Velléda and Sémélé: final hesitations of the Institut de France prior to making a reactionary choice

Anyone who hears the name of Velleda will then recall reading François-René de Chateaubriand’s Les Martyrs (1809). Likewise, anyone who has Semele mentioned to them will be reminded of Gustave Moreau’s painting, Jupiter et Sémélé (1895). Such might be the reactions of an intellectually-honest individual from today. Alas, such an instinctive response is contradicted by the matter of historical precision (such dates tend to be awkward like that), since Sémélé was set for the Prix de Rome candidates a few – yet still some – months prior to Moreau being commissioned by a rich amateur to create his version in oils. If Chateaubriand indeed provided the source of the cantata text for the 1888 competition examination (prior to him, Velleda, was regarded as being ‘a prophetess active in Germania, where she was afterwards revered as a goddess’, according to the Dictionnaire abrégé de la fable of 1787), it is unrealistic to consider Moreau as being the examination source for the year following the completion of his work of art. The positive aspect, however, of this cursory comparison between Chateaubriand and Moreau – two proponents of a similar aesthetic restraint, even of suppressed grief – is that it gets to the point of the question, to that idea borne out by later librettos (broadly speaking those used for the Prix de Rome competition over a twenty year period), according to which, to paraphrase the preface of Chateaubriand’s Atala, ‘one is not a great artist through torturing one’s soul’.

From the CD-Book Paul Dukas. Cantates, chœurs et musique symphonique (Palazzetto Bru Zane, collection Prix de Rome, 2015).