Thaïs ………………………………… Mary Garden
Crobyle …………………………………. Trentini
Myrtale …………………………………. Giaconia
Albine ……………………………. Gerville-Reache
Athanaël ………………………………….. Renaud
Nicias ………………………………….. Cazouran
Palemon …………………………………… Mugnoz
Un Serviteur ………………………….. Reschiglian
Conductor, Campanini
With this work French opera won its second triumph. The charm of Miss Garden's personality was felt, but her singing compelled less tribute, and though the opera had seven representations before the departure of M. Renaud compelled its withdrawal, its success was due much more to him than to his fair companion. The Thaïs of MM. Gallet and Massenet is not the Thaïs of classical story, who induced Alexander to burn the palace of the Persian kings at Persepolis—"who like another Helen, fired another Troy"—but she is of her tribe. Also of the tribe of Phryne, Laïs, and Messalina, who live in history and in art because of their beauty and their pruriency, their loveliness and licentiousness. The operatic Thaïs is the invention of Anatole France, who borrowed her name for a courtesan of Alexandria some centuries after the historic woman lived. With the help of suggestions borrowed from the stories of innumerable saints who fled from the vicious world into the desert, and industriously cultivated sanctity and bodily filth, of converted trollops and holy Anthonys, he constructed a tale of how one of these desert saints, filled with ardor to save the soul of a cyprian who had the gay world of Alexandria at her feet, went to her, persuaded her to put her sinful life behind her, enter the retreat of a saintly sisterhood and die in grace, while he, falling at the last into the clutches of carnal lust, repented of his good deed and wrought his own damnation. Changing the name of the unfortunate zealot from Paphnuce to Athanaël, M. Louis Gallet made an opera-book out of France's story, and Massenet set it to music. It is a delectable story, but it fell into the hands of master craftsmen, and the admirers of "art for art's sake" and at any cost, have cause to rejoice at the treatment which it received. Glimpses into the life of the frowsy fraternity of cenobites, and fragments of their doleful canticles are not engaging in themselves, but they are fine foils to pictures of antique vice and the songs and dances of classic voluptuaries. There are splendid dramatic potentialities for those who like such things and those who find profit in exploiting in the juxtaposition cheek by jowl of saintliness and sin; of Christian hymning and harlotry; of virtue in a physical wrestle with vice, and coming out triumphant, but handing the palm over to the real victor at the end; in the picture of a monk sprinkling the couch of Venus with holy water, and decking his cowl with roses.
Also there was a large personal note in the original creation of "Thaïs," and there was a large personal note in its reproduction. It is not altogether a pleasant one for the lover of real art to listen to. Had there been no Sybil Sanderson, it is doubtful if Massenet would ever have been directed to the subject. True, he had shown a predilection for frail women as his heroines before, as witness Marie Magdalen, Eve, Herodias, and Manon Lescaut; but in the works which exploited these women the personal equation did not enter so far as the world knows or the printed page discloses. But when he wrote "Thaïs" it was neither histrionic nor musical art that be aimed primarily to exploit, but the physical charms of an individual. Something was needed for the jaded boulevardiers of Paris to leer at while they feebly clapped their hands and piped "Ah, charmante! Ravissante!" It may be that the fine command of Oriental color which is supposed to have affinity in the idioms of music with voluptuousness in all its forms, had something to do with the case, but the whole structure of the piece, superb as it is in its contrasting elements, and theatrically ingenious and effective, points nevertheless to the unfortunate Sanderson. And in the same way its Parisian revival points to Madame Cavalieri and Miss Garden, and its American production to the latter. For the sake of gifted singers and accomplished actors merely, the opera was not created, and will not be kept alive. It rests for its success on the kind of argument which Phryne, of classic story, presented to her austere judges.
