MY DEBUT AT THE OPERA
Death, which by taking away my mother had stricken me in my dearest
affections, had also taken her mother from my dear wife. So we lived the
next summer at Fontainebleau in a sorrowful house of mourning.
Remembrance of the dear departed still hung over us, when I learned on
the fifth of June of the death of Bizet. The news came like a thunder
clap. Bizet had been a sincere and affectionate comrade, and I had a
respectful admiration for him although we were about the same age.
His life was very hard. He felt the spirit within him, and he believed
that his future glory would outlive him. _Carmen_, famous for forty
years, appeared to those called upon to judge a work which contained
good things, although it was somewhat incomplete, and also--what did
they not say at the time?--a dangerous and immoral subject.
What a lesson on too hasty judgments!...
On returning to Fontainebleau after the gloomy funeral I tried to take
up my life again and work on _Le Roi de Lahore_ on which I had already
been busy for several months.
The summer that year was particularly hot and enervating. I was so
depressed that one day when a tremendous storm broke I felt almost
annihilated and let myself fall asleep.
But if my body was lulled to sleep, my mind remained active; it seemed
never to stop working. Indeed my ideas seemed to profit from this
involuntary rest imposed by Nature to put themselves in order. I heard
as in a dream my third act, the Paradise of India, played on the stage
of the Opera. The intangible performance had, as it were, filled my
mind. The same phenomenon happened to me on several subsequent
occasions.
I never would have dared to hope it. That day and those which followed I
began to write the rough draft of the instrumental music for that scene
in Paradise.
Between times I continued to give numerous lessons in Paris, which I
found equally oppressive and enervating.
I had long since formed the habit of getting up early. My work absorbed
me from four o'clock in the morning until midday and lessons took up the
six hours of the afternoon. Most of the evenings were given to my
pupils' parents. We had music at their homes and we were made much of
and entertained. I have been accustomed to working in the morning like
this all my life, and I still continue the practice.
After spending the winter and spring in Paris we returned to our calm
and peaceful family home in Fontainebleau. At the beginning of the
summer of 1876 I finished the whole of the orchestral score for _Le Roi
de Lahore_ on which I had now spent several years.
Finishing a work is to bid good-by to the indescribable pleasure which
the labor gives one!
I had on my desk eleven hundred pages of orchestral score and my
arrangement for the piano, which I had just finished.
What would become of this work was the question I asked myself
anxiously. Would it ever be played? As a matter of fact it was written
for a large stage--that was the danger, the dark spot in the future.
During the preceding winter I had become acquainted with that soulful
poet Charles Grandmougin. The delightful singer of the Promenades and
the impassioned bard of the French Patrie had written a sacred legend in
four parts, _La Vierge_, which he intended for me.
I have never been able to let my mind lie idle, and I at once started in
on Grandmougin's beautiful verses. Why then should bitter discouragement
arise? I will tell you later. As a matter of fact I could stand it no
longer. I must see Paris again. It seemed to me that I would come back
relieved of my weak heartedness which I had undergone without noticing
it much.
I went to Paris on the twenty-sixth of July intending to bother Hartmann
with my troubles by confessing them to him.
But I did not find him in. I strolled to the Conservatoire to pass the
time. A competition on the violin was in progress. When I got there,
they were taking a ten minute rest, and I took advantage of it to pay my
respects to my master Ambroise Thomas in the large room just off the
jury-room.
As that place, then so delightfully alive, is to-day a desert which has
been abandoned for other quarters, I will describe what the place was in
which I grew up and lived for so many years.
The room of which I have spoken was reached by a great staircase entered
through a vestibule of columns. As one reached the landing he saw two
large pictures done by some painter or other of the First Empire. The
door opposite opened on a room ornamented by a large mantelpiece and
lighted by a glass ceiling in the style of the ancient temples.
The furniture was in the style of Napoleon I.
A door opened into the office of the director of the Conservatoire, a
room large enough to hold ten or a dozen people seated about the green
cloth table or seated or standing at separate tables. The decoration of
the great hall of the Conservatoire was in the Pompeiian style in
harmony with the room I have described.
