Parisian Theatres Research Articles

The Memory Man: Jacques Offenbach, Le Bonhomme Jadis and the Origin of an air connu

This article is in essence a study of intertextuality in two musico-dramatic genres in Paris of the 1850s: the comédie-vaudeville and straight plays with incidental music. The ‘texts’ that are considered here are interpolated songs in the comédie-vaudeville and purely instrumental interpolations in plays. Their intertextuality depends on the age-old process of contrafactum. Yet a problem arises when the listener cannot recognize the original source of the contrafactum and cannot perceive the intertext. The article traces such an intertextual problem. It illustrates how the attempt to answer what would appear to be a minor question regarding music in a comédie-vaudeville led to consideration of an aspect of Jacques Offenbach's output that has received very little attention and which in turn poses some problems of its own. I begin by discussing how intertextuality and musical memory were exploited in the nineteenth-century Parisian comédie-vaudeville. I then discuss how my inability to identify a ‘text’, in this case a particular tune used in a production in a Parisian theatre was so bothersome that it caused it to stick in my memory, which in turn allowed me to recognize it in a work by Offenbach. This in turn led to consideration of a short story and a play in which intertextual musical memory plays a large role, and to the music that Offenbach composed for the performance of that play which surprisingly led to the solution of the problem, the identification of the tune. I end with further comments.

Lehmann contre Héritiers Rostand: L’Aiglon, the transition to sound and the legal status of film and theatre

ABSTRACT When Parisian theatre impresario Maurice Lehmann sued the widow and sons of the late playwright Edmond Rostand in 1932, the French press took careful notice. Lehmann owned the theatrical rights to L’Aiglon, a play about the emperor Napoleon’s son, which Rostand had written for Sarah Bernhardt. But Rostand’s widow maintained the film rights. When a sound-film version appeared in 1931, Lehmann went to court, claiming that it was nothing more than a filmed theatrical piece, and as a result infringed on his rights. The subsequent court case – reported on in French dailies, film journals and jurisprudential sources – helped to determine the legal status of cinema in France, and established the precise differences, in French law, between cinema and theatre. Lehmann lost his case because of those differences, derived from the process of mechanical reproduction in cinema and, most importantly, the differences between listening to a movie and to a play.

Les fourberies de la Foire : une révolution sociopolitique et théâtrale

Between the 17th and 19th centuries, the competition between the official Parisian theatres and the popular trestles, such as the lodges of the fairs and the stages of the Boulevard, contributed to the development of an experimental dramaturgy characterised by theatrical crossing and the primacy of the actor’s gesture. To circumvent the prohibitions imposed by the Comédie-Française and the Opera, the impresarios of the Fair elaborate dramaturgical strategies full of invention, based on shows with simple units suitable for the combination of different genres. This theatre is thus able to develop into a stable artistic system, while remaining in a context of marginality and uncertainty; and to inspire some twentieth-century theories on the actor’s body, such as those of Edward Gordon Craig and Jacques Copeau. Focused on documentary archive evidence, this paper aims to bring out the main aspects of the unofficial repertoires, which turn out to be places of socio-political confrontation and, at the same time, systems of propagation of aesthetic reforms.

Paradoks o konwencji: «Refleksje krytyczne» Jean-Baptiste’a Dubosa

W 1719 roku Jean-Baptiste Dubos opublikował olbrzymią rozprawę o sztuce Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, w której zaproponował nowy rodzaj refleksji o tym, co artystyczne. Choć czerpał z teorii starożytników, to na szeroką skalę wprowadził do swojego dzieła nowoczesną, zwiastującą sensualizm perspektywę osobistego odbioru i indywidualnego zachwytu. Polskim teatrologom Dubos znany jest niemal wyłącznie dzięki artykułowi Zbigniewa Raszewskiego Partytura teatralna, przez co sprowadza się jego idee głównie do rozważań o możliwości stworzenia zapisu gry scenicznej. Tymczasem osiemnastowieczny teoretyk fascynował się istnieniem takiej partytury o tyle, o ile widział w niej narzędzie do wskazania aktorowi kierunku poszukiwań, której celem nie była utopijna wierność autorskiemu zamierzeniu, ale szansa na analizę wolności własnej i poszukiwania prawdy sztuki. Artykuł omawia główne strategie narracyjne zastosowane przez Jean-Baptiste’a Dubosa w traktacie, prezentuje główny obszar teatralnych zainteresowań autora i jego wyobrażenie o zastosowaniu maski w teatrze antycznym i w komedii dell’arte. Szkicuje związki koncepcji księdza Dubosa z osiemnastowieczną teorią i praktyką paryskiego teatru.

