SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
influence of the Conservatoire
The influence of the Conservatoire is, in music especially, an influence of the past and of the Government. One may say much the same of the Opera. This ancient association, which bears the imposing name of Académie nationale de Musique and dates from 1669, is a sort of national institution which is more concerned with the history of official art than with living art. The satire with which Jean-Jacques describes, in his Nouvelle Héloïse, the stiff solemnity and mournful pomp of its performances has not lost much of its truth. What is lacking in the Opera to-day is the enthusiasm that accompanied its former musical struggles in the times of the «Encyclopédistes» and the «guerre des coins.» The great battles of art are now fought outside its doors; and it has become by degrees a showy salon, a little faded perhaps, where the public is more interested in itself than in the performance. In spite of the enormous sums that it swallows up every year (nearly four million francs),[213] only one or two new pieces are produced in a year, and they are rarely works that are representative of the modern school. And though it has at last admitted Wagner’s dramas into its repertory, one can no longer consider these works, half a century old, to be in the vanguard of music. The most esteemed masters of the French school, such as Massenet, Reyer, Chausson, and Vincent d’Indy, had to seek refuge in the Théâtre de la Monnaie at Brussels before they could get their works received at the Opera in Paris. And the classical composers fare no better. Neither Fidelio nor Gluck’s tragedies–with the exception of Armide, which was put on under pressure of fashion–are represented; and when by chance they give Freischütz or Don Juan, one wonders if it would not have been better to let them rest in oblivion, rather than treat them sacrilegiously by adding, cutting, introducing ballets and new recitatives, and deforming their style so as to bring them «up to date.»[214]
[Footnote 213: This is according to M. Rivet’s report on the Beaux-Arts in 1906. The Opera employs 1370 people, and its expenses are about 3,988,000 francs. The annual grant of the State comes to about 800,000 francs.]
[Footnote 214: On the occasion of the revival of Don Juan in 1902, the Revue Musicale counted up the pages that had been added to the original score. They came to two hundred and twenty-eight.]
In spite of the changes of taste and the campaign of the press, the Opera has remained to this day as it was in the time of Meyerbeer and Gounod and their disciples. But it would be foolish to pretend that it has not its public. The receipts show well enough that Faust is in greater favour than Siegfried or Tristan, not to speak of the more recent works of the new French school, which cannot be acclimatised there.
this was: Influence Of The Conservatoire
go to next chapter: the enormous stage at the Opera
