CHAT ON DON QUICHOTTE

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, it was considered almost shameful to admit that one admired the music of Jules Massenet, the most prolific of French operatic composers in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. So-called connoisseurs would stare at you with a mixture of pity and contempt, as though you were irremediably trapped in a misguided, kitch-ridden notion of what art was supposed to be. The noted musicologist, Andrew Porter, encountered this reaction when asked by the then editor of the Master Musicians series of biographies, on which composer he would prefer to contribute a volume. Porter proposed Massenet, for whom he felt a genuine admiration. His distinguished editor, Eric Blom, also in charge of the famous Groves Dictionary, never quite took him seriously ever again. Fortunately, this snobbishly unfair attitude is disappearing. Massenet can now decently be praised not only as a charmer, a skillful and extremely conscientious craftsman, or a purveyor of delightfully perfumed sweets but as the creator of some ambitious and powerfully emotional music, much of it conceived on a very large scale. The term “heroic” is not an adjective often applied to Massenet, but it can be applied without exaggeration to more than a few passages in one of his final works staged in 1910, Don Quichotte.

Massenet’s opera bears only a tangential relationship to the illustrious Spanish novel, Don Quijote, by the 16th-century author Miguel de Cervantes, its original source of inspiration. The composer’s musical imagination was fired up, rather, by the play Don Quichotte, written by a contemporary dramatist by the name of Jacques Le Lorrain, an extremely picturesque character in his own right who, in more than one respect, appeared like the living incarnation of the derisory yet strangely moving and highly dysfunctional Knight of the Doleful Countenance that Cervantes had made famous. The composer was delighted by the transformation of the character of Don Quichotte who Cervantes treated with irony and sarcasm, understandably so, since the novel, Don Quijote is, among many other things, a satire on the literature of medieval chivalry. In the hands of Le Lorrain, the Knight becomes a tragic hero. Massenet also welcomed the sophisticated courtesan, Dulcinée, a far cry from the scullery wench and vulgar village tart, Aldonza, depicted in the Spanish novel. In Cervantes’ text, Don Quijote refuses steadfastly to see her as she is, persists in worshipping her, and calls her Dulcinea.

Massenet sympathized deeply with the hero of Le Lorrain’s play, Don Quichotte, the poor and defeated old man equipped with toy weapons, who sets out to redress the wrongs of the world in the name of his unbreakable idealism and his lady love. Massenet must have recognized many elements of his own personality in the tragic character of Le Lorrain’s chivalrous knight: his gentility, his craving for true love, his struggle against a creeping and crippling old age coupled with the knowledge that he was dying of cancer, and his struggle against the new harmonies of yet another new school of music already capturing the minds of younger composers. Massenet found the character of Dulcinée equally attractive because she was brought to life in his opera by a very beautiful young mezzo-soprano, Lucy Arbell with whom he was infatuated. Mlle Arbel’s voice had the texture of dark, molten chocolate; she was a fiery and accomplished dancer, and could even accompany herself creditably on the guitar in her fourth-act aria.

Yet despite the sadness, regrets, and sorrow that pervades his opera, Massenet called it a Comédie-héroïque, meaning a heroic comedy. In light of the composer’s definition of his work, I would like to explore the nature of Don Quichotte with you by analyzing the character of the hero himself, then by showing how the two other protagonists, his squire Sancho Panza, and his beloved Dulcinée, relate to him.

More than a few commentators have wondered whether Massenet’s Don Quichotte is a hero or a comic facsimile of one. At the beginning, the composer provides his title character with an entrance worthy of royalty. Distant acclamations herald a personage of seemingly great stature. Fanfare figures alternate with stately march rhythms. Yet in the same breath, the crowd also acclaims Sancho, Don Quichotte’s page,  Rossinante, his horse, as well as Sancho’s donkey! It would appear that his fellow Spaniards are celebrating an illusion. But hasn’t the frail Don Quichotte been cheered by readers throughout history precisely because of the comical extravagance of his imagination?

All is not comical, however, in this madman. With a mystic Christian invocation to “les Séraphins, les Archanges, les Trônes,” (The Seraphims, the Archangels, the Thrones) the hero orders Sancho to distribute their few remaining coins to the crowd. Hence the essence of the title character: despite his self-aggrandizement, he is fundamentally altruistic and virtuous. He seeks not only to imitate the exterior actions of the medieval knights whose exploits have addled his brain after many hours of voracious reading but also to embody their morality (or what he imagines it to have been). A combination of a crazed imagination with heartfelt virtue makes for a very moving protagonist.