Мстислав Добужинский и его кабаретные компаньоны: парижский сезон «Летучей Мыши» 1926 года

The essay is dedicated to collaboration of Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky (1875‒1957) with the Parisian theater “Chauve-Souris,” or “The Bat,” under the direction of the actor, entertainer, stage director and inspirer of the Russian cabaret Nikita Balieff (real name: Mkrtich Balyan, in Armenian: Նիկիտա Բալիեւ; 1877 (?) ‒ 1936). He invited Dobuzhinsky, who was in Berlin at the time, to become the Artistic Director and the lead designer for a new show of his theatre in the season of 1926. Balieff had already established himself as a successful European entrepreneur, and his cabaret theater had three successful tours on Broadway over six years. Dobuzhinsky accepted his invitation, hoping to improve his financial situation, as after more than a year spent in Europe he could not achieve that stability either in Riga, Kaunas, or Berlin. At the end of May, he began preparing the program for the new Paris season in alliance with choreographer Boris Romanov and playwright Piotr Potemkin. Also Dobuzhinsky invited collaboration of his son Rostislav and his wife Lidia Kopnyaeva in designing the sets for Balieff’s interludes. The premiere of the new program took place on October 1, and it gained success and accolades in Paris and later in Berlin. The season of 1926 was perhaps the most significant in the history of “The Bat,” but at the same time decisive for Baliev, since it marked the exhaustion of the very idea of Russian cabaret theater abroad. Despite the fact that the American tour was then canceled, “The Bat” still ended up on Broadway in late autumn of 1927. This program was the last for Balieff’s theater, as to how it was greeted and loved in America. It was already a completely different “Chauve-Souris,” the “Continental”, as American critics called it, of little interest to both Parisian and Broadway audiences.

The importance of sampling frames in representative historical corpora : a case study of Parisian theater

Pour tester les hypothèses avancées par la linguistique cognitive, il n’y a pas d’instrument plus efficace que le corpus. L’échantillonnage représentatif (Laplace 1814) est une technique qui permet d’examiner des corpus plus réduits, et ainsi plus abordables, et d’en généraliser les résultats à un cadre d’échantillonnage plus large. Or, un échantillon n’est pas pertinent à une hypothèse s’il n’est pas tiré d’un cadre d’échantillonnage qui soit lui-même pertinent à l’hypothèse.Dans mon projet doctoral (Grieve-Smith 2009) j’ai employé le corpus FRANTEXT (CNRTL 2018) pour tester l’hypothèse selon laquelle l’extension analogique d’une construction dépend de sa fréquence de type (Bybee 1995). J’ai comparé les textes théâtraux dans FRANTEXT pour les années 1800-1815 avec un nouveau Corpus de la Scène Parisienne, un échantillon tiré du catalogue de Wicks (1950 et seq.). Dans ce nouveau corpus, les négations de phrase déclarative se forment avec ne … pas dans 73,9 % des instances, tandis que dans FRANTEXT elles ne se forment avec ne … pas que dans 50,5 % des occurrences, une différence qui montre un biais en faveur de la langue littéraire dans FRANTEXT. Pour une évaluation adéquate des théories basées sur l’usage concernant le changement linguistique, il faudra un corpus contenant des textes représentatifs de la langue sur un siècle au minimum.

The Popular and the Academic: The Status of the Public’s Pleasure in the Quarrel of Le Cid.

The unprecedented success of Le Cid (1637) triggered a ferocious literary quarrel about the value of the judgement of the least “considerable” part of the theatre audience – the people. This article explains how the social and gendered distribution of the audience in the few Parisian theatres of the period could reveal the difference of the appreciation of various categories of the audience. The article then develops that at this time in France, the notion of the “public” does not refer to the audience but to the res publica, the edifying character of the plays meant to serve the public good. Indeed, the theatre was given a moral dimension, as an heritage to Horace’s Ars poetica in which the role of theatre was to please and instruct.This is followed by a discussion of two aspects of the quarrel. It was first set off by the fact that Corneille with his attitude disrupted the rules of the economy of cooptation in vigour in the Republic of letters, thus deeply shocking his peers. The second aspect of the quarrel pertained to the dramatic rules which were being established at the time. Le Cid transgressed some of these rules, in particular the rule of decorum. But the condemnation of the transgression of these rules put in question their purpose and their value. Corneille maintained that like Aristotle, he was concerned with the public’s pleasure and that Horace’s precept of moral instruction was secondary in theatre.The conjunction of the criticism of peers concerning the non-respect of the dramatic rules and the actual success with the public posed the question of the valid tribunal of literary works – peers or the public. Ultimately, the fact that the play had touched all categories of the audience – the people and the courtiers – facilitated the valorization of the people’s pleasure and the people’s judgement vis-à-vis the peers.

