Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Massenet: Esclarmonde

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Of the many operas of Jules Massenet only his Manon (1894) is at all well known today. Way back on Sunday, October 11, 1987, I broadcast a recording of Massenet's Le Cid (1885), a chivalric piece which had some popularity before the First World War but faded into obscurity thereafter. Such also was the fate of Esclarmonde, a similar medieval chivalric romance for the lyric stage with exotic and magical elements.

The opera was commissioned for the opening of the 1889 Paris Exhibition, for which the now iconic Eiffel Tower had been specially erected. After a successful run at the Opéra Comique even Massenet himself lost interest in it. (After his death it was revived in 1923.) Massenet wrote the title role of the Byzantine Empress Esclarmonde expressly for the American soprano Sibyl Sanderson, whose voice he admired. She was an operatic diva of the later nineteenth century. Another diva in the mid twentieth century, Joan Sutherland took the title role and with the aid of her husband Richard Bonynge successfully revived Esclarmonde at the Met in 1976 and subsequently at Covent Garden in 1983.

Sutherland and Bonynge made a studio recording of it at Kingswood Hall, London in 1976. That was the recording I aired long ago on Decca/London LPs on Sunday, May 15, 1988. That world premiere recording was reissued on compact disc in 1990. Bonynge conducts the National Philharmonic Orchestra and John Alldis Choir. Listen again in CD format to the Sutherland/Bonynge take on this neglected Massenet masterpiece. Wikipedia has got it right: "Esclarmonde is perhaps Massenet's most ambitious work for the stage and is his most Wagnerian in style."