Grand Opéra—Petit Opéra:Parisian Opera and Ballet from the Restoration to the Second Empire

Abstract

Abstract The emergence of grand opeera around 1830 resulted in large-scale works in five acts setting libretti largely based on historical subjects that dominated much European stage music until the First World War. But these shifts in generic paradigm came at a price. The repertoire of the Paris Opeera was based as much on ballet-pantomime as on opera, and until 1830 both genres would share the stage in a single evening. Although the aesthetic impulses behind grand opeera made programming new opera and ballet henceforth impossible, the state required the Opeera to maintain the balance between opera and ballet in order to reserve the institution9s ““pompe et luxe,”” a situation that called forth a number of responses from its management during the period that all Parisian opera houses were controlled by license (1806/7 to 1864). In the short term, the Opeera continued using older smaller-scale works to accompany ballet as part of the same evening9s entertainment, but despite the canonic pressures this exerted it was a practice that could not be sustained indefinitely. A second alternative was to shorten up-to-date grand opeera , to bring them down to dimensions at which they could be performed with ballets; the best-known example of this procedure is the reduction of Rossini9s Guillaume Tell from four acts (1829) to three (1831). A third possibility was the process of morcellement : the extraction of individual acts or pairs of acts from grand opeera and their performance alongside ballet. A longer-term strategy, and one so far entirely ignored in modern scholarship, was the development of a new type of stage music specifically to accompany ballet: petit opeera . Emerging from two closely related works at the same time as the birth of grand opeera , Rossini9s Le Comte Ory (1828) and Auber9s Le Philtre (1831), petit opeera was the direct result of institutional pressure from the state for the Opeera to mount productions of both opera and ballet, the preference of the institution and its audiences for evenings with both opera and ballet, and the indirect aesthetic pressure engendered by the appearance of grand opeera . The tradition of composing petit opeera continued up to the end of the licensing period in 1864 and encompassed, among such foreign imports as Weber, Verdi, and Donizetti, works by Haleevy, Adam, Thomas, Auber, and Rossini; two of the best-known casualties of the complexities surrounding the genre were Berlioz9s Benvenuto Cellini (1838) and Wagner9s scenario for Le Hollandais volant . Petit opeera was characterized by libretti in two acts with a limited number of musical compositions, a clear distinction between composed number and following recitative (a decisive break with grand opeera ), a limited number of characters and a comic register; it developed a set of conventions that remained consistent from its origins ca. 1830 to its latest presentations in Alary9s La Voix humaine (1861) and Massee9s La Mule de Pedro (1863).