested already then, as it does to this day, on his musical dramas. Massenet rated as the foremost figure in the grand opera for which his nation was famous in the late nineteenth century. In this capacity, he catered to the elite of his day. He made his name on the basis of such works as Hérodiade (1881), Manon (1884), Werther (1892), and Thaïs (1894). Musical dramas of these kinds afforded his audiences opportunities to retreat from the sometimes grim and unnerving modernity that surrounded them in real life, offering them fantasy masquerades that often relied on heavy doses of saccharine medievalism. The world around him was littered with signs of the breakdowns to come. All over the place it showed glints of anarchy, communism, and other forms of social change. Yet the
creator of our work was anything but a revolutionary. Rather, he was a centrist who sought to deliver entertainment to as much of the status quo as calculated tact allowed him to seduce. Though often an artist of greater charm than genius, by the premiere of Le jongleur de Notre Dame (1902) he was a cultural force to be reckoned with—often criticized and caricatured but never ignored (see Fig. 1.16).
Through music, Massenet achieved a similar status in the belle époque of French culture to that which Gaston Paris and Anatole France attained in scholarship and belles lettres, respectively. The songwriter was born in 1842, the philologist in 1839, and the writer in 1844. Just as Paris and France were inducted into the French Academy, the musician was accorded membership, over his fellow composer Saint-Saëns, in the Academy of Fine Arts. At the point of his election in 1878, he was the youngest person to have received this honor. Eventually he even served as president of the institution.
Nor was his mere succès d’estime: his acclaim did not come only from cognoscenti of music. On the contrary, for decades he exercised a near monopoly over the Parisian opera houses through the mass appeal of his creations.
Fig. 1.16 Caricature of Jules Massenet. Illustration by Aroun-al-Rascid [Umberto Brunelleschi], 1902. Published in L’Assiette au beurre (September 1902).
Le jongleur de Notre Dame was neither Massenet’s first nor last venture into romantic material inspired by the Middle Ages. Although known best for his musical dramas Manon and Werther, both set in the eighteenth century, his oeuvre in fact encompasses a substantial subset that belongs to the fin-de-siècle, medievalizing revival in music and literature as in architecture. The chapter of his autobiography that deals with
the opera about the jongleur and related ones set in the same era is entitled “In the Midst of the Middle Ages.” By this phrase the composer meant mainly that at this point in his life he had immersed himself in librettos with stories set in the medieval period. At the same moment, he alluded to his sporadic attempts to play upon what he understood of the oldest music in Europe to which surviving notation allowed real access, especially plainchant.
Seen in the rearview mirror, “The Virgin” can be interpreted as having taken a first step in this direction. An oratorio-like composition with a French libretto, this recounting of the Virgin’s life and afterlife was performed first at the Paris opera in 1880. Its four acts proceed from the Annunciation, through the Marriage at Cana and Good Friday, to the Assumption. Its score bore the impression of a lily. Effectively Mary’s logo, the floral symbol associated with her signaled implicitly, or at least not overtly, the topic of this sacred legend (see Fig. 1.17).
Massenet set four operas explicitly in the Middle Ages. Le Cid had its first night in 1885, Esclarmonde in 1889, Grisélidis in 1901, and Le jongleur de Notre Dame in 1902.
To them could be added Panurge, which was not staged until 1913, nearly a year after the composer’s death. All these musical dramas deserve at least a glance, if we are to situate Le jongleur de Notre Dame in its context within the musician’s oeuvre.
Together, the fivesome amounted to a brand that could be called Massenet medieval or medievalesque Massenet.
The earliest of the handful, the four-act Le Cid, has a libretto in French. The text is based upon the classic five-act tragicomedy by the seventeenth-century tragedian Pierre Corneille. Massenet’s story unfolds within what might be called anachronistically a
“clash of civilizations” in medieval Spain between Christians and Muslims (see Fig.
1.18). The composer calls the adherents of Islam by the now-discarded term Moors.
