Royale De Musique Research Articles

Golden Era of Baroque Dance

"The reign of Louis XIV marks an important milestone in the development of dance and art. Convinced that visual arts and music would significantly contribute to a monarch’s authority, image, and glory, the “Sun King” coordinated artistic activities through establishing a significant number of royal academies. Through the Académie Royale de Danse the art of dancing was given a proper language and notation system for the first time in history. On the other hand, the Académie Royale de Musique was tied to the birth of a national operatic style. Opera was the perfect tool for an idealistic and majestic projection of a nation’s monarch. Keywords: baroque dance, Louis XIV, dance notation systems, ballet de cour, royal academies, Jean-Baptiste Lully, music, opera. "

Speculating the Spectator: Dance and the Mise en scène of the Gaze at the Académie royale de musique, 1827-185

Introduction During the opening night of Le Diable boiteux on 1 June 1836 at the Academie royale de Musique, the stage was set to look like the Royal Theater of Madrid with actors in chairs in the back of the theater, looking out towards the performers as if they were the spectators. The libretto indicates any number of sounds one would hear in the theater corridors: a call bell announces the imminent rise of the curtain, musicians tune their instruments, and the regisseur eventually gives a ...

“Robert le Diable” as a political metaphor of July monarchy

The paper is devoted to the political meaning of the opera Robert le Diable by G. Meyerbeer, E. Scribe, G. Delavigne in the context of social and political changes that followed the 1830 July Revolution. Robert le Diable was the first new staging in L’Academie royale de musique after administrative and economic reform. The new government of “illegitimate” King Louis-Philippe and a new administrative system of the Opera whose management was delegated to an entrepreneur were sharply criticized by the legitimistes. They argued that the Bourbons patronized the arts, therefore the Opera flourished, and the deposition of the legitimate King Charles X led to the fact that cultural institutions became effete. Consequently Orleaniste elite considered a luxury setting of Robert le Diable as a way to appease political opposition’s dissatisfaction with new regime. The opera became a success due to the novelty of the music, magnificence and showiness of performance. The authors of the opera and theater administration made every effort to avoid any inflammatory allusions in the text and in the staging. However, contemporaries interpreted it as a political metaphor reflecting the contradictions of the new government which followed both the monarchical and liberal principles.

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]). …

Achille et Polyxène(1687): the Trojan war and a plea for peace at the Académie royale de musique

Jean-Baptiste Lully and (following Lully’s death) his disciple Pascal Collasse set to music a libretto by Jean Galbert de Campistron that deals with the reappropriation of an episode from the Trojan cycle, a heroic historical subject not previously treated on the stages of the Académie royale de musique or Italian opera houses; the result was Achille et Polyxène, a tragédie en musique in a prologue and five acts, premiered on 23 November 1687 (without the king in attendance). This all-encompassing spectacle marked a decisive moment in the history of the genre, at the very least as a bold synthesis of contemporary poetical and operatic practices. The theme of the opera is love thwarted by hatred between two nations, the love between Achilles, the Greek hero and king, and the Trojan princess Polyxena. The work drew from literary sources not previously used at the Académie royale: Homer’s Iliad (Books 9, 15–19, 22, 24), the Ephemeris belli Troiani (Journal of the Trojan War) attributed to Dictys Cretensis (Books 3 and 4), and Virgil’s Aeneid (Book 4); these works, which intend to interpret the question of the tragedy of mankind’s destiny, prompted the authors of the opera to emphasize the natural propensity of human beings towards wars that lead to their destruction. Thus, this tragédie en musique (not revived since 1712), is more than a large-scale entertainment for the court of the city; in the manner of ancient Greeks and Grand Siècle tragic playwrights, it is based on the power of Myth, with the understanding that the secular myth of Troy was considered as an equivalent of the myth of the Fall. This article puts together the absolutist, war-mongering strategies of Louis XIV and the strategies of an opera conceived within the circle of the Vendômes, an intellectual, artistic, free-thinking community enjoying the Grand Dauphin’s protection. The opera is thus a harmonious combination, not just of theatre, music and dance, but also homo- and hetero-eroticism, the heroic morality of the ideal prince, and the praise of peace between peoples. In this sense, Achille et Polyxène can be considered an exemplar of the ideological and creative freedom which a librettist and two composers could enjoy during the Ancien Régime, censorship notwithstanding, even while they were supposed above all to glorify the conquests and power of an absolute monarch. The method followed is transdisciplinary and aims especially at highlighting, behind and beyond the rhetoric of praise, the extremely dense network of intertextual, musical, choreographic and theatrical allusions which this opera comprises and which, taken as a whole, make it possible to characterize the styles of Campistron and Collasse.

