AN EARLY ESSAY IN ‘LEITMOTIV’: J. B. LEMOYNE'S ‘ÉLECTRE’

Abstract

THE CONTINUING exploration of early opera is likely to render suspect any new claim to be the innovator of a technique such as Leitmotiv. The work of Lemoyne (I75I-96) is in any case unlikely to have made much impression on the nineteenth-century composers with whom the technique is generally associated. He is mentioned by Berlioz' but as the author of a one-act comic opera (not opeiracomique), 'Les Pretendus', which contains no more musical repetition of the proto-Leitmotiv type than do many eighteenth-century operas, but which happened to be Lemoyne's longest-lived work. It is in '1lectre', performed only three times at the Academie Royale in I782 and greeted with unanimous critical disdain, that something is presaged approaching the continuity and complexity of thematic cross-reference which we tend to regard as Wagnerian-a systematization which is certainly unique in French opera before the Revolution. Lemoyne himself made no claim to originality; rather the reverse. '1lectre' appeared three years after Gluck's 'Iphigeniie en Tauride' but before the zenith of Piccinni ('Didon', late in I783) and the arrival of other substantial composers from abroad, Salieri and Sacchini. In I 78I Piccinni's 'Iphigenie en Tauride' had suffered defeat at the box-office by Gluck's,2 while French composers who tried to go their own way, such as Philidor and Gossec, were unjustifiably eclipsed. Lemoyne sought shelter under Gluck's umbrella, and in the printed score of 'tlectre' wrote a dedication to MarieAntoinette with this comment: L'homme de genie que le goCut eclaire de Votre Majeste et sa protection auguste ont attire parmi nous, m'a encourage. J'ai ose marcher dans la meme Carriere, quoi qu'avec des forces inegales, et embrasser un genre que son genie avait cree.