Again, like Gounod, Thomas turned to Shakespeare after having set Goethe. His ‘Hamlet’ (1868) was successful in Paris for a long time. And, though the music cannot match its subject, it contains some of the composer’s best work. The vocal parts are richly ornamented; the poetically conceived part of Ophelia is a coloratura rôle, such as modern opera, with the possible exception of Delibes’ Lakmé, has not produced, and the ballet music is brilliant. Françoise de Rimini (1882) and the ballet La Tempête were his last and least popular dramatic works.

Léo Delibes (1836-1891), a pupil of Adam, is widely known by his charming ballets. The ballet, which had played so important a part in eighteenth century opera, was quite as popular in the nineteenth century. If Vestris, the god of dance, had passed with the passing of the Bourbon monarchy, there were Taglioni (who danced the Tyrolienne in Guillaume Tell and the pas de fascination in Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable), Fanny Elssler, and Carlotta Grisi, full of grace and gentility, to give lustre to the art of dancing. The ballet as an individual entertainment apart from opera was popular during the greater part of the nineteenth century, and was brought to a high perfection, best typified by the famous Giselle, written for Carlotta Grisi, on subject taken from Heinrich Heine, arranged by Théophile Gautier, and set to music by Adam. To this kind of composition Delibes contributed music of unusual charm and distinction. La Source shows a wealth of ravishing melody and made such an impression that the composer was asked to write a divertissement, the famous Pas des Fleurs to be introduced in the ballet Le Corsaire, by his old master Adam, for its revival in 1867. His ‘Coppelia’ ballet, written to accompany a pretty comedy of the same name, and the grand mythological ballet ‘Sylvia’ are considered his best and established his superiority as a composer of artistic dance music.

The music of Delibes’ operas is unfailingly tender and graceful, and his scores remain charming specimens of the lyric style. Le roi l’a dit (1873) is a dainty little work upon an old French subject, ‘as graceful and fragile as a piece of Sèvres porcelain.’ Jean de Nivelle has passed from the operatic repertory, but Lakmé is a work of exquisite charm, its music dreamy and sensuous as befits its oriental subject, and full of local color. In Lakmé and the unfinished Kassaya[104] Delibes shows an awakening to the possibilities of oriental color. Ernest Reyer’s (1823-1909) Salammbo is in the same direction; but it is Félicien David (1810-1876) who must be credited with first drawing attention to Eastern subjects as being admirably adapted to operatic treatment. He was a pupil of Cherubini, Reber[105] and Fétis, and he was for a time associated with the activity of the Saint-Simonian Socialists. Later he made a tour of the Orient from 1833 to 1835; then, returning to Paris with an imagination powerfully stimulated by his long stay in the East, he set himself to express the spirit of the Orient in music. The first performance of his symphonic ode Le Désert (1844) made him suddenly famous. It was followed by the operas Christophe Colomb, Eden, and La Perle du Brésil, which was brilliantly successful. Another great operatic triumph was the delightful Lalla Roukh which had a run of one hundred nights from May in less than a year (1862-1863). At a time when the works of Berlioz were still unappreciated by the majority of people, David succeeded in making the public take an interest in music of a picturesque and descriptive kind, and in this connection may be considered one of the pioneers of the French drame lyrique. Le Désert founded the school which counts not only Lakmé and Salammbo but also Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore and many others among its representatives.

No French composer responded more delightfully to the orientalism of David than Georges Bizet (1838-1875) in his earlier works. His Pêcheurs de Perles (1863) tells the loves of two Cingalese pearl fishers for the priestess Leila. It had but a short run, though its dreamy melodies are enchanting. Several of its forceful dramatic scenes foreshadow the power and variety of Carmen. His second opera La jolie fille de Perth (1867), a tuneful and effective work, was based upon one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels; but in Djamileh (1872), his third opera, he returned to an Eastern subject. This was the most original effort he had thus far made, and it was thought so advanced at the time of its production, that accusations of Wagnerism—at that time anything but praise in Paris—were hurled at the composer. He was more fortunate in the incidental music he wrote for Alphonse Daudet’s drama L’Arlésienne, which is still a favorite in the concert hall.

