Armand entreats her to fly with him, which after the usual conflict of emotions she consents to do.  But meanwhile Thorel, who has been amiably harbouring the emigre, is arrested and dragged to the scaffold.  This brings about a change in Therese’s feelings.  She sends Armand about his business and throws in her lot with Thorel, defying the mob and presumably sharing her husband’s fate.  Massenet’s music is to a certain extent thrust into the background by the exciting incidents of the plot.  The cries of the crowd, the songs of the soldiers and the roll of the drums leave but little space for musical development.  Still ‘Therese’ contains many passages of charming melody and grace, though it will certainly not rank among the composer’s masterpieces, Massenet is one of the most interesting of modern French musicians.  On the one hand, he traces his musical descent from Gounod, whose sensuous charm he has inherited to the full; on the other he has proved himself more susceptible to the influence of Wagner than any other French composer of his generation.  The combination is extremely piquant, and it says much for Massenet’s individuality that he has contrived to blend such differing elements into a fabric of undeniable beauty.

Alfred Bruneau is a composer whose works have excited perhaps more discussion than those of any living French composer.  By critics who pretend to advanced views he has been greeted as the rightful successor of Wagner, while the conservative party in music have not hesitated to stigmatise him as a wearisome impostor.  ‘Kerim’ (1887), his first work, passed almost unnoticed.  ‘Le Reve,’ an adaptation of Zola’s novel, was produced in 1891 at the Opera Comique, and in the same year was performed in London.  The scene is laid in a French cathedral city.  The period is that of the present day.

Angelique, the adopted child of a couple of old embroiderers, is a dreamer of dreams.  All day she pores over the lives of the saints until the legends of their miracles and martyrdoms become living realities to her mind, and she hears their voices speaking to her in the silence of her chamber.  She falls in love with a man who is at work upon the stained glass of the Cathedral windows.  This turns out to be the son of the Bishop.  The course of their love does not run smooth.  The Bishop, in spite of the protestations of his son, refuses his consent to their marriage.  Angelique pines away, and is lying at the point of death when the Bishop relents, and with a kiss of reconciliation restores her to life.  She is married to her lover, but in the porch of the Cathedral dies from excess of happiness.  The entire work is rigorously constructed upon Wagner’s system of representative themes.  Each act runs its course uninterruptedly without anything approaching a set piece.  Two voices are rarely heard together, and then only in unison.  So far Bruneau faithfully follows the system of Wagner.  Where he differs from his master