Pirrhus ed. by Lisa Goode Crawford

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pirrhus ed. by Lisa Goode Crawford Lois Rosow Pancrace Royer. Pirrhus. Édition de Lisa Goode Crawford. (Patrimoine musical français. Anthologies: Musique de scène, IV, 3.) Versailles: Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, 2015. [Table of contents, p. iii; introd. in Fre., Eng., p. v–xcvii; texts and translations, p. xcix–cxxxvii; facsims., p. cxxxix–clxv; score, p. 1–213; crit. commentary in Eng., p. 215–34; appendix, p. 235–48. ISMN 979-0-707034-66-8; pub. no. CMBV066. i175.] Pancrace Royer (1705–1755) was a composer, keyboard player, and administrator, who in the course of his career held important supervisory and teaching positions at [End Page 139] the Paris Opéra, the French royal court, and the Concert Spirituel. We know him best for two successful operas from his mature years—Zaïde, reine de Grenade (1739) and Le pouvoir de l'Amour (1743)—as well as a collection of adventuresome harpsichord pieces. His first composition for the Opéra, the tragédie en musique Pirrhus (1730), is another matter. Pirrhus failed: despite star singers and dancers, and sets by the important stage designer Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni—in short, considerable institutional support for the young composer—the production closed after only seven performances. Critics, then and now, blame the libretto, attributed to an obscure poet named Fermelhuis. The choice of genre cannot have helped: the tragédie en musique was on life-support in the late 1720s, barely hanging on until 1733, when Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie gave it a shot in the arm. In any case, Pirrhus contains a good deal of music that is well worth our attention. The publication of an excellent critical edition is a welcome development. The libretto concerns an episode in the aftermath of the Trojan War, a popular subject in French drama of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The principal protagonists include Pirrhus (bass), son of Achilles; his prisoner, the Trojan princess Polixène; his kinsman Acamas (haute-contre); and his former fiancée, the sorceress Ériphile. Pirrhus loves Polixène though she rejects him; Acamas betrays Pirrhus by taking Polixène for himself; and the jealous Ériphile, in desperation, engineers a civil war. In the end Polixène sacrifices herself to save her captor's kingdom; as she dies, she confesses her love for Pirrhus. This web of personalities and relationships allows for the variety of conventional episodes and scene types Opéra audiences had come to expect: monologues and dialogues, scenes for the chorus and ballet troupe, and supernatural actions. The musical style mingles conservative passages with others using surprisingly adventuresome textures and harmonies. Much later in the eighteenth century, administrators at the royal court and the Opéra borrowed selected portions of the score for other purposes: the splendid chaconne (act 2), the divertissement for demons and magicians (act 3), and the divertissement for the nymphs of Thetis (act 4). This edition is generous, in both layout and content. Apart from the relatively brief enumeration of variant readings at the back of the volume, given only in English, all scholarly prose is bilingual. The libretto, too, is given in both the original French and an English translation. Just as the score is annotated with scene descriptions and stage directions taken from the libretto, so the separate transcription of the libretto is annotated to show the location of dances and other instrumental movements as found in the score. Lisa Goode Crawford's substantial scholarly introduction—comprising a well-researched historical overview, a thorough discussion of the musical and poetic sources, and sensitive and informative treatment of relevant performance practices—is accompanied by seventeen pages of source facsimiles, and supplemented with an essay by Michael Greenberg on the literary context for the libretto. Finally, François Francoeur's revised version of Royer's chaconne, created for a suite performed at the wedding of the Count of Artois in 1773, is given in an appendix. One happy by-product of the work's failure is a nearly complete set of legible surviving source materials in the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra in Paris. Had there been later revivals, these materials would have...