French Delegation at the Hungarian National Exhibition (1885)

Delibes's first leg of his journey began in 1885, when the literary section of the Hungarian Academy invited him and another thirty-nine leading Parisian cultural figures and intellectuals to visit the national exhibition being held in Budapest. The group comprised a number of writers, artists, musicians, physicians, lawyers, scientists, and journalists.Footnote ⁷ Following their visit to Budapest, arrangements were made for them to embark on a whirlwind tour of the country, from the Carpathian Mountains to the Great Hungarian Plain. The invitation was issued for three reasons. Generally, the Hungarian Society of Writers and Artists wished to thank the French for the warm welcome and hospitality shown to them on the occasion of their visit to Paris in July 1883. Furthermore, they wished to show their gratitude for French charitable aid given to the city Szeged at the time of its great flood in 1879, during which the town was nearly wiped away. Finally, Hungary wished to show its guests the country's progress in modernization since the Ausgleich and success in technology and industry.Footnote ⁸ Though the stated aims of the invitation were to express gratitude, to advance international cooperation, and to celebrate Hungary's economic development, the motivation for the visit by the French delegation was overwhelmingly political. At the time, the French government, still some years away from negotiating an alliance with Russia, was considering establishing closer and direct ties with Hungary to help offset German hegemony.

On Saturday evening, at 7:35, on 8 August 1885, Delibes and the other French delegates of the International Literary and Artistic Association, led by the indefatigable Ferdinand de Lesseps and escorted by the Hungarian representative Attila de Szemere, boarded the Orient Express at Gare de l'Est in Paris to begin their voyage from the Boulevard de Strasbourg to the banks of the Danube River. The two-year old passenger train with its first-class compartments and parlors was the scene of great merriment as it rolled eastwards. Its occupants, with champagne glasses in hand, perhaps believed that they were Hugoesque diplomats setting the stage for the defeat of German imperialism and preparing for the future United States of Europe.Footnote ⁹ Gaily calling out and answering one another, the raised and raucous voices of the Frenchmen, along with cacophonous music by composers Delibes and Jules Massenet to words of a funny rhapsody improvised by Armand Gouzien, overpowered the sounds of the speeding train. The sight of the racing black train with its unsteady passengers resembled Mazepa's legendary wild horseback ride into the steppes of Ukraine: “Vues de la route, ces six voitures, dans leur élan vertigineux, avec ces ombres collées aux vitres, sous l'étincellement des flammes vacillantes, devaient donner l'illusion de quelque chevauchée fantastique [Seen from the road, these six train cars in their dizzying momentum, and with shadows fixed in the windows, under the gleam of flickering flames, must have given the illusion of a fantastic cavalry charge].”Footnote ¹⁰ Perhaps no one enjoyed himself more than Delibes, who, full of verve and humor, filled the dining car with the music “d'une symphonie abracadbrante [a fantastic symphony].”Footnote ¹¹

However joyful the journey was, the train ride itself, and other moments during the delegates' visit to Hungary, was overshadowed by the specter of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's Germany. As the train approached the Franco-German frontier at Avricourt early Sunday morning and passed through Strasbourg, the songs and revelry turned to silence. The group fell into contemplation during the painful passage across the former French lands of Lorraine and Alsace: “Tout le monde est éveillé pour donner une pensée et un regard à la vieille cité annexée [Everyone is awake to give some thought to and cast a glance at the annexed old city].” The landscape now under foreign rule appeared alien and deprived of its former beauty. Crossing the powerful, tumultuous, and legendary Rhine River drew journalist Georges Blavet to comment that it was nothing but “un fleuve sale et vilain, sans caractère [a dirty, ugly river, without character].”Footnote ¹² Until the Orient Express crossed into Austria, the delegates felt uneasy, looking out the windows and observing how their train seemed to be under constant escort by a lance-bearing Prussian cavalry regiment, or Uhlans. The military display left them to wonder whether it was out of national pride or for a more hostile reason. It was with great relief that they escaped the watchful gaze, “envieuse et malveillante en Allemagne [resentful and malevolent in Germany],” and, upon passing through the Germano-Austrian frontier at Simbach, encountered a curiosity that was now “instantanément courtoise et sympathique [instantly courteous and friendly],” for in Austria “la France a tant d'amis instinctifs [France has so many instinctive friends].” At the first appearance of the Danube, the French travelers from the windows struck up Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz, then still a lyrical composition with satirical words by Josef Weyl (for Austria had lost its war with Prussia in 1866).Footnote ¹³

Music was a constant throughout the French delegation's tour of Budapest and the Hungarian countryside. Everywhere Delibes and the others traveled, they were accompanied by bands of Roma musicians playing seemingly nonstop the csárdás, a traditional Hungarian folk dance originating from the 1830s. Regardless of the leg of the journey, whether by wagon, boat, automobile, or cavalcade, the Roma followed and would lift the guests “en des regions inédites et quasiment extraterrestres [in unprecedented and almost extraterrestrial regions].”Footnote ¹⁴ Hungarian hospitality was like the folk dance, “une agitation continue, enivrante, qui vous enlace, vous soulève, vous rit, et vous emporte en un tourbillon [a continuous, exhilarating stirring, that hugs you, lifts you up, laughs at you, and carries you off in a whirlwind].”Footnote ¹⁵ Their hosts' generous spirit came across, whether the delegation was enjoying pantagruelian meals or engaging in bacchanalia—which included the tasting of fifty-year-old Tokay from the caves of Joseph Karl, the Archduke of Austria, or more soberly, surveying what type of oat was fed to the country's horses or the kind of coal used in its locomotives.