Henri Duponchel and the Birth of Romantic Theatrical Decor

Is devoted to Henri Duponchel, the brightest personality in Romantic musical and theatrical art. Being an architect, stage and costume designer, stage director and theatre manager of Académie Royale de Musique, he was the first who made Paris audience interested in Medieval colours, which became an essential part of Romantic theatre setting. Duponchel’s work and his input to development of the French grand opera are analysed within the Russian art criticism tradition for the first time.

An Annotatedlivretof Lully'sRolandas a Source for Seventeenth-Century Declamation

AbstractThe Houghton Library at Harvard University holds a copy of the 1685livretforRolandby Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully that has been marked up in three different seventeenth-century hands. The meanings of these markings cannot be conclusively deciphered until further corroborative sources come to light, but they seem to refer to declaimed performances of Quinault's text. The purpose of the current article is to propose possible interpretations of these annotations, guided by seventeenth-century theory of the oratorical pitches (tons) and eighteenth-century links between the Académie royale de musique and the Comédie française.

Noverre's Anonymous Composers: Mozart and Les Petits Riens

Noverre's Anonymous Composers:Mozart and Les Petits Riens Olivia Sabee (bio) When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrived in Paris in 1778 with his mother, he was a twenty-two year-old composer trying to establish his name in one of the most critical musical cities of Europe. In this paper, through Mozart's ballet Les Petits Riens, I will explore the situation of the anonymous ballet composer, one that is usually argued as having come to be in the nineteenth century, but which applies perfectly to Mozart. The choreography of Jean-Georges Noverre, the well-known maître de danse at the Académie Royale de Musique who arranged Mozart's commission for the ballet, was lost long ago, while in a reversal of celebrity it is now Mozart's name that makes this story particularly noteworthy. The question I will be exploring, the problematic status of the ballet composer, is one often taken up by music historians, but always begins with the nineteenth century. Eighteenth-century ballet composers, however, were frequently forced into anonymity, not having been credited for their work. In this paper I will argue that these disposable, now anonymous, composers, typical during the era when ballet was fighting to break away from opera, paved the way for the establishment of the working conditions described in the nineteenth century by music historians. The Enlightenment brought both turmoil and reform to theatrical stages across Europe. At a time when intellectual and artistic circles existed in close contact with one another, these reforms and the numerous treatises that inspired them reverberated throughout the international artistic community. Prominent players in the theatrical world such as David Garrick called for less emphasis on symbols of [End Page 800] court etiquette as well as for a clearer division between spectator and performer. The ballet was no exception to these reforms, and during this era the ballet d'action was first performed. As Jennifer Homans explains, "The notion that pantomime, music, and dance could tell a story without the help of words had been around for some time: in the commedia dell'arte and in the fairgrounds, in the ballets between the acts of Italian operas, and in Jesuit plays."1 The ballet d'action, however, brought this type of performance to the official theaters, such as the Académie Royale de Musique, or the Opéra de Paris, where I will situate this study. How then does the ballet d'action relate to anonymity at the Opéra? The implementation of this new dance form gave ballet the power to tell a story, and in doing so indelibly changed the artistic process involved in its creation. As ballet was stripped of its traditional and subordinate relationship to opera, a new relationship between ballet master and composer developed. When Mozart arrived in Paris, he already had several contacts in the city, notably Baron Grimm and Noverre, who had recently acquired his post at the Académie Royale de Musique and whom Mozart had met in Vienna. These well-connected men helped the composer find enough work to survive while trying to establish himself in a new city. In Paris, Mozart took on students in addition to composing works for the Concert Spirituel and taking private commissions. His mother Maria Anna Mozart describes their hardships at length: [Mozart] has to write two concertos, one for the flute and one for the harp, and in addition an act for an opera for the French theatre. Besides all this he has a pupil, who pays his six livres a lesson, that is, three louis d'or for twelve, though we shan't get the money until they are all finished. Thus we shan't pocket a kreuzer before Easter. Meanwhile our capital has become very small and won't go very far, for we shall have to move into other rooms, as it is too far off here to walk and we have already spent a lot of money on drives.2 Parisian life was very expensive, and, aside from finding a position as a Kappellmeister, Mozart's other principal preoccupation while in Paris was to compose an opera, which he frequently presented to his father...

