ABSTRACT
Through close and careful reading of the libretti and scores of Massenet’s operas, we may understand and re-evaluate his contribution to opera at the end of the nineteenth century. The examination of libretti and their adaptation from anterior literary and artistic sources, a process that can highlight revealing changes, is a first invaluable step in situating an opera’s cultural context. Thereafter, Massenet’s music may be taken into account: the musical ‘signs’ may be semantically interpreted to disclose dramatic truth.2 Thus, the way in which the music supports, reinforces, sidelines or contradicts the ideas and images contained within the libretto may allow a reading of contemporary social and political issues. In this chapter, the second tableau of Act 2 of Massenet’s opera He´rodiade is taken as a casestudy in order to show the way in which this opera can be read as a review of events of the decade prior to its composition – the fall of Napole´on III and the creation of the French Third Republic – but in a far-removed historical context.3 Thus, Massenet’s opera may be shown to mirror
1This chapter was first given as a paper entitled ‘He´rodiade: Anticlerical, Imperial or
Republican Opera?’ at the Tenth International Conference on Nineteenth-Century
Music at the University of Bristol in July 1998. The text printed here is a revised and
extended version of that paper, taking into account comments received. In this respect, I
would like to thank Tim Carter, Katharine Ellis, Annegret Fauser, Roberta Marvin and
David Rosen for their invaluable advice and copious guidance. 2Frits Noske, The Signifier and the Signified: Studies in the Operas of Mozart and
Verdi (Oxford, 1990), p. 316 (originally published The Hague, 1977). 3This scene reunites all strands of the political and ‘public’ intrigue of the opera
which are first exposed in Act 1 (Phanuel’s confrontation of the Jews; He´rodiade’s
interview with He´rode, interrupted by an indignant Jean Baptiste) and which culminate
in Jean’s condemnation in Act 3. The sentimental and ‘private’ issues, the ‘love story’
of the opera, are sidelined during this scene.
