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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
The ‘réalisme’ of Massenet's La Navarraise divided critics at its belated Parisian première on 3 October 1895. While the opera has typically been read as a straightforward attempt at French verismo, this article suggests a more complex set of ways in which modernity and the modern world shaped critical perceptions of and responses to realism. Placing La Navarraise within its wider cultural and technological contexts, I argue that the critics’ ambivalence to its realism provides insight into the changing and contested nature of critical perception and subjectivity in Paris in the final years of the nineteenth century.
1 ‘De la couleur, de la passion, une mise en scène d'un réalisme puissant, une artiste parfaite; pour mettre en relief tout cela, une histoire empoignante, rapide, haletante, pleine de frissons tragiques et de tendresses pâmées. Voilà La Navarraise!’ Charles Formentin, ‘Les premières’, Le jour, 5 October 1895. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
2 For more on international performances of La Navarraise, see Alfred Loewenberg, Annals of Opera, 1597–1940, 3rd edn (London: J. Calder, 1978), col. 1177.
3 For more on the early Parisian reception of Cavalleria rusticana, see Matteo Sansone, ‘Verga and Mascagni: The Critics’ Response to “Cavalleria rusticana”’, Music and Letters, 71 (1990), 198–214 (esp. pp. 207–8).
4 ‘On y trouve, en réalité, plus d'artifices que d'inspirations.’ Paul Ginisty, ‘Les premières représentations’, Le petit Parisien, 20 January 1892.
5 Henri Gauthier-Villars (writing as ‘L'ouvreuse’), ‘La soirée parisienne’, L’écho de Paris, 5 October 1895.
6 For more on Massenet's relationship with the giovane scuola and the Italian publishing house Sonzogno (which published Cavalleria rusticana and bought the rights to many of Massenet's works in Italy), as well as the composer's visits to Italy, see Matthew Franke, ‘Massenet's Italian Trip of 1894 and the Politics of Cultural Translation’, Massenet and the Mediterranean World, ed. Simone Ciolfi (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2015), 161–71.
7 Arman Schwartz, Puccini's Soundscapes: Realism and Modernity in Italian Opera (Florence: Olschki, 2016), 49.
8 Steven Huebner, ‘La Navarraise face au vérisme’, Le naturalisme sur la scène lyrique, ed. Jean-Christophe Branger and Alban Ramaut (Saint-Étienne: Université de Saint-Étienne, 2004), 129–50.
9 That any critics at all used the term ‘vériste’ in relation to Cavalleria rusticana is interesting in itself, as it shows that at least certain critics of the period were thinking in terms of the realist frameworks that have so preoccupied later scholars. For an example of a Parisian critic using the term, see Ginisty, ‘Les premières représentations’, Le petit Parisien, 20 January 1892. A dossier de presse of the Parisian reviews of both Cavalleria rusticana and La Navarraise can be found on the Francophone Music Criticism website: <http://www.fmc.ac.uk> (accessed 18 July 2016).
10 Giger goes so far as to suggest that verismo could be better understood as a period in Western music history that emerged after Romanticism than as any coherent style. See Andreas Giger, ‘Verismo: Origin, Corruption, and Redemption of an Operatic Term’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 60 (2007), 271–315. Sansone has also, in ‘Verga and Mascagni’, examined the problems of relating operatic verismo to its literary counterpart.
11 The fact that Jules Claretie (1840–1913), author of the short story on which La Navarraise was based and co-author of the opera's libretto, wrote a number of naturalist novels over his career makes the total absence of references to naturalism in the reception of La Navarraise's realism somewhat striking.
12 For biographical information on Bruneau, as well as a discussion of his naturaliste operas, see Steven Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 395–425.
13 See, for example, Manfred Kelkel, Naturalisme, vérisme et réalisme dans l'opéra, de 1890 à 1930 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1984), 1–17.
14 Clair Rowden, ‘La Navarraise face à la presse’, Le naturalisme sur la scène lyrique, ed. Branger and Ramaut, 106–28. See also Rowden, ‘Werther, La Navarraise, and Verismo: A Matter of Taste’, Franco-British Studies, 37 (2006–7), 3–34.
15 ‘M. Massenet a écrit une superbe partition.’ ‘Intérim’, ‘Musique’, Le Gaulois, 4 October 1895.