Massenet’s opera, then, strikes a delicate balance between the serious and the comic. In Act II the weight shifts to humour. Here the librettist, Henri Cain, skips over Le Lorrain’s play to refer back to the novel in order to include a light-hearted scene at the beginning of the act where Don Quichotte attempts unsuccessfully to compose a poem for the lady of his heart. Then Sancho makes a denigrating reference to his master’s pugnacious encounter with sheep and pigs that the latter mistakes for heathen enemies. But the most conspicuous return to Cervantes in this act is the episode of the windmill which in the popular imagination has assumed almost iconic status as an example of Don Quichotte’s delusions. The knight leads his charge against these so-called giants to motoric rhythms and musical textures such as one might find in a serious episode of a Gluck or Rameau opera, a musical anachronism that obviously pokes fun at our hero.

The oscillation between the serious and the comic occurs again in the third act. Dulcinée had requested of her knight errant that he retrieve a very expensive pearl necklace that a band of infamous robbers had stolen from her. This courageous action, she insists, will be proof of his devotion to her. Because the bandits are reputed to be ruthless, the assignment appears somewhat cruel. With its threatening trombone chromaticism, the beginning of Act III where Don Quichotte encounters the robbers seems terrifying enough. But how frightening can these criminals be when Massenet illustrates their footsteps with a light scherzando motif? To extricate himself from a dangerous situation Don Quichotte plays the role of a Christian martyr and, what seems improbable, generates enough physical strength to break his fetters. Because of the improbability that the skinny knight can call upon such force, it is hard to gauge whether the intended effect is tongue-in-cheek, a caricature of those brawny heroes who perform superhuman feats in medieval romance. Catholic mysticism may also be subject to a lampooning here. Indeed, the sudden sound of the organ on the Spanish Sierra seems incongruous. Don Quichotte appears to win over the bandits almost too effortlessly, as though he were a saint performing a miracle. The magic of Massenet’s music, however, persuades us to suspend our disbelief. We realize that in real life such a transformation of evil into good through the spiritual power of an elderly, self-deluding man would be well-nigh impossible. Nevertheless, this event is so exalting through the eloquence of the composer’s music that we might well say to ourselves, “If it doesn’t and can’t happen in real life, then perhaps it should! The world would be a much better place to live in.”

The staging and decors in the production I saw emphasize splendidly this disconnect between Don Quichotte’s inflamed imagination and the reality surrounding him. The stage space is filled with massive, leather-bound old storybooks. They symbolize the distorted, indeed, hopelessly fantastical vision our hero has acquired of the world by absorbing and believing literally the tales of chivalry he had been devouring. They explain instantly and vividly why Don Quichotte has become a comical yet endearing madman. 

Sancho, too, moves from the comic to the sublime. During the first three acts, he resembles Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He has a very prosaic mind, and seems interested only in food, drink, and staying out of danger. He is a coward from the word go, fleeing into the forest in the third act and leaving his old master to cope with the evil robbers all alone. But he appears as an antithetical Leporello. Mozart’s character spins out hyperbole about male virility. Sancho, disapproving of his master’s devotion to Dulcinée, pours out hyperbole about male victimisation by the opposite sex in the longest aria of the opera. For all the comedy in the role, however, by the end of the fourth act, Sancho turns into a courageous, selfless defender of Don Quichotte. With a soaring and sonorous melody, he bids his knight to leave the unworthy Dulcinée who has refused his marriage proposal and her retinue of cruelly mocking admirers. The jeering of Dulcinée’s guests provokes Sancho’s fury. He rebuffs the elegant and shallow ladies and their gentlemen companions because they are incapable of understanding the one fact he now understands: the innocent generosity and heartfelt commitment to humanity of this self-deluding old man.

