French Opera Research Articles

Grétry’s Operas and the French Public: From the Old Regime to the Restoration. By R. J. Arnold

As framed by the cover description, R. J. Arnold’s study seeks an understanding of the contemporary appeal of Liégeois opera composer André-Modeste Grétry to Parisian audiences, and explains this appeal primarily through ‘his mastery of song’ (p. 5). If we consider performance statistics during his career, or the size of the crowd (and outpouring of grief) at his funeral in 1813, not to mention the wealth of commemorative events in subsequent years, his influence on the French musical public of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was surely considerable. From this starting point, Arnold traces the contours of Grétry’s career, and sets out his place in a cultural context. Indeed, as befits a volume appearing in this series, Arnold is particularly adept at cultural contextualization, and the study is concerned as much with Grétry’s place in contemporary aesthetic debates, as with his political and social importance and wider shifts in musical and artistic history, for example the quarrels over Gluck and even the shift to Romanticism. More contemporary concerns, such as theories of musical listening, the aesthetics of the tableau, the sociology of taste, and debates over the parterre, are fully integrated. Rousseau is never far from sight, both as musical theorist and as personal role-model, but the discussion also considers many other theorists of lesser renown. The study follows a roughly chronological shape: attention is given both to the opéras-comiques and to works for the Opéra, and there is welcome, sustained attention to Grétry’s writings, from his Mémoires to other lesser-known texts such as Réflexions d’un solitaire and De la vérité. Grétry’s music has a ‘plasticity’ of meaning (p. 18) that suits it to a range of political usages and to the expression of a palette of sentiments, but equally important is his music’s expression of nostalgia after the Revolution: in a period beset by musical and other quarrels, there is a ‘reconciling’ (p. 81) and stabilizing quality, shared by both his musical compositions and his prose works as writer on music (and even, for some, as philosophe). This is more a cultural study than an analysis of Grétry’s operas, though: while his works are frequently referenced and cited, sustained musico-dramatic analysis is somewhat in the background. Given the frequent reference to tears and other emotional manifestations, there is much here that a historian of the emotions will value, even though Arnold eschews the recent theoretical literature concerning that topic. His work also meshes well with current research on posterity. Opera and music specialists will particularly appreciate this book’s impressive range of primary research and deft interweaving of the major topics of contemporary debates in French opera.

Review of John S. Powell. 2000. Music and Theatre in France, 1600-1680 . Oxford: Oxford University Press

The seventeenth century in France, an era in which French dramatic arts reached a pinnacle of development, has inspired tomes of writing, both in French and in English, on the literature and theater of the period. But despite the importance of music and dance in this time, and particularly despite their prominence in the theater, there remain relatively few books available to the English reader on the subject. Major English monographs on the music are few and can be listed easily: James R. Anthony’S comprehensive French Barqoue Music (1978), Robert Isherwood’s Music in the Service of the King (1973), Louis Auld’s The Lyric Art of Pierre Perrin (1986), Norman Demuth’s French Opera (1963), and Caroline Wood’s Music and Drama in the Tragedie en musique, 1673-1715 (1996). Scholars have recently contributed to several significant collections of essays, and a growing number of tools for research and critical editions have been published, but few book-length works serve the English reader. John S. Powell’s Music and Theatre in France, 1600-1680, the most recent installment of Oxford’s Monographs on Music, presents a significant new contribution to this small bibliography. Powell’s impressive 582-page book, which addresses the musical practices of comedy, tragicomedy, tragedy, and mythological and non-mythological pastoral drama during the period, offers the first major work in English to thoroughly investigate these rich and momentous topics, all of which contributed significantly to the development of French opera.

Peculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment Mimesis

Peculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment Mimesis

Opera’s ‘Return to Antiquity’: Adaptation, gender and the illusion of authenticity in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide

Abstract During the early modern period in Europe, a revived interest in Greek tragedy exerted a dominating influence over the forms of new dramatic styles. Yet despite this influence, Greek tragedies, whether in Greek or in direct translation, were virtually never performed publicly. Instead, adapted versions of tragic plots made their way onto Europe’s public stages in a variety of forms. This article interrogates this phenomenon as it is manifested in the ‘return to Antiquity’ in eighteenth-century French opera, using Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide as a case study. Comparing this opera’s use of gender norms in the construction of a single character, Clytemnestra, to her gendered portrayal in both the neoclassical and classical source texts upon which Gluck drew, this article examines the ways in which adaptation may be utilized to erase evidence of cultural difference between source and target contexts, creating the illusion that the target society’s norms merely reflect an objective reality rather than a contingent and changeable cultural construct.