Bouquet francais

Jean-Baptiste Lully spotted the potential talent of Jean-Féry Rebel (1666–1747) when Rebel was a boy of eight singing in the Chapelle Royale. Lully took him on as a protégé, teaching him the violin and composition. By 1699 Rebel was leading the orchestra of the Académie Royale de Musique and within six years had became one of the celebrated Vingt-Quatre Violons du Roy, finally rising to become Batteur de Mesure at the Opéra in 1720. Earlier, in 1713, he published his 12 Sonates à violon seul mellées de plusieurs récits pour la viole comprising six Italianate sonates followed by six French dance suites using double stops and tremolo passages and some elaborate three-part textures in the viol recitatives. He was most famous as the creator of the genre of choreographed and programmatic symphonies, starting with Caprice in 1711, which was danced by the much fêted Françoise Prévost, danseuse seule at...

'Il n'y a qu'un Paris au monde, et j'y reviendrai planter mon drapeau!': Rossini's Second Grand Opera

When Rossini left Paris in 1836, he left a city with which he had been closely associated for nearly fifteen years. But he also departed with the nagging sense that Paris was owed more than the single grand opéra represented by Guillaume Tell, an obligation that emerged anew in the early 1840s. The Paris premiere of the revised version of the Stabat mater in 1842 laid the ground for Rossini's return to the city in the following year. Expectations that he was coming to Paris to provide a successor to Guillaume Tell were not matched by Rossini's own ambitions: to consult with the world-famous urologist Jean Civiale. While a wide range of new Rossini endeavours were mooted for the Académie Royale de Musique—translations of La donna del lago, Semiramide, and L’italiana in Algeri—none came to fruition. The question of Rossini's second grand opéra continued in the background alongside various rumours of new works—an opera based on Jeanne d’Arc and one on a new libretto by Scribe—the concrete results were a French translation of Othello (1844) and the pasticcio Robert Bruce (1846). In 1844, a statue of Rossini was proposed for the foyer of the Académie Royale de Musique in the Salle Le Peletier, and it was inaugurated in 1846. Rossini was the only living composer to be so honoured, a fact that triggered a number of discourses—formal and informal—that equated Rossini's creative silence with death.

Operatic Sources for Death’s Jest-Book

IN June, 1825, Thomas Lovell Beddoes announced in a letter to his friend Kelsall, ‘I … am thinking of a very Gothic-styled tragedy for wh I have a jewel of a name—DEATH’S JESTBOOK’.1 The date is significant, for that month saw the staging of Meyerbeer’s opera Il crociato in Egitto at the Haymarket, a production that the poet would almost certainly have attended. (A letter to Bryan Waller Procter in 1824 shows him to be a connoisseur both of opera and of ballet, and his report on a production of Tancredi at La Scala also suggests familiarity with the repertoire of L’Académie royale de musique—the Paris Opéra. This in turn presupposes other continental trips before 1824, although there is no record of these in his patchy biography.) Here is an extract from the Haymarket programme Il Crociatio in Egitto: In an expedition to the coast of Egypt, which took place in the Sixth Crusade, in the neighbourhood of Damietta, a band of the Knights of Rhodes … was surprised, betrayed, and after a most heroic resistance overpowered, by the superior numbers of the enemy. Armand d’Orville, a young Knight of Provence, was one of this valiant band. Fainting from loss of blood, he remained among the slain. * * * Meanwhile, overtures were made to the Sultan by the Knights of Rhodes, for an exchange of prisoners: terms of peace were also offered, and an embassy from them arrived at Damietta. The action commences at the arrival of this embassy.2