The csárdás is sometimes likened to a recruiting dance, and the Hungarian hosts appeared to be in full enlistment mode, by some estimates spending over 20,000 francs, courtesy of the Ministry of Commerce, to entertain the French delegation. And their French guests were willing conscripts. Political gestures abounded on both sides. On the part of the Hungarians, they made every effort to make the Frenchmen feel at home—“nous étions chez nous!”—among brothers and in a sister nation. Upon stepping off the train in Szob, just north of Budapest, the travelers were greeted by a young French woman who had been orphaned during the Franco-Prussian war and then adopted by a Hungarian family. This gesture had the appearance of the French welcoming the French. Throughout the trip, the French guests were transported in special trains by the administrators of the Hungarian railways and led by locomotives draped in garlands and flags in the colors of France and Hungary. Regardless of the time of day, the town, or the size of village they passed through, they were universally and enthusiastically greeted: “Soyez les bienvenus! Vive la France! Vive la chère France! Français, on vous salue, on vous aime!” The patriotic welcomes prompted dramatist Abraham Dreyfus to compare the Danube to the Seine, and the river's Margaret Island to Croissy Island. With musicians playing the Marseillaise and the Hungarian people speaking the French language as well as, or even better than, the French, Dreyfus wondered whether he and his compatriots had really left France and were not somehow disembarking at Rouen or Bordeaux.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, the Hungarian national exhibition and the events surrounding it were a world pageant of sorts, meant tactfully to convey dual allegiances to the Austrian Empire and the ethnic Hungarian nation, to assert the strength of the national market, and to ensure international credit. The kingdom's capital, Budapest, was marketed to Europeans as the “Paris of the East.”Footnote ¹⁷

The French delegation reciprocated by paying tribute to Hungary's revolutionary heroes and making overt displays to honor Hungarian patriotism. Lesseps, “lui [qui] réunit les Océans” [the man who brings together the oceans], at a luncheon in the Redoute-building in Pest, toasted the Hungarian hosts, promising that his next born—the twelfth by his second marriage—if a son, would be named Étienne (Stephen), after the patron saint of Hungary, and, if a daughter, would be named Giselle (Gizella), after the first queen consort of Hungary and spouse of Saint Stephen.Footnote ¹⁸ True to his word, Gisele de Lesseps was born on 12 December 1885. Other, perhaps lesser, physical manifestations of respect included paying homage to the Hungarian national poet Sándor Petőfi. The French delegates formed a procession to the statue erected in his honor in Budapest and laid there a wreath. This act was full of heavy significance. Petőfi had died at age 26 in 1849, in one of the battles of the Hungarian Revolution. Furthermore, as author of the Nemzeti dal (National Song), Petőfi is said to have inspired the revolution that grew into a full-out war for independence from the Austrian Empire. Later, when in Arad, the French delegation visited the martyrs' monument to pay its respect to the thirteen rebel generals who were executed there on 6 October 1849 by order of the Austrian general Julius Jacob von Haynau.

These manifest associations with shared revolutionary histories signaled a mutual challenge to the prevailing political order. France was looking for strategic allies to weaken Germany's stronghold over Central Europe and to end its diplomatic isolation. The 1882 Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy left France vulnerable. By visiting monuments related to Hungary's 1848 revolution, the French delegates stoked the fires of Hungary's recent insurrectionist history. Most likely, the visitors did not deliberately set out to undermine the Triple Alliance, but their actions certainly provoked a response from Germany. As for Hungary, the staging of its first national exhibition in Budapest, and its hosting of foreign delegations and journalists, was a source for civic and national pride. The imperial government in Vienna did not entirely approve, even though both Crown Prince Rudolf and his father, Francis Joseph I, jointly officiated at the exhibition's opening ceremony.

The French delegates learned during their visit that a German newspaper had reported that the goal of their voyage was to revolutionize Hungary. Responding to this news, writer Louis Ulbach countered: “C'est bien plutôt nous qui sommes révolutionnés de tout ce que nous voyons et surtout de cette sympathie sans bornes pour la France [Rather, it is we who are revolutionized by everything we see, and, especially, by this boundless sympathy for France].”Footnote ¹⁹ These words suggest that France was the true benefactor of goodwill; however, there was some truth to German concerns. Journalist Adolphe Badin suggested in his report that Hungary, thirty-six years after 1849, “est mûr pour la liberté [is ripe for liberty].”Footnote ²⁰ Germany also saw the visit as a French provocation to stir up sympathy with regard to its lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine. Certainly remarks by Ulbach along the lines of Hungary providing France with its first revenge—“la revanche-préface,” against “les reptiles de Bismarck”—sought to needle Germany. German pressure was brought to bear on the governments of both France and Austria-Hungary to offset this diplomatic fiasco. A series of meetings between the French guests and government officials were either not organized or canceled. For example, Count Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil, French ambassador to Austria-Hungary, did not meet the train as it passed through Vienna; Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza left Hungary; Joseph Karl, archduke of Austria, excused himself from a luncheon organized on his estate on Margaret Island; and Count Alajos Károlyi, the Austrian ambassador to London, did not receive the French guests at his estate in Mezőhegyes.