The Medical and the Musical: French Physiology and Late Nineteenth-Century Operatic Training

AbstractIn 1892, physician Achille Gouguenheim (1839–1901) was invited to teach a course on the physiology and hygiene of singing at the Paris Conservatoire. By that time, scientists had been interested in the mechanics of the ‘invisible’ singing voice for years, initially experimenting on human and animal cadavers using strings and weights to make dead larynges sing. By mid-century, with the development of better quality artificial lighting and mirrors, physicians and physiologists finally developed a better understanding of the relationship between voice and physiology. Meanwhile, by 1890, a growing number of connoisseurs and medical professionals alike were concerned that there was a crisis ruining French operatic singing. Gouguenheim and others argued that the key to improving the situation rested on embedding medical knowledge and its relationship to the proper functioning of the larynx and voice into pedagogy at the Conservatoire. Drawing upon archival documents, debates in leading periodicals and Gouguenheim’s published lecture notes, we examine the marriage between medical science and artistic pedagogy during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Overall, we argue that this evidence reveals a strand of French vocal training that merged the fields of science and artistry, if ever so briefly, creating pedagogical methods that for a few years offered the promise of rescuing French opera performance.

Zwischen Schlachtfest und Passion. Stationen des Orpheus-Stoffes auf der Hamburgischen Opernbühne

The paper presents the opera as a musical and literary genre that is closely linked to principles of intertextuality. In a twofold analysis various examples of the Hamburg Opera – including Reinhard Keiser’s Der Angenehme Betrug/ oder: Der Carneval von Venedig (1707) and Georg Philipp Telemann’s Die wunderbare Beständigkeit der Liebe, oder Orpheus (1726) – are re-evaluated in the context of French opera as well as protestant German Passiontide literature.

Le comte Ory: opéra en deux actes by Gioachino Rossini (review)

ROSSINI'S LE COMTE ORY Gioachino Rossini. Le comte Ory: Opera en deux actes = Opera in two acts = Opera in due atti. Livret d' = Libretto by Eugene Scribe. Edite d' = Edited by = A cura di Damien Colas. Part 1: Introductory Materials and Act 1. (Works of Gioachino Rossini, 5a.) Kassel: Barenreiter, 2014. [Editorial policy in Fre., Eng., Ita., p. viii-xi; abbrevs. in Fre., Eng., Ita., p. xii; principal sources in Fre., Eng., Ita., p. xiii; pref. in Fre., Eng., Ita., p. xiv-cxiii; facsims., p. cxv-cxxi; orchestra & characters, p. cxxiii; libretto, p. cxxiv-cxlvi; score, p. 3-380. Cloth. ISMN: 979-0-006-55216-0, pub. no. BA 10508-01. i992 inclusive of vols. 5a and 5b.]Gioachino Rossini. Le comte Ory: Opera en deux actes = Opera in two acts = Opera in due atti. Livret d' = Libretto by Eugene Scribe. Edite d' = Edited by = A cura di Damien Colas. Part 2: Act 2 and appendices. (Works of Gioachino Rossini, 5b.) Kassel: Barenreiter, 2014. [Score, p. 381-697; appendices, p. 701-822. Cloth. ISMN: 979-0-006-55216-0, pub. no. BA 10508-01. i992 inclusive of vols. 5a and 5b.]Gioachino Rossini. Le comte Ory. Critical commentary by Damien Colas. (Works of Gioachino Rossini, 5.) Kassel: Barenreiter, 2014. [Abbrevs., p. 7; principal sources, p. 8-9; sources, p. 10-27; critical notes, p. 31-359. ISMN 979-0-006-55217-7, pub. no. BA 10508-40. i328.]Le comte Ory, Rossini's second most successful French opera, had an impressive performance record in the nineteenth century, with over 430 performances in Paris alone. Premiered on 20 August 1828 at the Academie royale de musique (the Paris Opera), Le comte Ory was Rossini's third opera in French and the last of a small series of revised and updated works produced for the Opera that were based at least in part on an earlier Italian opera. In the last few years of the Bourbon Restoration, the Opera took advantage of its joint administration with the Theâtre Italien, a lyric theater devoted exclusively to Italian opera, to commission several works from Rossini: he reworked Maometto II as Le siege de Corinthe (1826), and Mose in Egitto as Moise et Pharaon (1827). Although the joint administration was dissolved in 1827, Rossini remained under contract to produce two more French works for the Opera. The second of these would be Guillaume Tell, Rossini's only entirely original (and his most successful) French opera, eventually premiered in 1829. For Le comte Ory, however, Rossini turned once again to an earlier Italian composition: Il viaggio a Reims, a one-act dramma giocoso he had composed for the coronation of Charles X in 1825, and which, due to its occasional nature, had a very limited performance run at the Theâtre Italien. As early as 1826, Rossini had considered recycling the material from Il viaggio for an Italian semiseria opera on a libretto entitled La figlia dell'aria by Luigi Balocchi, but the project was abandoned. Sometime in the early months of 1828, Rossini returned to the project, only this time in collaboration with Eugene Scribe, who had already branched out from vaudeville with several librettos for the Opera Comique, and had just made his debut on the Opera's stage with La muette de Portici in February 1828. Scribe also drew on an older work for the libretto: he revised and expanded a one-act comedie-vaudeville cowritten with Charles-Gaspard DelestrePoirson, Le comte Ory: Anecdote du XIe siecle, first presented at the Theâtre du Vaudeville in 1816.The initial phase of the comte Ory project, particularly regarding the relationship between Scribe and Rossini, remains frustratingly opaque due to an absence of correspondence; but two preparatory sketches of the libretto in Scribe's hand provide a sense of the complex task involved in merging the two works, particularly with regard to the distribution of the musical numbers from Il viaggio in the expanded plot (see pp. lxi-lxiii [page references are to Patricia B. Brauner's English translation of Damien Colas's preface]). …