It has been said that the quality of Bizet’s operatic work, like that of Gluck, depended in a measure on the value of his book. He was indeed fortunate in the libretto of Carmen, adapted from Prosper Merimée’s celebrated study of Spanish gypsy character, by Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, the best librettists of their day. The dramatic element in the story as written was hidden by much descriptive analysis, but by discarding this the authors produced one of the most famous libretti in the whole range of opera. Carmen was brought out at the Opéra Comique in 1875. Bizet’s occasional use of the Wagnerian leading motive was perhaps responsible for some of the coldness with which the work was originally received. Its passionate force was dubbed brutality, though we now know that it is a most fine artistic feeling which makes the score of Carmen what it is. Carmen was to Bizet what Der Freischütz was to Weber. It represents the absolute harmony of the composer with his work. In modern opera of real artistic importance it is the perfect model of the lyric song-play type, and as such it has exercised a great influence on dramatic music. It is in every way a masterpiece. The libretto is admirably concise and well balanced, the music full of a lasting vitality, the orchestration brilliant. Unhappily, only three months after its production in Paris the genial composer died suddenly of heart trouble. His early death—he was no more than thirty-seven—robbed the French school of one of its brightest ornaments, one who had infused in the drame lyrique of Gounod and Thomas the vivifying breath of dramatic truth. The later development of French operatic romanticism in Massenet and others, as well as Saint-Saëns’ revival of the classic model, are more fitly reserved for future consideration. Our present object has been to describe the development of the drame lyrique out of the older comic opera, and in a manner this culminates in Carmen.

IV

We have still to give an account of the development of the opéra comique in another direction—that of farcical comedy, a task which falls well within the chronological limits of this chapter. One reason for the gradual approximation of the opéra comique to the drame lyrique and grand opera, quite aside from the influence of romanticism, lay in the appearance of the opéra bouffe, representing parody, not sentiment. For if the opéra comique and drame lyrique of the first three quarters of the nineteenth century represented the advance of artistic taste and the preference of the musically educated for the essentially romantic rather than the merely entertaining; the opéra bouffe or farcical operetta, a small and trivial form, was the delight of the musical groundlings of the second empire, at a time when the pursuit of pleasure and the satisfaction of material wants were the great preoccupations of society; Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) was in a sense the creator of this Parisian novelty. Though Offenbach was born of German-Jewish parents in Cologne, the greater part of his life was spent in Paris, and his music was more typically French than that of any of his French rivals. The tone of French society during the period of the Second Empire was set by the court. The court organized innumerable entertainments, banquets, reviews, and gorgeous official ceremonies which succeeded one another without interruption. Music hall songs and opéras bouffes, races and public festivals, evening restaurants and the amusements they provided, made the fame of this new Paris. And the music of the music halls and opéras bouffes was the music of Offenbach, the offspring of ‘an eccentric, rather short-kilted and disheveled Muse,’ who later assumed a soberer garb in the hands of Lecocq, Audran, and Hervé.

In conjunction with Offenbach the librettists Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy were the authors of these operettes and farces which made the prosperity of the minor Parisian theatres of the period. The libretto of the opéra bouffe was usually one of intrigue, witty, if coarse, and into the texture of which the representation of contemporary whims and social oddities was cleverly interwoven. Although the opéras bouffes were broad and lively libels of the society of the time, ‘they savored strongly of the vices and the follies they were supposed to satirize.’ Offenbach was peculiarly happy in developing in musical burlesque the extravagant character of his situations. His melodic vein, though often trivial and vulgar, was facile and spontaneous, and he was master of an ironical musical humor.[106] The theatre which he opened as the ‘Bouffes Parisiens’ in 1855 was crowded night after night by those who came to hear his brilliant, humorous trifles. La grande duchesse de Gerolstein, in which the triumph of the Bouffes Parisiens culminated, is perhaps the most popular burlesque operetta ever written, and it marked the acceptance of opéra bouffe as a new form worth cultivating. Offenbach’s works were given all over Europe, were imitated by Lecocq, Audran, Planquette, and others; and, being gay, tuneful, and exhilarating, were not hindered in becoming popular by their want of refinement. But after 1870 the vogue of parody largely declined, and, though Offenbach composed industriously till the time of his death and though his opéras bouffes are still given here and there at intervals, the form he created has practically passed away. As a species akin in verbal texture to the comédie grivoise of Collet, adapted to the idiom of a later generation, and as a return of the opéra comique to the burlesque and extravagance of the old vaudeville, the opéra bouffe has a genuine historic interest.

But it must not be forgotten that Offenbach created at least one work which is still a favorite number of the modern grand opera repertory. This is Les Contes d’Hoffmann, a fantastic opera in three acts. It appeared after his death. It is genuine opéra comique of the romantic type, rich in pleasing grace of expression, in variety of melodic development, and grotesque fancy; and, though the music lacks depth, it is descriptive and imaginatively interesting, wonderfully charming and melodious, and has survived when the hundred or more opéras bouffes which Offenbach composed are practically forgotten.

F. H. M.