Back home in Paris, at least one writer also considered the delegation's voyage to Hungary as gratuitous. Paul Forestier, an armchair traveler reading the daily reports about the delegate's activities and receptions, satirically mused that had he been a member of this group, then he would have assimilated himself quickly into Hungarian life. In two years' time, he would have fathered Hungarian children, taken on the name of “Forestierki,” and spent his free moments composing variations of the csárdás.

The joyful tempo of the csárdás, the artistry of the Roma musicians, and the respect of the Hungarian hosts did leave composers Delibes and Massenet in “eighteenth heaven.” Their hosts honored them with a concert at the Hungarian Royal Opera House at which they directed their own works. They received standing ovations and were crowned with garland wreaths for their efforts: Delibes conducted the orchestra for his ballet Coppelia, and Massenet for his Hérodiade. More importantly, opportunities abounded during their visit for Delibes's study of the rhythms of Hungarian folk music. Delibes spoke on the subject at a parting banquet in Budapest on the evening before the delegation's departure to the Carpathian Mountains. On another occasion, he was particularly moved by the performance of an old Roma violinist. He addressed the man, remarking on how singular and original his art was, and what a service this violinist rendered to the history of music by transmitting folk tradition. Delibes, most probably speaking for himself, concluded that the old musician had already influenced “sur la technique de quelques artistes chercheurs.”Footnote ²¹ He, as a composer and artist-researcher, had decided upon the completion of Lakmé to compose his next opera on an equally exotic subject, moving the setting from mid-nineteenth-century British India to Austrian Galicia.

Léo Delibes's Tour of Galicia

Following the triumphant festivities for the French visitors, which ended on 20 August, Delibes left his fellow companions, who returned to Paris, and set off for Austrian Galicia. His objective was to collect popular melodies for his next composition, in which the main characters were to be drawn from Galician society. For nearly three weeks, the composer traveled throughout the eastern borderlands of the Austrian Empire—all over Galicia and Bukovina, from Kraków to Kolomyia and beyond—noting down song after song, writing original studies, and collecting sketches of the landscape and peoples, all of which were to help with his next opera.

The Galician province that Delibes encountered was under the rule of Habsburg Emperor Francis Joseph. Its population of six million was multicultural, multilinguistic, multiconfessional, and largely agrarian. Among the inhabitants were Poles, Ruthenians, Germans, Armenians, Jews, Moldavians, Hungarians, Czechs, and Roma. Following the uprising of 1846, the Revolution of 1848, and greater Galician autonomy after 1867, Galician nationalists—particularly Poles, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), and Jews—were asserting their political, religious, and linguistic rights. Tensions grew between Polish and Ruthenian nationalists. Nonetheless, there were also members of the intelligentsia who advocated for a specifically Galician culture and a unified provincial community.Footnote ²² It could also be argued that other intellectuals, and certainly the peasantry, were indifferent to national concerns, and, as Tara Zahra writes, these individuals were more connected “to their local, regional, professional, familial, and religious communities than to any overarching national community.”Footnote ²³ Was one a Galician, an Austrian, a Pole? Or rather a Roman, a Greek Catholic, or a Jew? Or a member of the gentry, a civil servant, or a peasant? Or simply “tutejsz,” someone “from here”? However, it is easy to argue indifference when one culture dominates another, as was the case in Galicia in the late nineteenth century, when by 1873 a devolution of power from Vienna to the Polish landowning class produced efforts to Polonize Yiddish-speaking Jews and the largely peasant Ruthenian population for the next two decades.Footnote ²⁴

Ironically, this administrative change relied upon subsuming Polish national culture into a Galician identity—the national past into the provincial present—as the province was the lifeline to the preservation of the former and a counterweight to “the so-called nationalities problem that would embitter Habsburg politics for the next half-century.”Footnote ²⁵ For Delibes, his Galician experience was guided and shaped by his Polish friends and colleagues, yet it did afford alternative perspectives on the music and culture of this province, from the peoples of the plains to those of the mountains. The multitude of these Galician encounters would ultimately disrupt the unity of his opera Kassya, which led to the criticism that the composer and the librettists had left nothing out of the composition and had created a vertiginous world full of: “Choeurs de paysans joyeux et de paysans furieux, de buveurs, de racolleurs, de bandits, de bohémiens, de seigneurs de la cour, etc. [Choruses of jolly peasants and angry farmers, drunkards, recruiting officers, bandits, gypsies, lords of the court, etc.].”Footnote ²⁶

The Polish-language press paid particular attention to Delibes's movements during his trip through Eastern Galicia. The Kraków daily Czas announced on 13 August his imminent visit and its purpose. The composer Adam Münchheimer, who was then serving as director of the Grand Opera Theater in Warsaw, related to readers of the weekly Echo muzyczne, teatralne i artystyczne [Echo of Music, Theater and Art] that Delibes was writing an opera on Polish relations and that he had asked Münchheimer for help in locating sources. Although little is known about Delibes's daily itinerary during those two to three weeks, we know that he arrived in Lviv, the capital of Austrian Galicia, around 30–31 August, and departed for Kraków on 2 September. In Kraków, Delibes briefly met with Władysław Żeleński, who was a Polish composer and professor of the city's Music Society School (later, after 1888, a conservatory).Footnote ²⁷ Delibes, during this stopover, may have been introduced to the fifteen-year-old Zygmunt Stojowski, who was at the time a student of Żeleński. Two years later, he would become one of Delibes's students in Paris (and one who endeared himself so much to Delibes and his wife that they offered to adopt him so that he could compete as a French national in the prestigious Prix de Rome competition).Footnote ²⁸ Newspapers also reported that Delibes traveled to Kolomyia and Zakopane, towns located respectively in the foothills of the Carpathian and Tatra Mountains in present-day Ukraine and Poland, as well as to a number of Galician villages.Footnote ²⁹