16 Oh! la délicieuse musique pour sourds!’ Charles Demestre (writing as Charles Martel), ‘La soirée d'hier’, La justice, 5 October 1895.
17 Some went on to outline the great efforts that had been taken in the production to achieve the most striking realist effect possible, with Alphonse Franck writing in L’événement: ‘The bells are, apparently, installed in the underbelly of the theatre and weigh 1,500 kilograms. We bought them from Spain, no doubt’ (‘Les cloches sont, paraît-il, installées dans les dessous du théâtre et pèsent quinze cents kilogs. On les fait venir d'Espagne, sans doute’). Franck (writing as ‘Sarcisque’), ‘Soirée parisienne’, L’événement, 5 October 1895. Massenet's autograph score, held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (and available online at <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10308909p/f1.image.r=Massenet%20La%20Navarraise>, accessed 1 December 2017) contains detailed instructions about the positioning of the bells and the way in which they should be played.
18 ‘Il a peut-être un peu trop sacrifié la musique à cet effet, la remplaçant par des sonorités et même par des bruits.’ Victorin Joncières, ‘Revue musicale’, La liberté, 6 October 1895.
19 ‘La musique perd ses droits.’ Auguste Goullet, ‘La musique à Paris’, Le soleil, 4 October 1895.
20 ‘Mademoiselle Calvé invoque la Vierge sur une seule note (mi, mi, mi, mi); pour ceux qui aiment cette note-là, ça doit être fort joli.’ Gauthier-Villars, ‘La soirée parisienne’, L’écho de Paris, 5 October 1895.
21 Arman Schwartz, ‘Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo Reconsidered’, 19th-Century Music, 31 (2007–8), 228–44 (p. 234).
22 Adriana Guarnieri Corazzol, ‘Opera and Verismo: Regressive Points of View and the Artifice of Alienation’, trans. Roger Parker, Cambridge Opera Journal, 5 (1993), 39–53 (p. 42).
23 Schwartz, Puccini's Soundscapes, 8.
24 Ibid., 4.
25 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013).
26 Jameson invokes ‘presence’ at various points in his book; see, for instance, Jameson, The Antimonies of Realism, 22, where he writes of the ‘two modes of récit and presence’. Notions of presence have recently been a source of interest in the humanities more broadly, such as in the work of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, which positions presence against hermeneutics. See Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). In musicology, too, issues of presence have been raised in various ways, as for example in Carolyn Abbate, ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 505–36.
27 See, for example, M. de Saint-Geniès (writing as ‘Richard O'Monroy’), ‘La soirée parisienne’, Gil Blas, 5 October 1895.
28 ‘L'autre soir à l'Opéra-Comique, ce n’était pas la musique que cela “puait”; ce n’était que la poudre.’ Camille Bellaigue, ‘Revue musicale’, Revue des deux mondes, 15 October 1895.
29 George Bernard Shaw, ‘La Navarraise’, The World, 27 June 1894. Published in Shaw's Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, ed. Dan H. Laurence, 2nd edn (London: Bodley Head, 1989), iii: 1893–1950, 248–51 (p. 248).
30 While these reviewers were in the minority, there is no easy way of categorizing them as a group. It is certainly not the case that the critics for the mass, ‘populist’ papers praised the score while the critics for more highbrow or conservative newspapers disliked it. For example, the politically conservative and self-styled paper for the nobility and haute bourgeoisie Le Gaulois praised Massenet's score at length, while the mass-circulated Le petit Parisien, which had a predominantly lower-middle-class and literate working-class readership, presented a much more critical review of the work. See ‘Intérim’, ‘Musique’, Le Gaulois, 4 October 1895, and Paul Ginisty, ‘Les premières représentations’, Le petit Parisien, 4 October 1895. Audiences, too, seem to have resisted less, and the opera achieved significant popularity with the Parisian public.
31 ‘Et tandis que les soldats répètent le refrain en ré majeur, le clairon lointain fait entendre sa sonnerie en si bémol, sans souci de la tonalité. C'est d'un réalisme très hardi, mais aussi très saisissant.’ Joncières, ‘Revue musicale’, La liberté, 6 October 1895.
32 Shaw, ‘La Navarraise’, The World, 27 June 1894; Shaw's Music, ed. Laurence, iii, 250.
33 ‘Intérim’, ‘Premières représentations’, Gil Blas, 5 October 1895.