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

Reviewed by: Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History by Rebecca Harris-Warrick Chantal Frankenbach Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History. By Rebecca Harris-Warrick. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. [xx, 484 p. ISBN 9781107137899 (hardback), $135; ISBN 9781316777596 (e-book), $108.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, appendices, bibliography, index. In reflections on the relative importance of music, text, and gesture to an integrated musical drama, thoughts often turn to Richard Wagner's famously amalgamated Gesamtkunstwerk and his personification of the "three primeval sisters"—the arts of tone, poetry, and dance—in The Art-Work of the Future (Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993], 95–96; reprint from Richard Wagner's Prose Works, vol. 1 [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, [End Page 72] 1895]). According to Wagner, this trinity, "tight-clasped, breast on breast, and limb to limb … ever themselves and ever for each other," reunited in his works after a long and shameful separation in the march of operatic history. Wagner casts the muse of Dance as a "tricked-out figure" (Wagner, p. 106) who must atone for her former independence and fallen ways in order to repair the ancient and lofty sisterly bond. Between the lines of his manifesto, of course, we can easily read Wagner's contempt for what had become of dance in French opera. The very tradition he despised, however, had long nourished an arguably more genuine, more fully realized Gesamtkunst werk than his own abstract ideal. Tangled definitions of "gesture" and "dance" aside, it is fair to say—and even more confidently now with Rebecca Harris-Warrick's book—that the French had scooped Wagner's fabled reunion of the muses by over a century. With her thorough account of the essential role dance played at the Académie Royale de Musique, Harris-Warrick joins a growing list of scholars who have recently addressed the long-neglected role of dance in the history of opera: Jennifer Nevile, ed., Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–1750 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Sarah Yuill McLeave, Dance in Handel's London Operas (Eastman Studies in Music 96 [Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013]); Marian Elizabeth Smith, Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle (Princeton Studies in Opera [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000]); Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (California Studies in 19th-Century Music 13 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004]); and Davinia Caddy, The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-Époque Paris (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism 22 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012]). Turning away from the prevailing misconception that divertissements were parenthetical and inconsequential to the French opera's dramatic impact, Harris-Warrick finds new cause to examine the role of dance in what she calls "the lushest and most expansive" music of Jean-Baptiste Lully's time (p. 2). While she is careful to acknowledge that the term "divertissement" suggests a distraction from the real business of the drama, she presents a contrary view: these interludes are "conventionally circumscribed" portions of every act that in fact reverberate throughout the overall drama (p. 8). Using a work-centered approach, Harris-Warrick documents in meticulous detail how dance functioned in Lully's operas and those of his successors in various Parisian theaters. Librettos, scores, and the erratically dispersed didascalies ("stage directions," defined on p. 29) noted in them, make up the primary evidence of this study of the French operatic repertoire from 1672 to 1735 (with a second book planned for Jean-Philippe Rameau's works of the period following). Also invoking the muses, Harris-Warrick elegantly prefaces her study by recalling the prologue of Lully's first opera, in which three of them sing, "Let us mingle our loveliest songs with the most beautiful dances" (p. 7). As both an invitation into a visual spectacle and a "statement of aesthetic purpose," these words encapsulate the integration of dance and dramaturgy that Harris-Warrick exposes in her study. She divides the book into two parts: the first devoted...

A Case Study in Analysing Digitised Archive Data: Authors at the Comédie-Italienne, 1760-70

The use of ‘big data’ in the humanities is becoming increasingly prevalent, as researchers try to exploit the capacities of modern computing to provide new perspectives on and access to more traditional forms of documentation. In this vein, two major projects currently seek to digitise and analyse the financial records of the major Parisian theatres in the eighteenth century, creating searchable databases that promise to bring the information to worldwide audiences and allow entirely new types of analysis. This article uses a small-scale study of a subset of the Comedie-Italienne’s administrative records in the period 1760-70 to explore the potential benefits and challenges of such enterprises. It makes new data on audience, takings and authorial payments for this decade freely available to readers, and examines the process of capturing and rationalising data drawn from early modern records. To demonstrate the potential of the larger projects, this subset of data is then used both to reconsider the commercial status of the Comedie-Italienne with respect to its French counterpart, and to provide the first account of the finances of the authors who wrote for the Italian troupe. Finally, this article argues that despite the many and varied benefits of digitisation and computational manipulation of archive data, in order for such projects to make a serious contribution to scholarship, it is vital that the material, contingent, human element of original records is not lost.

Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens, 1807–1914 éd. by Nicole Wild

