Opera, Dispossession, and the Sublime: The Case of Armide

Abstract

Opera was new to late-seventeenth-century France, at once an object of fascination and revulsion. Beginning in 1672, Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully (nd Giovanni Battista Lulli) created the first French operas as trag dies en musique. Spectators were seduced; theorists were skeptical. What was one to do with a genre that Aristotle could not have said anything about? What would the sensuousness of music do to the intellectual force of French tragedy? To many, furthermore, opera was yet another example of ruinous Italian influence. In France, where music-making often had political overtones, Lully carefully sought to distinguish the tragddie en musique as something other than an Italian import. By creating a musical fabric that was a near continuum of air and recit, Lully distanced himself from the discrete alternation of aria and recitative that characterized Italian opera.2 By making air and recitative virtually indistinguishable, and thereby defining the musical voice as a consistent entity, Lully created an effect of continuous subjectivity rather than drawing attention to the operatic form itself as an alternation of two formally distinct vocal modes. In other words, through a specific kind of vocal writing, he attempted to create an effect of continuity of character rather than to display the virtuosity of the singers. It was in part through this naturalization of the musical voice within the context of the French theatrical tradition that Lully created French opera. I want to contrast Quinault's and Lully's emphasis on the voice with the extraordinary visual impact of early French opera in order to speculate that their last tragddie en musique, Armide (staged in the