In the backdrop to the production, architecture evocative of the Middle Ages, both Romanesque and Gothic, signals Westernness and Christianity.
The story of Massenet’s 1889 Esclarmonde centers upon the eponymous Byzantine empress and sorceress. The opera is enacted in a fantasy world where Byzantine meets medieval—or East meets West (see Fig. 1.19). The prologue, first act, and epilogue take place in Constantinople, while the third and fourth acts play out in France. The title character falls in love with a French knight from Blois named Roland who visits Byzantium. She has been enjoined to remain veiled until she turns twenty, when her husband will be selected through a tournament. Upon hearing that her beloved is on the cusp of marrying, she has him whisked away by sorcery to an island. There she becomes his wife in all but name, with the proviso that he not ask her identity or see her face. After one night together, Esclarmonde returns Roland to his native city to save it from being overrun. When she joins him there after his victory, the archbishop discovers the arrangement between the two of them. Thinking her to be a demon, he exorcises her. After further complications, Roland triumphs in the competition that enables him to marry the heroine openly.
Fig. 1.17 Title page of Charles Grandmougin and Jules Massenet, La Vierge: Légende sacrée en quatre scènes (Paris: Ménestrel, Heugel, 1880).
Fig. 1.18 Boabdil the Moor declares war against the king of Castille in Act 2, Scene 4, of Jules Massenet’s Le Cid. Engraving by Émile Bayard, 1885. Published in L’Illustration (December 5, 1885),
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jules_Massenet_-_Le_Cid_2e_Acte,_4e_Tableau_-_L%27Illustration.jpg
Fig. 1.19 Title page of score for Alfred Blau, Louis de Gramont, and Jules Massenet, Esclarmonde:
Opéra romanesque, illustration by Eugène Grasset (Paris: G. Hartmann, 1889).
For the narrative, the librettists drew upon two medieval French poems. One was the romance Partonopeus de Blois from the last third of the twelfth century, the other the early thirteenth-century chanson de geste or epic entitled Huon de Bordeaux. During the tumult of the Paris Commune that began in mid-March of 1871, one of the writers is said to have taken refuge in the library of Blois. There he chanced upon a copy of Partonopeus. Thus, this musical drama too owes its roots to the turn to the Middle Ages—more complex than simply a retreat into them—that followed close behind the Franco-Prussian War. Massenet’s Esclarmonde was uniquely positioned to have broad impact, and its composer was singled out officially for being a prodigy in the genre, since it was the only opera to premiere during the Universal Exposition of 1889. Its opening night was the very date on which the French President Sadi Carnot presided over the ribbon-cutting for the Eiffel Tower. Like all the rest of the fair, it was intended to showcase before the world the achievements of France on the centenary of the revolution.
Around 1900, Massenet composed Grisélidis, a so-called lyric tale (French conte lyrique) comprising a prologue and three acts. The ultimate source was the story of patient Griselda (see Fig. 1.20). The account of the browbeating and bullying inflicted upon this young woman is best known to Anglo-American audiences through its appearance in “The Clerk’s Tale,” one of the Canterbury Tales. For all the importance of Chaucer in the English-speaking world, the libretto adheres in large measure instead to an internationally more influential source: the narrative as related in the Italian prose of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. In almost all versions, the tale focuses upon the progressively more bestial ordeals that the noble husband metes out to his long-suffering wife to test her loyalty oath. Among various changes, the librettists of the French opera set the events in fourteenth-century Provence. For extra measure, they also added a demon as a tempter. In Massenet’s version, Griselda’s spouse makes a wager with the Prince of Darkness that his better half will remain faithful to him while he squares off against the Saracens, as medieval Christians often designated Muslims, especially Arabs. While the husband is absent, the malevolent spirit makes many fruitless efforts to seduce the nobleman’s wife. Old Nick, looking like a member of a Blue Man Group who has been run through a vacuum cleaner bag, steals the show with an attitude that qualifies as (and this cannot be open to question) devil-may-care (see Fig. 1.21).
