Late grand opera: Massenet's Le Cid

In his review of the world première of Jules Massenet's Le Cid (1885) at the Opéra, the critic Victor Wilder took the composer to task for smothering Corneille's tragedy ‘with all the spices customarily used to season that indigestible dish called grand opera’. Wilder listed the ingredients he detected: religious scene, formal ballet (‘for the enjoyment of abonnés [subscribers] who arrive late’), Moorish dancing girls in a military camp, the fantastic apparition of St James, warrior chorus ‘in the manner of the Marseillaise’, and ‘inevitable’ procession. Characteristically meticulous about the latter, the libretto lists its participants: six seigneurs, six ladies in waiting, six pages for the king, six pages for the Infante, two officers, eight Moorish chieftains … and on it goes. ‘What more could the most exacting abonné want?’ asked Wilder, ‘A cardinal, perhaps?’ A swipe at Halévy's La Juive, premièred fifty years before at the same house, highlighted the generic colours of Massenet's work.

Besides spectacle, Wilder might also have noted Massenet's skill at creating rapid action sequences and manipulating the sharp contrasts and spatial effects essential to grand opera. One instance is the scene in Act II where Chimène discovers that her beloved Rodrigue has killed her father, the Comte de Gormas. Here events from the opera's literary antecedents (Guillén de Castro's Las Mocedades del Cid and its latter reworking by Pierre Corneille as Le Cid) are considerably compressed and melodramatically embellished.