My Recollections Part 6

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 Roch.e.l.le_.

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: One of the last portraits of Ma.s.senet]

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 pa.s.sage 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, n.o.ble 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 compet.i.tions, 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 pa.s.sage 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, ent.i.tled _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.