Few people nowadays have heard of Massenet’s Sapho.
It has a lot going for it, but it hardly qualifies as a forgotten
gem. The story bears striking similarities to elements of both
La Traviata and La Rondine. Sapho is the pseudonym
of Fanny Legrand, an artist’s model with a notorious reputation.
She meets and falls in love with the impressionable young Jean,
who is unaware of her past. When he finds out he leaves her
for the bosom of his family in Provence and the innocent Irène,
but he later regrets his decision and returns to Fanny. She
accepts his apology but, when he falls asleep, she leaves him
forever.
The plot has potential, but Verdi and Puccini had already explored
its possibilities to the nthdegree
and much of Massenet’s dramatic structure feels contrived.
The whole of Act 4, for example, where Fanny goes to Avignon
to plead with Jean’s family, is entirely unnecessary and
there are other longueurs elsewhere. The scene with the most
potential is the second of Act 3, where Jean reads the letters
from Fanny’s former lovers before forcing her to burn
them. There is proper drama there, though the music doesn’t
quite manage to match it. Other aspects are attractive enough,
including a touch of Provençal colour with Jean’s
Act 1 aria, “Ce monde que je vois”, which then returns
sung from a distance in Act 4. Mostly, though, Massenet’s
style is declamatory and conversational, lacking the rich arcs
of melody that characterise his greatest masterpieces, such
as Manon and Werther. The piece contains very
few proper arias or even ensembles. The music for Fanny and
Jean’s love scene in Act 2 is pretty but hardly approaches
the lyrical heights of other Massenet operas. Elsewhere, such
as in the party scene of Act 1, the music comes across as somewhat
clumsy. Small wonder, then, that it has never really found widespread
favour, falling, as it does, half-way between old fashioned
“number” opera and the more Wagnerian, through-composed
style.
I am told that this recording originally appeared elsewhere
but, for reasons that must remain mysterious, it has found itself
re-released, with no contextual explanation, on the Malibran
label. Unfortunately, the performance isn’t particularly
good. The heroine Renée Doria sounds far too matronly
to be a convincing harlot, and she is a touch on the shrill
side too: her outburst at the end of Act 3, Scene 1, for example,
sounds distinctly iffy! It’s the sort of role that you’d
like to hear sung by the likes of Renée Fleming today.
There are certain similarities of colour between Fleming’s
and Doria’s voices, but Doria sounds, frankly, past it
by the time this recording was made and the effortful quality
of her voice is very off-putting. Gines Sirera has an appropriately
French tone to his singing, lyrical and rounded with a slightly
nasal twang. He doesn’t know the meaning of subtlety and
he tends to bluster through each scene like a bull in a china
shop. Elya Waisman as Irène is, if anything even more
shrill than Doria, and there is no allure in her Act 2 duet
with Jean. The playing of the orchestra is distinctly workmanlike,
and altogether it feels as though very few people were sufficiently
committed to the project, or that their efforts did not yield
sufficient artistic results.
All things considered, then, this is probably a release for
die-hard Massenet fans only. The world still awaits a decent
recorded Sapho, but I doubt that anyone is in much of
a hurry to commission a new one any time soon. The other consideration
is that there is no documentation to speak of at all with the
discs, bar a track list and cast list. There are no texts or
translations, and not even a synopsis to help you on the way.
Is that really good enough for an opera so little known?
Simon Thompson
Fanny Legrand - an artist’s model (Sapho) - Renée Doria
(soprano) 