Rodrigue et Chimene (review)

Like Ludwig van Beethoven, Claude Debussy considered the problems of opera throughout his career, and in his middle years composed a single masterpiece of the genre. The Debussy Œuvres complètes, now about half finished, features among its latest volumes the most important of Debussy's previously unpublished works, the unfinished opera Rodrigue et Chimène, to a libretto by Catulle Mendès (1841-1909) based on the Spanish romance of El Cid. Except for Pelléas et Mélisande (1893-1902), the one opera that Debussy did complete out of several planned or partly sketched, Rodrigue et Chimène is Debussy's longest work, and it represents the principal focus of his compositional effort during three critical years at the start of the 1890s. Richard Langham Smith's long-awaited and excellent edition for the Œuvres complètes is certain to be an important resource for all who look for greater understanding of Debussy's evolving style and aesthetic.

Debussy's two dispiriting years in 1885 and 1886 as a Prix de Rome laureate, though they generated a number of unfinished attempts, did not result in any envois that satisfied either his home committee or the composer himself. After his return to Paris in 1887, however, Debussy began to be an independent composer, and by 1890, when he first decided to compose Rodrigue et Chimène, he had completed three significant large-scale works—the Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, and the cantata La damoiselle élue—which mark his first emergence as a major composer. During the next two years, as he worked on the opera, Debussy also dealt with problems of text setting in some of his best songs, including the Trois mélodies and the first series of Fêtes galantes on texts by Paul Verlaine, and the Proses lyriques on his own poems. Yet despite his efforts, Rodrigue et Chimène became an increasing frustration for Debussy, and recognizing in 1893 that he could no longer accommodate Mendès's libretto to his own evolving direction as a composer, Debussy abandoned the opera after composing nearly all of three acts. Thus unburdened, like six years before, Debussy responded with a remarkable outburst of new works that revealed him to a small but understanding public as the most visionary and progressive composer of his time: the String Quartet of 1893, the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune of 1894, and especially the first sketches for Pelléas et Mélisande, which might well have been the deciding factor in Debussy's abandonment of Rodrigue et Chimène. Thus it is especially welcome to have in print for the first time the one previously missing major work that links Debussy's first and second creative periods and illuminates convincingly the continuity of his maturation.

The foreword to the new edition explains the complicated history of the libretto of Rodrigue et Chimène. Mendès, a successful poet and novelist and a founder of the Revue wagnérienne, was a passionate admirer of Richard Wagner's music and a personal friend of Wagner himself, who in turn had an affaire du cœur with Mendès's wife, the writer Judith Gautier. In 1883, Mendès wrote a workable but dramatically insipid libretto for Emmanuel Chabrier's Tristanesque opera Gwendoline (1885). Mendès had announced as early as 1878 that he was writing a libretto to be entitled Le Cid, but did not name a chosen composer, who in any case would not have been the sixteen-year-old Debussy. Other librettists were competing for attention on the same popular subject, and Mendès essentially bowed out...