French Opera at the Fin de Siecle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (review)

French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style. By Steven Huebner. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-18-816280-4. [xvii, 526 p. $125.]

Steven Huebner loves opera, French opera. And probably no other North American knows as much about it as he does. Besides his book The Operas of Charles Gounod (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), he has written about Georges Bizet's Carmen, Alfred Bruneau's Le rêve, Reynaldo Hahn's and Léo Delibes's adaptations of Pierre Loti's Le mariage de Loti and Madame Chrysanthème, Italian influences on Jules Massenet's grand operas, and opera audiences. In his new book, an elegantly written, in-depth study of thirteen other important French operas, he challenges critics who have long privileged Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande as first in its Wagnerisms. In French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style, Huebner traces "le spectre wagnérien" (p. vii) in works by nine other French composers. From Lohengrin in Esclarmonde, Thaïs, and Le roi d'Ys to Tristan und Isolde in Le roi Arthus and Parsifal in Fervaal, he shows that Wagner haunts these operas as "critical prop" (p. 87), leitmotivic structure, or idealist vision, never reducible to "stylistic pastiche" (p. vii). The result is a penetrating portrait of French operatic culture amidst vigorous self-examination, struggling above all with questions of national identity.

In part 1 (140 pages or one-third of the book), Huebner focuses on Massenet, from his "ascent" to his subsequent "emasculation" by Wagnerian critics. Four operas receive individual chapters: Manon, Esclarmonde, Werther, and Thaïs. Why so much attention to Massenet, since most of his operas portray a "bourgeois domestic environment appropriate to comedy" (p. 133), not Wagnerian epic? Not only was Massenet the most popular opera composer of his time, he was a major influence on young composers at the Paris Conservatory. From 1883, when Wagner died, to 1894--the decade during which the operas discussed in this book were conceived or first performed--all but two Prix de Rome winners in composition were Massenet's students. Debussy, a student of Ernest Guiraud who won in 1884, knew he had to write like Massenet to get the prize. Building on his "Massenet and Wagner: Bridling the Influence" (Cambridge Opera Journal 5 [1993]: 223-38), Huebner investigates how Massenet integrated elements of Wagner's drame lyrique in a way "consonant with his own tradition" (p. 134), that is, "to suit an agenda built on the manifestly non-Wagnerian premiss that local level musical reprise did not necessarily need to be sacrificed in order to achieve musical cohesion across acts and even entire works" (p. 101). That this left both conservatives and Wagnerian progressives unimpressed, however, does not fully explain Massenet's successes.

Part 2, "Ambivalent Wagnerians and Conservative Renewal" (80 pages) examines composers who initially were attracted to Wagner's music. As the chapter titles suggest, Ernest Reyer was really a "Berliozian," Camille Saint-Saëns waffled "on the cusp," and Edouard Lalo embraced Wagnerism only "in spite of himself." Huebner shows that despite their leitmotivs and Wagnerian allusions, Reyer's Sigurd, Saint-Saëns's Henry VIII, and Lalo's Le roi d'Ys embraced renewal within the French tradition of grand opera. Gounod's understated melodic style returns as an important influence. Sensitive to nuance, Huebner explores not only why Wagnerian critics attacked Saint-Saëns, but also why Le roi d'Ys pleased Wagnerians and conservatives.

Part 3, "Wagnerian Renewal," another third of the book, reads as an arrival at an apex with Emmanuel Chabrier in his Gwendoline and Le roi malgré lui, Vincent d'Indy in Fervaal, and Ernest Chausson in Le roi Arthus. Huebner ties their ways of "abutting the fresh against the traditional" (p. 283) to their enthusiastic embrace of Wagner...