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Memorialisation, Commemoration and Commodification: Massenet and Caricature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2013

CLAIR ROWDEN
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Abstract

This article addresses the physical presence of Jules Massenet in the media during the Third Republic in France through the lens of the caricatural press and the cartoon parodies of his operas which appeared in journals such as Le Journal amusant and Le Charivari. Although individual works were rarely outright successes in critical terms during his lifetime, Massenet's operas always stimulated debate and Massenet, as a figure head for a national art, was revered by both the state and its people. Drawing on theories of parody and readership, I argue that despite the ‘ephemeral’ nature of these musical artefacts, they acted as agents of commemoration of the composer and of memorialisation and commodification of his works for both operagoers and those who rarely entered the opera theatre.

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Articles
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , July 2013 , pp. 139 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 The Paris Opéra unambitiously programmed a new production of the ever-popular Manon with a director and a creative team who ripped out the opera's heart and soul: both literally, by making unfounded and dramatically incomprehensible cuts to the score and by mixing styles and periods of costumes in a half-hearted attempt at an intemporal setting, and figuratively, by deliberately interpreting the opera ‘against the grain’, thereby mocking the work, its conventions and opera's performing traditions in general. The Opéra-Comique, which has been playing the ‘patrimony card’ to the full in recent seasons, programmed no Massenet for the centenary year, and only a study day and concert, initiated in collaboration with Opéra-Comique dramaturge Agnès Terrier, was slipped into the first part of the 2012–13 season. The Bibliothèque-Musée de l'Opéra produced an extremely modest exhibition titled La Belle Epoque de Massenet and an accompanying catalogue, which, despite its undisputed beauty, is dominated by a long article reiterating worn-out, early twentieth-century stereotypes in the reception of Massenet, his works and his success, in particular those of the composer as superficial, manipulative, money-grabbing, or a control freak. See my review of the exhibition catalogue, La Belle Epoque de Massenet, ed. Ghristi, Christophe and Auclair, Mathias (Montreuil, 2011)Google Scholar, in L'Avant-scène Opéra: Opéra et mise-en-scène Robert Carsen, 269 (July/August 2012), 166. The Bibliothèque nationale de France oversaw both this catalogue and an afternoon ‘Célébration Massenet’ in January 2012 at which librarians and musicologists presented research dealing with the library's collections and holdings.

2 Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version)’, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938, trans. Jephcott, Edmund, Eiland, Howardet al., ed. Eiland, Howard and Jennings, Michael W. (Cambridge, MA and London, 2002), 99–133, at 120Google Scholar.

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5 See my ‘“Cariculture” in 1890s Paris’, in Enhancing Music Iconography Research: Considering the Current, Setting New Trends, ed. Baldassare, Antonio, Pring, Debra and Blanco, Pablo Sotuyo (Vienna, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

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7 For discussion of cartoon parodies of works by composers other than Massenet, see my ‘“Cariculture” in 1890s Paris’.

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11 Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York and London, 1985), 89–94Google Scholar.

12 Other anachronistic visual elements include the traces of contemporary cobbling techniques visible on the soles of the dead men's shoes (Fig. 1, bottom row, first frame).

13 The text that has been cut off in Figure 2 reads: “La musique, très suggestive, est de notre illustre maestro Massenet, qui a enfilé délibérément la route de Beyreuth [sic].”

14 Umberto Eco, ‘A Reading of Steve Canyon’, trans. Bruce Merry, Twentieth-Century Studies, 15/16 (December 1976), 18–33, at 32–3.

15 ‘Le Théâtre au Crayon, par G. Lafosse. Théâtre de l'Opéra. Le Roi de Lahore’, Le Charivari, 46e année, 6 May 1877; and Stop, ‘Chronique Théâtrale, – par Stop (Opéra-Comique). Manon’, Le Journal amusant, 38e année, no. 1431, 2 February 1884, 4.

16 Contrary to the more modern forms of parodic cartoon and animated cartoon discussed by Gray, Jonathan in Watching with ‘The Simpsons’: Television, Parody and Intertextuality (New York and London, 2006), 66Google Scholar.

17 Stop also has Werther take the train when he is first sent away by Charlotte (see Fig. 2, second row, last frame).

18 See Marais, ‘Le Mage’, Le Charivari; Stop, ‘Théâtre de L'Opéra. Le Mage’, Le Journal amusant; Stop, ‘Stop Echos’, Le Journal amusant, 47e année, no. 1961, 31 March 1894, 5; Henriot, ‘Le Cid. Musique de Massenet’, Le Journal amusant, 39e année, no. 1527, 5; Sahib, ‘Le Cid à l'Opéra’, La Vie parisienne, 23e année, no. 50, 12 December 1885, 701; Bast, ‘Le ‘Cid’ à L'Opéra, La Silhouette, 6e année, no. 507, 6 December 1885.