Platée: Ballet bouffon en un prologue et trois actes, RCT 53 (review)

Reviewed by Lois Rosow Ohio State University Jean-Philippe Rameau. Platée: Ballet bouffon en un prologue et trois actes, RCT 53; livret de Jacques Autreau; révisé par Adrien-Joseph Valois d'Orville et Balot de Sovot. Version 1749; version 1745 (compléments). Édition de M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet. Bonneuil-Matours, France: Société Jean-Philippe Rameau; distribution mondiale: Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, [End Page 360] c2005. (Opera omnia, sér. 4: Musique dramatique, vol. 10.) (Musica Gallica.) [Gen. pref. in Eng., Fr. (Sylvie Bouissou), p. vii–viii; contents, p. ix; introd., p. xi–lxxx; livret in Fr., p. lxxxi–xcii; roles, etc., p. xciv; table of contents for the score, p. xcv–xcviii; score (version of 1749), p. 1–257; score (version of 1745), p. 258–327; crit. apparatus in Eng., p. 329–400; annexes, p. 401–21; facsims., p. 424–34; prospectus for Rameau Opera omnia, p. 435. Cloth. ISMN M-006-52787-8; pub. nos. SJPR-OOR IV.10, BA 8852. €398.] Jean-Philippe Rameau. Platée: Ballet bouffon en un prologue et trois actes, RCT 53; livret de Jacques Autreau; révisé par Adrien-Joseph Valois d'Orville et Balot de Sovot. Version 1749; version 1745 (compléments). Édition de M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet; réduction clavier-chant de François Saint-Yves. Bonneuil-Matours, France: Société Jean-Philippe Rameau; distribution mondiale: Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, c2005. (Opera omnia, sér. 4: Musique dramatique, vol. 10.) (Musica Gallica.) [Avertissement in Fr., Eng., p. v; table of contents for the score, p. vi–x; roles, etc., p. xi–xii; vocal score (version of 1749), p. 1–260; vocal score (version of 1745), p. 261–352. ISMN M-006-52788-5; pub. nos. SJPR-OOR IV.10r, BA 8852a. Duration: ca. 3 hrs. €47.95.] Elizabeth Bartlet's critical edition of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Platée appeared in print in 2005, the year of her death, which followed a long battle with cancer. This edition is a brilliant achievement, and it is certainly fortunate for the rest of us that she was able to complete it before her final illness. Platée was a last-moment addition to the elaborate festivities at Versailles during February and March of 1745 for the marriage of Maria Teresa, infanta of Spain, to Louis, dauphin of France. It replaced Pandore, the planned five-act tragédie en musique by Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer, with a livret by Voltaire, that the composer was unable to complete in time. Another new work by Rameau (also with a text by Voltaire), La princesse de Navarre, performed on the eve of the royal wedding on 23 February and repeated on the 27th, served as the centerpiece of the festival. Rameau had been preparing Platée for the Académie Royale de Musique (the Opéra) in Paris for the late summer or fall, and only a modest amount of work remained when the call came to offer it to the royal court instead. Its premiere at Versailles marked the end of the festivities on 31 March. In May of 1745, Louis XV showed his appreciation for both works by naming Rameau compositeur de la musique de la chambre du roi. The resultant court commissions kept Rameau very busy, so it is not surprising that the Paris premiere of Platée was further delayed. That premiere eventually took place on 9 February 1749, with numerous revisions (as was normal when an opera returned to the stage after several years, especially with a change of venue). Additional productions at the Opéra occurred in February of 1750 and 1754, and in later years the prologue enjoyed an independent existence at the Opéra, brought together with individual acts from other works to make an evening's entertainment. Platée holds a unique place in the oeuvre of Rameau: it is a farce (ballet bouffon), in which Jupiter pretends to love the ugly nymph and marsh queen Platée in order to...