Reviewed by: Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens, 1807–1914 éd. by Nicole Wild Evan Baker Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens, 1807– 1914. Nouv. éd. rev. By Nicole Wild. Préface de Joël-Marie Fauquet. Lyon: Symétrie, 2012. [526 p., ill., maps. ISBN 978-2-91437-348-7. i152,30] In 1902, Maurice Second noted in Théâtre des Boule vards 1789–1848 (Paris: Société française d’Im primerie et de Librairie, 1902) that from 1815 until 1830, the so-called “minor” Parisian theatres presented a staggering number of new works: 369 comedies, 280 melodramas, 200 opera-comiques, and 1,300 vaudevilles. The Opéra, the most important theatre of all, staged 1,455 performances of more than 400 operas (http://chronopera.free.fr [accessed 4 December 2015]). All of this data begets numerous questions: where, when, and in which theatres did these performances take place? What were the production capabilities of the theatres? Who were the directors and designers? Moreover, what regulations governed the number of theatres and genres performed? Many publications discuss individual theatres performing so many genres in nineteenth-century Paris—spoken theatre, opera, ballets, circuses, vaudevilles, its productions, stage design, social history, chronologies, and architecture of individual edifices. Little, however, has been published surveying all of the theatres of that time. The difficulties in investigating such a topic are immense. Documents lay dormant in numerous public and private archives; eyewitness and newspaper reports require cross-referencing; existing iconographic material sought out; and chronologies controlled. For many years, Nicole Wild was Conservateur en chef of the Bibliothèque et Musée de l’Opéra housed in the former Emperor’s Pavilion at the Palais Garnier, now a part of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Her book reaps the fruits of her long researches and vast knowledge of nineteenth-century Parisian theatres and its associated genres: opera houses, spoken plays, circuses, dance, shadow puppet theatre, prestidigitation, ad infinitum. Nineteenth-century stage design is another |specialty of hers, having authored two important catalogues of the collection of designs, prints, and drawings in the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Décors et costumes du XIXe siècle. Vol 1. Opéra de Paris – Vol. 2. Théâtres et décorateurs (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1987, 1993). The Bibliothèque nationale made both volumes freely available online through Open Edition Books: http://books.openedition.org/editionsbnf/948 and http://books.openedition.org/editionsbnf/809 (accessed 4 December 2015). First published as Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens au XIXe siècle: les théâtres et la musique (Paris: Aux Amateurs de livres, 1989), and long out of print, Wild’s new ouvrage supersedes this edition with new and updated data through 1914 and, equally important, includes additional rare illustrative material including thirty colour plates; eighteen contemporary views of the auditoria by the French engraver Alexis Orgiazzi (fl. ca. 1800–1839), are provided as well. A historical overview opens the book with a brief, but important, examination of the regulations governing theatrical performances (including opera and dance) in Paris. Laws promulgated by Napoleon I in 1806 and 1807 dictated the closure of a number of “minor theaters.” Upon the Emperor’s final overthrow in 1815, most theatres promptly reopened, much to the delight of the public addicted not only to opera, dance, opéra-comiques, and classical theatre, but also to mélodrames, vaudevilles, diorama, and the circus as well. By 1835, more than twenty-five theatres were offering performances of all genres, ten within walking distance of one [End Page 52] another, particularly along the Boulevard du Temple. In 1864, Napoleon III eased regulations allowing the establishment of café-théâtre, but at the same time ordered all theatrical pieces and libretti to be submitted for approval by the government censors. The three regulations appear as facsimiles in the appendices. The overview continues with a discussion of the names of the edifices, after its geographic location (Le Peletier for the Opéra), a monument (Théâtre du Panthéon), or a quartier (Théâtre du Luxembourg). A brief discussion of methodologies and the source material found in the riches of the Bibliothèque et Musée...

Le Numéro Barbette: Destabilising Gender on the High Wire and the Flying Trapeze

In the autumn of 1923, Barbette (Vander Clyde) took Parisian theatres by storm with a provocative amalgamation of trapeze artistry and female impersonation. His act in interwar France was timely and daring. While the destructive results of the First World War had left the country with deep concerns about the degeneration of the male body and the nation as a whole, Barbette's performance signified a homosexual identity and a questioning of traditional categories of masculinity and femininity. Fostering the interest of controversial poet and film maker, Jean Cocteau and his artistic entourage, Barbette's performance received much praise and was immortalised in Cocteau's 1926 essay Le Numéro Barbette. Drawing on a number of under-examined performance reviews by French critics, as well as Steegmuller's interview with Barbette, I focus on how Barbette's career and performances contributed to debates about the constructedness of gender and how they were indicative of the tensions of a post-war culture that wanted to ‘return to order’. Barbette's blurring of gender categories during his aerial performances embodied these post-war tensions and signified a liminality in which gender could be destabilised and reimagined without severe repercussions.

Olivier Halanzier and the Operatic Museum in Late Nineteenth-Century France

Olivier Halanzier, director of the Paris Opera 1871–9, had a longer career and a higher professional profile than Parisian theatre directors who have been the object of sustained musicological interest. Halanzier is, however, a pivotal historical figure. First, he is an important lens through which to understand how Parisian disdain for French regional practice intersected with operatic canon-formation and the conceptualization of the new Palais Garnier as a museum; and how this officially sanctioned designation came to signal the progressive redirection of subsidy away from new commissions and towards revivals. Secondly, he is important for the way his unusual career trajectory intersects with the demise of grand opera: Halanzier’s legacy as chief architect of the Paris Opera as national museum exposed the irony that the institution, with its monumental genre of grand opera curated within its equally monumental Palais Garnier, no longer led the operatic world in compositional terms.

Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism by David Charlton (review)

Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism. By David Charlton. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xxi, 413 p. ISBN 9780521887601 (hardcover), $124.99; ISBN 9781139786065 (ebook), $100.] Music examples, illustrations, portraits, charts, diagrams, bibliography, index.David Charlton's Opera in the Age of appears on the heels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's tercentenary, in a year that also saw the publication of an insightful colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. In its introduction, Jacqueline Waeber comments on the perpetual historiographical chasm between Rousseau's intellectual and musical output which, as she claims, inevitably fuels the cliche of the dabbler ( Jacqueline Waeber, convenor, Rousseau in 2013: Afterthoughts on a Tercentenary, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 1 [Spring 2013]: 253). From Andre Gretry's Memoires through nineteenthcentury criticism and into our post-Derridean musicological present, critics concentrated their evaluations of Rousseau's musical thought on his individualism and his personality, focusing almost exclusively on his prose writings. Rejecting the Great Man model, Charlton offers a thorough reexamination of Rousseau's musical milieu. His book, then, is not as much about as it is around Rousseau. By examining Rousseau's famous one-act Le devin du village alongside Eustachio Bambini's bouffons troupe, as well as little-known contemporaries, Charlton presents a comprehensive study of musical life in and around Paris between the years 1739 and 1774, roughly between Rameau's zenith and Gluck's advent (p. xi). In short, Opera in the Age of is a massive achievement in its comprehensive reexamination of a critical period in French musical history.Charlton draws on a dizzying array of primary source material, and touches on issues of patronage, comic and tragic conventions, the politics of repertory choice, modes of historical and pastoral representation, discourses of opera reform, and the mobility of operatic works between Parisian theaters. In chapter 1, entitled Palaces and Patronage: Le Devin and the 1754 Alceste, Charlton discusses the theater group of Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompa dour, the official chief mis - tress of Louis XV from 1745 to her death in 1764. Scholars of the period, Charlton argues, hitherto focused on luxury and image-making as the principles driving Pompadour's selection of theater works for her court. But published accounts, Charlton writes, have rarely assessed the musical and operatic achievement of the woman who commissioned twelve new operas, eight of which reached the Paris stage in largely authentic form, many circulating in the public domain through printed scores and librettos; who trained, rehearsed, sang and acted the female (or male) leading role in all of them; and who oversaw the running of a group whose decisions were taken exclusively by women (p. 15). In support of this claim, Charlton includes a useful table that provides an overview of theater works sponsored by Pompadour (Rousseau's Devin was performed there in 1752, a year before its public premiere at the Theâtre du Palais-Royal).Charlton's discussions of staging, acting, costuming, and singing conventions offer valuable insights into the technologies of operatic production in eighteenth-century France, a severely understudied area of scholarship. Charlton identifies two primary types of comedic movement: haut (high) and bas (low), represented by stylized gesture and realistic movement, respectively. Such distinctions are found in Opera librettos that record the practices of earlier revivals and also record the stage directions for the use of subsequent generations (p. 36). Two examples of such librettos are M. Favart's Don Quichotte, set by Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (see table 2.1, p. 37) and Jacques Autreau's Platee, set by Jean-Philippe Rameau (see table 2. …

The Transnational Reception of Improvised Drama: Tommaso Sgricci in Paris and in the Periodicals

The Italian improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci (1789–1836), known for his ability to improvise tragic dramas on themes requested by audience members, made international tours to Paris in 1824 and 1826. This article examines the impact of his performances in Parisian theatres by way of the reviews that appeared in European periodicals. Differences among national tastes and aesthetic values inform the reception of Sgricci's performances by French, German, and English reviewers, and these differences become further defined as reviewers respond to one another and write for different markets. The transnational reception of Sgricci and other improvvisatori also reveals how nineteenth-century journalists are themselves improvising as they adapt rapidly to new readerships and innovative types of performance.

Fitzgerald and France, Or “The Course Of True Love Never Did Run Smooth” A Review Essay

Fitzgerald and France, Or “The Course Of True Love Never Did Run Smooth” <i>A Review Essay</i>

Une histoire du théâtre à Paris: de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre by Jean-Claude Yon

