class="caption">CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS

Composer of Samson and Delilah.

LEO DELIBES

Composer of Lakmé.

THE QUALITY OF MASSENET

So many operas ought to speak well of Massenet’s versatility, as it surely does of his productiveness and industry; but the individuality of this composer, which is incontestable, is an individuality of style which leans heavily on sameness. The French wits who thought it clever to dub him “Mademoiselle Wagner” twenty years ago never got the opportunity to call him Madame Wagner. He never grew up to that estate. He did not grow older in thought or riper in creative ability; but only more facile in expression.

JULES MASSENET. 1842-1913

All of Massenet’s operas are essentially illustrative of the sentimental spirit of French art. Whether Gounod attempts to write an oratorio on so sublime a subject as the fall and redemption of man, or Massenet tries to picture the touching faith and piety of an honest mountebank, it is all one: the music is bound to run out into a strain of religious balladry. But French music as represented by Gounod and Massenet is ingenuous also in its persistent pursuit of beauty. The northern ideal of strength before beauty, or truth before convention, is not for the French, with their devotion to elegance of utterance, and this fact has saved their lyric stage from the deplorable tendency exhibited by the most notable, and probably greatest, German composer since Wagner, namely, Richard Strauss (strous). Oscar Wilde, though English, wrote his “Salomé” in French; but it had to wait for the coming of a German for a musical glorification of its morbid attraction toward dead bodies. Nor is Electra’s bestial ferocity, as pictured by Hoffmansthal and Strauss, likely soon to find favor among the French. Thus much must be said in favor of the artistic tendency of a people who are still willing to hark back to a miracle-tale like that of “Our Lady’s Juggler,” or to a legend like that of “The Patient Grizel,” for operatic material.

MASSENET IN HIS STUDIO IN 1891

Between Gounod and Massenet there stands at least one French dramatic composer who accomplished much, but promised more in respect of the development of the lyric drama. Bizet’s “Carmen” has won heartier recognition in Germany than even Gounod’s “Faust.” Perhaps the qualities which conquered this distinction were against it when it first appeared in its native land. It may have been a feeling of its approach to an extra-national ideal which made the French people, who with all their enthusiasm for art are yet strongly predisposed in favor of their own ideals, scent an objectionable Teutonism in “Carmen” and give it only tardy recognition; perhaps also more than a touch of jealous patriotism.

The Franco-Prussian War had a twofold effect upon music in France,—it threw the people back upon an appreciation of some of their own composers,—Berlioz (bear-lee-oze), for instance,—and also turned them against not only the German, but also all of their own composers in whom they thought they recognized German influences. The feeling was not only strong to taboo Wagner, but everybody in whose music they scented Wagnerisme. Their conception of the term was amusingly vague. They did not recognize it in the freedom of form manifested in “Faust”; but felt it in the truthful and forceful dramatic expression which marked