It is very significant that from this moment till the end of the opera Sancho uses the familiar rather than the formal form of address when speaking to his master. We no longer have this distinction in the English language, but in French, it is still of paramount importance. One does not cross this boundary lightly either in France or Québec even today. One uses “Tu” or “Thou” when addressing close friends, “Vous” for people with whom one either does not have or does not want to have an intimate relationship. The surge of compassion and admiration for his master that overwhelms Sancho here is underscored by his sudden recourse to the familiar form of address. Sancho no longer considers himself his master’s servant. The unconditional and protective love he now feels for the half-insane yet noble old man has made him Don Quichotte’s best friend and adopted son as well. The words he sings here are deeply moving: “Viens, mon grand! Viens! Viens!” (Come, my great one! Come! Come!) It is not that Sancho has forgotten to what insane extremes Don Quichotte’s wild imagination has led both of them. But now all this has become irrelevant. Given the ugliness of the real world, the only thing that counts for Sancho at present is the lofty idealism of his master, however insane it might be, because in the mind of Don Quichotte at least, it remains real. The squire speaks now as though he had become a clone of his master: “We have work to do. Let us strike out against the cruelty of the world.”  In the fifth and final act, the radical change in Sancho’s relationship with Don Quichotte is confirmed. He views the latter as a Christ-like figure, expressing for the elderly knight a filial love bordering on veneration. Needless to say, when Don Quichotte dies, Sancho is heartbroken, crying out in despair, “Mon maître adoré”(My beloved master).

Unlike Sancho, Dulcinée remains unwilling and unable to embark with Don Quichotte on wild adventures with a view to saving humanity, despite the strange fascination she experiences in the presence of the sublime madman. Being intelligent, she can comprehend in her own manner the spiritual exaltation that impels her aged knight errant to act the way he does. But she has too elemental a temperament, she has her feet too much on the ground to ever entertain the notion of wedding her destiny to that of her elderly worshipper.

Dulcinée belongs to a long line of Massenet heroines like Manon and Thaïs for whom love in its physical as well as spiritual sense is as necessary for her as the air she breathes. Neither she nor they can be described as femmes fatales. One of Massenet’s great accomplishments as a composer was the creation of sexy female protagonists, alluring ladies who can excite men without arousing in them subliminal castration anxieties. She charms men without devouring them. Dulcinée’s music encompasses a wide range. Both her Act I aria “Quand la femme a vingt ans” (When a woman is twenty years old), and “Lorsque le temps d’amour a fui” (When the time for loving has vanished) in Act IV overflow with a melancholy bordering on despair. Much like the better-known Thaïs standing before her mirror, Dulcinée reflects upon the waning of beauty and pleasure. The mezzo range enhances the wistful effect with resonant cadences in the dark low register of the voice. Dulcinée senses that the very qualities that make her irresistible to her panting, salivating suitors will one day fade the same way an exquisite flower quickly loses its bloom. She longs for something more substantial, perhaps an elusive spiritual plenitude. She yearns for a relationship that can resist the vicissitudes of time, yet her centre of gravity seems to be her carnal instinct. In Act IV she informs her four feckless suitors that she is bored with them because she craves, as she says in French, “d’inconnus frissons mordant ma chair gourmande.” (unknown thrills biting into my greedy flesh). Massenet’s erotic manner shines in this passage. In her aria, Dulcinée’s voice leaps down from a high note to execute sinuous chromatic turns low in the register. Then the voice reveals a sudden brightening of the harmony to emphasize these as yet “unknown thrills,” and the words “chair gourmande” are lasciviously drawn out at the cadence.

Don Quichotte is devastated when the lady of his heart refuses his hand in marriage. But how could it be otherwise? Dulcinée is what we would call, in hyper-politically correct language, a horizontally accessible lady. There’s no way the half-emaciated, worn-out, elderly knight could ever satisfy such a ravenous consumer. All he can offer her is sex in the head rather than sex in the bed. Later in the same act, she displays heartfelt musical empathy to the knight whom she so bitterly disappoints, and more or less echoes the audience's reaction when she says of him, “Peut-être est-il fou, mais c’est un fou sublime.” (He is perhaps a madman, but a sublime one.)

Having failed to win the hand and heart of the woman he so worshipped, exhausted now both physically and emotionally after so many hair-raising adventures prompted by his delusional yet deeply moving idealism, there is nothing left for Don Quichotte except to die. While comforting Sancho, he hears Dulcinée’s voice, imagining her to be a star calling out to him. Just like another, much more recent reincarnation of the Don Quijote legend, Broadway’s Man of La Mancha, Massenet’s Don Quichotte also strove to live the impossible dream and to reach for the unreachable star. At the end of the opera, one can’t help thinking that perhaps certain failures are worth infinitely more than many forms of success.