In L'viv, the author of Coppélia and Lakmé made arrangements to meet with Karol Mikuli, who at the time was serving as artistic director of the Galician Music Society and as director and professor of the L'viv Conservatory. Mikuli, a pianist and composer of Armenian descent, was born in Chernivtsi, the capital of the Bukovina region that was populated by Jews, Romanians, Germans, Ruthenians, and Poles, and in smaller numbers, Russians, Hungarians, and Armenians. His mother introduced him to music, and after a brief foray into medicine, Mikuli moved to Paris in 1841 (when Delibes was still just a young boy) to study under Chopin and remained there until 1847. There, among other musicians and writers, he met Franz Liszt, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. Mikuli returned to Chernivtsi in 1848 and traveled around Bukovina and Bessarabia searching out native talents and recording their folk songs, dances, and customs. In 1858, he settled permanently in L'viv and remained there until his death in 1897. Mikuli was actively engaged in conducting local orchestras and choruses; teaching piano, composition, and theory; composing piano and chamber works, popular songs, and folk music; and editing the works of Chopin.

For Delibes, Mikuli was an important connection to the folk music of the region, and he asked for his help in obtaining Polish and Ruthenian songs. After their meeting, the two attended a Polish-language performance of Offenbach's Contes d'Hoffmann at the Skarbek Theater. The nineteenth-century public in L'viv had a real taste for Parisian operettas, and one diarist noted that in the city theater the “daily bread consists of the plays by Offenbach and the cancan.”Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, French culture and products prevailed in most spheres of life for Galician Polish elites, and they were a reminder of life in pre-partitioned Poland. Delibes, in a conversation with Mikuli, remarked after the performance how favorably impressed he was with the L'viv orchestra, the singer Elżbieta Skalska in the role of Giulietta, and the conductor Henryk Jarecki, whom the Frenchman remembered from Jarecki's visit to Paris in December 1882.

While visiting the Galician capital, which was the center of cultural and social life in the province, Delibes attended a private concert held at the residence of the Ziembicki family on one of the most exclusive streets in the city's central-western neighborhood.Footnote ³¹ He heard there Ruthenian and Polish folk music, including a kolomyika whose original themes made him laugh with joy, and a mazurka from which he could not keep himself from dancing. The French composer was known for his congenial disposition, and it was not unusual for him to participate exuberantly in musical entertainments, as he had done years earlier on a festive Friday evening by performing a polka solo at Jacques Offenbach's home to celebrate the “imminent end of the World.”Footnote ³²

The Ziembicki home was that of Dr. Grzegorz Ziembicki, who was a professor of surgery at the University of L'viv and physician at the city's municipal hospital. Ziembicki had strong ties to France, and Delibes most likely first met him in Paris. In 1871, Ziembicki had been selected as an intern by the municipal hospital administration, one of the few, if not the only, Galician practitioners in France. While in Paris, he fulfilled his residency requirements at the dermatological, surgical, and syphilitic Hôpital St. Louis. Ziembicki completed his studies in 1875 with a specialization in urology, and then for two years served as a physician at the Polish School in Paris. He returned frequently to France in his capacity as a member of the Surgical and Anatomical Societies of Paris, and in 1895 to receive the highest decoration granted by the Legion of Honor, that of chevalier. At the 100th anniversary of the Internat in 1902, Ziembicki expressed his Franco-Polish patriotism by criticizing the expulsion of Slavic students from German universities and declaring that the foreign alumni of the hospital program were for France “vos colons scientifiques ... des sentinelles avancées,” ready to defend “l'idée française qui ... n'est que celle de la vraie liberté” [“your scientist-colonists… advanced sentinels,” who are ready to defend “the French idea ... which is only that of true freedom”].Footnote ³³ Whereas France had exported scientific knowledge to Galicia, it was now the province's turn to export its musical traditions to France via Delibes. Decades later, another guest present at the salon concert hosted by the Ziembickis, Stanisław Niewiadomski, a Polish composer and music critic who was then manager of the Lviv opera, offered an account of the evening in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita. He described Delibes's wide-eyed delight upon hearing the playing of the kolomyika (a Ruthenian dance) and the composer's enthusiastic joining in the rhythmic dancing to the mazurka.Footnote ³⁴

However, Niewiadomski disapproved of Delibes's music-gathering mission. He viewed the visit to L'viv as an attempt by a Westerner to appropriate material from the East for simple exotic effect. Yet Delibes, while traveling through Galicia, and particularly during his visits to L'viv and Kraków, would have been hard-pressed to hear any original music of the region imbued with Polish or Ruthenian attributes. The offerings in theaters, music societies, and private homes showed a marked preference for the musical culture of Austria, Germany, or France. These foreign cultures were regarded as superior to the local Galician one. Yet, despite the lack of fully developed original Polish or Ruthenian repertoires, provincial high society highly regarded Galician folk songs and folk music and considered them as the main repository of their “national” music culture. It was to this source of Galician cultural identity that Delibes was drawn, and the authenticity of which he wished to capture for his opera by collecting folk melodies from local musicians and music authorities alike.

