Reaching the Promised Land: Massenet’s La Terre promise and the Religious Republic
In 1900, Jules Massenet’s final oratorio, La Terre promise, was premiered in Paris at Saint-Eustache as part of a series of oratorio performances that attracted significant attention not only from the press, but also from figures no less than the Archbishop of Paris and Senator Joseph Fabre, who bemoaned the prospect that such performances transformed the church into the “theater of Saint-Eustache” and, therefore, that the Catholic Church had finally succumbed to the “secularizing” influence of the Republic. Written by a composer whose previous sacred works had been received as more secular than sacred due to their overtly sexualized depictions of Biblical women and whose operatic successes had been heralded as ensounding the Republic’s “genius,” La Terre promise promised to deliver just the powers of secularization that the church feared.
Yet La Terre promise defied expectations. At the same time that its nod to Handelian counterpoint and its Biblical text rendered it appropriately religious in the eyes of traditional Catholics, the story of the Jews’ delivery from bondage to freedom and its implicit Dreyfusard support appealed directly to anticlerical Republicans. Whereas modern historians of the Third Republic often emphasize the seemingly insurmountable chasm between Catholic traditionalists and “secular” Republicans, I argue that the case of Massenet’s La Terre promise points to a far more fluid and multilayered cultural and political landscape during the fin de siècle. By analyzing the narratives created by the music and by its critical reception, I show instead that La Terre promise demonstrates how music by a modern Republican composer could function simultaneously as a model of religious devotion through sacred music and also as a symbol of Republican ideology, thus allowing the “secular” Republic to retain its Catholic roots, embrace its modernity, and identify itself as a Republic that was simultaneously sacred and secular.
In 1900, Jules Massenet’s final oratorio, La Terre promise, was premiered in Paris at Saint-Eustache as part of a series of oratorio performances that attracted significant attention not only from the press, but also from figures no less than the Archbishop of Paris and Senator Joseph Fabre, who bemoaned the prospect that such performances transformed the church into the “theater of Saint-Eustache” and, therefore, that the Catholic Church had finally succumbed to the “secularizing” influence of the Republic. Written by a composer whose previous sacred works had been received as more secular than sacred due to their overtly sexualized depictions of Biblical women and whose operatic successes had been heralded as ensounding the Republic’s “genius,” La Terre promise promised to deliver just the powers of secularization that the church feared.
Yet La Terre promise defied expectations. At the same time that its nod to Handelian counterpoint and its Biblical text rendered it appropriately religious in the eyes of traditional Catholics, the story of the Jews’ delivery from bondage to freedom and its implicit Dreyfusard support appealed directly to anticlerical Republicans. Whereas modern historians of the Third Republic often emphasize the seemingly insurmountable chasm between Catholic traditionalists and “secular” Republicans, I argue that the case of Massenet’s La Terre promise points to a far more fluid and multilayered cultural and political landscape during the fin de siècle. By analyzing the narratives created by the music and by its critical reception, I show instead that La Terre promise demonstrates how music by a modern Republican composer could function simultaneously as a model of religious devotion through sacred music and also as a symbol of Republican ideology, thus allowing the “secular” Republic to retain its Catholic roots, embrace its modernity, and identify itself as a Republic that was simultaneously sacred and secular.