La réception des cantates de Luigi Rossi dans la France du Grand Siècle

Luigi Rossi was one of the best known composers in France between the 17th and 18th century. Numerous documents and musical sources bear witness to a significant circulation of his cantatas during this period. There was a clear process of assimilation of Rossi's style on the part of numerous French composers and a reutilization of his music in a number of contexts. His cantatas were accessible through the manuscripts of the royal library, printed in music anthologies, sung in private concerts of noble amateurs and in professional public performances at the Academie royale de Musique. Over the course of this reception, Rossi's music, which circulated almost exclusively in manuscripts, was transformed through a process of gradual modification. This music was so well-known and fashionable that it was considered very similar to the French style. Still a long time after his death, Luigi Rossi appeared as a common heritage and an integral part of the cultural landscape of France's Grand Siecle.

Jean-Nicolas Servandoni's Spectacles of Nature and Technology

(1) Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project The name Servandoni appears enigmatically in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, the unfinished work in which Benjamin theorized the foundations of modernity. (2) Grouped with flanerie and illusion, and contextualized within Benjamin's interest in the effect of industrial production on traditional cultural forms, the obscure references connect the architect, painter, set designer, and virtuoso of spectacle Jean-Nicolas (1695-1766) to problems of modern aesthetics. (3) Given that most of Benjamin's references for the Arcades project point to nineteenth- and even twentieth-century figures, it is curious that should be pulled from the past to create a tableau of nineteenth-century Paris. Based on those brief notes, one is left to imagine the anticipatory link Benjamin saw between Servandoni's work and the industrialized nineteenth century.... Jean-Nicolas is most often remembered today as the architect of the St Sulpice facade in Paris. (4) Educated as an artist in Rome, he moved to Paris in 1724 and became known for his lavish set designs for the Opera. He was admitted to the Academie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture in 1731, and was the choice of royalty to decorate public festivals in England, France, and Portugal. (5) His reputation well established, he began to use his skills in architecture, art, set design, and his flair for the extravagant to produce a series of mute spectacles at the Tuileries between 1738-1743 and 1754-1758. The plays combined the vogue for English pantomime with the breathtaking effects of the seventeenth-century machine play. (6) Diderot characterized as a great machinist and architect, a good painter, and a sublime decorateur, and the Encyclopedie calls him the only stage designer of any real talent in all of Paris, but in spite of ample praise for his talents, the judgment of by his contemporaries does not necessarily yield the image of a man on the forefront of modernity, as Benjamin's notes might suggest. (7) In fact, critics warned that his aesthetic sense was so antiquated that he risked adoption by the seventeenth century. (8) In his own time, it seems that Servandoni's work brought to mind nostalgia more than it anticipated the future. His productions, cohabited by ancient ruins and modern technology, stage a combat between the old and the new in which one clear victor is not always apparent. This essay aims to shed light on Servandoni's paradoxical modernity as expressed in his mute spectacles. In particular, I will focus on how the confrontation of nature and technology in the Spectacle de Pandore (1739) and La foret enchantee (1754) reinforces the effects of his scenic innovations. I will suggest that the ideological and cosmological underpinnings of Servandoni's aesthetic are informed by, and yet alter the world-view of the princely cabinet of curiosities. Servandoni's tableaux reflect and respond to a tradition devoted to the absorption of the modern into the ancient, to the tethering of the artificial to the natural, and to the preservation of enchantment amid change. Of Servandoni's innovations, the elevation of scenography as spectacle in its own right most impacted his renown. According to M.J. Moynet's 1873 study of theater machines and decor, les progres de la mise en scene [...] furent peu sensibles [...] jusqu'a Servandoni. (9) Moynet echoes the tone set by Diderot, Blondel, and Marmontel in the Encyclopedie. More recent studies affirm that, with very few exceptions, stage decor was severely limited both in quantity and in importance on the eighteenth-century French stage. (10) Servandoni's contributions to scenography are manifest in his early work with the Paris Opera, and become even more apparent in his later productions at the Tuileries, where the decor itself becomes the primary focus of the spectacle. After studying in Italy and working in Portugal and England (where he made set decorations for the London Opera), brought his experience to the Academie Royale de Musique. …

Scene Design at the Court of Louis XIV: The Work of the Vigarani Family and Jean Berain. By Frederick Paul Tollini. Studies in Theatre Arts 22. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003; pp. 137; 34 illustrations; 6 color plates. $109.95 cloth.