Galician ethnographers had begun to study the province's musical culture in the early nineteenth century. Their efforts were among a number of other encyclopedic projects undertaken then, and with increasing frequency towards the end of the century, with “the assumption that Galicia was in and of itself a meaningful territorial unit and worthy of ethnographical/anthropological analysis.”Footnote ³⁵ Zorian Dołęga-Chodakowski (pseudonym of Adam Czarnocki) in his book O Sławiańszczyźnie przed chrześcijaństwem [On Slavic Culture before Christianity] (1818) presented a research outline that proposed the collection of folk songs. Several years later, the almanac Pielgrzym Lwowski [The Lwow Pilgrim] published texts to a number of traditional Polish and Ruthenian folk songs, along with several illustrative notations of melodies. An article in the Lviv-annual Pąmietnik narodowy [National Journal] soon followed this publication. Its author wrote about the songs of the Polish and Ruthenian people: “Folk songs are the only source from which national poetry and national music grow out.” The idea of an ethnically diverse, but integral Galicia was emphasized by the author of Pieśni polskie i ruskie ludu galicyjskiego [Songs of the Polish and Ruthenian People in Galicia] (Lviv, 1833), who considered “popular” and “national” music one and the same, whether it originated from among the region's peasantry or nobility, from times past or the present. Oskar Kolberg's thirty-six volume encyclopedic works on songs and ethnography ensued. The compilation and popularization of the songs of the Galician folk had as its aim the creation of a shared culture and sense of a distinct identity. To aid in this nation-making project, music was written down and made accessible through the distribution of piano sheet music for the home.Footnote ³⁶

Whereas original folk songs of Galicia were generally not known outside of the province, and did not circulate far from the borders of this Austrian kingdom, Delibes intended to bring this culture to the attention of the Western world by deliberately selecting these lands as the setting for his next opera and single-mindedly seeking out popular melodies, both Polish and Ruthenian. His fieldwork mirrored the ethnographic efforts outlined above, which sought to define Galicia as a provincial territory and a national homeland.

His final opera set him apart from being a simple armchair Orientalist, one who composes music meant to invoke distant lands, such as China, Japan, India, or Egypt, from the comfort of his study in Paris. Unlike many composers who imagined some mythic “East” and did not visit the lands about which they only fantasized (or, if they did, did not notate the music they heard), Delibes, during his impressionistic and fact-finding journey, traveled through the land, met the people, observed them and took notes, and verified his findings against the opinions of his Polish colleagues. The composer even went so far as to stay in Kolomyia, a town of only about 24,000 inhabitants, which “for someone used to Parisian comforts must have not been too tempting”; in other words, he did everything to immerse himself in the culture and to bring his frame of mind in line with the content of his opera.Footnote ³⁷ The world took notice. The French newspaper Le Ménestrel announced Delibes's impending return to Paris on 13 September, and the Polish press reported that he had immediately set to work on his next opera, Kassya.Footnote ³⁸

Galician Peasant Uprising of 1846: Léo Delibes's Kassya (1893)

The opera Kassya by Léo Delibes, composed to a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille and adapted from a Leopold Sacher-Masoch novella, made its premiere nearly eight years after the composer's voyage to Hungary and Galicia. The opera is set in Galicia during the peasant revolts of 1846. It was first staged at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 24 March 1893. The work was presented posthumously and under another composer's orchestration, that of the composer's friend and former travel companion, Jules Massenet. Fifty-four-year-old Delibes died on 16 January 1891. He left a complete piano-vocal score to his final opera, but he had only finished orchestrating its first act.

Delibes's earlier and more notable works include the ballets Coppélia (25 May 1870) and Sylvia (14 June 1876) and the operas Le roi l'a dit (24 May 1873) and Lakmé (14 April 1883). Following his successes with the ballets Coppélia and Sylvia, Delibes was appointed professor of composition at the Conservatory in 1881, and in 1884, he became member of the French Institute, replacing the chair vacated by Victor Massé. Delibes's music, in the school of Gounod and Bizet, is considered charming and graceful, full of witty melodies and personality, and characterized by a lightness of touch and vivacity of spirit, yet lacking a strong musical identity. Notwithstanding these characteristics, Delibes is regarded as the father of modern ballet and significantly influenced such composers as Tchaikovsky, Alexander Glazunov, and Igor Stravinsky.Footnote ³⁹

Figure 1:

Théâtre national de l'opéra-comique. Kassya : (Opéra) : [estampe] / Tinayre sc [sig.]