From Plantation to Paradise? Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764–1789 by David M. Powers (review)

From Plantation to Paradise? Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764-1789 DAVID M. POWERS East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014 272 pp. The silence at the core of From Plantation to Paradise? resounds all too clearly: among the many documents David Powers surveyed for this project, none inscribes the thoughts or emotions of an enslaved musician. What she examines instead are documents created by those empowered to write and publish, revealing a familiar Janus-faced portrait of these colonial primary sources. On the one hand, we see the rhetoric of enlightened, rational equality; on the other, the realities of segregation and oppression. In this sense, the question mark in Powers's title speaks to the underlying cultural tensions that animate her study. From Plantation to Paradise? offers an engaging history of music both as a means of empowerment and as a technology for domination in France's Caribbean colonies. From this position at the geographic fringes of the French Enlightenment, the profound contradictions of the era can be seen all the more clearly. Yet Powers is concerned less with exposing contradictions than with examining how conflicting ideologies, power structures, and institutions affected the lives and music making of nonwhite musicians in these colonies. Her focus falls primarily on performers and performances of French opera, a genre long understood in terms of its complex relationship to political power. This study is no exception; Powers sees in opera's confluence of music and drama not just an entertaining spectacle but a poignant form of political control. Although opera-related documentation from the colonies is scarce (at least compared to what survives from Europe), Powers offers a rich context for her sources, putting them into dialogue with relevant materials from France, and understanding their significance in relation to the political and material realities of life in the colonies. In the preface, Powers divides her study into two parts. The introduction and chapters 1-2 describe in broad terms the cultural, political, and material circumstances of both slavery and music making in the colonies. Chapters 3-7 explore in detail the activities of nonwhite musicians in this period. Seven appendixes (as diverse as miscegenation terminology tables and discographies of repertory discussed) bolster her argument, presenting much of her evidence clearly and succinctly. The introduction establishes a precedent for finding in European sources orientalist descriptions of the African other. Powers notes, for example, the relative silence of philosophes like Voltaire on the question of slavery in the French colonies, a practice he openly criticized in Spanish and Portuguese territories (7-8). Closer to the topic at hand is her analysis of how depictions of slaves and slavery in French opera libretti underscore the presumed inferiority of the sub-Saharan African Other (19). By inscribing this bias into cultural practices, Powers argues, France established a cultural politics through opera aimed at controlling the slave population. The forms of power and control present in the colonies are considered in the first two chapters. Chapter 1 considers the implications of the 1685 code noir and 1716 edit for the status of slavery in eighteenth-century colonies. These laws rigorously defined the restrictions placed on slaves, maximizing the power of the monarchy and its government to exert complete control. This included the creation of a racial stratification system that established precise names and categorizations for those of mixed race, those who were freed, and so forth. Examining the slave and free populations of French colonies in the eighteenth century, Powers argues that these controls were necessary if the monarchy hoped to reduce the possibility of slave revolts. By 1789, there were approximately ten slaves for every white citizen in some colonies. …

