MY DEBUT AT THE THEATER
On my return to Paris I lived with my wife's family in a lovely
apartment whose brightness was calculated to delight the eye and charm
the thoughts. Ambroise Thomas sent me word that at his request the
directors of the Opera-Comique, Ritt and de Lewen, wanted to entrust to
me a one-act work. This was _La Gran'Tante_, an opera-comique by Jules
Adenis and Charles Grandvallet.
This was bewildering good fortune and I was almost overcome by it.
To-day I regret that at that time I was unable to put into the work all
of myself that I might have wished. The preliminary rehearsals began the
next year. How proud I was when I received my first notices of
rehearsals and when I sat in the same place on the famous stage which
had known Boieldieu, Herold, M. Auber, Ambroise Thomas, Victor Masse,
Gounod, Meyerbeer!...
I was about to learn an author's trials. But I was so happy in doing so!
A first work is the first cross of honor. A first love.
I had everything except the cross.
The first cast was: Marie Roze, in all the splendor of her youthful
beauty and talent; Victor Capoul, the idol of the public; and Mlle.
Girard, the spirited singer and actress, the delight of the
Opera-Comique.
We were ready to go on the stage when the cast was upset. Marie Roze was
taken away from me and replaced by a seventeen year old beginner, Marie
Heilbronn, the artist to whom I was to entrust the creation of _Manon_
seventeen years later.
At the first rehearsal with the orchestra I was unconscious of what was
going on, I was so deeply absorbed in listening to this and that, in
fact to all the sonorousness of the work, which did not prevent me,
however, telling every one that I was entirely pleased and satisfied.
I had the courage to attend the first performance--in the wings, which
reminded me of Berlioz's _L'Enfance du Christ_ which I had attended
secretly.
That evening was both exciting and amusing.
I spent the entire afternoon in feverish agitation.
I stopped at every poster to look at the fascinating words so large with
promise:
First Performance of _La Grand'Tante_
Opera-Comique in One Act
I had to wait to read the authors' names. That would come only with the
announcement of the second performance.
We served as a curtain raiser for the great success of the moment, _La
Voyage en Chine_ by Labiche and Francois Bazin.
I had been a pupil of the latter for a brief while at the Conservatoire.
His pilgrimages to the land of the Celestials had not deprived his
teaching of that hard, unamiable form which I suffered from with him,
and I left his class in harmony a month after I joined it. I went into
the class of Henri Reber of the Institute. He was a fine, exquisite
musician, of the race of Eighteenth Century masters. All his music
breathed forth pleasant memories.
One fine Friday evening in April, at half-past seven, the curtain rose
at the Opera-Comique. I was in the wings near my dear friend Jules
Adenis. My heart throbbed with anxiety, seized by that mystery to which
for the first tune I gave myself body and soul, as to an unknown God.
To-day that seems a little exaggerated, rather childish.
The piece had just begun, when we heard a burst of laughter from the
audience. "Listen, _mon ami_, what a splendid start," said Adenis. "The
audience is amused."
The audience was indeed amused, but this is what happened. The scene
opened in Brittany on a stormy, tempestuous night. Mlle. Girard had
faced the audience and sung a prayer, when Capoul entered, speaking
these words from the text:
"What a country! What a wilderness! Not a soul in sight!" when he saw
Mlle. Girard's back and cried:
"At last.... There's a face!"
He had scarcely uttered this expression when the roars of laughter we
had heard broke loose.
However, the piece went on without further incident.
They encored Mlle. Girard's song, _Les filles de la Rochelle_.
They applauded Capoul and gave the young debutante Heilbronn a great
welcome.
The opera ended in sympathetic applause, whereupon the stage manager
came out to announce the names of the authors. Just then a cat walked
across the stage. This was the cause of fresh hilarity which was so
great that the authors' names went unheard.
It was a day of mishaps. Two accidents on the same evening gave grounds
for fear that the piece would fail. There was nothing in it, however,
and the press showed itself really indulgent. It sheathed its claws in
velvet in its appreciation.
Theophile Gautier, a great poet and an eminent critic, was kind enough
to fling a few of his sparkling bits at the work, proof of his obvious
good feeling.
_La Grand'Tante_ was played with _La Voyage en Chine_, a great financial
success, and I lived fourteen evenings. I was in raptures. I no longer
consider only fourteen performances; they scarcely count.
The orchestral score (it was not engraved) was lost in the fire at the
Opera-Comique in 1887. It was no great loss to music, but I should be
happy to have the evidence of the first steps in my career.
At this time I was giving lessons in a family at Versailles, with which
I am still in touch. I was caught in a heavy shower on my way there one
day. That rain was good to me, verifying the adage, "Every cloud has a
silver lining." I waited patiently in the station for the rain to stop,
when I saw near me Pasdeloup who was also waiting until the shower was
over.