Another one of Delibes's musical qualities was his talent for incorporating foreign elements into his compositions and imbuing them with innovative coloring, as in La Source set in Circassia and the Lakmé set in India in which “the British attempt to rule India is presented as neither heroic and admirable nor utterly vile but something in between: necessary or at least unavoidable, yet also obtuse and misguided.”Footnote ⁴⁰ These works by Delibes were in the tradition of the “perfumed” opera, as had been popularized going back to the seventeenth-century,Footnote ⁴¹ and which proliferated particularly in the nineteenth century with such works as: Hector Berlioz's Les Troyens (1863), Georges Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de perles (1863) and Carmen (1875), Giacomo Meyerbeer's L'Africaine (1865), Giuseppe Verdi's Aida (1871), and Camille Saint-Saën's Samson et Dalila (1877), among many others.

When Delibes returned to Paris in September 1885 from the eastern periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire full of new impressions and exotic notations, he required a libretto into which he could pour all the motifs and strange harmonies that were playing in his head. His long-time collaborator Philippe Gille, who had written a number of libretti for Delibes, and associate Henri Meilhac, who had helped adapt Prosper Mérimée's Carmen for Georges Bizet, strove to find a story to suit their friend's inspiration.

The composer—though fully motivated after his journey along the Danube and Dniester rivers, and in possession of numerous picturesque motifs that he had collected—faced innumerable difficulties setting the libretto to music. His friends and collaborators, Meilhac and Gille, had been charged with finding a subject and setting that would suit Delibes's vision. Although Delibes's friend in Warsaw, Adam Münchheimer, suggested that the artists base their poem on folklore compiled by the Polish ethnographer and musicologist Oskar Kolberg, they fixed their choice for a libretto on one of Leopold Sacher-Masoch's stories. The story was entitled “Frinko Balaban” and had been translated into French by Thérèse Bentzon and published in the collection Legs de Caïn (1874). Delibes read and approved of Gille's and Meilhac's selection. Unfortunately, and unlike the fast, csárdas-like tempo of the Hungarian voyage, converting the tale to verse went slowly, and the librettists provided their friend the poem for Kassya scene by scene. Other obstacles ensued. A fire destroyed the Salle Favart, the home of the Opéra-Comique, in May 1887, and the newly appointed director after the blaze, Louis Paravey, was poorly disposed towards the work.

Delibes first sat down to compose the piano score to Kassya in February 1886. Not satisfied with his own sources, and looking for additional material, he turned to his Polish friends in Paris and abroad for assistance. In terms of published sources, he had at his disposal Stanisław Moniuszko's songs that had been translated into French in the series Échos de Pologne.Footnote ⁴² Thanks to Münchheimer, Delibes was able to obtain and consult the collection of Oskar Kolberg's Lud, a multivolume compilation of folklore (songs, tales, proverbs, riddles, and ethnographic documents) from areas in today's Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. The pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski also made suggestions. Paderewski had made his debut in Paris at the Salle Erard in March 1888 and was living in Paris in 1889. During that period, Paderewski supplied Delibes with some Polish folk themes. Paderewski even had an opportunity to hear Delibes play for him some of the ballet music from Kassya at the home of their mutual acquaintance, Zygmunt Stojowski. Stojowski, now a student of Delibes, recounted how Paderewski, though delighted in Delibes's use of harmonization, overall found the music banal. Delibes countered humorously that perhaps he meant that the music was “too Parisian,” or “too Delibian,” over which the two had a good laugh.Footnote ⁴³

Although Delibes was able to poke fun at his “Parisian” style, he wanted Kassya to represent Galicia faithfully, particularly the region in which it was set, Pokutia, and, more specifically, the area around Kolomyia. The composer's reliance on Polish sources would suggest that, if anything, his music would be more Polish rather than “too French,” and thus not capture the diversity of Galician society portrayed in Sacher-Masoch's tale and Gille's and Meilhac's poem. We know, based on excerpts of his correspondence with Münchheimer published in 1889 in Echo muzyczne, teatralne i artystyczne, that Delibes greatly admired the music of Polish composers Stanisław Moniuszko, Józef Nowakowski, and Igancy Marceli Komorowski.Footnote ⁴⁴ He appreciated their incorporation of Polish folk dances and song into their compositions, such as Moniuszko's use of these national elements in depicting socioeconomic and sociocultural relations in his operas, the use of the polonaise to depict the nobility, and the mazurka and krakowiak to represent the folk. Delibes's reliance on Polish sources and his Polish circle of friends, such as Münchheimer, Stojowski, and Paderewski, would suggest that he was not well acquainted with the ethnic diversity of Sacher-Masoch's Galician universe and that his encounters during the trip to Galicia in 1885 had been limited to the urban Polish elites. This was not the case.

Delibes had a fine appreciation of folk music and sensed the nuanced differences between the melodies of Polish gentry and folk versus those belonging to the Ruthenian peasantry. Additionally, he instinctively detected the subtleties of music between the eastern and western slopes of the Carpathians. Aside from relying on Polish sources, he researched original Ruthenian and Little Russian (Ukrainian) music. Delibes availed himself of two monumental collections that included extensive documentation of Ruthenian and Ukrainian songs: the aforementioned Lud by Oskar Kolberg (published in 36 volumes between 1857–1907 and containing 10,000 folk melodies and 12,500 song texts), which included four volumes (1882–1889) devoted to the folk culture of Pokutia (Pokucie), along with engravings by Tadeusz Rybkowski of the area's peoples and dwellings; and the work Piśni, dumki i szumki ruśkoho naroda na Podoli, Ukraini i w Małorossyj [Ruthenian Songs, Dumkas, and Shumkas in Podilia, Ukraine, and Little Russia] published by Antoni Kocipiński in Kyiv (1861).

