As you walk around the Cité des Sciences and the Cité de la Musique, you will notice the graffiti crying out for God and justice where others have scrawled the signs of racial hatred. It is remarkable how much remains of the old district of La Villette.
9
OPÉRA
LINE 7 RUNS STRAIGHT to the Opera. While Châtelet -Les Halles is incontestably the central point of Paris, Haussmann's exercise of drawing straight lines through the western sections of the capital did create at the Opéra what many consider the most striking crossroads in town. The Avenue de l'Opera, opened in 1870, created a direct link between the Louvre and the grands boulevards, behind which was struck the westward extension of the Rue Réaumur, justly named Boulevard Hauss-mann, where Paris's main department stores grew up. From the doorway of Brentano's bookshop on Avenue de l'Opera, as Andrew Hussey remarks, one gets a fine view of "the 'Second Empire' at work in all its monumental and strangely impressive vulgarity" Zola would have agreed that the Opéra district was as magnificent as it was inhuman, a land of pleasures for the fat bourgeoisie. And that was precisely what the Opera's architect, Charles Gamier, intended. "Let your eyes rejoice at the golden rays, your soul warm itself to the vibrations of colour," he wrote with the same pomposity as he built. "Mesdames, you will appear at the Opéra with shoulders naked, diamonds around the neck and silk about the body!" Garnier's Opéra house boasts of being the largest theatre in the world and it still draws a gasp from a visitor emerging for the first time from Metrostop No. 9.
Most Parisians, when they hear the word "Opera," think of this huge square with its imperial boulevards stretching out in every direction. Folk memory has a lot to do with this. It was here that the wildest celebrations at the end of the First World War occurred—Marthe Chenal, wrapped in a tricolour flag, sang the Marseillaise from the Opéra steps while searchlights in red, white and blue scanned the ground, buildings and roofs. Picnic tables were laid out on the same square for a somewhat soberer celebration on 8 May 1945. Strictly speaking, however, the term "Opera" refers not to a place but to the troupe of performers whose origin goes back to the seventeenth century The same confusion is made over the term "Opera Comique" which most people would identify as the lusciously gaudy building a short way up the Boulevard des Ca-pucines on Rue Favart. The "Opera Comique" was a troupe of entertainers founded in 1714 to perform pantomimes and parodies of opera. Bear in mind, however, that all "comique" means in this context is French Opéra with spoken dialogue—it can include the most tragic plots, such as Bizet's Carmen.
It is worth taking that stroll up the Boulevard des Capucines from the Opéra to the Opéra Comique. The subsidiary industry to music was, of course, restaurants—a hundred years ago the restaurants straddling this boulevard were the most famous and expensive in town, such as Tortoni's, the café Hardy or the café Riche next door. "Ilfaut être bien riche pour dÎner chez Hardy et bien hardi pour dÎner chez Riche," one used to say in the last decades of the nineteenth century—"You have to be rich to dine at Hardy's and hardy to dine at Riche's." Hardiness was not, on the other hand, the principal quality of the directors of the Opera. Over the last decades of the nineteenth century the repertoire for Garnier's bare-shouldered ladies consisted of no more than a dozen operas, four of them being by Giacomo Meyerbeer—Les Huguenots, Le Prophète, L'Africaine and Robert le diable. Mozart's Don Giovanni made it to the top, as did Carl Maria von Weber's Freischütz. But La Favorite could scarcely be considered Donizetti's best opera. And it is a rare Opéra house today which will risk a performance of Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet. In 1887 a frustrated subscriber wrote to the directors: "I shall not be subscribing again. Last winter I swallowed twelve performances of Patrie on Fridays, and I need a rest."
The Opéra Comique was altogether different. Its directors were a good deal more sympathetic to the wild fantasies of composers: they took risks. One of the most famous flops at the Opéra Comique was Bizet's Carmen, which was booed off the stage at its premiere in 1875. Poor Bizet died without ever knowing that he had composed the world's best known opera. Eight years later the Opéra Comique reinstalled Carmen on its winter programme. By 1891 over 400 performances had graced its stage—"the best box on the ears the critics have had," noted Claude Debussy, a composer destined to create, within eleven years, another scandal on the stage of the Opéra Comique.