The brilliancy of the play, its masterly handling of contrasts equally gratifying to the scenic artist, the actor, and the composer, challenged admiration and won it in large measure at the Manhattan performances. From the ordinary theatrical point of view it would not be easy to pick a quarrel with the drama. It would be almost churlish when there is so much to be grateful for, to pick flaws in M. Massenet's score. In the first place, compared with the vast volume of stuff poured forth by his younger colleagues of Italy, and even by some of his confrères of France, it makes appeal for approval by its evidences of consummate technical mastery. It never trickles; it never grows stagnant; it never gropes; it never fails for want of matter and manner in utterance. Its current is smooth and self-reliant. It carries action and scene buoyantly and unceasingly, even if it does not always expound them deeply or give them adequate external adornment. When it has no real warmth it simulates it admirably. Its texture is well-knit. There is purpose, not deep, not long-sustained, but, so far as it goes, logical, in the composer's application of the system of typical or representative phrases. There is, too, a measure of appositeness in the structure and character of his themes—the themes of asceticism, of Athanaël, of Thaïs. There is mastery of local color which makes the composer's use of Oriental tints as dramatically appropriate as it is engaging in all the scenes of ancient profligacy which fill the center of the artist's canvas.
M. Massenet's orchestra is an active agent in the development of the drama, and the episodes in which it becomes dominant are not pauses in the action created because of a felt need for something besides an undercurrent for the inane chatter of dialogue; instead they carry on the psychological action, the concealed drama which is playing on the stage of the hearts of the people concerned in the story. There is fitness in the interlude, in which Thaïs disposes herself to reproduce the pantomime of the loves of Aphrodite and Adonis, and a pretty touch of significance in the reminiscence of the music which had disturbed Athanaël's dream in the first act. There is more than mere musical charm in the intermezzo which follows the scene in which the monk wakes into life the conscience of the courtesan. She has defied him to the last, but the struggle in her soul has begun, and while he sleeps on the steps of her house the progress and outcome of the struggle are portrayed in the instrumental number which Massenet has called a "Religious Meditation." In itself it is not unlike scores of pieces similarly intituled, but it is made significant by its introduction of the theme of Thaïs in a chastened mood, in the garb of solemn gravity; and the melody of the violin solo, borne up by almost indefinable harmonies, and floated by harp arpeggios, recurs again before the death scene of Thaïs to delineate her ecstasy and Athanaël's despair. Though the intermezzo, thus admirably motived, marks the highest flight of Massenet's genius in this opera, there are many other pages in the score which might be chosen for praise. Enough that while the admirers of "Manon" and "Werther" are not likely to find the music of those operas equaled, they will yet find much to fascinate them in "Thaïs."
I have said, in effect, that the chief triumph in the performance of Massenet's opera was won by M. Renaud. Miss Garden had, indeed, established herself as a popular favorite, but it was not until the production of Charpentier's "Louise," on January 3, 1908, an opera with which her name was more intimately associated in popular report, that it could be said without qualification that French opera had won its battle. The principal parts in this opera were distributed amongst Mr. Hammerstein's singers thus:
Louise ………………………………. Miss Mary Garden
Julien ……………………………. M. Charles Dalmorès
Mother of Louise …………………. Mme. Bressler-Gianoli
Father of Louise …………………… M. Charles Gilibert
Irma …………………………….. Mlle. Alice Zeppilli
Camille ………………………………. Mlle. Morichini
Gertrude ………………………………. Mlle. Giaconia
Suzanne …………………………. Mlle. Helene Koelling
King of the Fools ………………………… M. Venturini
A Ragpicker ……………………………. M. Reschiglian
A Junkman ………………………………….. M. Mugnoz
Elise |
A Street Sweeper | ……………………… Mlle. Severina
A Street Arab ………………………….. Mlle. Trentini
An Apprentice …………………………… Mlle. Sigrist
Conductor, Campanini
