Massenet: Esclarmonde And Cendrillon Suites

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Cat No: 8555986

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Release Date: 06 January 2002

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 747313598625

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: MASSENET

Description
Jules Massenet (1842-1912)Suite from Esclarmonde • Suite No. 1 Op. 13 • Suite from CendrillonRomain Rolland once claimed that the spirit of Massenet sleeps at the heart of every Frenchman. The most successful opera composer of his generation in France, Massenet wrote music that has sometimes inspired cynicism and hostility through its particularly sensuous beauty, a quality that has to some seemed facile and superficial. The criticism itself may now appear in the same terms. Massenet coupled technical command with a gift for graceful melody and exercised a strong influence over his successors, perceptible in the work of Debussy and of Ravel, as of Puccini. The very charm and grace of his music was to earn him the nick-name bestowed on him by his enemies, "la fille de Wagner".Jules Massenet was born in 1842, the son of a foundry-owner whose prosperity relied on the production of scythes. A decline in business led the family to move in 1847 from Saint-Etienne to Paris, where Madame Massenet supplemented the family income by giving piano lessons, her youngest son among her pupils. At the age of eleven Massenet entered the Conservatoire, where, in 1863, he won the Prix de Rome, his residence in Rome bringing some respite from the period when, as a student, he had found it necessary to support himself by serving as a percussionist at the Opéra and as a café pianist.Success came to Massenet through the support of his teacher at the Conservatoire, Ambroise Thomas, and of his enterprising publisher Georges Hartmann. In 1872 he won his first operatic triumph with the Victor Hugo adaptation Don César de Bazan, followed, in 1873 by the sacred drama Marie-Magdeleine, a choice of heroine that was characteristic in an age that made much of the repentance of a fallen woman. Manon, in 1884, established his position without question, although the next opera, Le Cid, staged at the Opéra in 1885, failed to please. The coincidence of a new libretto, based on a medieval romance, and a meeting with the young American soprano Sybil Sanderson, lay behind the opéra romanesque Esclarmonde, in which the title ro1e was designed to exploit the remarkable range and quality of the young prima donna. The work was staged at the Opéra-Comique in 1890 and impressed a Parisian audience increased by the Exhibition of 1889. Based on the romance Partenopeus de Blois the opera tells the story of the princess Esclarmonde, daughter of the Emperor and magician Phorcas, and her secret love for Roland. The hero, while away fighting the Saracens, breaks the oath of secrecy that he had sworn to his beloved, the penalty for such treachery being death. From this fate he saves himself in a tournament in the Ardennes forest and is rewarded with the hand of Esclarmonde. The spectacular opera includes a scene in which Roland is transported to a magic island to be greeted by Dream-Spirits and a scene of hunting in the forest.Massenet wrote eight or
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