Review: Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, by Olivia Bloechl

Abstract

Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France , by Olivia Bloechl. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. xiii, 286 pp. “We cannot seem to be rid of kings” (ix). Olivia Bloechl begins her original and provocative new monograph with a succinct assessment of French operatic historiography. The foundations of the tragedie en musique are indelibly associated with the court of Louis XIV, and in writings on the genre, both venerable and recent, the specter of absolutist politics looms large. How and to what extent were the lofty ideals of the Bourbon regime reflected in the messier realities of the creation and reception of its public art? In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France , Bloechl does not dismiss the oft-discussed links between monarchical rule and the conventions and topics of lyric tragedy. Indeed, in her telling the thematics of the tragedie en musique remained remarkably consistent—and in several respects remarkably conservative—from Lullian origins through the late eighteenth century. Bloechl's primary contribution is rather to nuance and reorient our understanding of what it meant for French opera to be political, drawing on theories of governmentality by Foucault, Butler, and Agamben, among others. Her analyses underscore that lyric tragedy mythologized two distinct but interrelated axes of power, which she describes as “sovereignty-reign” and “economy-government” (p. 4). If this repertoire frequently provided glorious, transcendent affirmation of the monarch, Bloechl argues, it also commented on the organizational and administrative mechanisms of the early modern state. Opera and the Political Imaginary …