Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition in the Opera: Massenet's Herodiade and Thais. By Clair Rowden.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For over fifteen years Musik-Edition Lucie Galland has drawn attention to the repertory of nineteenth-century French opera by publishing reprints of rare scores, anthologies of press reception, and scholarly studies. Jules Massenet, who remains under-subscribed in the economy of our discipline, gets book-length treatment in Clair Rowden's fine new volume, published five years after Jean-Christophe Branger's comprehensive study of Manon (Manon de Jules Massenet ou Le Crépuscule de l’opéra-comique (Metz, 1999)). They are the first monographs to deal perceptively with Massenet's music (journal essays are rare as well), although Brigitte Olivier's literary reflections on Massenet's librettos (J. Massenet: Itinéraires pour un théâtre musical (Arles, 1996)) should not be discounted. Hérodiade (1881) and Thaïs (1894) have always been uttered in the same breath in assessments of Massenet's career because of the similarity of their protagonists: in both, the saintly man gets undone by the flesh and the sensual woman raised by the spirit. Of course, the family resemblance cannot be denied, but different generic premisses in themselves illustrate the limitations of the comparison. Hérodiade falls squarely within the tradition of grand opera, setting personal agenda against an epic backdrop, whereas Thaïs was conceived for the Opéra-Comique (though eventually premiered at the Opéra) as a drama centred on just two characters, and with scarcely a hint of politics or a collective imperative. Although she might have given greater weight to generic tradition, particularly as it plays out in Hérodiade, Rowden deftly examines how a stable set of issues she has identified unfolds differently in each work. I am not sure, however, that the hermeneutic application of republican morality and Catholic tradition, the guiding ideas announced by the title, best represent the achievements of this book. Republican ideology gets hardly any consideration as it relates to Thaïs and the discussion of Catholicism for both operas seems scarcely concerned with traditional theological issues, however defined. One might guess as much from the idiosyncratic treatment of John the Baptist in Hérodiade. Although he thunders at the illicit union of Hérode and Hérodiade in the prehistory of the opera, by the end he seems as decadent as the other characters.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".