Music, Pantomime & Freedom in Enlightenment France by Hedy Law (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Music, Pantomime & Freedom in Enlightenment France by Hedy Law Annalise Smith Music, Pantomime & Freedom in Enlightenment France. By Hedy Law. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2020. [xvii, 265 p. ISBN 9781783275601 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 978178749374 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, bibliography, index. Hedy Law's Music, Pantomime & Freedom in Enlightenment France stems from a single question: Why did Jean-Georges Noverre refer to pantomime ballet as "an offspring of liberty?" (p. 4). Law more than answers this question in her monograph, providing the reader with an in-depth exploration of how composers incorporated pantomime ballet into their operatic works in eighteenth-century France, and the various ways in which pantomime was seen to both reflect and cultivate ideas of moral liberty during the Enlightenment. Drawing on a multitude of primary sources, Law [End Page 599] traces pantomime from the early eighteenth century up to the French Revolution, bringing necessary attention to a medium of dance that is often overlooked in discussions of French opera. This exploration allows Law to address some of the best-known composers of eighteenth-century French opera—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Antonio Salieri—while also bringing attention to less well-known works that nevertheless indicate the depth to which pantomime was embedded in eighteenth-century operatic practices. Pantomime is most frequently interpreted as a type of dance in which performers adopt more naturalistic movements in order to express emotion and dramatic action, as opposed to the more decorative steps of traditional ballet. Individual scenes or dances that utilized pantomime appeared at the Opéra de Paris in the 1740s, while fully independent pantomime ballets, often called ballet d'action, emerged in the 1770s (though these works were always performed alongside another work). Law frequently touches on pantomime as a type of dance and its shifting hierarchical relationship with more traditional forms of ballet. A significant portion of her argument and discussion, however, is bound up in pantomime as a style of acting. As Law notes, in the seventeenth century, pantomime was not a genre of performance but a type of performer. Though pantomime was often associated with lower forms of drama in the early eighteenth century, by the middle of the century it had gained traction as a serious genre, one in which the traditions of ancient Rome might be revived. We can thus consider pantomime an element of the dramatic reform taking place throughout Europe at this time, one that was increasingly integral to both spoken plays and opera. The fame of English actor David Garrick stemmed in no small part from his skill at pantomime, with the actor viewed as the inheritor of the Roman tradition. Not coincidentally, his performances in Paris in the mid-1760s served as a model for how French actors, even those at the Opéra, could embrace pantomime as an expressive tool. In the beginning chapters of her monograph, Law addresses how pantomime first manifested in operatic dance. Rousseau's Le devin du village serves as an example of how dance could be used to communicate a complete dramatic idea without relying on sung text to convey the plot (albeit with some reliance on a printed libretto). Yet Law's focus on pantomime as a style of acting means that many of the examples she discusses—particularly in the operas of Gluck and Salieri—are not dance pieces at all but instead relatively short moments of instrumental music in the middle of arias or recitatives in which the performer engages in pantomime acting. Law convincingly argues that these short moments were conceived of by the composer as an opportunity for pantomime, pointing to actions suggested by the lyrics, certain figurations in the music that suggested motions such as sudden pauses or expressive gestures, or even specific directions in the score that directed the actor to move in a certain way. Collectively, these moments highlight the degree to which expressive acting was increasingly seen as a requirement of good drama on the operatic stage. While pantomime embodied a general shift toward naturalistic movement and acting, it was not just this turn in dramatic practice that led some writers to promote it as a "dance...