Some of the greatest battles over Opéra during those years were due to Richard Wagner. It is difficult today to understand the total hold Wagner operas had at the time on the imagination of artists—not just Opéra fanatics, but also poets, painters, novelists, playwrights, creative people of all persuasions. Pilgrimages to Bayreuth, Wagner's Bavarian home, were organized from every corner of Europe. Wagner had created a new religion. But the great paradox was that, in Paris, Wagner was rarely performed. In 1861 the Opera—then housed in a plain, neoclassical edifice on Rue Le Peletier—put on a performance of Tannhäuser: the harangue of the critics assured that it would not be played again in the French capital for another generation. In May 1887 Charles Lamoureux, a conductor who had launched six years earlier a highly successful series of concerts (the Orchestre Lamoureux is still very active today), organized ten performances of Lohengrin at the Eden Theatre; a riot on the first night put a prompt end to that. Wagner lovers in Paris were reduced to listening to private solo performances accompanied by two pianos or—as in the case of Debussy—reading in silence the orchestral scores, stupefied by their brilliance. They could also, again like Debussy, take the crowded train to Bayreuth.
How could a young composer break out of this operatic world so dominated, despite the popular censure, by this god, Richard Wagner?
It was Claude Debussy who broke the spell with his opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, which premiered on the stage of the Opéra Comique at the end of April 1902. It was, by all accounts, one of the greatest events in the history of opera.
But the first few days of Pelle'as's life on stage were rough. The libretto was drawn from Maurice Maeterlinck's play of the same name, which had been performed just once in Paris, at the Bouffes Parisiens on 17 May 1893, Trve days after Wagner's Die Walküre opened, to much applause, at the Opéra Gamier. Many at the time saw an affinity between Pelléas and Wagner's Tristan, including the Gothic-sounding names of its characters and its distant, medieval setting. A tender and naive Mélisande is drawn into marrying the Prince Golaud. Her life, spent languishing in a bleak seaside castle, is transformed by the love of Golaud's younger half-brother, Pelléas : an incestuous quarrel is born, leading to the death of the two lovers. Something like the belligerence in the play emerged in real life after Debussy and the Opéra Comique's director Albert Carré refused Maeterlinck's mistress the part of Mélisande, giving it instead to the twenty-five-year-old Scottish soprano Mary Garden. Maeterlinck wrote an open letter to Le Figaro in which he expressed the hope for the opera's "prompt and resounding collapse." Maeterlinck, an expert with a sword, then challenged Debussy to a duel; Debussy wisely refused.
In the meantime the performers became totally absorbed in the beauty of Debussy's half tones. In her memoirs, Mary Garden recalls how the singers first sang through their parts in the drawing room of the conductor André Messager. As Debussy played the piano, she was taken over "by the most extraordinary emotions I have ever experienced in my life . . . I seemed to become someone else." There they sat, the singers bowed in their scores as if at prayer. "When Debussy got to the fourth act I could no longer look at my score for the tears. It was all very strange and unbearable. I closed my book and just listened to him and as he played the death of Mélisande, I burst into the most awful sobbing."
By the end the whole cast was crying "as if we had just lost our best friend, crying as if nothing would console us again."
The scenery in greys and blues by Eugene Ronsin and Lucien Jusseaume—"At the front of a cave," "A well in the park," 'A terrace at the exit of the vaults," 'A room in the castle"—contained all the refined brilliance one has come to expect
of that short-lived belle époque. Though the Opéra Comique appeared vast from the exterior, its corridors were hardly equipped to handle the large canvases. There was an average of three transformation scenes with each act, and Debussy had not foreseen the amount of time this would take, so he spent, between rehearsals, a large part of his time fretting away in his two-room flat at 58, Rue Cardinet, composing the wonderful interludes that have moved audiences for generations since.
The first reviews were mixed, some of them terrible: the music was "sickly and practically lifeless," Debussy sacrificed "music to vague conceptions and dangerous compromises," "rhythm, song and tonality are three things unknown to M. Debussy." Undoubtedly the poisonous atmosphere at the full dress rehearsal had contributed to this. The auditorium had been packed, while, in the reception rooms and corridors, there was a general to-and-fro of critics and musicians. Debussy hid himself in Messager's office, chain-smoking. The first two acts passed by in relative peace. But after Golaud had dragged Mélisande around the stage by the hair, trouble began. Mélisande ended the scene by chanting, "Je ne suispas heureuse"—or, according to some accounts, missing her line with a "Je suis malheureuse"—"You can say that again!"
screamed out somebody from the back of the theatre. General hilarity broke out in the last scene of Act III, "Before the castle," in the encounter between little Yniold and Golaud, which had given Debussy nightmares to compose.
