Wexford Festival Opera

24, 27, 30 October, 2 November

Thérèse

Thérèse is the story of three people caught up in the terror of the French Revolution and of how the politics of their time have a decisive effect on their lives, forcing them to confront their relationships and to make life and death choices. Thérèse and her husband André Thorel are Girondists, a political movement which campaigned for the end of the monarchy in France, but whose members were then executed as the reign of terror began. Their friend Armand de Clerval is a nobleman who loves Thérèse, and with whom Thérèse is planning to escape into exile. But her husband, whom she admires and respects, is caught up in the Revolution and Thérèse deliberately leaves her lover and goes to her death with her husband.

Massenet’s ability to write music that portrays intimate human relationships and every possible emotional conflict is wonderfully demonstrated in this tightly-constructed, tense music drama, the dramatic intensity of the music revealing the personalities of the three protagonists.  Massenet and his librettist created the story after Massenet and some friends had a near-supernatural experience in an old Carmelite convent in Paris where many moderate Republicans had been murdered in 1793.

La Navarraise

Massenet had a deep influence on Puccini, who adopted styles of vocal writing from the French composer which were to become characteristics of the verismo tradition of post-Romantic opera. La Navarraise is regarded as being in the verismo tradition, with its realistic depictions of lower class contemporary life. It is set in Spain in 1874 during the Carlist War, and like Thérèse, features a tragic heroine, Anita.

If Thérèse’s renunciation of her lover and her choice of marital fidelity unto death on the guillotine enables her to ascend to the moral high ground, it is a different story with poor Anita, the girl from Navarre (‘la Navarraise’). Once she makes the wrong moral choice she begins an irrevocable descent into her own personal hell, and like a Thomas Hardy heroine, becomes a plaything of fate. She is a familiar figure in every age: in love, poor, prevented from marrying the man she loves through lack of money, and so lacking in moral principles that she is tempted into committing murder for money so that she can marry. The moral point is well made that nothing can go right after that, and consequently she is misunderstood and renounced by the man she loves, who accuses her of prostitution. He dies and she loses her mind and goes mad.

Jules Massenet: Double Bill

Thérèse

Drame musical  in two acts
Libretto by Jules Claretie
Composed in 1905-6
First performed at the Opéra, Monte Carlo; 7 February 1907
Sung in French

La Navarraise

Épisode lyrique in two acts
Libretto by Jules Claretie and Henri Cain
Composed in 1893
First performed at Covent Garden, London; 20 June 1894
Sung in French