He had never spoken to me. The wait at the station and the bad weather
were an easy and natural excuse for the conversation we had together. On
his asking me whether in my work at Rome I had not written something for
the orchestra, I replied that I had a _Suite d'Orchestra_ in five parts
(the one I had written in Venice in 1865); he begged me point blank to
send it to him. I sent it the same week.
I take extreme pleasure in paying homage to Pasdeloup. He not only aided
me generously on this occasion, but he was also the creative genius of
the first popular concerts which aided so powerfully in making music
understood outside the theater.
[Illustration: One of the last portraits of Massenet]
In the Rue des Martyrs one rainy day (Always rain! Truly Paris is not
Italy!) I met one of my confreres, a violoncellist in Pasdeloup's
orchestra. While we were chatting, he said, "This morning we read a very
remarkable _Suite d'Orchestra_. We wanted to know the author's name, but
it wasn't on the orchestral parts."
I jumped up at once. I was greatly excited. Was it my work or that of
some one else?
"In this _Suite_," I asked him with a start, "is there a fugue, a march,
and a nocturne?"
"Exactly," he replied.
"Then," I said, "it is mine."
I rushed to the Rue Lafitte and flew up the stairs like a madman to tell
my wife and her mother.
Pasdeloup had given me no warning.
On the program for the next day but one, Sunday, I saw my first
orchestral suite announced.
How was I to hear what I had written?
I paid for a place in the third balcony and listened, lost in that dense
crowd, as it was every Sunday, in that gallery where they even had to
stand. Each passage was well received. The last had just ended when a
young fellow near me hissed twice. Both times, however, the audience
protested and applauded all the more heartily. So the kill-joy did not
gain the effect he wanted.
I went back home all of a tremble. My family had also gone to the Cirque
Napoleon and came to find me at once. If my people were happy at my
success, they were still more pleased to have heard my work.
One would have thought no more about that misguided hisser, except that
the next day Albert Wolf devoted a long article on the front page of the
_Figaro_, as unkind as it could be, to breaking my back. His brilliant,
cutting wit was amusing reading for his public. My friend, Theodore
Dubois, as young as I was in his career, had the fine courage to reply
to Wolf at the risk of losing his position. He wrote a letter worthy in
every way of his great, noble heart.
Reyer for his part consoled me for the _Figaro_ article by this curious,
piquant bon-mot: "Let him talk. Wits, like imbeciles, can be mistaken."
I owe it to the truth to say that Albert Wolf regretted what he had
written without attaching any importance to it except to please his
readers, and never thinking that at the same time he might kill the
future of a young musician. Afterwards he became one of my warmest
friends.
Emperor Napoleon III opened three competitions, and I did not wait a
single day to enter them.
I competed for the cantata _Promethee_, the opera-comique _Le
Florentin_, and the opera _La Coupe du Roi de Thule_.
I got nothing.
Saint-Saens won the prize with his _Promethee_; Charles Lenepveu was
crowned for his _Le Florentin_--I was third--and Diaz got first place
with _La Coupe du Roi de Thule_. It was given at the Opera under
marvellous conditions of interpretation.
Saint-Saens knew that I had competed and that the award had wavered
between me and Diaz who had won. Shortly after this he met me and said:
"There are so many good and beautiful things in your score that I have
just written to Weimar to see if your work can't be performed there."
Only great men act like that!
Events, however, decreed otherwise, and the thousand pages of
orchestration were for thirty years a well from which I drew many a
passage for my subsequent works.
I was beaten, but not broken.
Ambroise Thomas, the constant, ever kind genius of my life, introduced
me to Michel Carre, one of the collaborators on _Mignon_ and _Hamlet_.
The billboards constantly proclaimed his successes and he entrusted me
with a libretto in three acts which was splendidly done, entitled
_Meduse_.
I worked on this during the summer and winter of 1869 and during the
spring of 1870. On the twelfth of July of that year the work had been
done for several days, and Michel Carre made an appointment to meet me
at the Opera. He intended to tell the director, Emile Perrin, that he
must put the work on and that it would pay him to do so.
Emile Perrin was not there.
I left Michel Carre, who embraced me heartily and said, "Au revoir. On
the stage of the Opera."
I went to Fontainebleau where I was living, that same evening.
I was going to be happy....
But the future was too lovely!
The next morning the papers announced the declaration of war between
France and Germany and I never saw Michel Carre again. He died some
months after this touching meeting which seemed so decisive to me.
Good-by to my fine plans for Weimar, my hopes at the Opera, and my own
hopes too. War, with all its alarms and horrors, had come to drench the
soil of France with blood.
I went.
* * * * *
I will not take up my recollections again until after that utterly
terrible year. I do not want to make such cruel hours live again; I want
to spare my readers their mournful tale.