Messager's precise execution and the performers' disciplined devotion—along with the fantastic spectacle of Ronsin andjusseaume's decor—were what saved Pelléas. The premiere on 30 April saw an uncomfortable repetition of the screams and charivari among the audience. Perhaps it was just out of curiosity that the numbers increased.
But as those numbers grew, so did the fascination of Paris for Debussy's opera. The critics shifted from cold indifference to a cheering endorsement. Young musicians, like Maurice Ravel, sat night after night in the auditorium mesmerized by the opera's beauty. "Third performance,"
noted Henri Btisser, who was directing the off-stage chorus, in his diary for 3 May. "Large audience, more responsive and sympathetic. At the end there are calls for Debussy, but he refuses to appear on stage."
He remained in Messager's office, puffing away at his cigarettes. A Pelleas cult was developing.
By then Debussy was facing another problem: what to do after the completion of what had been his life's work. "To complete a work, is a little like the death of someone one loves, no?" he had written in 1895 to his artistic friend Pierre Louÿs (pronounced "Louee"). There was obviously a relationship here with what Debussy defined in another long letter, written to his benefactor, Prince André Poniatowski, in 1893, as the "Cult of Desire": "One has the most mad and sincere desire for an object of art (a Velasquez, a Satzouma vase or a new form of tie). What joy there is at the moment of possession; it is a true love. Then at the end of a week, nothing. The object stands there for five or six days without receiving as much as a glance. One will regard it again with the former passion only after an absence of several months . . ."
This is probably why Debussy never completed a second opera, though the operatic and theatrical projects that he embarked on went in all directions. His friends used to remark that he did make life difficult for himself: every time he had some success he had to make a complete break with the work he had just produced and slog away at something completely different. Debussy had to distance himself from Pelléas. "The realization of a work of art, beautiful as it may be, almost always contradicts the inner dream," he wrote in the review Musica one year after the opera's premiere. By then he was working on the orchestration of his three Estampes, beginning with "Pagodes," which played on the memory of oriental harem dancers that he had seen on the Champ de Mars during the World Expositions of 1889 and 1900; and on three orchestral "sketches" that cost him nearly two years of sweated labour, "On the sea from dawn to midday," "The play of waves" and "Dialogue between the wind and sea": La Mer.
Debussy was experimenting with the new sounds and rhythms he had created in Pelléas. And the press did not let up in its criticism of the sounds of Claude Debussy Like the composer himself, the commentary became increasingly cerebral. Soon the country's most thoughtful writers entered the fray, most notably Romain Rolland and Marcel Proust. In January 1904 Jean Lorrain, afin-de-siècle poet and columnist who passed himself off as a "dandy of perversity," began a series of articles in Le Journal entitled Les Pelle'astres. Debussy, as always, wanted to send in a long reply. "Reply to him? One hundred times no!" wrote Louys, quite beside himself. "You do not argue with a journalist. No artist does that." So Debussy maintained his silence. But the articles went on and on, eventually appearing in book form in 1910. The main gist of Lorrain's argument was that Debussy and his followers had created a new religion much worse than the Wagnerian faith because it catered exclusively to effete and exorbitantly precious snobs. 'At least the followers of Wagner are sincere," he noted. Debussystes, on the other hand, were "beautiful young men with long hair who skilfully turned their curls into a fringe along the forehead."
One could dismiss Lorrain's columns as a prolonged piece of journalistic nastiness. But Lorrain did hit a dissonant chord that resonated with the cultural quarrels of the day. On one side were the romantic idealists, the Wagnerians, on the other the symbolists, the Debussists;
it was the difference between "German music" and "French music." It was precisely this that defined the difference between Romain Rolland and Marcel Proust in the way they approached Debussy's music.