34 ‘On doute, ce petit opéra terminé, si vraiment c'est un opéra qu'on vient d'entendre, ou seulement un mélodrame.’ Bellaigue, ‘Revue musicale’, Revue des deux mondes, 15 October 1895.
35 Auguste Goullet, ‘La musique à Paris’, Le soleil, 4 October 1895.
36 For information on the genesis of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, see Sansone, ‘Verga and Mascagni’. Certain Italian critics clearly shared this view, as Sansone illustrates (p. 206).
37 Rowden, ‘La Navarraise face à la presse’, 116–21.
38 Demar Irvine, Massenet: A Chronicle of his Life and Times (Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1974), 185.
39 For information on Calvé as a singer and actress, see Steven Huebner, ‘La princesse paysanne du Midi’, Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914, ed. Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 361–78.
40 See, for example, Albert Renaud, ‘Premières’, La patrie, 5 October 1895.
41 Huebner, ‘La princesse paysanne’, 371.
42 Jean Contrucci, Emma Calvé: La diva du siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), 164–8. See also Calvé's autobiographical writings: My Life, trans. Rosamond Gilder (New York and London: D. Appleton & Co., 1922), and Sous tous les ciels j'ai chanté: Souvenirs (Paris: Plon, 1940).
43 ‘Ces jeux déréglés de pantomime’. Alfred Bruneau, ‘Les théâtres’, Le Figaro, 4 October 1895.
44 ‘[Elle] abuse les mêmes effets de physionomie.’ Alexandre Biguet, ‘Premières représentations’, Le radical, 5 October 1895.
45 Rowden has suggested that these were a feature of a particular style of acting associated with verismo; indeed, Jean-Christophe Branger has written of Calvé as ‘la Duse lyrique’, drawing a comparison with the Italian actress Eleanora Duse, whose acting seems to have had many of the same characteristics. See Rowden, ‘La Navarraise face à la presse’, 115–16, and Jean-Christophe Branger, ‘Massenet et Emma Calvé: La “Duse lyrique”’, Sapho–La Navarraise, L'avant-scène opéra, 217 (Paris: Editions Premières Loges, 2003), 50–3. Since the Parisian critics did not themselves draw such connections in their reviews of La Navarraise, and since they had little experience with verismo in its operatic form outside Calvé's performances in Cavalleria rusticana, they may well have associated these characteristics explicitly with Calvé herself.
46 This consideration of how realistic Calvé's acting was is an important one, since the French term ‘réaliste’ can be translated either as ‘realist’ or ‘realistic’. It is also an interesting possibility that Calvé's acting as Anita was linked to conventions of theatrical representations of madness, although the critics’ comments are not explicitly connected with Anita's descent into madness in the opera. Rowden (‘La Navarraise face à la presse’, 118) mentions that Calvé visited Charcot's theatre at Salpêtrière hospital. An interesting parallel also emerges here between the descriptions of Calvé and what Melanie Gudesblatt has pointed to when she discusses turn-of-the-century Viennese responses to the ‘truthful’ performances of the soprano Marie Gutheil-Schoder. See Melanie Gudesblatt, ‘Origins of a Menschendarstellerin: Characterization and Operatic Performance in Fin-de-siècle Vienna’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 144 (2019), 55–82 (pp. 63–6).
47 ‘J'affirme qu'ils donnent à l’œuvre sa véritable physionomie.’ Bruneau, ‘Les théâtres’, Le Figaro, 4 October 1895. A number of critics besides Bruneau also used the word ‘physionomie’ in describing Calvé's performance: Ernest Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, Journal des débats, 12 October 1895; Biguet, ‘Premières représentations’, Le radical, 5 October 1895; and ‘Intérim’, ‘Premières représentations’, L'Estafette, 5 October 1895 are but three examples.
48 Karen Henson, Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. pp. 7–9. Massenet and his operas feature prominently in Henson's book, in relation not to Calvé, but to Sybil Sanderson, another of the composer's favoured prima donnas. Henson explores the relationship between composer and performer in the context of contemporary visual culture and its emergent technologies (see pp. 88–121).
49 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1999).
