Review: Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History, by Rebecca Harris-Warrick

Abstract

Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History , by Rebecca Harris-Warrick. Cambridge Studies in Opera. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xx, 484 pp. In the mid-1700s, notorious rake Giacomo Casanova attended a performance of Andre Campra's Les fetes venitiennes (1710) at the Paris Opera. His reactions varied from amusement (the backdrop placed the bell tower and the ducal palace on the wrong side of Saint Mark's Square) to boredom induced by Campra's music. Most noteworthy to him, however, was the enthusiastic response of the audience to the dancer Louis Dupre, marked by total silence during his appearance and vigorous applause upon its conclusion. According to Casanova, his French companion explained this reverence by stating, “Such is the power of beauty and goodness, of the sublime and the truth to nature which penetrate the soul. … This is true dance.”1 Although the French passion for dance has long been acknowledged by scholars, histories of French Baroque opera have primarily pursued an ideological or evolutionary approach to the development of the genre. No previous work on French Baroque opera has fully addressed the tutued elephant in the room—the pervasiveness of dance within these genres. Rebecca Harris-Warrick's Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera seeks to redress this omission, tracing developments from 1672 (the premiere of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Cadmus et Hermione ) to 1735. Harris-Warrick's thesis is that dance, far from being a supplemental or incidental aspect of French Baroque musical theater, is in fact fundamental to its dramaturgy, and that those parts of a …