Gaspare Vigarani, the Italian architect and set designer, was hired in 1659 to build a new theatre in the Tuileries Palace for the festivities celebrating Louis XIV's marriage in 1660. This theatre, the ill-fated albeit magnificent Salle des Machines, was not completed in time for the wedding celebration. It opened in February 1662 with a production of Cavalli's opera Ercole amante. His sons Carlo and Ludovico had assisted Vigarani in creating the scenery and machinery for this production. In 1663, Carlo was invited back to France to supervise royal entertainments, a function he exercised until 1680. In 1673, he joined the composer Lully at the newly created Académie royale de musique, where he designed scenery until 1680. Jean Berain, who was named to the post of “dessinateur de la chambre et du cabinet du Roi” in 1674, had assisted Vigarani early in his career and designed costumes for Lully's operas. He succeeded Vigarani as set designer at the Opera in 1680, a post he would hold until 1710.

La revolution des Bouffons: l'opera italien au Theatre de Monsieur 1789-1792 (review)

La revolution des Bouffons: l'opera italien au Theâtre de Monsieur 1789-1792. By Alessandro Di Prouo. (Collection Science de la Musique.) Paris. CNRS Editions, 2003. [561 p. ISBN 2-271-06017-6. euro45.] Music examples, illustrations, facsimiles, bibliography, indexes. As the author clarifies in the introduction, this study does not attempt a history of a venue but rather that of a genre. Instead of considering the spoken works and operas comiques that were performed alongside opere buffe at the Theatre de Monsieur, Di Profio's book focuses on the thirty-three Italian operas performed there between 26 January 1789 and 31 August 1792, when the troupe disbanded. Insofar as the Theâtre de Monsieur was the first French theater to boast an established troupe of Italian singers, it owed its existence to the need for a Parisian venue for the performance of Italian opera. The troupe moved from the Tuileries to an auditorium in the SaintGennain fair, and finally changed its name to the Theâtre Feydeau after moving into a new building on the rue Feydean during June 1791. While Italian opera was performed throughout Europe from Vienna to Saint Petersburg to London, France was loyal to its own form of serious opera-the tragedie lyrique-and, increasingly during the second half of the century, to the opera comique. The opening of the Theâtre de Monsieur, named for the youngest brother of the king, Monsieur, the comte de Provence, followed two other brief experiments with Italian opera in late-eighteenthcentury France. In the first instance, maneuvering against the rival ComedieItalienne (also known as the OperaComique), the Academie royale de musique (the Paris Opera) staged Italian operas from 1778 to 1780, the majority of which were composed by Niccolo Piccinni. The second experiment with Italian opera took place when Mademoiselle Montansier, with the support of her friend, MarieAntoinette, whose preference for Italian opera derived from her childhood in Vienna, brought over the Italian troupe from Haymarket from july through October 1787, while the London theater was closed for the summer. Di Profio begins with a brief historical introduction, tracing the increasing interest in Italian opera during the decade prior to the opening of the Theâtre de Monsieur. Using archival sources, including the fonds Sageret located in the library of the Comedie-Francaise and records at the Archives nationales, Di Profio devotes his first chapter to the business affairs of the theater, tying the Theatre de Monsieur as a business to the complex cultural politics of the ancien regime. The chapter includes architectural plans and images of the theater, as well as detailed lists of administrators (including the enterprising impresario, Giovanni Battista Viotti), instrumentalists, and singers. Unlike French singers, Di Profio explains, Italian singers benefitted from an international market and, as a result, fetched in some cases nearly double the salaries of their French counterparts. Chapter 2 treats the relationship with rival theaters, in particular the Opera, which exercised total control over Parisian theatrical production stemming from legal privileges dating from the time of Louis XIV. The Opera required the Theatre de Monsieur to pay a large licensing fee and limited its repertory to French-language parodies of Italian operas, one-act spoken comedies, and opere buffe. In practice, though, these restrictions were sometimes ignored. As small theaters proliferated in Paris at the twilight of the ancien regime, particularly after 1791, the old system of privileges was clearly on its last legs. Yet, the official theaters-the Academie royale de musique, the Comedie-Italienne (with which the Theâtre de Monsieur was in most direct competition), and the ComedieFrancaise-continued to scramble to validate their exclusive claims. The financial impact of the opening of the Theâtre de Monsieur on the rival theaters was immediate. Di Profio exhaustively analyzes the claims, take-over attempts, and legal maneuvering. …