50 Henson, Opera Acts, 8.
51 Huebner, ‘La princesse paysanne’, 373. For more on the history of advertising posters, see Mark S. Micale, ‘France’, The Fin-de-siècle World, ed. Michael Saler (London: Routledge, 2015), 93–116 (p. 94). For an exploration of operatic realism and photographic mediation, see Ellen Lockhart, ‘Photo-Opera: La fanciulla del West and the Staging Souvenir’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 23 (2011), 145–66.
52 The Home Monthly, 6 (June 1897), 13, available online via the Willa Cather Archive, <http://cather.unl.edu/nf021.html> (accessed 19 May 2015).
53 Contrucci, Emma Calvé. Calvé's independence is evident throughout the book, and Contrucci writes in particular of her ‘tempérament volcanique’ (p. 167).
54 See Flora Willson, ‘Classic Staging: Pauline Viardot and the 1859 Orphée Revival’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 22 (2010), 301–26. For more on the importance of the statuesque to mid-nineteenth-century perceptions of the diva, see Susan Rutherford, ‘“La cantante delle passioni”: Giuditta Pasta and the Idea of Operatic Performance’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 19 (2007), 107–38.
55 Indeed, there was a growing interest in acting theory at the time about the way in which performers (including singers) moved between gestures on stage. One such example of this was the work of François Delsarte, which developed as a response to the unnatural poses of classical acting. While Delsarte himself did not write a book, one of his students, Genevieve Stebbins, employed his ideas in The Delsarte System of Expression (New York: E. S. Werner, 1886). The body positions Calvé adopts are hard to correlate exactly with the Delsartean expressive positions, but the idea of a body in movement is very much in keeping with his thoughts.
56 For accounts of the interactions between photography, realism and fiction, see Daniel Akiva Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
57 ‘Leur épisode lyrique dure exactement quarante-six minutes, vingt-cinq seconds. C'est le record de l'opéra.’ ‘Méphisto’, ‘Soirées parisiennes’, Le jour, 5 October 1895.
58 ‘10 h. 46’. – Les Carlistes attaquent le village’. Ibid.
59 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1983: repr. with a new preface 2003), 65–88. For an account of how the railway changed perceptions of time, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, 3rd edn (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014), esp. pp. 33–44.
60 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 82–3. Bergson's ideas are explored throughout Kern's book.
61 It was not unusual in itself for reviews of this ‘soirée parisienne’ type to say little of music, of course, but the link this review makes between the visual aspects of the opera and exact timings is remarkable.
62 For more on the early history of cinema, see Rémi Fournier-Lanzoni, French Cinema: From its Beginnings to the Present (New York and London: Continuum, 2002) and H. Mario Raimondo-Souto, Motion Picture Photography: A History, 1891–1960 (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2007).
63 ‘L'on se croirait vraiment en Espagne.’ Morandès, ‘Soirée parisienne’, La patrie, 5 October 1895.
64 ‘La Navarraise deviendra un très grand succès car Elle est espagnole!’ Méphisto, ‘Soirées parisiennes’, Le jour, 5 October 1895 (emphasis added).
65 Kerry Murphy explores the prevalence of Spanish works in all areas of French artistic life from as early as the Napoleonic period. Murphy, ‘Carmen: Couleur locale or the Real Thing?’, Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer, ed. Fauser and Everist, 293–315 (pp. 295–306).
66 This trend in fact continued long after La Navarraise, as Samuel Llano has shown in Whose Spain? Negotiating ‘Spanish Music’ in Paris, 1908–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 192–235.
67 Ibid., xv–xxii. Of course, there were also myriad representations of Spain in literature and visual art, many of which (such as Renoir's The Spanish Guitarist (1894)) portrayed musicians and musical performances.
68 For a discussion of the idea of the ‘internal Other’, see Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 150–74, and James Parakilas, ‘The Soldier and the Exotic: Operatic Variations on a Theme of Racial Encounter, Part 1’, Opera Quarterly, 10 (1994), 33–56.
69 Murphy, ‘Carmen: Couleur locale or the Real Thing?’, 293.
70 ‘Ce n'est pas du vrai réalisme: ce n'est que du manque de logique.’ Jules Guillemot, ‘Revue dramatique’, Le soleil, 9 March 1875.
71 For more on the early reception of The Spanish Singer, see Jane Mayo Roos, ‘Manet and the Impressionist Moment’, Perspectives on Manet, ed. Therese Dolan (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 73–96 (p. 77).