Ambroise Thomas was leaning on the mantelpiece. When he saw me, he
smiled joyfully, held out his arms into which I flung myself, and said
with an appearance of resignation, delightful at the time, "Accept it;
it is the first rung."
"What shall I accept?" I asked.
"What, you don't know? They gave you the cross yesterday?"
Emile Rety, the valued general secretary of the Conservatoire, took the
ribbon from his buttonhole and put it in mine, but not without some
difficulty. He had to open it with an ink eraser which he found on the
jury's table near the president's desk.
That phrase "the first rung," was delightful and profoundly encouraging.
Now, I had only one urgent errand--to see my publisher.
I must confess to a feeling which enters into my tastes to such an
extent as to be indicative of my character. I was still so youthful that
I felt uneasy about the ribbon which seemed to blaze and draw all eyes.
My face was still moist from those lavish embraces and I was planning to
go home to the country when I was stopped on the corner of the Rue de la
Paix by M. Halanzier, the director of the Opera. I was surprised the
more, for I believed that I was only moderately thought of at the Great
House as a result of the refusal of my ballet, _Le Preneur de Rats_.
But M. Halanzier had a frank and open mind.
"What are you doing?" he asked. "I hear nothing of you."
I may add that he had never spoken to me before.
"How could I dare to speak of my work to the director of the Opera?" I
replied, thoroughly confused.
"And if I want you to?"
"Well, I have a simple work in five acts, _Le Roi de Lahore_, with Louis
Gallet."
"Come to my house, 18 Place Vendome, to-morrow and bring your
manuscript."
I rushed to tell Gallet, and then went home to Fontainebleau, carrying
my wife the two bits of news, one obvious in my buttonhole, and the
other the greatest hope I had ever had.
I was at the Place Vendome the next morning at nine o'clock. Gallet was
there already.
Halanzier lived in a beautiful apartment on the third floor of the
superb mansion which formed one of the corners of the Place Vendome.
I began the reading at once. Halanzier stopped me so little that I went
right through the whole of the five acts. My voice was gone ... and my
hands were useless from fatigue.
As I put my manuscript back into my old leather portfolio and Gallet and
I prepared to go:
"Well! So you leave me no copy?"
I looked at Gallet in stupefaction.
"Then you intend to perform the work?"
"The future will tell."
I was scarcely reinstalled in our apartment in the Rue du General Foy on
my return to Paris in October, than the morning's mail brought me the
following bulletin from the Opera:
_Le Roi
2 heures----Foyer_
The parts had been given to Mlle. Josephine de Reszke--her two brothers
Jean and Edouard were to ornament the stage later on--Salomon and
Lassalle, the last creating a role for the first time.
There was no public dress rehearsal. It was not the custom then as it is
nowadays to have a rehearsal for the "couturieres," then for the
"colonelle" and, finally, the "general" rehearsal.
In spite of the obviously sympathetic demonstrations of the orchestra
and all the personnel at the rehearsal, Halanzier announced that as they
were putting on the first work of a debutant at the Opera, he wanted to
look after everything himself until after the first performance.
I want to record again my deep gratitude to that singularly good
director who loved youth and protected it.
The staging, scenery and costumes were of unheard-of splendor; the
interpretation of the first order....
The first performance of _Le Roi de Lahore_, the twenty-seventh of
April, 1877, was a glorious event in my life.
Apropos of this I recall that on that morning Gustave Flaubert left his
card with the servant, without even asking for me. On it were these
words:
"This morning I pity you; to-night I shall envy you."
These lines show so well the admirable understanding of the writer of
_Salammbo_ and that immortal masterpiece _Madame Bovary_.
The next morning I received the following lines from the famous
architect and great artist Charles Gamier:
"I do not know whether it is the hall which makes good music; but,
_sapristi_, what I do know is that I lost none of your work and
found it _admirable_. That's the truth.
"Your
"CARLO."
The magnificent Opera had been opened sixteen months previously, January
5, 1875, and the critics had considered it their duty to attack the
acoustics of that marvellous house built by the most exceptionally
competent man of modern times. It is true that the criticism did not
last, for when one speaks of Garnier's magnificent work it is in words
which are eloquent in their simplicity, "What a fine theater!" The hall
obviously has not changed, but the public which pays to Garnier his just
and rightful homage.