Later would come the posthumously staged Amadis. The text reveals its broader context within the medievalizing vogue at the turn of the century by explicitly citing the Pre-Raphaelite British painter Edward Burne-Jones in describing various images (see Fig. 1.22). This musical drama was first performed in Monte Carlo in 1922, nearly a decade after Massenet’s death. The composer had begun to work on it far earlier, and he may have done the bulk of the composition immediately after writing the musical drama of concern to us. If so, Grisélidis, Le jongleur de Notre Dame, and Amadis would
have constituted in effect a triptych of medievalesque operas, all composed in the first two years or so of the twentieth century. The text of Amadis tells a story based on a Spanish chivalric romance (see Fig. 1.23).
Fig. 1.20 Poster for “Grisélidis: Conte lyrique, par Armand Silvestre et Eugène Morand; Musique de Massenet.” Color lithograph on linen after original by François Flameng, 1901.
Fig. 1.21 Lucien Fugère as the Devil in Jules Massenet’s Grisélidis.
Photograph by Cautin et Berger, 1901.
Fig. 1.22 Edward Burne-Jones, Love among the Ruins, 1873. Watercolor, 96.5 × 152.4 cm. Private collection, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burne-jones-love-among-the-ruins.jpg
Fig. 1.23 Title page of Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, Los quatro libros del virtuoso cavallero Amadís de Gaula (Caragoça [Saragossa]: George Coci Aleman, 1508).
Although the earliest extant form of the original is an edition published in 1508, tales related to the medieval one were recounted and recorded already at the latest by the mid-fourteenth century. As told in the libretto, the narrative, set in Brittany, revolves around the brothers Amadis and Galaor. Separated at birth, they end up dueling over a princess before they recognize each other. Galaor dies before his sibling, now an unwitting fratricide, can piece together that he has fatally wounded his own sibling.
Massenet, seeking an encore of the triumph he had experienced with dramas based on medieval material, had in the wings a second medievalesque opera, set in the fourteenth century as Grisélidis had been. The composer apparently trusted that his creation would be a success, since he had the vocal score of Le jongleur de Notre Dame engraved even before the musical drama was accepted for performance. The publishing house belonged to Henri Heugel, who mediated to bring about a meeting of the minds between Massenet and Albert I of Monaco. In fact, Heugel’s home in Paris provided the venue for a crucial tryout of the work before the Prince. Since acceding to
the throne in 1889, the ruler of the principality had been an enterprising benefactor of the arts and sciences. On June 15, 1901, the Romanian-born Raoul Gunsbourg, director of the Opera of Monte Carlo, clinched the deal by signing a contract with Heugel for the composition. For his pains, Massenet received a tidy sum, and the publisher soon printed the score. Purely by chance, the name of the press, going back to 1842, means in French “The Minstrel.”
An unidentified artist designed a title page in an agreeable Gothicizing style, with elaborate floriation. Within a quatrefoil, he framed the Virgin. Our Lady wears a blue and gold head cloth and is crowned with a nimbus, all against a golden background (see Fig. 1.24).
Fig. 1.24 Title page of piano-vocal score for Maurice Léna and Jules Massenet, Le jongleur de Notre-Dame: Miracle en trois actes (Paris: Heugel, 1906).
The illustrator indulged in a slight sappiness that verges on kitschiness. For all that, the depiction of Mary evidenced a sensitivity to and understanding of medieval art and iconography. The Middle Ages, especially as monumentalized in missals and other such manuscripts that the late nineteenth century treasured, matched musical drama well. Both codices and operas were multifarious, multifunctional, and multimedia, with the verbal, visual, and musical all melding within them. Thus, Heugel’s decision to appropriate all the characteristic fixed features and fine flourishes of a handwritten book from six or seven centuries earlier in presenting a medievalesque opera was not a matter of chance. Rather, it acknowledged a bona fide correspondence between the two media. Not by accident did Gothic revivalism intersect with the Golden Age of opera: drama set to music constituted an ideal form of art in which to bring parchment to life.