Kolberg and Kocipiński spent much of their lives recording folk songs, the former gathering ethnographic material of Poles and national minorities living within borders that corresponded to a prepartitioned Poland, and the latter, with some overlap, in the regions of Podilia, Volhynia, and Little Russia (essentially Left-bank Ukraine). They were both romantic nationalists endeavoring to capture a disappearing folk heritage. Kolberg was more of a Polish patriot and conducted much of his work under the auspices of the Anthropological Commission of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Kocipiński gathered songs first while in the service of the Austrian army in Bukovina and later while working as a publisher in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Kyiv, Chişinău, and Zhytomyr. Kocipiński, during his years in Kyiv, became active in the city's Ukrainian movement and, as a minor composer, set music to poems by members of the Ukrainian school in Polish literature, such as Antoni Malczewski, Bohdan Zaleski, and Wincenty Pol. The first edition of his collection of more than one hundred Ruthenian (Ukrainian) songs, dumkas, and shumkas was published with the title page in the vernacular, and the second edition in Latin (i.e., Polish) script, so that it could reach a wider audience in Europe. This action was in direct opposition to the censorship circular of 1859 that prohibited the publication of Ukrainian-language books using the Latin alphabet in the Russian Empire. For his publishing activities and the hosting of weekly musical evenings devoted to aficionadas of Polish and Ukrainian songs, Kocipiński was under police surveillance, and his works were banned and confiscated by Kyiv authorities. When he died in 1866, Kocipiński left four hundred of the folk songs he had collected unpublished.

Today, Kocipiński's volume Piśni, dumki i szumki ruśkoho naroda na Podoli, Ukraini i w Małorossyj [Ruthenian Songs, Dumkas, and Shumkas in Podilia, Ukraine, and Little Russia] is a rarity, in both Cyrillic or Latin script, and it is a wonder the Delibes had a copy to consult. The work greatly influenced his writing of Kassya, and he studied its selections carefully, together with the notations he gathered during his travels through Galicia.

We see Delibes's methodological approach to composition and his concomitant determination to faithfully capture the character of the opera's subject in a series of questions he posed to Münchheimer in September 1886. He first asked about the folk music for kolomyiky, and whether their tempo (2/4 time) and scale modes (raised 6th to a minor 3rd, or a raised 4th to a major 3rd) were more characteristically Little Russian (Ukrainian) or Polish. Additionally, he wanted to know on which side of the Carpathians these dances were performed. As the action of Kassya takes places in the town of Kolomyia, from where this form originated, Delibes found it confusing that some of the passages he had recorded while in Galicia to depict the Polish nobility bore close resemblance to those that should have corresponded to the Ruthenian peasantry. The close proximity in which Ruthenian and Polish peasants lived in parts of rural Galicia would help explain the mixing of folk dance and music genres with which Delibes was grappling. He was resolute about getting the “local color” right and pressed on with his questions. Delibes asked about other songs in 2/4 time, such as the “Kozak,” and what people and area they represented. Wanting to avoid the improper use of original versus popular music, such as had unintentionally happened when Delibes used a Moniuszko melody for part of his ballet Coppélia, the Frenchman also inquired of his Polish friend whether the motifs he was citing were popular or attributed works.Footnote ⁴⁵ Finally, Delibes wanted Münchheimer to let him know whether the musical notes he had jotted down for a dumka he heard sung in the area of Lviv was identifiable. Was it a folk song, or perhaps an excerpt from an opera or a work by a composer?Footnote ⁴⁶ The dumka would be one of the pearls of the Kassya production in 1893.

For Delibes, composing the score to Kassya was a combination of stylistic experimentation and personal understanding. His musical exploration was not what Stanisław Niewiadomski had dismissed as simply “a gourmet looking for unknown morsels,” or a collector seeking ethnographic material for his museum; in other words, someone who had no regard for representing the region or culture in question, and for whom the Carpathians could easily have been the Caucasus.Footnote ⁴⁷ Delibes sought to combine the qualities of French grand opera with the clear and melodic charms of the opéra-comique and with the picturesque, symphonic, or choral themes found in folk music.Footnote ⁴⁸ The opera was also a labor of love. Everyone around him noted how taken he was with the subject—“Nous ne savons vraiment pas pourquoi Léo Delibes s'était si fortement épris du conte bizarre et noir de Sacher Masoch [We have no idea why Léo Delibes was so strongly enamored with the odd and dark tale by Sacher Masoch].” One can suppose that the music and setting held something intensely personal for him, and this may have been because of his close associations with Polish emigrés in Paris and nearby Clichy.

Delibes, whether experimenting stylistically or paying homage to his friendships, or for both reasons, moved forward deliberately on the score to Kassya. He continued to work on the piano-vocal music at an abnormally slow pace, not finishing it until 1 June 1890, a period of four years and six months during which the French press periodically and with anticipation reported on his progress. It would take him six more months to orchestrate the first act, and a third of the way through the second act, his pen stopped ironically at these fateful words: “Ma besogne s'achève [My work is ending].”Footnote ⁴⁹ The evening before his death, Delibes visited with his friend Philippe Gille and played some of the motifs from Kassya to entertain Gille's son (and his godson), Victor. Feeling tired after dinner, he lay down for a time, returned home, and passed away the following morning.Footnote ⁵⁰ At the funeral mass, Delibes's composer-friend Charles Grisart performed at the organ one of the interludes, “La Neige,” from the incomplete Kassya, a sad and profound piece that made a great impression.