"Louise" had made a great noise, both in a literal and figurative sense, during the greater part of the preceding eight years. It had made the rounds of the principal opera houses on the European continent, but most of the noise came from Paris, and among those who sat in Mr. Hammerstein's boxes and stalls on the occasion of its American production there were many who had already made the acquaintance of the work at the Opéra Comique, in the French capital. It is likely that their interest in the performance was mingled more or less with curious questionings touching the attitude which local opera-lovers would assume toward it. There is a vast difference in the mood in which Americans go to public entertainments in Paris and at home. In a sense, though not a large or dignified one, the tragic element in the story of Charpentier's opera is universal; but its representation is in every particular the most local and circumscribed of any opera ever written. I am not disposed to waste much time or space in a discussion of things to which the patrons of our playhouses have often exhibited a callous indifference. It is only to justify a hurried analysis of the artistic nature of the work that attention is called to some of its essential characteristics. "Louise" is not a French opera, though its score is French, its people speak French, and its music echoes French measures when it is original, and also when borrowed or imitated. "Louise" is Parisian in its gaiety, its passions, its vulgarity, and its artistic viciousness. If music could in itself give expression to ethical ideas, it would also be proper to say that this score is Parisian in its immorality. Coupled with its story, which glorifies the licentiousness of Paris and makes mock of virtue, the sanctity of the family tie, and the institutions upon which social stability and human welfare have ever rested and must forever rest, the music may also be set down as immoral. Certain it is that there is nothing in it that is spiritually uplifting, and as little that makes for gentleness and refinement of artistic taste. It is not French in the historic sense, because it rudely tramples upon all the esthetic principles for which the French composers, from Lully to the best of Charpentier's contemporaries have stood—elegance, grace, and beauty of expression.
It is, however, characteristic of the times—characteristic in subject and in utterance. To the intellectual and moral anarchism universally prevalent among the peoples of Western culture, which desires to have idealism outraged, sacred things ridiculed, high conceptions of beauty and duty dragged into the gutter, and ugliness, brutality, and bestiality placed upon a pedestal so long as a consuming thirst for things hot in the mouth may be slaked, it makes a strong appeal. To Mr. Hammerstein its success meant much. It was a reward for another exhibition of a bold and adventurous spirit; of his skill in gathering together a band of artists splendidly capable of presenting the works which he was trying to make the prop of a new lyric theater in the American metropolis; of a daringly enterprising purpose to make all the elements of his new productions harmonious and alluring—the stage pictures, the action, the singing, and the instrumental music. This achievement he accomplished when not only the large and striking features of the opera—its scenic outfit, its pictures of popular carousal on the heights of Montmartre, the roystering realism of the scene in a dressmakers' shop, the splendid acting of Miss Garden and Mme. Bressler-Gianoli, the fine singing of M. Dalmorès, and the more than superb acting and singing of M. Gilibert—found their complement in the finish of a hundred little details, insignificant in themselves, but singularly potent in helping to create the atmosphere without which "Louise" would be little better than Bowery melodrama,—a play that would be a hundred times more effective if its hero and heroine were represented as living in Williamsburg, swelling at the spectacle of the lights spanning the East River, and longing for the fleshpots of the so-called "Tenderloin District" in New York.
The story of "Louise," in brief, is that of a sewing-girl who lives with her parents on Montmartre, up to which, night after night, blink and beckon the lights of the gay city. An artist, who is her neighbor, wooes her and offers marriage, but her parents, a harsh, unsympathetic mother and a tender-hearted father, are rigid in their objections to him because of his insufficient means and loose character. Her lover lures her out of her workshop, and, after he has inculcated in her the doctrine of free love and free life, she leaves her parents to consort with him. The artist's jovial companions make her queen of a Montmartre festival for a purpose wholly extraneous to the story, but one that serves the composer, who is his own librettist, and in the midst of the merrymaking the mother appears and pleads with the girl to return to her home to comfort her dying father. Her lover permits her to do so on her promise to return to him. At home her father entreats her to give up her life of dishonor. She listens to him petulantly. The music of a fête in the city below, voices calling her from a distance, and the flashing lights in the great city below, throw her into a frantic ecstasy; she sings of her love and calls to her lover. The mother thinks her mad, but the father drives her out of the house, only to repent and call after her a moment later. But she is gone, and the drama ends with the father shaking his fist at the city, and shrieking at it his hatred and detestation.