Don Quichotte

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O P E R A N O T E S | L Y R I C O P E R A O F C H I C A G O
November 19 - December 7, 2016 | 29
By 1908, Jules Massenet had settled
comfortably into his role as French
opera’s elder statesman. The 66-year-
old composer divided his time between his
Parisian apartment on Rue de Vaugirard, his
country house at Égreville, and Monaco, where
he was a regular guest at the royal palace. He’d
long since given up his teaching duties at the
Conservatoire, but continued writing new
operas at a rate of about one every two years.
Although critics and younger composers had
started to consider his style outmoded, his new
works still enjoyed popular success.
Massenet’s fortunes, however, were about
to change. An attack of rheumatic pains,
which would confine him to bed for much of
the coming year, was followed in May 1909
by something far more devastating: his opera
Bacchus was an unmitigated disaster. The
experience, although not wholly unforeseen,
came as a shock to a composer whose technical
abilities and theatrical instincts had allowed
him to side-step failure for much of his career.
Discouraged and bedridden, Massenet found
solace only in his work. From his labors
emerged Don Quichotte, the elegant heroic
comedy that would stand as his final triumph.
For most of his life, Massenet had
enjoyed success. He won the prestigious Prix
de Rome at just 21 and was appointed to
a professorship at the Paris Conservatoire
while still in his thirties. In the aftermath of
the Franco-Prussian War, when the grand
operas of Meyerbeer – which had dominated
Parisian stages for the previous half-century
– were falling out of fashion, Massenet rose
to prominence as a musical dramatist who
could situate large-scale emotions within more
natural and more intimate settings. Although
his earliest foray into opera – the now-forgotten
La grand’tante from 1867 – prompted one
critic to suggest that Massenet should stick to
orchestral writing, the moderate success of Le
roi de Lahore in 1878 was followed in 1884
by Manon, the work that would establish his
international reputation.
In the decade that followed, Massenet
could do no wrong. Werther quickly became
a fixture of opera houses worldwide, and
Thaïs , although not as well-known today,
was even more popular during Massenet’s
lifetime. Even in the first years of the 20th
century, new Massenet works could still fill
theaters. His most notable late-period success,
Ariane (1906), a retelling of the Greek myth
of Ariadne and Bacchus, did well enough that
Massenet’s publisher, Henri Heugel, decided
there should be a sequel.
Yet everything about Bacchus seemed
doomed from the start. The fact that the
heroine had died at the end of Ariane was
of little concern to librettist Catulle Mendès,
who not only devised an implausible way of
bringing her back to life, but also transplanted
the lovers into the world of the Ramayana, a
Sanskrit epic! The normally cordial Massenet
privately despised Bacchus’s libretto. When
the dead body of Mendès was discovered in
a railway tunnel one morning in February
1909, only three months before the premiere,
Massenet pleaded with his publisher to have
the opera scrapped. Heugel refused. Bacchus
opened three months later and was withdrawn
after only six performances. Today it remains
the only Massenet opera that has never been
revived or recorded.
Massenet had started sketching the music
for Don Quichotte earlier that year, but after
the debacle of Bacchus he took to it with
renewed vigor. Yet for a composer so recently
stung by failure, the story of Don Quixote was
an odd choice. In the three centuries since the
first appearance of Cervantes’s novel (the first
part was published in 1605, the second in
1615), the knight of La Mancha had become
one of the most recognized figures in western
literature, and numerous poets and dramatists
had reused the novel’s characters and stories
for their own artistic ends. Yet while Don
Quixote continued to grow in stature, most
of the works it inspired fell quickly into
obscurity.
Like Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem
Orlando Furioso, published a century earlier,
Don Quixote was mined extensively for opera
plots during the 17th and 18th centuries: in
addition to the knight’s own adventures, the
story of a young couple, Cardenio and Lucinda
(from the first book) and the wedding of the
wealthy Camacho (from the second) were
Ferruccio Furlanetto (Don Quichotte) and Eduardo Chama (Sancho) at San Diego Opera, 2014.
KEN HOWARD/SAN DIEGO OPERA
A Final Triumph: Massenet’s Don Quichotte
By Jesse Simon