CRISES AND RENEWAL IN TWENTIETH‐CENTURY FRENCH OPERA
2010; Wiley; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2010.0110
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
Resumo9 9 C R I S E S A N D R E N E W A L I N T W E N T I E T H - C E N T U R Y F R E N C H O P E R A V I N C E N T G I R O U D It is in the nature of things that all forms of art, even at their most successful, are constantly felt at the time to be going through one crisis or another. Such feelings are easily exacerbated in periods of economic or political di≈culties. Opera, arguably the most expensive of all art forms, is all the more exposed in times of economic downturns. The Great Depression, which began to hit France seriously in 1931, resulted in a major decline in ticket sales, in Paris and elsewhere. The financial emergency had obvious artistic implications for French opera: it remained possible to fill houses with the popular repertory – Faust, Carmen, Manon, Werther, Louise – but it was much more di≈cult to attract audiences to hear new works. Naturally, composers and cultural administrators wondered whether opera itself was in crisis. Since Jean-Baptiste Lully’s days, opera had dominated the French musical scene. This preeminence had been o≈cially sanctioned in the training of composers at the Conservatoire. The country’s top honor for a budding composer, the Prix de Rome in music, established by Napoleon in 1803, was intended to launch operatic careers: while its first round was an assessment of the student’s musical competence in harmony and counterpoint, the 1 0 0 G I R O U D Y final contest, a dramatic cantata (originally for one voice, but for three voices as of 1839), was essentially a mini-opera. At the Conservatoire , composition students were typically trained by teachers – Luigi Cherubini, Fromental Halévy, Léo Delibes, Jules Massenet , to name four of the most prominent – who were first and foremost opera composers, while the longest-serving directors in the nineteenth century, Esprit Auber and Ambroise Thomas, also worked primarily for the theater. Composers like Emmanuel Chabrier and Édouard Lalo, who won a hard-earned place in the lyric repertory without having followed this route, were exceptions that proved the rule. And this orientation remained in place even as the French musical landscape was undergoing major transformations . In the decades following the Franco-Prussian War, opera found itself having to compete for the favor of the public with other musical genres in which the most gifted French composers of their generation distinguished themselves – the symphony, chamber music, instrumental music, symphonic poems, the mélodie. Success in the theater remained desirable but was no longer the only way to succeed. Massenet, who wrote much, in many genres, besides his twenty-five operas, was the last major French composer to be, above all, an opera composer. While some of his gifted pupils (Camille Erlanger, Henry Février, Raoul Laparra, and Henri Rabaud, among others) followed the same path, none of them achieved a comparable status as an opera composer save for Gustave Charpentier – with one opera. This was also a new trend. For composers like Gabriel Fauré, Ernest Chausson, Claude Debussy, or Paul Dukas – all of whom wrote ‘‘their’’ opera and never completed a second – opera no longer represented, quantitatively at least, the major part of their output. While Maurice Ravel produced two, they are, significantly, short works, and more remote from the operatic tradition than Pelléas or Pénélope. More tellingly , a growing number of composers, even after submitting to the grueling Prix de Rome routine, eschewed opera altogether. Charles Koechlin, a pupil of Massenet and Fauré, wrote ballets – a genre that gained considerably in prestige in the wake of the artistic achievement of the Ballets Russes – but no opera. The same is true of Florent Schmitt, who had the same teachers and, luckier than Ravel, won the Prix de Rome at his fifth attempt in 1900. As C R I S E S A N D R E N E W A L 1 0 1 R for Erik Satie, his interest in the musical theater...
Referência(s)