The role of dance in French Baroque opera

Abstract

In a robust series of publications spanning some 30 years, Rebecca Harris-Warrick has taught us to appreciate and understand the role of dance in French Baroque opera. Thanks largely to her work, we no longer think of divertissements as mere decorative parentheses; we have learned to read them as an essential component of the drama. Now Harris-Warrick has pulled together the disparate pieces of the argument and fleshed them out with related topics and additional detail to create the wide-ranging narrative in this book, which covers the period of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s operas (1672–86) and the ensuing period, dominated by André Campra’s operas (1687–1735). A companion book, on the era of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s operas (from 1733 to the 1760s), is in preparation. While this book does not pretend to deal with the operatic scenes that unfold in vocal monologues and dialogues, it does such a thorough job of contextualizing the divertissement within the larger dramatic arc, and of covering genre and other aesthetic issues, that it can easily serve as an introduction to French Baroque opera writ large.