Act III. First Scene. The Temple of Moloch. Second Scene. The Terrace of Salammbô.
Act IV. First Scene. The Camp of the Mercenaries. Second Scene. The Tent of Mathô. Third Scene. The Field of Battle.
Act V. The Forum.
I need hardly tell you the original story—how Mathô, the fierce Libyan warrior, first saw the lovely daughter of Hamilcar; how he resolved to win her; the rape of the sacred veil of Tanit, called the Zäimph, and Salammbô’s terror at seeing it shroud the person of a Barbarian in her sleeping chamber; the pursuit, the escape, the return of Hamilcar and the resolve of Salammbô to win back for Carthage its holy veil. Who can describe after Flaubert the massed shock of armies, the pillage of cities and the crucifixion of the lions! To the march of his sonorous sentences we move through strange scenes, scenes of repulsive horror, slaughtered men and beasts, and the odor of sun-baked carcasses, over which hover obscene winged creatures seeking carrion.
Salammbô, after a hieratic ceremonial with the huge sacred serpent of the temple—Rodin alone might execute this episode in shivering marble—visits the tent of Mathô, recovers the Zäimph, but meets with an accident. She discovers her love for the Mercenary chief, who justly besieges Carthage for the pay of his soldiers, and she snaps the gold anklet-chain that daughters of patricians wore in those times. Mathô is captured, tortured by having to run the gantlet of Carthage’s enraged populace, and finally drops before the terraced throne upon which sits Salammbô beside her affianced husband, Narr’ Havas, the Numidian. The poor hunted wretch, over whose red flesh the skin hangs in bloody strips, dies, and his heart is cut out before the eyes of Salammbô. She takes poison from a goblet handed her by the expectant bridegroom. All who touch the veil of Tanit must perish. So is it decreed by the law and the prophets!
M. du Locle has altered this significant ending by making Salammbô stab herself, and then Mathô—by the usual “frenzied and superhuman effort”—breaks his bonds and carves himself into eternity. It is sweetly gory and melodramatic, this ending. Of course, the trip through the aqueduct is omitted and the theft of the Zäimph takes place before Salammbô’s eyes. This is in the second act. The librettist, with memories of Faust, causes Mathô to make an imaginary circle through which it would be impious to penetrate. Incidentally he wooes the young lady with true Gallic ardor. Yet this act, far removed as it is from the book, is the best of the five.
What follows is of no consequence; the council chamber is lugged in for its picture, and the spectacle of Salammbô dressing on a terrace under the rays of a Carthaginian moon, as round as a silver buckler, does not advance the action materially. The camp and battle scenes do credit to the taste of the decorator, though they are meaningless. But in Mathô’s tent, where Salammbô presently arrives, Reyer strikes fire for the first time. His hero and heroine have thus far been smothered by processions of chanting priests, by mobs of soldiery, by ballets and by monster choruses. Here the man and the woman, face to face, bare their souls, and the music, not so passionate or so desperate as Valentine and Raoul’s duo in the fourth act of Les Huguenots, is yet sincere and touching. After that the opera oozes away in mere pantomime. There is a fall down a series of lofty staircases, which is not high art.
I could only distinguish two well-defined leading-motives in the partition. One came from Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, fourth act, the other is a slight deviation from Tristan’s cry in Act III: “O Isolde.” For the rest, I have a vague remembrance of cantilena without melody, finales without climax, a thin, noisy, shallow, and irritating stream of orchestration and a vocal score that either screamed or roared. The harmonic scheme is dull and there is little rhythmic variety. Reyer, as I said before, has few musical ideas, and he does not conceal this deficiency by the graceful externals of a brilliant instrumentation. As well meant as was Reyer’s admiration for the immortal story, a story that will outlive the mock antiquities of Bulwer, Ebers, and Sienkiewicz, the French critic and composer was not the man to give it a musical setting. Wagner or Verdi—none other—could have made of his glowing Oriental prose-poem a music-drama of vital power and exquisite coloring.
It is a holy and wholesome thing to visit the graves of genius, for the memories aroused may serve as an inspiration and a consolation in the spiritually arid tracts of daily and doleful existence. But as the emotions aroused at the sight of great men’s relics are profound only to the individual—they seldom make interesting reading—so more than a record of the fact that I have visited Rouen several times to view the tomb of Gustave Flaubert is not of burning importance. I cannot help protesting, however, at the tardy official recognition accorded one of the greatest prose masters France can boast, and one of the great world novelists. In the Solferino Gardens there is the marble memorial by the sculptor Chapu, and up on the heights of the Monumental Cemetery lie his remains in the Flaubert family plot, not very far from the Joan of Arc monument. The Government has done nothing, though it has erected marble quarries to mediocrities not worthy to unlatch the shoes of Flaubert. Guy de Maupassant is remembered in the Solferino Gardens by a statue vis-à-vis to the master whom he loved and to whom he owed so much. At Paris another loving memorial stands in the Parc Monceau; yet for Flaubert, a giant when compared to the unhappy writer of the Contes, there is nothing—not even a commemorative tablet.