72 ‘J'ai vu de poétiques vallées enfumées par des tramways à vapeur […]. J'ai vu, sur de hautes montagnes, serpenter des funiculaires, et dans les églises des plus petits villages des paysannes endimanchées, toutes fort laides et fort ridicules, avec de vastes chapeaux surchargés de rubans et de fleurs. J'ai vu aussi dans une gorge des Pyrénées un ministre déjeunant sur l'herbe, et qui, pour se distraire allègrement des soucis de son ministère, lançait des bouteilles vides dans le torrent écumeux.’ Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, Journal des débats, 12 October 1895.
73 ‘Des habitudes et des costumes autrefois particuliers à certains pays, il n'y a plus trace nulle part. Le piano a pénétré dans tous les villages et chaque chaumière a son roman-feuilleton. De sorte que, lorsqu'on se croit à trois cents lieues de Paris, on n'est pas allé beaucoup plus loin que Levallois-Perret.’ Ibid. Levallois-Perret is a north-western suburb of Paris.
74 Méphisto, ‘Soirées parisiennes’, Le jour, 5 October 1895.
75 Alessandra Campana, Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 193. Although Campana's discussion focuses on specifically Italian contexts, there is much to be said for her ideas in a French context, too.
76 ‘A quoi bon, dès lors, courir la chance de perdre aujourd'hui une bataille […] en essayant d'imposer à des spectateurs toujours hasardeux des trouvailles, des hardiesses dont on suspecte l'effet foudroyant?’ Bruneau, ‘Les théâtres’, Le Figaro, 4 October 1895.
77 See, for example, Albert Montel, ‘Chronique musicale’, Le rappel, 5 October 1895: ‘le tout enfin merveilleusement agencé et organisé pour tenir le spectateur toujours en haleine’.
78 Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1998).
79 Crary sets out these challenges particularly clearly in Suspensions of Perception, 11–79.
80 Annegret Fauser, ‘Cette musique sans tradition: Wagner's Tannhäuser and its French Critics’, Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer, ed. Fauser and Everist, 228–55 (pp. 240–1).
81 See Steven Huebner, ‘Massenet and Wagner: Bridling the Influence’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 5 (1993), 223–38.
82 ‘D'un usage très périlleux, si elle se généralisait’. Bruneau, ‘Les théâtres’, Le Figaro, 4 October 1895.
83 ‘Et il me semble même que M. Massenet eût bien fait de laisser aux théâtres étrangers cette pièce trop visiblement écrite pour eux.’ Ibid.
84 To give but one example, the reviewer for Gil Blas wrote of the score: ‘Certainly, this creation leaves Cavalleria far behind it’ (‘Certainement cette création laisse loin derrière elle celle de Cavalleria’) ‘Intérim’, ‘Premières représentations’, Gil Blas, 5 October 1895. Others, such as Joncières, even claimed that the musical style of the opera was entirely different from Mascagni's: ‘I hasten to say, however, that, despite its violence and brutality, its score is of a whole other style than that of the Italian composer’ (‘J'ai hâte de dire, cependant, que malgré ses violences et ses brutalités, sa partition est d'un tout autre style que celle du compositeur italien’). Joncières, ‘Revue musicale’, La liberté, 6 October 1895.
85 See Rowden, ‘La Navarraise face à la presse’, 120–1.
86 Franke explores Massenet's Italian reception in this period in detail in Matthew Franke, ‘The Impact of Jules Massenet's Operas in Milan, 1893–1903’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014).
87 For more on the Dreyfus Affair and its political and social consequences, see Leslie Derfler, The Dreyfus Affair (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood, 2002).
88 ‘L'Opéra-Comique a décidément adopté l’état militaire.’ Demestre, ‘La soirée d'hier’, La justice, 5 October 1895. He was not alone in commenting on the popularity of military operas at the Opéra-Comique; reviews in Le petit Parisien and Le journal (both 4 October 1895), L'intransigeant, La gazette de France, La liberté, Gil Blas, Le temps (all 5 October 1895) and La revue des deux mondes (15 October 1895) all remark on the fact. Soldiers had long since occupied an important place across the spectrum of French stages, and in recent years Benjamin Godard's La vivandière (1885), Bruneau's L'attaque du moulin (1893) and Paul Vidal's Guernica (1895) had all premièred at the Opéra-Comique.