19 See Huebner, Steven's discussion of this passage in his French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford, 1999), 82–7Google Scholar.

20 These projections illustrate the article by Patrick Gillis, ‘Genèse d'Esclarmonde’, L'Avant-scène Opéra: Massenet Esclarmonde – Grisélidis, 148 (September/October 1992), 22–33.

21 On the press reception of Esclarmonde, see Fauser, Annegret (ed.), Jules Massenet – Esclarmonde – Dossier de presse parisienne (1889) (Weinsberg, 2001)Google Scholar.

22 Stop, ‘Opéra-Comique. Sapho’, Le Journal amusant, 50e année, no. 2155, 18 December 1897, 5.

23 Stop, ‘Stop Echos’, Le Journal amusant; Tézier, ‘Thaïs ou la Tentation de St Antoine à l'Opéra’, Le Charivari, 61e année, 22 March 1894, 3.

24 For all issues to do with the press reception of the opera, see my Jules Massenet – Thaïs – Dossier de presse parisienne (1894) (Heilbronn, 2000). More detailed treatment, as well as reproductions of the caricatures published in the press after the premiere of Thaïs, can be found in my ‘Opera, Caricature and the Unconscious: Massenet's Thaïs, A Case Study’, Music in Art, 34/1–2 (spring–fall 2009), 274–89.

25 Stop, ‘Stop Echos’, Le Journal amusant.

26 The pun on the title of the opera Ver de Terre (‘worm’) is sustained by the children, drawn as open-mouthed hungry chicks, as they rehearse their carol at the start of the opera (they are described in the text as ‘little chickens’ with Charlotte as the ‘mother hen’), but by the end they have turned into ducks happily ‘quacking’ under a dying Werther's window (whether this ‘quacking’ refers to the potentially out-of-tune singing of the children is open to interpretation).

27 Frequently, references to the opera's music are represented by a staff and musical notation, sometimes incongruously attached to the protagonists or else merely in the background. Characters may be drawn in stereotypical gestural poses for dramatic singing heroines, as Henriot does for both Chimene and l'Infante in Le Cid. See Henriot, ‘Le Cid. Musique de Massenet’, Le journal amusant.

28 ‘Le Théâtre au Crayon’, Le Charivari.

29 For example, Jenny, Laurent, ‘The Strategy of Form’, trans. Carter, R., in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. Todorov, Tzvetan (Cambridge, 1982), 34–63Google Scholar; Gray, Watching with ‘The Simpsons’.

30 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 2 and 6.

31 Eco, ‘A Reading of Steve Canyon’, 33.

32 In Mikhail Bakhtin's description of the carnivalesque, parodic laughter becomes a triumphant leveller, not subjective, not individual, but issuing from a collective conscience of a single social group. It can be festive, regenerative, cathartic. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, Hélène (Bloomington, IN, 1984), 59–144, especially 90–92Google Scholar.

33 On these concepts, see Rehding, Music and Monumentality, 78.

34 Ibid., 40.

35 Katharine Ellis has demonstrated how, in an earlier period, such charges were often commissioned by the lampooned subject; I have found no documents to suggest this with regard to Massenet. Ellis, , ‘The Fair Sax: Women, Brass-Playing and the Instrument Trade in 1860s Paris’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 124 (1999), 221–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other swiftly drawn caricatures, of Massenet the man, appear in archival iconographic holdings; in this article I concentrate on those that appeared in the press and so reached a wide audience familiar with the composer's works.

36 Press dossiers of the reception of both these works in the Parisian press can be found on the web resource ‘Francophone Music Criticism 1789–1914’ at http://music.sas.ac.uk/fmc.

37 Fauser, Annegret, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair (Rochester, 2005), 67Google Scholar. Fauser notes that during the 1880s and until the rise of Puccini in the mid-1890s, the most important modern composer represented by the publisher Ricordi (in Italy and much of the rest of the world) was Massenet.

38 The text accompanying Luque's second charge refers to Massenet's recent completion of Werther, suggesting that it dates from 1887. The close succession of these two charges by the same artist could suggest Massenet's commissioning of at least one of the drawings, or his prominent and all-pervasive position in operatic culture at that precise time.