The task of completing the orchestration to Kassya fell to two others. With authorization from Delibes's widow, Meilhac and Gille first turned to Ernest Guiraud to arrange the score. Guiraud was best known for writing the orchestral recitatives used for the posthumous versions of Bizet's Carmen and Offenbach's Contes d'Hoffmann. Although Guiraud devoted most of the year 1891 to completing the orchestration for Kassya, he soon gave up for two reasons. First, he wanted to focus on writing his own opera, Brunhilde. Second, he found what had been a project of affectionate devotion and a means of pious tribute to Delibes had been tainted by the machinations of the Heugel Publishing Company. They had turned the labor of love into a business arrangement.Footnote ⁵¹ Kassya and Brunhilde were both left unfinished because of Guiraud's death in Paris, also at age 54, on 6 May 1892. Jules Massenet, who had traveled with Delibes through Hungary and the Carpathian Mountains, and who had shared in the trip's visual and musical experiences, agreed to help realize Kassya.

Kassya opened at the Opéra-Comique on 24 March 1893, after some delay because of illness among the cast, and was performed eight times before closing on 18 April. Although reviewers were sympathetically disposed toward the posthumous production and Massenet's unenviable task of arranging the score, the opera left them generally disappointed with the poem, the orchestration, staging, or all of the above. There were, however, aspects that universally pleased the critics and that recalled Delibes at his best. They particularly praised his melodies that incorporated elements from Polish and Ruthenian folk music and the four Slavic folk dances in the ballet. It was these arrangements that allowed for Delibes's “personality,” his charm and light touch, tinged with exotic colorings, to emerge from behind Massenet's heavy-handed orchestration.

Performance history of Kassya, opéra en quatre actes et cinq tableaux, the poem by Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille (after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch), with music by Léo Delibes

• Paris. Théâtre National de l'Opéra-Comique.

• 1893, March 24, 27, 29; April 6, 8, 13, 15, 18. Receipts: 24, 924 francs. Principal performers: Margareta Iamandi-Nuovina (Kassya), Etienne Gibert (Cyrille), Cécile Simonnet (Sonia), Gabriel Soulacroix (Le Comte de Zevale), Lorrain (Kostka).

• Ballet

• Paris. Théâtre National de l'Opéra-Comique. “Danses slaves.” (choreographed by Mme. Mariquita)

• 1913, February 1, 3, 8, 23, 24, 27. 28. Performers: Yetta Rianza, Darling, Thérésina Négri, Richaume, and Senka Malatzoff.

• Concerts (selected)

• Paris. Jardin zoologique d'acclimatation.

• 1894, 24 June, 19 August; 1895, 3 February. “Polonaise.” 1894, 15 July. “Mazurka.”

• Pau. Casino.

• 1896, March. “La Neige,” “Polonaise,” and ballet music (under the direction of Edouard Brunel).

• Lille. Palais-Rameau.

• 1896, May 31. “Polonaise” (under the direction of Oscar Petit).

• London. Queen's Hall Promenade Concerts.

• 1897, January 9. “Polonaise” and ballet music (under the direction of Henry J. Wood).

• Paris. Private concert at the home of Mme Léo Delibes.

• 1899, January. Fragments from Kassya (choruses sung by students of the Conservatory under the direction of André Wormser).

• Derby (England).

• 1899, December 6. Ballet music (under the direction of Harold Henry).

• Dieppe. Casino.

• 1900, August. “Thème slave et variations de Kassya” (under the direction of Adolphe Bourdeau, with Galand).

• Monaco. Cercle des étrangers.

• 1913, July. “Polonaise” (under the direction of Louis Vialet).

Reviews of Kassya (Premiere on 24 March 1893)

• Paris.

• 1893: Le Temps (24 Mar., 27 Mar. 1893); Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, Le Matin, Le Petit parisien (25 Mar.); L'Écho de Paris, Gil-Blas, L'Intransigeant, Le Jour, La Lanterne, Le Ménestrel (26 Mar.); Le Temps (27 Mar.); La Nouvelle revue (Mar.-Apr.); Journal des débats, Revue bleue (1 Apr.); Journal amusant (1 Apr., 8 Apr.); Les Annales politiques et littéraires, Le Monde artiste (2 Apr.); Revue du cercle militaire (9 Apr.); Le Correspondant (10 Apr.); La Revue hebdomadaire (Apr.); Revue d'art dramatique (Apr.-June); La Revue encyclopédique (15 Apr.); Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique (1893 (1894)).

• London.

• 1893: The Morning Post (29 Mar.); The Era (1 Apr.).

• 1895: New Quarterly Music Review (Nov.)

• Milan.

• 1893: Gazzetta musicale di Milano (26 Mar., 4 Apr.)

• Stockholm.

• 1893: Svensk musiktidning (1 Apr.)

• Warsaw.

• 1893: Echo muzyczne, teatralne i artystyczne (27 Mar. (8 Apr.)).

• New York City.

• 1893: New York Times (25 Mar., 24 Apr.).

• New Orleans.

• 1893: The Daily Picayune (16 Apr.)