A serious production of Thaïs - readers uninterested in opera can skim right past this one - readers interested in opera, apply your best judgment

The entry on Thaïs, the 1894 Jules Massenet opera, in The New Grove Book of Operas (2000), ends with this:

The human truths contained in Thaïs have yet to be revealed either on stage or indeed on record; it is, in many ways, an opera still awaiting its first serious production.

I presume the entry has been revised since then.  I have seen a serious production of Thaïs, and am listening to it now.  Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson recorded the opera in 2000 with a regional French orchestra.  I saw the production in Chicago in 2002 or 2003.  Hampson I saw several times in Chicago, but I believe this was the only time I have heard Fleming perform.

I would not want to put too much pressure on my memory of any opera I have seen, particularly one I had never heard.  I asked ma femme what she remembered, and she immediately said “the set” - a bright version of the Alexandria and the Egyptian desert, yellow, white, and blue (about two-thirds down, there it is) – “and not much else.”

How do I know it was a serious performance, then?  Back to the New Grove.  In the 1894 premiere, the star "'accidentally' exposed her breasts," and a 1973 performance featured "the first full-frontally nude opera singer."  Fleming remained clothed for her entire appearance.  If anything, the production was too static, except that the attention was then firmly on the interpretation of the music.  Really, I know the performers understand what they are singing, are “serious,” because I can hear what they’re doing on the recording.

I wrote and have abandoned a little exploration of the musical themes of the opera.  The only point worth keeping is that Massenet is clearly composing in a Wagnerian world.  Motifs run through the entire piece, performing the same thematic functions of a repeated color or phrase in a novel, except I can hum the motifs.  I am not a particularly sophisticated listener – after multiple plays of the recording, I have been able to pick out five themes.  I doubt that’s all of them.  The one the brass section plays at the beginning of the monk’s “Voilà donc la terrible cité” aria is blatantly ripped off of Tannhäuser (1845).  I think it’s Tannhäuser.

All of the motifs are blended together in the “Méditation religieuse,” a six-minute instrumental section in the exact center of the opera.  Thaïs has just been “converted” by the monk, has just decided to abandon her earthly life and return to the Christian church.  In France’s novel, this is a moment of catastrophic “victory” for the monk.  Massenet abandons the monk, and gives his attention to Thaïs, to her psychological state, which is quiet but ecstatic, and entirely wordless, aside from some off-stage humming.  France’s anti-clerical satire is entirely abandoned by Massenet.  In some sense, this eviscerates the novel.  All for the best.

I understand that the “Méditation religieuse” is popular at weddings.  It’s the moment when a courtesan resolves to become a nun, and a monk begins a life of erotic torment.  Ha ha ha!  But no one at the wedding will know that.

The Fleming and Hampson recording is highly recommended, although I wish there were a CD of highlights.

The flesh of Thaïs sparkling in the light of the waters

An Egyptian hermit becomes obsessed with an Alexandrian courtesan, Thaïs, who he remembers from his youth, and becomes convinced that he has been chosen to convert her to Christianity.  He travels to Alexandria, where he succeeds in his mission.  Thaïs renounces the world and enters a convent; the monk, however, has developed an unquenchable passion for Thaïs that destroys him.  This is one way to describe Anatole France’s Thaïs (1890), and it also applies to the Jules Massenet opera, first performed four years later.

This summary omits everything, absolutely everything, that makes France’s short novel interesting, exasperating, ridiculous, profound, bad, and great.  Dead center in the novel is a parody of Plato’s Symposium, which brushes against the Judas heresy before concluding that the secret savior of mankind is a continually reincarnated Helen of Troy.  The courtesan Thaïs is an early Christian incarnation of the Helen-spirit, apparently.  I would apply all of the words in the above list, except “great,” to this one episode, which has nothing to do with anything resembling a story.

The monk Paphnutius - Massenet’s librettist found the name insufficiently euphonious and switched to Athanaël - encounters a series of figures who represent alternative, non-Christian philosophies, Skeptics and Stoics and Epicureans.  I began to fear that the entire book would be a series of such monologues or debates, and that Thaïs herself was simply one more point-of-view.

The monk’s obvious sexual repression was a complicating factor, though.  After the conversion of Thaïs, which, in an irony discarded by the opera, has almost nothing to do with any action of the monk, his condition, his spiritual and physical anguish, grows even worse.  Here’s where I began to use the word “great,” for the torments of Paphnutius, a twenty page series of increasingly bizarre visions and agonies, of which Massenet contains barely a hint.

In the center of the episode, the saint becomes a stylite.  In the sort of irony France would employ repeatedly in Penguin Island (1908), the saint draws pilgrims; the pilgrims draw commerce; commerce creates a prosperous city; a prosperous city is full of vice:

In the inns, the drinkers, reclining upon divans, called for beer or wine.  Dancers, with painted eyes and naked breasts, performed before them religious and lascivious scenes.  Young men played dice apart, an old men pursued courtesans.  Above these moving forms the motionless column stood alone; the horned head looked into the shadow, and above it Paphnutius watched between heaven and earth.  Suddenly the moon arose above the Nile, like the naked shoulder of a goddess.  The hills streamed with light and azure, and Paphnutius thought he saw the flesh of Thaïs sparkling in the light of the waters among the sapphires of the night.

