Grétry’s Operas and the French Public: From the Old Regime to the Restoration. By R. J. Arnold

Abstract

As framed by the cover description, R. J. Arnold’s study seeks an understanding of the contemporary appeal of Liégeois opera composer André-Modeste Grétry to Parisian audiences, and explains this appeal primarily through ‘his mastery of song’ (p. 5). If we consider performance statistics during his career, or the size of the crowd (and outpouring of grief) at his funeral in 1813, not to mention the wealth of commemorative events in subsequent years, his influence on the French musical public of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was surely considerable. From this starting point, Arnold traces the contours of Grétry’s career, and sets out his place in a cultural context. Indeed, as befits a volume appearing in this series, Arnold is particularly adept at cultural contextualization, and the study is concerned as much with Grétry’s place in contemporary aesthetic debates, as with his political and social importance and wider shifts in musical and artistic history, for example the quarrels over Gluck and even the shift to Romanticism. More contemporary concerns, such as theories of musical listening, the aesthetics of the tableau, the sociology of taste, and debates over the parterre, are fully integrated. Rousseau is never far from sight, both as musical theorist and as personal role-model, but the discussion also considers many other theorists of lesser renown. The study follows a roughly chronological shape: attention is given both to the opéras-comiques and to works for the Opéra, and there is welcome, sustained attention to Grétry’s writings, from his Mémoires to other lesser-known texts such as Réflexions d’un solitaire and De la vérité. Grétry’s music has a ‘plasticity’ of meaning (p. 18) that suits it to a range of political usages and to the expression of a palette of sentiments, but equally important is his music’s expression of nostalgia after the Revolution: in a period beset by musical and other quarrels, there is a ‘reconciling’ (p. 81) and stabilizing quality, shared by both his musical compositions and his prose works as writer on music (and even, for some, as philosophe). This is more a cultural study than an analysis of Grétry’s operas, though: while his works are frequently referenced and cited, sustained musico-dramatic analysis is somewhat in the background. Given the frequent reference to tears and other emotional manifestations, there is much here that a historian of the emotions will value, even though Arnold eschews the recent theoretical literature concerning that topic. His work also meshes well with current research on posterity. Opera and music specialists will particularly appreciate this book’s impressive range of primary research and deft interweaving of the major topics of contemporary debates in French opera.