Chances are that if you know the title Esclarmonde, you pretty much already know the basics.  

Owing to what he described in his Memoirs as “a chance meeting” in 1887, Jules Massenet, age 45, was tres enchanté to meet transplanted Sacramento socialite Miss Sibyl Sanderson, age 22. He was so taken with her, uh, unique gifts that he ensconced her in the same hotel in which they collaborated on a vehicle suitable for Miss Sanderson’s opera debut.

The premiere of Esclarmonde, a Byzantine epic in four acts with Prologue and Epilogue, was given at the Opéra-Comique in 1889 where it was performed over 100 times through the end of the century, and from to St. Petersburg to New Orleans, almost always with Miss Sanderson (who was said to help launch the career of Mary Garden, of whom devout Parterriani know a great deal).

Sanderson and Massenet apparently got along pretty well: not only was she a noted interpreter of his Manon, he composed Thaïs for her. Also a fan, Saint-Saëns wrote something entitled Phryné for her. But the world didn’t see poor Sibyl in Massenet’s eyes (or ears) and the reception of her 20 Met performances as Manon and Gounod’s Juliette between 1895 and 1901 was lukewarm at best.

Of her debut the Times pronounced, “Miss Sanderson’s voice lacks warmth and emotional character. It is pretty, but it is much too small for the Metropolitan.” The Tribune was less kind: “Of Miss Sanderson’s performance, it is possible to speak with kindly recognition, if not with enthusiasm. Her voice is not one of the kind to be associated with serious opera.”

So unfriendly a reception was enough to cause her to abandon the stage shortly after her marriage in 1897 to a Cuban millionaire sugar heir. She died from a cocktail of depression, alcoholism, and pneumonia at 38, some nine years before Massenet.

With Sanderson gone, Esclarmonde was only sporadically revived until, in 1974, the intrepid Richard Bonynge rescued it from the jaws of obscurity as a vehicle for the jaws of Joan Sutherland.

A sort of touring company came together including Giacomo Aragall (out to beat Franco Corelli for the tightest tights in opera judging from production photos), Huguette Tourangeau, and Clifford Grant, who all performed their roles for the first time in San Francisco in 1974 in a Lotfi Mansouri production to which we shall listen this week.

Jules Massenet: Esclarmonde

San Francisco Opera
Richard Bonynge, conductor
08 November 1974

L’empereur Phorcas – Clifford Grant
Esclarmonde – Joan Sutherland (role debut)
Parséïs – Huguette Tourangeau
Énéas – William Harness
Le chevalier Roland – Giacomo Aragall
Cléomer – Philip Booth
L’evèque de Blois – Robert Kerns
Un envoyé sarrazin – Gary Burgess
Un héraut byzantin – Gary Burgess

Photo: Ron Scherl