The episode culminates with the monk’s renunciation of his sainthood when he calls for the assistance of the human Christ.  The human Christ is, of course, long dead.  The human saint is on his own.

The quotation is on p. 111 of a 1932 edition, published by Walter J. Black, translated by who knows who.  It’s different than, but similar to, Gutenberg’s version.

A hodgepodge of factual matter and unsupported opinion about Anatole France

For some reason, I want to spend a good part of the week on a couple of novels by Anatole France, Thaïs (1890) and Penguin Island (1908).  These were once famous books; France was once a famous writer – he won the Nobel Prize in 1921, at the age of 78, and his reputation has been in decline ever since.  His banquet speech is worth a glance.  The first sentence is hilarious.

In some sense, I mean his reputation in English, but I am not convinced that his status in French is much higher.  I paged through a couple of recent histories of French literature (e.g., A Short History of French Literature, Sarah Kay, 2003, Oxford UP) and France was always mentioned, but not for any of his books.  He has been reduced to a pro-Dreyfusard and a friend of Zola.

Penguin Island actually has a long episode that is a satirical revision of the Dreyfus Affair.  It’s poor stuff compared to the sophisticated use of the episode in Proust’s work, but France’s writing has an entirely different tone and purpose, and contains one brilliant bit I want to write about later.  I wonder if Proust has come to fill the literary niche France once occupied.

I invoked the dread word – satire.  No doubt France, in his dozens of books, had more than one mode, but in both of the novels I read he could not be clearer about his pedigree.  In tone, style, ideology, he is a disciple of Voltaire and other eighteenth century rationalists.  Thaïs evokes Zadig (1747); Penguin Island covers all of French history, and thus moves through time rather than space, but has a kinship with Candide (1759), and even ends with the cultivation of a garden, sort of – more of a meadow, really.

The garden is atop the ruins of Paris, disguised “Penguin” Paris, which has been dynamited by anarchists.  Yes, another demolished city!  I didn’t know it was there, honest.  The novel actually ends with another city built over the garden built on the old city.  You can retreat from the world and cultivate your garden, but only up to a point.

Thaïs is the basis of the third most performed Jules Massenet opera.  The librettist of course eviscerates his source, but the opera is nevertheless excellent, at least when performed, as I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, by Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson – but when is that not true?

Penguin Classics has a single France novel in print, The Gods Will Have Blood, a historical novel of the French Revolution.  The French title is better - Les Dieux ont soif, The Gods Have Thirst – someone, please fix my French – because of the sinister ambiguity.  Thirst for what?  Oh no, for blood!  Anyone read it?

obooki read a couple of early France novellas last year (down near the bottom).  He gave Jocasta a 3 (of 10) and The Famished Cat a 4, which on his scale, where almost every book ever published is a zero, is pretty good.

Such a hodgepodge.  What have I learned?  Voltaire, in decline, Massenet, Dreyfus Affair, thirsty gods.  I might return to Massenet, but otherwise, the rest of the week, I’ll ignore all of this, and just write about the Anatole France I actually read.  Attention, focused; throat, cleared.

A lovely travesty at the Vienna Staatsoper

Meine Frau and I saw a production of Massenet’s Werther (1892) in the legendary, historic, blah blah blah, Vienna Staatsoper. The production, although not insane, included the usual attention deficit disorder- induced decisions (set the story in the 1950s, put a working television on stage, why not?) They were in keeping with the main curtain or drop which had images of Popeye and the Incredible Hulk on it.*

The story, the adaptation, of The Sorrows of Young Werther was unbelievable, a disgrace, the creation of someone who apparently actively hated Goethe’s story and wanted to destroy it. A bizarre and inappropriate Christmas theme runs through the entire opera. Charlotte is given a younger sister who has a crush on Werther. And the entire last act is the final meeting between Werther and Charlotte, after (after!) Werther has fatally shot himself. That last act is a travesty, really.

But that last act (most of the previous act as well), a long duet between the two leads, was also a sort of pure flow of song that was basically as beautiful as any opera I know. I was best off ignoring the subject, ignoring the words entirely, just luxuriating in the singing.

Werther was sung by the young Spaniard Rolando Villazón. He was not the most forceful tenor I’ve ever heard, but he had an amazing clarity, a perfect tone. The Viennese audience applauded him as soon as he came to the fore of the stage, before he had sung a note, which I found weird, but he’d earned the applause by the end. Sophie Koch was Charlotte, almost as good.

Opera fans put up with a lot of nonsense. Maybe that’s true of fans of anything, 19th century literature included.

*In general, Vienna felt genuinely elegant. So I can’t explain this lapse.