Reviews 247 Yon, Jean-Claude. Une histoire du théâtre à Paris: de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre. Paris: Flammarion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7007-0188-3. Pp. 437. 29 a. Yon offers a valuable compendium of information about the underpinnings of nineteenth-century Parisian theater. This is a wonderfully informative book for those of us who have taught plays such as Hernani, La dame aux camélias, or La fille Élisa and longed to know more about the behind-the-scenes battles over censorship, theater construction and personnel, authors’ and actors’ rights, patronage, and the theatrical experience itself. This is not an histoire of Paris’s greatest theatrical works, but of its theaters. Yon adopts a resolutely historical approach, considering plays themselves as historical documents (259). He provides a comprehensive overview of the social and cultural forces that influenced theaters and their operation in nineteenth-century Paris.Although Yon uses the term théâtre largely to refer to state-sanctioned structures until 1864, he also discusses a variety of other spectacles including cafés-concerts, circuses, and sports, particularly in sections devoted to the Belle Époque. The book’s first section, “L’État face aux théâtres parisiens,” develops chronologically from 1791 to 1914, tracing theater’s fate in the hands of each political regime. The second, “Les structures de la vie théâtrale,” evokes the way theaters were laid out, operated, frequented , and supervised (fire laws for example), explains how authors and personnel collaborated to bring texts to the scene, describes the working conditions of performers and stage hands,and the experience of the theater-going public.The third part,“Répertoires et diversité des spectacles,” provides a thematic overview of different generic categories of the 32,000 pièces performed in Paris from 1800–1900 (259): they ranged from tragedy and opera to melodrama, vaudeville, dance, pantomime, panorama, circus, and sports.Yon’s conclusion describes the controversial droit des pauvres, the tax levied on theaters to support charitable activities, and interprets its unpopularity as symptomatic of the tenuous associations between theaters and their perceived social utility. Each section of Yon’s book draws upon a wealth of archival materials (letters from Haussmann to ministers, from the police to ministers, among writers and actors), to reveal the book’s overarching thesis: that nineteenth-century French theater was a dramatocratie, meaning that theater was at the heart of public life and informed public opinion (7). Indeed, he shows that all nineteenth-century French rulers were concerned by theatrical spectacles’ influence on the lower classes, and the threat that such a dramatocratie represented for the state. Even Third Republic leaders were concerned by the shape and form exerted by theater and struggled (ineffectually it would turn out) to control public spectacles. But Yon also perceives the Third Republic as the moment when theater lost this social privilege, when it morphed into one among many attractions in a developing société du spectacle (351). Yon’s work is thus not a neutral accounting of the development of bourgeois Parisian theaters, le grand théâtre, but a commentary on theater’s implications for nineteenth-century French society as a whole. This book will be a valuable resource for teachers and students alike. It is published in an affordable paperback edition, it is well-documented, contains a useful index,and is full of interesting excerpts from historical documents and correspondence. While sometimes a bit technical, it would make an excellent French-language historical resource for literature courses dedicated to nineteenth-century French theater and theatrical history. Montclair State University (NJ) Elizabeth Emery Society and Culture edited by Frederick Toner Beffa, Jean-Louis. La France doit choisir. Paris: Seuil, 2012. ISBN 978-2-02-106499-5. Pp. 287. 18 a. Ce choix crucial est celui du type de capitalisme que la France devrait adopter. Ex-PDG de Saint-Gobain (1996–2007) et conseiller politique actif, Beffa analyse clairement la mondialisation, dissèque le mal économique français, et propose des solutions. Il distingue entre les “métiers mondiaux [...] où la production d’un pays donné est en concurrence directe avec les productions d’un autre pays” (17), et les métiers régionaux o...

The Struggle for Spectacle on the Paris stage, 1669–1680

The second half of the French seventeenth century is generally viewed as the age of Classicism, when rigorously pared-down plays were performed against the neutral decor of the palais a volonte. However, what is less wellknown is that the theatre-going public was equally if not more avid for music and spectacle, as can be seen in Donneau de Vise's comment of 1672: 'Nous sommes dans un siecle ou la musique et les ballets ont des charmes pour tout le monde, et que les spectacles qui en sont remplis sont beaucoup plus suivis que les autres' ('We live in a century in which music and ballet charm everyone and shows that contain them are much more popular than others').1 Music was, though, not only an attraction in its own right, it was also essential to cover the noise of stage machinery, and spectacle without music was considered well-nigh impossible. It was the desire to satisfy this public craving for the combination of music and spectacle that led to the creation of genres such as Moliere's comedie-ballet, the machine play and French opera, in each of which the component elements of music, dance, elaborate scenery, stage machinery and special effects were combined in subtly different ways. Seventeenth-century Parisian theatre was a cut-throat world where a small number of companies (between three and five) competed to attract a limited audience,2 and one of the key ways in which this competition manifested itself was as a battle over the exploitation of stage music and, thereby, spectacle.3Two men who played a defining role in the development of French opera and machine play were the marquis de Sourdeac and his associate, the sieur de Champeron, who not only designed and built the first Paris Opera but were amongst the first professional stage machinists. Their contribution has never been in doubt, but Sourdeac, in particular, has attracted attention more for his disordered private life than his artistic and technical capabilities,4 and, even as far as theatre history is concerned, the two associates have tended to appear primarily in walk-on roles in the stories of other men - notably the two founding-fathers of French opera: Pierre Perrin and Jean-Baptiste Lully. One consequence of this treatment is that the various documents relating to them have never been examined as a whole and in chronological order. In this article, therefore, I will bring Sourdeac and Champeron centre stage for the first time in order fully to explore the part they played in the struggle to obtain sole control of music and spectacle on the Paris stage.The seventeenth century has been characterised as an era of increasing specialisation, as Louis XIV and Colbert sought to marshal the creative arts 'in the service of the King'.5 At the same time, creative artists competed for pre-eminence in their respective domains. Their motivation was commercial as well as artistic - if Lully sought to be at the top of the musical tree it was because of the money to be made there - and the number of people able to get on in any given field was limited. I will, therefore, be tracking the agreements and disagreements, allegiances, contracts, ruptures and rivalries between a comparatively small group of men. A final introductory point is that an examination of the existing literature on these events reveals previous commentators to have been remarkably partial, coming down emphatically on one side or another. This is an aspect of the topic that deserves closer examination than I am able to give here, although the most striking examples will be noted.On 28 June 1669, Pierre Perrin was awarded letters patent by the King authorising him to give musical performances in French verse, and banning anyone else from giving such performances for twelve years without his permission.6 Perrin's associate was the composer Robert Cambert, although the exact terms of their agreement are not known. They were preparing to put on their first opera, Ariane, when, in December 1669, they met two distinctly louche characters: the (real) marquis de Sourdeac and the (false) sieur de Champeron. …

