Rodrigue et Chimene (review)

Abstract

Claude Debussy. Rodrigue et Chimene. Edition de Richard Langham Smith. (oeuvres completes, ser. 6: oeuvres lyriques, vol. 1.) (Musica Gallica.) Paris: Durand, c2003. [Gen. pref. in Fr., Eng., p. ix; foreword, p. xi-xxx; selective bibliography, p. xxxi; characters, libretto, p. xxxii-lxxi; score, 250 p.; abbrevs., p. 252; crit. notes, p. 253-95; appendices, p. 297-310; facsims., p. 311-31 Cloth. ISMN M-044-00022-7; D. & F. 15510. euro251.] Like Ludwig van Beethoven, Claude Debussy considered the problems of opera throughout his career, and in his middle years composed a single masterpiece of the genre. The Debussy oeuvres completes, now about half finished, features among its latest volumes the most important of Debussy's previously unpublished works, the unfinished opera Rodrigue et Chimene, to a libretto by Catulle Mendes (1841-1909) based on the Spanish romance of El Cid. Except for Pelleas et Melisande (1893-1902), the one opera that Debussy did complete out of several planned or partly sketched, Rodrigue et Chimene is Debussy's longest work, and it represents the principal focus of his compositional effort during three critical years at the start of the 189Os. Richard Langham Smith's long-awaited and excellent edition for the oeuvres completes is certain to be an important resource for all who look for greater understanding of Debussy's evolving style and aesthetic. Debussy's two dispiriting years in 1885 and 1886 as a Prix de Rome laureate, though they generated a number of unfinished attempts, did not result in any envois that satisfied either his home committee or the composer himself. After his return to Paris in 1887, however, Debussy began to be an independent composer, and by 1890, when he first decided to compose Rodrigue et Chimene, he had completed three significant large-scale works-the Cinq poemes de Baudelaire-, the Fantaisie toi' piano and orchestra, and the cantata La damoiselle elue-which mark his first emergence as a major composer. During the next two years, as he worked on the opera, Debussy also dealt with problems of text setting in some of his best songs, including the Trois melodies and the first series of Fetes galantes on texts by Paul Verlaine, and the Proses lyriques on his own poems. Yet despite his efforts, Rodrigue et Chimene became an increasing frustration for Debussy, and recognizing in 1893 that he could no longer accommodate Mendes's libretto to his own evolving direction as a composer, Debussy abandoned the opera after composing nearly all of three acts. Thus unburdened, like six years before, Debussy responded with a remarkable outburst of new works that revealed him to a small but understanding public as the most visionary and progressive composer of his time: the String Quartet of 1893. the Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune of 1894. and especially the first sketches for Pelleas et Melisande, which might well have been the deciding factor in Debussy's abandonment of Rodrigue et Chimene. Thus it is especially welcome to have in print for the first time the one previously missing major work that links Debussy's first and second creative periods and illuminates convincingly the continuity of his maturation. The foreword to the new edition explains the complicated history of the libretto of Rodrigue et Chimene. Mendes, a successful poet and novelist and a founder of the Revue wagnenenne, was a passionate admirer of Richard Wagner's music and a personal friend of Wagner himself, who in turn had an affaire du coeur with Mendes's wife, the writer Judith Gautier. In 1883, Mendes wrote a workable but dramatically insipid libretto for Emmanuel Chabrier's Tristanesque opera Gwendoline, (1885). Mendes had announced as early as 1878 that he was writing a libretto to be entitled Le Cid, but did not name a chosen composer, who in any case would not have been the sixteen-year-old Debussy. Other librettists were competing for attention on the same popular subject, and Mendes essentially bowed out of the race when it became known that Jules Massenet would compose a Cid opera based on Corneille's play. …