Geneviève

In 1881, the finalists of the Prix de Rome competition (Edmond Missa, Georges Marty, Paul Vidal, Alfred Bruneau and Claude Blanc) were set a poem inspired by a medieval subject, Geneviève, written by Édouard Guinand. After due deliberation, the jury ruled that none of the works entered was of a sufficiently high standard; no first prize was awarded and Alfred Bruneau received a second Grand Prix. Their decision may have been determined as much by their rejection of certain modernist tendencies found in Bruneau’s music as by a desire to curtail the influence of Jules Massenet, whose pupils were winning most of the prizes. Whatever the case, Geneviève’s first formal performance at the annual public session of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (22 October 1881) was enthusiastically received by the press. In T. Tréfeu’s view, “Monsieur Bruneau’s cantata is out of the ordinary. He sometimes tends towards that melodiousness which gains such disapproval nowadays! And it may be because of this failing that he was not awarded the Grand Prix”. Likewise, Chicot wrote in Le Triboulet: “one wonders by what whim of the jury the composer, Monsieur Bruneau, was only given a second prize and did not receive the first prize outright. It has been claimed that this is because his music has melodic tendencies. – That is very possible indeed”. With only a few exceptions, the critics unanimously criticised the jury’s severity and hailed Bruneau’s work as a remarkable piece, characterised by the elegance and originality of its orchestration and as  “the sign of a composer with a bright future”.