Reviews — The New York Times

From the New York Times - April 2, 1911

MASSENET TELLS HOW HE COMPOSES HIS OPERAS
“That Fellow’s Stuff is Made of Bronze!” Cried Carre,
Meaning He Never Changed It, Once Written.

     Massenet, most popular and indefatigable of French operatic composers, whose “Thaïs,” “Juggler of Notre Dame,” and “Manon” have made him as well known within the last few years to New Yorkers as to Parisians, has been interviewed. As the famous composer persistently stays in his native France, without venturing to cross the ocean, as have Puccini and Humperdinck of late, the honor of interviewing him fell to a French journalist, M. Emile Berr, who obtained the interview for Lectures Pour Tous, a sprightly Paris magazine.
     Since Oscar Hammerstein made the name of Massenet important in the operatic annals of New York (previous to the advent of the energetic impresario of the Manhattan Opera House the Frenchman was known only through “Le Cid” and “La Navarraise”) such a host of lovers of the modern French school has appeared here that anything about Massenet should make welcome reading. Interviews galore there have been with Miss Mary Garden regarding her interpretation of “Thaïs” and “The Juggler”; with M. Renaud on the subject of what he thinks of his hermit’s rôle in the former opera and his monk’s rôle in the latter.
     But of Massenet little except what the regular books of reference disclose.
     Now comes M. Berr with some interesting and intimate descriptions of the prolific composer in his Paris home. Far from being content with his extraordinary record of operatic successes, Massenet will have another opera produced next month, the interviewer tells us. The name of this works is “Thérèse.” And then-will he rest? By no means. Another work, “Rome Vaincue,” has been prepared by this amazingly energetic musician, and is scheduled for production at Paris in February, 1912.
     And it is but two months ago that Massenet’s “Don Quixote” had its first production! And their composer is nearing his seventieth birthday!
     Massenet’s home is near the beautiful Luxembourg Gardens. He received the interviewer in his big parlor, lined with bookcases, which are filled not only with ordinary books but with valuable operatic scores. The composer advanced to meet his visitor with outstretched hands and led him at once to the most comfortable corner in the room.
     He did not seem a man who had worked hard for half a century. He did not seem tired. His face grew animated, like that of a man just at the threshold of his career, when his attention was called to the success of “Don Quixote.”
     “Yes, I can’t complain,” he said. “The year that has just come to an end was a good one for me, and that which is beginning has begun will. At the present time I have nine works on the boards. As far as I can find out, these works have been performed during the past year a total of 3,009 times through out the world.
     Massenet, says M. Berr, tells these things in a clear voice, with animated gestures. His eyes, half closed at first, open wide as he speaks, showing a glance in which the fire of youth still burns. The interviewer, watching him, found appropriate the saying of another Frenchman, growing old in spite of himself:
     “I am a youth, tormented by the body of an old man!”
     But Massenet, he adds, is not of the melancholy sort. He takes up the subject of the coming first performance of “Thérèse” next month with the charming impatience of a boy. Then he talks of “Rome Vaincue.”
     “My friend Henri Cain,” he says, “obtained the authorization to write a libretto based on the fine tragedy of that name, and I have already written the musical score for it. It will be performed for the first time at the Monte Carlo Opera House.”
     “Is it actually finished?”
     “Certainly. I never speak of a score until it is done and printed. And when I announce for the first time the name of one of my works, that means that it may, if necessary, be staged the next day.”
     “Do you compose rapidly?”
     “That depends on the work, the subject, the circumstances. Some operas have kept me busy one, two, three years.
     “Which did you write most rapidly”
     “ ‘Manon.’ ”
     One of his greatest successes! Massenet tells how he wrote it thus:
     “I was at the home of Meilhac. We were speaking of an opera which we intended to write together. The proper arrangements had not been made, and we were correspondingly put out.
     “Quite by chance during our talk Meilhac glanced at a bookshelf on which was a copy of ‘Manon Lescaut.’
     “Ha! A pretty subject for an opera-and a pretty title,’ he said suddenly.
     “ ‘Call it simply “Manon,’ ” said I, ‘that’s better.’
     “Meilhac got to work on it at once, in collaboration with Philippe Gille. That was in the Winter of 1883. In the Spring the completed libretto was brought to me. Five months later I had finished the score. On Jan. 19, 1884, ‘Manon’ was performed for the first time at the Op‚ra Comique. The title rôle was taken by the unforgettable Heilbronn, who seventeen years before had made her d‚but in my little operetta called ‘Grand Tante’ ”
     Massenet does not always work with such feverish haste. Far different is the history of “Werther,” another success both abroad and in new York. The librettists brought him their part of the work early in 1885. Not feeling ready to set it to music, Massenet kept the libretto for two years. Then he set it to music, and tucked it away in a drawer, awaiting the proper moment for making it known to the public.
     It was not until five years after the completion of the score-in January 1892-that the première of “Werther” took place at the Imperial Opera House, Vienna, with the celebrated Van Dyck in the title rôle.
     Of course the interviewer, like all of his kind, asked the great composer that time-honored question, “How do you work?” And Massenet answered it most interestingly.
     “I get up very early,” he said. “Between 5 and 6 o’clock I work. In doing so I read or write at the same time. But I do not begin actually to set down a score until the general outline is clear in my mind.”
     “But is there never lack of agreement between your ideas and those of the librettist?”