Le personnel musical de l'Opéra de Paris sous le règne de Louis XVI

Abstract In 1776, through the impetus given by Louis XVI's Intendant des Menus Plaisirs Papillon de La Ferté, the French monarchy took direct control of the Académie Royale de Musique (as the Paris opera company was officially called) by enacting a new regulation, valid up to the end of the Ancien Régime. This reorganization leads us to study the relatively small group constituted by the instrumentalists and the singers of the most famous opera company in France. This paper deals with their education, their career, their incomes and highlights of their daily life.

La dimension utopique de la pastorale

This article attempts to show that the pastoral in music, presenting an ideal society, was part of the Utopian genre. The works played at the Académie Royale de Musique are placed in the context of 17th and 18th century agro-pastoral society, in order to show the implications of its topoi, representations of an ideal including references to the past, social criticism and the need to project oneself into the future. The naturally artistic shepherds, part of a closed world, figure an idyllic way of life and praise liberty in an egalitarian society. Their moral values, the source of their happiness, were opposed to the habits of the town and the court, shown as hypocritical and unjust. The subversive message was only limited by the need to include the monarch in the dream of peace. The élite pastoral brought to life a lastingly successful microcosm ; while revealing frustrations, its universe provided an optimistic message of confidence in human capacity to create happiness.

"Un Cabinet de Musique"--The Library of an Eighteenth-Century Musician

Gabriel-Vincent Thevenard (1669-1741) was a leading singer at the Paris Opera during its early, formative years. He was born probably in Orleans, but possibly in Paris (see plate 1), and is said to have been the son of a food merchant in whose shop he worked as a youth. (1) Nothing is known of his early training as a singer, but by 1690, he was in Paris performing at the Academie royale de musique. While initially assigned secondary and substitute roles, by 1695 Thevenard had become a noted basse-taille at the Opera. He appears to have been a student of Andre Destouches, who created parts for him (as did Andre Campra), and he sang leading roles in works by the finest opera composers of the time. (2) In 1729, after some forty years of activity as a professional singer, Thevenard married a young girl and retired from the Opera with a pension. He is purported to have been a heavy drinker and carouser, and to have had a fiery and testy temperament. (3) Little else was known about Thevenard, (4) at least before a catalog of his musical library was recently uncovered, providing a fascinating view of this man through the special quality of the collection he assembled. The catalog was printed in 1742, the year after Thevenard's death, compiled for the purpose of selling the library by auction. A copy survives as a unicum at the Bibliotheque nationale de France (call number: delta 3743). The owner of the collection is anonymous in the printed source (as is the publisher), but a manuscript inscription in a contemporaneous hand on the paper cover of the catalog provides the identification Tevenard--1742. (5) The care with which the collection is described is unusual for auction catalogs of the time, suggesting that it probably was compiled by the publisher using notes left by Thevenard. The catalog lists 302 individual items, numbered consecutively and divided into seven principal musical genres: Sonates (78 items), Pieces de clavessin (11 items), Cantates (20 items), Cantatilles (5 items), Airs (13 items), Motets (9 items), and Opera (166 items). A few works in other genres are included among these without separate classification; for example, concertos are found under Sonates, musical treatises under Airs, works for viol under Pieces de clavessin, and ballets and divertissements under Opera. Yet--apart from grouping the works of individual composers by genre, and from maintaining the order of opus or volume numbers for works issued in series--there appears to be no logical organization to the catalog; composers are listed neither by nationality nor alphabetically, nor are their works arranged chronologically. Indeed, the compilation may well reflect the manner in which Thevenard stored his music: generally by composer within each genre, but with little heed paid to the sequence of items on the shelf. The information supplied for individual catalog listings is not always consistent; each may include a work's title, size, format, date, opus or volume number, the number of its voices or parts, and indication as to whether the item is printed, engraved, or in manuscript. Only occasionally are bindings or unusual physical characteristics described (these are noted especially among the Opera). There are a small number of unclear or incomplete listings that describe items in general terms rather than provide specific titles or publication information (particularly among the Airs). Items that comprise two or more works bound together are normally listed by the genre and composer of the first work in the binding, followed by identification of the others that comprise the bound volume. The numerical listing of items is consecutive throughout the catalog, except for four works, which are identified by numbers already assigned to other works in the listing, but supplied with asterisks (nos. 31 *, 122 *, 177 *, and 202 *). This procedure provided the compiler with a convenient way of adding works to the listings without disturbing the original order. …