39 Monsieur Croche, ‘D’ “Ève” à “Grisélidis”’, La Revue blanche, 1 December 1901, reproduced in Debussy, Claude, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. Lesure, François (Paris, 1987), 59–61, at 59Google Scholar.

40 On the reception of Manon, see Branger, Jean-Christophe, Manon de Jules Massenet, ou Le Crépuscule de l'Opéra-Comique (Metz, 1999), 133–202Google Scholar.

41 That Massenet, as a prominent composer with a triumphant career, could be more easily identified with the hero of Le Cid than with any character in Manon may have also contributed to the choice of work used to commemorate the composer and his success. Steven Huebner briefly discusses the reception of Le Cid in his French Opera at the Fin de Siècle, 75–6. For a highly critical, satirical and caricatural review of the opera, see U.T., ‘Le Cid à l'Opéra’, La Vie parisienne, 23e année, no. 50, 12 December 1885, 698–702, with a composite double-page image by Sahib.

42 See Henriot, ‘Le Cid. Musique de Massenet’, Le Journal amusant. In the last image of this cartoon, the opera director Pedro Gailhard is seen in a bubble pulling the strings of the ‘puppets’ on-stage; according to Henriot, he is the true puppet master behind Massenet's success.

43 Bast, ‘Le ‘Cid’ à L'Opéra, La Silhouette. The simultaneous success of Manon at the Opéra-Comique is suggested by its scrumpled scroll which Massenet shoves into his pocket while the Le Cid scroll is carried proudly under his arm.

44 See Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle, 103.

45 Richepin was not elected to the Académie Française until 1908, whereas Massenet had had a seat at the Académie des Beaux-Arts since 1878. See Branger, Jean-Christophe, ‘Massenet (1842–1912): Une vie’, in La Belle Epoque de Massenet, ed. Ghristi, Christophe and Auclair, Mathias (Montreuil, 2011), 17–27, at 19Google Scholar.

46 Maurice Marais's cartoon of Le Mage (Le Charivari. Fig. 4) also referred, in its last image, to Crawford's accusation of plagiarism, but affirmed that Crawford had subsequently admitted he was in error.

47 Max Nordau, La Dégénérescence, trans. Auguste Dietrich, was published by Félix Alcan in two volumes in December 1893 and March 1894, even though both volumes carry 1894 as their date of publication. See my Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera: Massenet's Hérodiade and Thaïs (Weinsberg, 2004), 157–240.

48 For detailed treatment of the Parisian caricatures following the première of Thaïs, see my ‘Opera, Caricature and the Unconscious’.

49 For discussion of Thaïs in a post-Wagnerian context, see Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle, 135–59.

50 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 53. Political caricature at the French fin de siècle – destined to shock, to provoke a new awareness of a situation and to incite change – issued from the milieu of counterculture, from the very French world of the ‘contre-pouvoir’, from journals such as Le Balai, Le Don Quichotte, Le Troupier, Le Pilori and Le Grelot. The authorities (the police at the beck and call of the politicians since the abolition of censorship) constantly called into question the existence of these journals, seizing their publications and even imprisoning their editors.

51 See Parisi, Jonathan, ‘Mettre en scène Cendrillon: d'Albert Carré (1899) à Benjamin Lazar (2011)’, in Massenet aujourd'hui: Héritage et postérité, ed. Branger, Jean-Christophe and Giroud, Vincent (Saint-Etienne, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

52 Harries, Dan, Film Parody (London, 2000), 120Google Scholar. Harries nevertheless warns against assuming that conservatism will win out over transgression.

53 Bayard, Emile, La Caricature et les caricaturistes (Paris, 1900), 212–14Google Scholar.

54 Melot, Michel, L'Œil qui rit: Le pouvoir comique des images (Fribourg, 1975), 89Google Scholar; Buchinger-Früh, Marie Luise, ‘La Peinture du Second Empire dans les caricatures du Charivari’, in La Caricature entre République et censure. L'imagerie satirique en France de 1830 à 1880: Un discours de résistance?, ed. Régnier, Philippe (Lyon, 1996), 338–44, at 343Google Scholar.

55 Bayard, La Caricature, 216–18.

56 Such journals tended to stick to moral satire, often aimed at the mid- to lower bourgeoisie, and often traded in social and sexual behaviour and acceptable titillation.

57 Philippe Dujardin, ‘Glossaire’, in Le Geste commémoratif, 475–504, at 482.