Female Singers and the maladie morale in Parisian Lyric Theaters, 1830-1850

Female Singers and the maladie morale in Parisian Lyric Theaters, 1830-1850 Kimberly White (bio) In 1835 music critic Henri Blanchard wrote a provocative article titled "Les actrices mariées," published in the theater journal Le monde dramatique. The article opened with a mock conversation conveying the critic's concern with morality in Parisian theaters. Was he about to launch into a tirade on performers' libertine lifestyles and their detrimental effects on public morality? Not at all. Instead, Blanchard voiced concern over bourgeois morality, which infiltrated the theaters and led women artists to adopt a virtuous lifestyle. He linked what he perceived as a wilting of the dramatic arts to an increased number of married actresses: "Do you know why dramatic art is disappearing? Why the beautiful flower of our civilization wilts on its stem in our brilliant capital of France?" "My word, no." "Because actresses are getting married." "What a paradox! Then you are not in favor of this laudable, respectable, sacred bond? . . . But what about morality?" "Ha! It is very much a question of morality of these pretty women! Of women artists, exceptional in our social order! What, do you not see that these seductive fairies, these fascinating sylphs, with their enchanting [vocal] organs, naive grace, and voluptuous glances, who bring chaos to your mind and trouble in your heart, are depoetizing themselves at will? [. . .] I condemn this monomania for marriage, [End Page 57] this scandalous neglect of the rights of the public, this maladie morale that takes away all of our pretty actresses and that saps, destroys all of our illusions."1 While perhaps tongue-in-cheek, Blanchard's comments underlined an issue that preoccupied a number of critics during the nineteenth century, that is, how theater women's difference from other women could be necessary to theater culture. The prima donna has long been considered essentially distinct from other women, her ambiguous position in society uneasily tolerated. With hectic performing schedules, difficult working conditions, and various other exigencies of professional theater life, singers often had trouble conforming to dominant social norms.2 Louis Gentil, Opéra employee and author of the infamous Journal d'une habilleuse, claimed that all women wanting to make a career of singing must renounce the sweetness of private life: burdened by the necessity of making a lifetime's wages in a decade or so, female singers had no time for sickness, marriage—even friends.3 Their existence on the fringes of acceptable feminine behavior—whether by choice or by necessity—has often led to discursive strategies in various media (novels, serial fiction, critical reviews, theatrical works) that represented professional theater women as incapable of fulfilling stereotypical feminine roles. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's vitriolic diatribes against actresses in his Lettre à d'Alembert (1758) made it clear that a woman who performed for others publicly—and, even worse, for money—could not possibly possess [End Page 58] any of those qualities so essential to her sex.4 As Rebecca Pope and Susan Leonardi put it, "What the diva can't be [. . .] is wife, good woman, true woman. Divahood kills womanhood."5 Bad wife, bad mother, bad woman. With the rise of bourgeois morality in postrevolutionary France, women of all classes were increasingly defined by their roles as wives and mothers. Throughout the nineteenth century, women artists faced many challenges in negotiating a space for their creative efforts in gendered public and private spheres. Nancy Reich has suggested that the increased emphasis on the home as the proper sphere of the woman must have caused considerable conflict for the professional woman musician who had to leave and earn a salary.6 Certainly, female performers were increasingly subjected to the dictates of bourgeois morality and castigated for their failure to conform. And yet there remained an appreciation of their different role in the public sphere. Blanchard and some of his contemporaries felt that theater women occupied an exceptional position in Parisian society; not only should they be exempt from fulfilling the roles prescribed for middle- and upper-class women, but their place outside ordinary society was actually essential to theater culture. "The actress must be an actress; the dancer, a dancer in all the meaning...

Adapting The Liberal Lover : Mediterranean Commerce, Political Economy, and Theatrical Form under Richelieu