French opera in abundance

French opera in abundance

Dance in Opera in London, 1673–1685

This article looks at the extent to which French styles of theatrical dancing influenced opera in London during the years 1673–1685. In the 1670s the emergence of opera in London owed much to Stuart Court culture and its interest in French ballets de cour and English masques. Meanwhile on the London stage in the 1670s, English theatrical dance was now enhanced by the ability of the Duke of York's new theatre at Dorset Garden to offer the sort of spectacular staging already known in Paris and which suited opera so well. These influences – the love of French music and dancing as balanced by the continued interest in vernacular theatre and its new capacity for spectacle – resulted in an English approach to opera in which the dancing and scenography rarely remained completely French or completely English. This article considers opera dancing in London, from the addition of dance to a reworked Shakespeare play in 1673, followed the next year by the first opera sung in French to be staged in London, and the sometimes hybrid applications of English and French dance in opera thereafter. That the fascination with French opera had diminished after 1685 is reinforced by the unsuccessful attempt to stage one of Lully's tragédies-en-musique in a London theatre the following year.

A Multi-Layered Analysis of Dancing in Eighteenth-Century French Opera

This article offers an analysis of the contribution of dance to the success of French opera in the eighteenth century. It explores its development as it responded to the needs of music and song; its capacity to blend with evolving opera forms fitting in and commenting upon the décor itself; and draws out the inventiveness of successive generations of performers and choreographers who ensured that the works of Lully, Campra and Rameau continued to respond to changing public taste. From this analysis, dance emerges as the barometer by which we can measure the superiority of French over Italian opera, as it paved the way for the creation of ballet d'action.

Afterlives of French operaairs

Afterlives of French opera<i>airs</i>

“Sous le rythme de la chanson”

The issue of “bad declamation” in French opera drew significant critical attention from composers and scholars in the long nineteenth century, with writers such as Castil-Blaze, Saint-Saëns, and d’Indy noting down perceived faults in French text setting. In this article, I examine examples of “mistreated accents” in nineteenth-century French opera, arguing that French composers from Grétry and Auber to Gounod and Bizet often used rhythm and text setting as a way to differentiate between two different kinds of operatic music: non-diegetic music (singing as speech) and diegetic music (singing as song). The diegetic style was also extended to situations where dance and military topics were used to depict characters performing to onstage audiences. I apply this framework to selected excerpts from Bizet’sCarmenin order to examine the part played by contrasting text-setting styles in the construction of that work’s musical drama.

Variations on Much Ado About Nothing: Beatrice and Benedick in Target-Language Adaptations

Abstract Drama texts are characterized by the transient nature of their stage reception and their malleability. This implies a close relationship with the context of performance while it also explains why they are frequently subject to varying degrees of adaptation. This article will study variations on Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, first revising different approaches to its performance in the original language, and then analysing two adaptations which involve translation: a Spanish play, Jacinto Benavente’s Los favoritos, and a French opera, Hector Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict, both inspired by the two most attractive and witty characters in the bard’s text, Beatrice and Benedick, who have been the object of a number of versions and adaptations and therefore encourage exploration in different contexts. Slightly different ways of dealing with the main elements in the play will be observed in these two target texts, for instance regarding the general tone, or issues such as the concepts of marriage and love; ultimately, these aspects also highlight the suppleness of drama texts, particularly of classic works, which tend to move easily between languages and cultures, historic periods or artistic genres.

Review: Dramatic Expression in Rameau’s “tragédie en musique”: Between Tradition and Enlightenment

Book Review| April 01 2015 Review: Dramatic Expression in Rameau’s “tragédie en musique”: Between Tradition and Enlightenment Dramatic Expression in Rameau’s “tragédie en musique”: Between Tradition and Enlightenment, by Cynthia Verba. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xi, 327 pp. Olivia Bloechl Olivia Bloechl OLIVIA BLOECHL is Associate Professor of Musicology at UCLA and a critical historian of early music. Her research focuses on French opera before 1800, global early music historiography, postcolonialism, and the ethics and politics of music. The author of Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and coeditor of Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2015), she is currently completing a study of the politics of opera in Old Regime France. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2015) 68 (1): 229–233. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2015.68.1.229 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Olivia Bloechl; Review: Dramatic Expression in Rameau’s “tragédie en musique”: Between Tradition and Enlightenment. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2015; 68 (1): 229–233. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2015.68.1.229 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search The year 2014 was the 250th anniversary of the death of Jean-Philippe Rameau, and the past few years have seen a wealth of commemorative performances, conferences, and scholarly publications, including a major new biography of the composer.1 Cynthia Verba’s critical study of Rameau’s tragédies en musique is well timed to coincide with this celebratory moment, and it makes an important contribution to the literature on the composer’s achievement in this prestigious, semi-official form of French opera under Louis XV. Verba is a respected authority on the history of musical thought in the French Enlightenment, and her new book builds on this expertise while moving markedly in the direction of musical analysis and criticism. The resulting study will be of interest especially to those seeking close interpretive analyses of Rameau’s serious stage works, with good contextualization and comparative discussion throughout. The book opens with an introduction setting out its major... You do not currently have access to this content.