A Bibliographical Footnote to Benton and Halley: Discovery of Jean-Baptiste Phillis's Methode courte et facile

Our late colleague Rita Benton is remembered and admired for her many accomplishments including a book entitled Pleyel as Music Publisher: Documentary Sourcebook of Early-Nineteenth-Century Music, which was completed after her death by Jeanne Halley. (1) Reviewing this book for Notes in 1991, Corey Field wrote: A wealth of detail is beautifully laid out for examination and thoroughly cross-referenced.... This book is a model of its kind.... (2) Readers familiar with this work know that it lists the publications issued by Ignace Pleyel's firm from its founding in 1795 to its demise in 1834--about four thousand tides in all--an astounding achievement for an early-nineteenth-century music publisher that translates to an average of nearly two new tides engraved, printed, and issued for every week of the company's thirty-nine-year existence. Benton and Halley list Pleyel's publications alphabetically by composer, followed by plate number, opus number, short-tide, and publication date for each entry. The degr ee of detail presented in these categories suggests that, in addition to literary sources, surviving copies were examined whenever possible. Of course, many musical works documented by purely literary evidence--such as publishers' lists or advertisements--are no longer extant, and the objects of Benton and Halley's work proved no exception to this fact. Accordingly, their book alerts the reader to these instances by the use of dashes where data remain incomplete. This author had occasion to reacquaint himself with Benton and Halley's book in 1997 after acquiring a reproduction of a baroque guitar. For the benefit of those readers unfamiliar with the guitar's historical development, the typical baroque guitar is a smaller instrument than the guitars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (3) Perhaps the most important difference among these instruments, however, is the manner in which they are strung. The baroque guitar employs five courses, or pairs of strings, to which various tuning systems were applied throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; whereas the guitar that came to prominence in the classic era, developed further in the romantic era, and remains in use today, features six single strings and a standard tuning (E-A-d-g-b-[e.sup.1]). Collecting and studying the repertory of the baroque guitar led to consideration of the transitional period during which the five-course guitar was eclipsed by the six-string instrument--a gray area of simultaneous, confusing, and spottily documented events occupying the closing decades of the eighteenth century, and extending into at least the opening decade of the nineteenth. (4) One of the guitarists of this transitional period to come to this author's attention was a Parisian named Jean-Baptiste Phillis. Biographical information on Phillis is scant. Alexandre Etienne Choron and Francois Joseph Fayolle misspell Phillis's surname in their Dictionnaire historique des musiciens. (5) They indicate he was a professeur of guitar in Paris who was renowned for his songs and accompaniments, and for a guitar method. The entry also alludes to a lawsuit in which Phillis was a defendant. The plaintiff, who lost the case, consoled himself by publishing a pamphlet in which he--not surprisingly--vilifies both Phillis and Pleyel. (6) Francois Joseph Fetis reports that Phillis was born in Bordeaux in 1751, established himself in Paris around 1784, and died there on 30 December 1823. (7) At the close of the entry, Fetis provides a list of eight works by Phillis that includes two methods. As the nineteenth century progressed, Phillis and his compositions fell into obscurity Though one of his methods is listed in the first installment of Carl Friedrich Whistling's Handbuch der musikalischen Liteeratur, (8) by the close of the century Robert Eitner could do little more than quote Fetis in the entry for Phillis in his Biographisch-bibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon, adding that a single copy of Phillis's opus 4--a set of three trios for guitar or lyre guitar with violin and viola owned by the Conservatoire royale de musique in Brussels--was the only work by this composer known to him. …