In the 1630s and 1640s, Cardinal Richelieu transformed the Parisian theater into an arm of the state. Through the institution of the Academie Francaise, patronage of his circle of Cinq Auteurs, oversight of critical treatises to discipline dramatic aesthetics, and establishment of laws to police the playhouse, the minister ensured that the theater would be to the state, (1) a means of inculcating French subjects in the morals and political values that would foster the regime's stability. (2) Richelieu's role as supreme patron and censor of works performed on the French stage in these decades has informed a vast corpus of critical work uncovering the political ideologies conveyed in individual plays. (3) While these efforts have focused on topics such as kingship, sovereignty, Machiavellianism versus traditional noble values, and the formation of ideals of Frenchness little attention has thus far been devoted to the theater's engagement with economic policy. This is surprising given Richelieu's well-documented commitment to strengthening the French state's fiscal profile. (4) Scholarship on the English theater of the same period, by contrast, has produced a wealth of analyses of the transmission of economic values through the theater. (5) How should we interpret this apparent silence of the French stage on the subject of trade and commerce? Was it a taboo topic, disruptive to emerging classicist poetics? Or is it a lacuna in modern criticism rather than in seventeenth-century dramatic writing, possibly the result of a sense on the part of scholars that mercantile concerns had no place among elevated classical values? To explore these questions, I aim with this essay to illustrate one case in which the theater did serve as an arena for thinking through the cultural, moral, and economic implications of changes in French trading strategies in the mid-1630s. During the same theatrical season in which Corneille's Le Cid sparked a furor over moral and aesthetic standards for vraisemblance and bienseance, two French dramatists proposed theatrical adaptations of another Spanish source--Cervantes' exemplary novella El amante liberal--which addressed themes of Mediterranean commerce, religious conflict, loss, and redemption. (6) The plays, both entitled L'Amant liberal, have been largely written out of French literary history, in part because they are admittedly less than stellar examples of the period's dramatic achievements, but also because they belong to the much-maligned genre of tragicomedy, (7) and because they were authored by two playwrights (Georges de Scudery and Guyon Guerin de Bouscal) whose reputations have been eclipsed in Corneille's overpowering shadow. From this place of marginality, however, the plays reveal quite a bit about the anxieties surrounding France's renewed efforts to encourage their merchants to replenish the state's coffers by engaging in Mediterranean trade. The intersection between theatrical concerns and commercial matters in these two plays demonstrates how the theater attempted to negotiate and disseminate relatively new economic theories as well as the cultural and moral values that would support them. Mediterranean topics were a staple of French theater and fiction in the early part of the seventeenth century. (8) The Renaissance rediscovery of the so-called Byzantine novel popularized stories of shipwreck and captivity set in the southern coast of the sea and supplied the plots for countless tragicomedies in France in the early part of the seventeenth century. Traditionally, the subgenre's popularity has been explained in terms of its prestigious classical heritage or its appealingly episodic structure. (9) While these aspects surely played an important role in its success, it is also possible to view the preference for this type of story in a more materialist light. The familiar narrative of Mediterranean romance served as a useful frame for reconceptualizing questions of cultural and religious identity during a period of increased exchange between France and the Islamic Mediterranean following Richelieu's adjustments to French economic policy. …

Georgia J. Cowart . The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2008 . Pp. xxiii, 299. $55.00.

Musicologist Georgia J. Cowart's book is a masterful history of the performing arts in France during the reign of Louis XIV. Anchored in a series of close readings of ballets performed at the king's court, this compelling study explores the thematic links between music and theater at Versailles as well as at the emerging public theaters in Paris. Cowart is particularly interested in revealing the extent to which artists and musicians constrained by royal patronage were nevertheless able to articulate an anti‐militarist utopian vision in their works. In contrast to the triumph of war found in court ballets, artists from Jean‐Baptiste Poquelin Molière and Jean‐Baptiste Lully to André Campra and even Antoine Watteau instead celebrated the triumph of love and pleasure in their creations. For historians interested in why Louis XIV performed in court ballets and why he turned away from the arts after the 1670s, Cowart's volume has much to offer. This exquisitely written analysis of libretti, choreography, and music during the last decades of the seventeenth century evokes a world of aristocratic gallantry and shows the degree to which genres that modern viewers might consider distinct—opera, ballet, tragedy, and comedy—were still fluid during the grand siècle. Authors and musicians borrowed liberally from one another and over time translated what had been the exclusive genre of the court ballet for the somewhat more open and socially inclusive audiences of the Parisian theaters.. Cowart explores how the youthful Louis XIV's active participation in burlesque ballets that celebrated the theme of noble leisure confirmed his place in the traditional aristocratic hierarchy and confirmed its values. By the late 1660s, however, when his penchant for war led him to engage in a series of long and increasingly costly military conflicts, court ballets shifted to more militaristic music and a more overtly propagandist portrayal of Louis XIV as glorious victor. Yet, as Louis grew older and his marriage to the devout Madame de Maintenon led him away from frivolous entertainments, artists found some leeway to return to the depiction of love and pleasure on the stage. During the 1690s, plays that borrowed heavily from earlier court performances reversed the hierarchy of militarism over love. In the 1696 La naissance de Vénus, Jupiter (representing Louis) is presented as a tyrant whose abuse of power drives Venus to retreat to a pastoral island where peace among the nations reigns under her loving example. Given that these plays were performed at a time when Louis's armies were facing the rest of Europe in what was commonly perceived to be a fruitless military venture, Cowart's claim that these pastoral plays had a wider political resonance is easy to accept. Artists drawn to the burgeoning libertine culture of Paris and to the patronage circle around the Dauphin expressed their ambivalence with war by portraying on the stage a world of pastoral beauty and harmony. On the stage at least, pleasure triumphed.