Visions of Medea: Musico-dramatic transformations of a myth

Abstract

On 13 March 1797, Cherubini'sMédéewas given its première at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris. The opera was designed to be atragédie lyriquewith all the trappings: only the hostility directed towards young composers (Cherubini, but also Méhul and Le Sueur) during the Terror and the Directory had prevented its performance at the city's first theatre, the Académie Royale de Musique (briefly re-christened the Théâtre de la République et des Arts after the Revolution). Although Cherubini's opera followed the conventions ofopéra comique(most important, of course, the use of spoken dialogue), it also bore significant traces of late eighteenth-centuryopera seriadramaturgy. This generic eclecticism placedMédéein the midst of an aesthetic tangle, an early manifestation of nineteenth-century opera's strained but still powerful connection to eighteenth-century conventions.