RoUand, the pacifist, essayist, mystic and idealist, did not like Debussy His early writings had been devoted to music and, at thirty-five, he had become the Sorbonne's first professor of the history of music just at the time Pelléas premiered. Rolland's basic view was that music was the one dimension of the arts which could bring all nations together; the great tragedy of his time was that all music since around 1850 had become decadent and nationalist. He had a slight preference for the ideals of German music, "strong" and thematic, but he was even critical of Wagner.
French music was all too refined. Rolland's best known work of fiction is his ten-volume roman fleuve, Jean-Christophe, published between 1904 and 1912. Its hero, Jean-Christophe, is a Beethoven trying to come to terms with the disasters of Rolland's contemporary world. "To the devil with your manufactured chords!" criés out Jean-Christophe in Paris, in an obvious allusion to Debussy Jean-Christophe and two Parisian musical critics set off to the Opéra Comique to hear Pelléas et Mélisande.
After the first act Jean-Christophe leans over to one of the critics and asks, "Is it like that all the time?" "Yes," replies the critic. "But there is nothing there," says Jean-Christophe. "Nothing at all. No music. No development."
His private diary shows that Rolland was repeating a real experience he had had in 1907. Rolland was in a box at the Opéra Comique with Maurice Ravel, the critics Jean Marnold and Lionel de la Laurencie, and Richard Strauss, whose German operatic version of Oscar Wilde's Salome premiered in Paris that year. After the first act, Strauss leant over and whispered in Marnold's ear, "Is it always like that?" "Yes." "Nothing more? There's nothing to it. No music, no development." Marnold made a long-winded attempt to explain the combination of Maeterlinck's poetical phrases with Debussy's subtle musical phrases. Rolland himself pointed out the sobriety of Debussy's art. Strauss replied, "But I am a musician, and I don't hear anything." He repeated, "I, I am a musician before all else. From the moment the music is in a work, I want it to be mistress, I don't want it to be subordinate to anything else." After the show, the group went down to the popular musicians" café, the Taverne Pousset, on Rue de Chateaudun. Strauss tried to elaborate. "Fine," he said, weighing the word. His French was not terribly good: "It is very fine, very..." he waved his hands, "verygekiinstelt [artful], but it is never spontaneous; it lacks Schwung."
Schwung in German, meant verve or energy, rather than "swing." For Rolland, with his preference for "German"
music over "French," the great quality of the former was that it was schwungvolt, or energetic and stirring. This was certainly what made Strauss's Salome different from Debussy's Pelléas. But Rolland did not like that either. For those who think all contemporary music is a trial to listen to, Romain Rolland is their man.
For those who love Debussy, it is Marcel Proust. The playwright René Peter introduced Debussy to Proust sometime in the late 1890s, which would not have been difficult since they frequented the same cafés near the Opéra and had the same circle of friends. Proust, probably at this early date, must have felt the affinity of his own ideas of time and memory with those of the composer. Debussy, many times in his correspondence, writes of the pleasure of the moment and the effort to refine this through memory. "When you don't have the means to travel," he wrote to Messager in September 1903, "you have to make up for it with your imagination." And so he began, in landlocked Burgundy, composing La Mer—which he himself admitted was based on a childhood memory of his long holidays by the Mediterranean with his aunt. One cannot imagine a more Proustian theme. Proust wrote that the "only true voyage of discovery is not visiting different sceneries but possessing other eyes"—the whole of his huge, seven-volume A la recherche du temps perdu is based on that idea, an attempt, through the working of memory, to evoke the pleasure of a past instant. One could not find a better definition of Debussy's music. Proust sought to go behind the traditional plot of a novel. Debussy adventured into the back stages of melody.
Late in his life Proust told the writer Jacques Benoist-Méchin—a lover of things German—that music had been one of the great passions of his life. "Had been," he added, "for today I have little opportunity to listen to it." Proust's chronic timidity undoubtedly explained why he did not develop a closer relationship with Debussy. It was not, apparently, for want of trying. According to his English biographer, Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy used to meet Proust frequently at Weber's on Rue Royale, a smart café where many of the musical and literary world used to gather before the First World War. One evening, apparently in 1895, Proust proposed to Debussy to take him round to his home in his carriage. Debussy did not like Proust's way of speaking, with the unending sentences that characterized his writing. Proust, in his generous manner, proposed a large reception in the musician's honour. "Pardon me," replied Debussy, "I'm just a bear. Perhaps it would be best if we continued to meet by chance, as we have been doing up to now."
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