     “Yes, indeed. What I do then is to ask the librettist to remove the obstacle before me, the thing which bothers me. ‘Develop this, shorten that, put aside this, cut out that,” I suggest to him.
     “At the start have I not adapted my ideas to the conception of the librettist? Well, what I ask him is to make slight changes of detail, if they are necessary, in order that I may arrive at the full realization of the ideas which I am seeking.
     “When the librettist and I have reached a perfect agreement-not a moment before-I begin to write my music. And, as I know exactly what I want and where I am going-as, from the very instant that I put the notes on paper my full score has already taken shape and is alive within my mind-all I have to do is to let my pen run smoothly over the paper.”
     “It is true that you compose without erasing anything?”
     Massenet began to laugh.
     “You shall see,” he said.
     Rising, he hurried over to a high bookcase filled with big white volumes bigger than dictionaries-“the battle line of Massenet’s manuscript works.” Taking down the first that came to his hand, he opened it. The interviewer glanced over the pages.
     Not a blot, not a correction. Here and there, in the margin, in letters infinitesimally small, little sentences showing what was happening in the outside world while the composer was buried in his work.
     “Cloudy weather,” says one note; another: “Charpentier has won the Prix de Rome.” Even when absorbed in composition Massenet found time to jot down the first success of young Charpentier, the man who was to delight two continents with his “Louise.”
     All those manuscript scores are for full orchestra.
     “Do you write out the music for all the orchestral parts together when you are composing?” asks the interviewer.
     “Certainly; I assure you that I am unable to hear the note that I am writing for an orchestra unless it is accompanied by an orchestra. What my pen jots down is a total harmonious effects which I am unable to disassociate from each other in my mind.
     “See-here is a note that is to be sung, and, below it, the notes for each of the instruments that must accompany it. I hear them all together. Every musician will tell you that is the way to compose.”
     “Then you never compose at the piano?”
     “Never.”
     “You do not feel the need of trying what you have written on your own ears?”
     “It’s useless. My piano could tell me nothing that I did not know already. I never open it until much later, when the work is being rehearsed, in order that those who are to interpret the rôles in it may sing before me and hear my explanations of what they have failed to understand.”
     “But has it never happened that a manager, before producing an opera which he has ordered from you or which you are submitting for his approval, requires that you allows him to hear it?”
     Massenet smiled.
     “Once and only once,” he replied, “a manager demanded that of me. I told him that if I played five acts on a piano, and, possibly, had to repeat them several times, I should get overheated, and that I preferred not having the opera produced to catching a cold.”
     “But,” persisted the interviewer, “does not your audacious method of work make it much more difficult to make changes when they appear necessary after rehearsals?”
     Again the composer smiled.
     “Fortunately, I know nothing about such difficulties,” he declared. “Once Albert Carré remarked when one of my works was in rehearsal at the Opera Comique:
     “ ‘Massenet?-why, that fellow’s stuff is made of bronze!’
     “What he meant was that my music, good or bad, is never altered once it leaves my hands. It is not altered, because it is usually the result of long preparation and carefully planned work.
     “I reap on the stage the profits which I have sown by my efforts at home.”
     Then the talk turned to the singers who have “created” the principal rôles in Massenet operas. The composer showed himself grateful to them for their part in helping him to fame.
     “What a joy it is for an operatic composer,” he exclaimed, “to have as interpreters people who have theatrical sense! During forty years I have been seconded in my efforts by the most marvelous singers, men and women, that have ever been seen!
     “Among them are some to whom I owe, if I may put it thus, a supplement of gratitude-I mean those singers who understand and interpret my works as actors either because they are experienced in dramatic art, or because they act intuitively. Often it has been the case that, from some bit of acting suggested by one of these actors, from a single word, a gesture, a silence which had never occurred to me, a great dramatic effect has come that has delighted me. Talazac made one of those great ‘finds’ in Manon, Lucy Arbell in ‘Thérèse’ ”
     And Massenet, carried away with enthusiasm at the thought of these great moments in his life, leaped from his seat with flashing eyes and acted out what he meant with vivid words and vivid gestures.
     “He would have sung them had I urged him a bit,” declares M. Berr. But he preferred to ask other questions, such as, “Don’t the dress rehearsals and ‘premières’ of your operas excite you a good deal?”
     “I’m never present at them,” said Massenet. “That is a fixed rule with me. Two months ago, however, for the first time, I was at the dress rehearsal of ‘Don Quixote.’ I caught the grippe. It was a lesson to me.
     “But you have at least led the orchestra when your works have been performed?”
     “Yes-as often as I could, till I was fifty. then fatigue came. Now I must let others conduct.
     “Do you know that letting some one else conduct the orchestra at the first performance of one of your works, even when that some one is your best friend, is somewhat like getting married by proxy? It is far better to get married yourself!”
     “Which is your favorite work?” Was the next question.
     “I think it is ‘Thérèse,’ ” Massenet replied.
     When the interviewer inquired of Massenet when he intended to rest, the veteran composer burst out laughing.
     “Never!” he exclaimed.
     “Not even after ‘Rome Vaincue?’ ”
     “Fiddlesticks! I am already writing the opera that is to follow it!”

Last updated December 30, 2006