Vagaries of the Vaudeville: Notated Music in French Opera Librettos, 1753–1779

Vagaries of the Vaudeville: Notated Music in French Opera Librettos, 1753–1779

Musical Chiaroscuro in French Baroque Opera: The Case of Abbé Pellegrin's Tragédies en Musique

AbstractThe libretti of Simon‐Joseph Pellegrin's tragédies en musique are a perfect example of the use and functioning of musical clair‐obscur in French opera in the eighteenth century. They illustrate the way it shapes and structures them both from a micro and macro point of view, with a rich typology of arias as well as literary and musical patterns. The need for variety and contrast and the systematic alternation between different types of arias, lyrical forms, registers, scenes and genres help structure French opera of the Enlightenment.

Review: Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism

Book Review| August 01 2014 Review: Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism, by David Charlton. Cambridge Studies in Opera. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xxi, 413 pp. Georgia J. Cowart Georgia J. Cowart Georgia J. Cowart is Professor of Music at Case Western University. She is the author of The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and has written widely on music and the arts, aesthetics, and ideologies of Old-Regime France. She was guest curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Watteau, Music, and Theater” (2009) and is currently working on a book project on that topic. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2014) 67 (2): 598–602. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2014.67.2.598 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Georgia J. Cowart; Review: Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 August 2014; 67 (2): 598–602. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2014.67.2.598 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Like David Charlton's earlier study of André Grétry's opéras-comiques,1 his latest book reveals a profound knowledge of a repertoire that has until recently attracted little musicological attention. In Opera in the Age of Rousseau, the author surveys French opera from 1739 to 1774 (between “Rameau's zenith and Gluck's advent” [p. xi]). Within this frame, he traces a series of clashes between old and new, French and Italian, comedy and tragedy, convention and experiment. The central focus is a reassessment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's one-act opera Le Devin du village (1752) in the wider context of courtly opera, pastoral, opera-ballet, and opera buffa. Charlton analyzes Rousseau's opera, not as an exception or even an aberration, but rather as the hub of an intricate web of genres and individual works, all embodying an era of confrontation, assimilation, and change. The overarching argument is that Le Devin du village reflects a... You do not currently have access to this content.

Rosa de Vries: A Dutch Diva and Nineteenth-Century Trans-Atlantic Operatic Culture

AbstractIn an arduous, twenty-year international career, Dutch opera soprano Rosa de Vries née van Os (1824–89) performed both French and Italian opera repertory with leading companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Experiencing triumphs and disappointments while managing both career and family, de Vries represents a class of mid-century opera singers, celebrated in their time but little remembered today. This article tells the story of de Vries's life and career, and in doing so aims to contribute to an understanding of transatlantic operatic life at the time. This reconstruction of Rosa de Vries offers a gateway for further studies of the cultural heritage of an important period in the history of opera and the strenuous demands of an international operatic marketplace.

The Staging of Salieri’s Les Danaïdes as Seen by a Cellist in the Orchestra

AbstractDuring the 1780s a cellist in the orchestra of the Opéra, known only as Monsieur Hivart, served the Russian Count Nicholas Sheremetev as an operatic agent, sending scores, librettos, costume designs, stage designs and other materials related to opera in Paris, and advising the count on the production of French operas in Russia. Hivart was in contact with such composers as Grétry, Sacchini and Piccinni, and the stage machinist and ballet master of the Opéra, and from his place in the orchestra he could watch their work take shape on stage. This gives his letters to Sheremetev (published in Russian translation in 1944 but largely unknown in the West) significant value for historians of opera in eighteenth-century Paris. Especially extensive are Hivart’s reports on the first production of Salieri’s Les Danaïdes, which contain much information about the first production available nowhere else.