Massenet was essentially a shy man who had an overwhelming desire to be liked, a personality trait which is key to an understanding of the nature of his music. Above all, the composer sought to please rather than to challenge his audience. Massenet sought to entertain and dazzle. Only on rare occasion do any of his 30-plus operas rise to the level of depth to be seen and heard in the operas of his older contemporaries Wagner and Verdi, both of whom were still alive during the creation of his middle-period works, or even his exact contemporaries Bizet (whose Carmen was conscientiously provocative) or Debussy (whose Pelleas et Mélisande is a hallmark of twentieth century musical and operatic achievement). In a way, Massenet’s scores were the quintessential equivalent of the belle-epoque style with its roots in Orientalism, decoration for its own sake and curvilinear designs. This style is noted for its attractive, superficial beauty and its popularity with the bourgeoisie. If even inexact parallels can be made between music and art or architecture, this not only describes the music of Massenet but of Saint-Saëns, Chabrier and Charpentier in France, and Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Puccini who carried the burden of the Italian operatic tradition.
While Esclarmonde, Le Roi de Lahore, Hérodiade and Thaïs represent Massenet’s forays into the exotic East, Manon, Werther and Don Quichotte represent an attempt to confront heavier literary themes and he did so with varying degrees of success. What all of these scores have in common is also that with which he is so often compared to Gounod: a great facility for melody. These melodies or tunes were crafted purely towards the characterization of the operatic roles presented to him in his chosen librettos. For instance, through careful listening one will notice distinguishing musical ‘marks’ that characterize Quixote, Sancho Panza and Dulcinea in Don Quichotte…the quasi-academic music of the knight, the buffo style of his servant and the frivolous, coquettish turns of phrase that appear in the music of the idealized maiden. There is, as well, a reliance on clever pastiche, especially in the first act, with the composer seeming to attempt to out-Carmen his old friend Bizet in the recreation of Spanish-flavored music.
Great musical moments abound in Don Quichotte. All of Act II is really quite a brilliant re-creation of the windmill scene from the original novel, from the orchestral description of dawn and Quixote’s mangled attempt to create a rhyming chanson to sing for his beloved, through Sancho’s condemnation of womankind (a clever satire on Leporello’s Catalogue Aria), to the comic horror of the “géant, monstrueux cavalier” that the main character sees in the otherwise harmless windmills. The Don’s duet with Dulcinea in Act Four is certainly a highlight, as two different musical worlds gently collide for a few minutes while the ‘lady of his thoughts’ tries to reveal to him the impossibility of their love in the face of cold reality. And the final scene, with Dulcinea’s voice wafting sweetly above the body of the dying knight, is considered a great coup for any singing actor.
Massenet’s music is often considered overly sentimental and one wonders if he will ever receive the kind of latter-day reconsideration that has been given to composers like Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky. After all, Massenet was a man of the theatre (much like Puccini, the ‘Italian Massenet’) and a master of the orchestra (he even made a lady out of the saxophone, whose sensuous timbre can be heard in Le roi de Lahore, Hérodiade and Werther). This early enthusiastic admirer of Wagner always kept a sense of French reserve (to his credit) and knew how to build a seamless dramatic scene without broad siding the audience with bombast. No wonder turn-of-the-century audiences loved him; now it’s our turn.