10 Opera and ballet to the death of Gluck
Towards a truly French opera
The history of opera in France customarily opens with the political and artistic oeuvre of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, ministre principal from 1643 until his death in 1661 (first during Anne of Austria’s regency, then during Louis XIV’s reign). Mazarin was the first to attempt the assimilation of Roman and Venetian opera at the French court. His motive was twofold: politically to ensure a privileged entente among France, Italy and the Roman papacy, and musically to perpetuate the artistic politics of his predecessor, Cardinal Richelieu, who fruitfully campaigned for the establishment of French classic theatre.
Such a start influences the rest of the narrative: the history of French opera is the history of a confrontation between French and Italian traditions. As shaped by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87) and the dramatist Jean-Baptiste Quinault, the tragédie en musique was the official expression of French opera serving a political remit, the grandeur of France and its king, its existence predicated on the denial of other operatic traditions. During the ancien régime the early exclusion of comedy also left what Catherine Kintzler has aptly referred to as a ‘case vide’,1 a gap that would be filled at various periods by other forms: opéras comiques, French adaptations of Italian intermezzi comici and the opéra-ballet. Thus the history of French opera is shaped by oppositions – French/Italian, tragic/comic – that would challenge the status of the tragédie en musique in the mid-eighteenth century without undermining it and would simultaneously facilitate the rise of related genres.
French tragédie en musique was already prefigured by the French poet Pierre Perrin, who, in collaboration with the composer Robert Cambert (c. 1628–77), aimed at the integration of Italian opera within French theatrical and musical traditions that were well established at the end of the seventeenth century.2 These included the ballet de cour and the theatrical pièces à machines popular since the 1630s, in which spectacular elements held a distinctive position through the use of machinery. Also included was the later comédie-ballet, largely represented by Molière, for whom Lully wrote scores in which the complementarity of spoken dialogue, dance and music greatly helped Lully to hone his knowledge of dramatic music. Indeed, French models for a sung-throughout drama existed from the 1650s. Perrin and Cambert’s Pastorale d’Issy and Ariane, ou Le mariage de Bacchus (both from 1659, scores lost) were still drawing on the tradition of the ballet de cour, but their mythological plots, intertwining of airs and récits, and panegyrical prologues point towards tragédie en musique.3 In 1669 the king granted Perrin lettres patentes for the establishment of an Académie d’Opéra for the public performance of operas ‘in music and the French language’.4 The two first operas performed under the patent were Perrin’s pastorale Pomone (1671; Cambert’s score is mostly lost) and Gabriel Gilbert’s pastorale heroïque, Les peines et les plaisirs de l’amour (1672), again with Cambert’s music. In both works the imprint of Italian opera is perceptible through the magnificence of the stage setting and machinery (flying characters, storms, thunder and lightning). This era ended quickly owing to Perrin’s imprisonment for debt in 1671. With the king’s protection, Lully acquired Perrin’s lettres patentes in 1672, updating the privilege with the acquisition of a monopoly on opera performances in Paris. Lully also tried as hard as he could to reduce the number of musicians employed by other theatres. For instance, in 1673 he obtained a royal ordinance to prevent the Comédiens François du Roy from using ‘more than two voices and six violins’.5 Such changes secured Lully’s supremacy at the Académie Royale de Musique (frequently referred to as ‘l’Opéra’), restricting the repertoire of the Opéra to his own works.
Outside Paris, operatic life was also controlled by privileges: in 1684 Lully received a royal ordinance prohibiting the establishment of any opera académies in France without the king’s permission. Nevertheless, a financial arrangement with Lully permitted académies royales to appear in France: the Académie Royale de Marseille was inaugurated in 1685 with Lully’s Le temple de la paix, and the Académie Royale de Musique in Lyons in 1688 with Lully’s tragédie Phaëton.6 Other cities followed: Rouen in 1688 and Lille with a privilege granted to the composer Pascal Collasse (1649–1709) in 1690.
Cadmus et Hermione (Paris, 1673), Lully and Quinault’s first tragédie en musique, exemplifies defining features of the new genre, notably librettos based on classical mythology, in this case Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is the first of Lully’s thirteen tragédies en musique. Eleven were written to Quinault’s librettos; the other two, Psyché (1678) and Bellérophon (1679), set librettos by Thomas Corneille. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the terms tragédie en musique and tragédie mise en musique (‘tragedy set to music’) were used more frequently than the later tragédie lyrique. Only after Lully’s death were librettos derived from sources other than mythology and medieval romance; these included Persian history for Rameau’s Zoroastre (1749) and Christian scripture for a rare opéra biblique, Jephté (1732) by Michel Pignolet de Montéclair (1667–1737).
Rigorously observed throughout the eighteenth century, the five-act division continued in most nineteenth-century grand operas. In Lully’s time, the prologue preceding the first act was dramatically unrelated to the main plot; it served as a laudatio to Louis XIV, who was frequently represented through allegorical disguises. Only after the king’s death in 1715 did librettists abandon the panegyric tone, shifting the prologue’s focus to an allegorical story related to the main plot. The prologue began to disappear altogether in mid-century, for the first time in 1749 in Rameau’s Zoroastre.
A paradigmatic feature of the tragédie en musique is the divertissement at the end of each act. Meaning ‘entertainment’, the divertissement is a suspension of the plot, with the main actors usually in the position of spectators watching new or secondary characters. Replete with airs, choruses and dances, the divertissement fuels expectation for the return of the main action. The prominence of dance sets the Lullian tragédie en musique apart from its Italian counterpart. As Kintzler puts it: ‘in French opera, the presence of dance is compulsory; the problem is making it necessary’.7
The rise of early opéra comique and opéra-ballet
Hosting acrobats and rope dancers, singers, musicians and mimes, the Parisian fair (Foire) theatres were a long-standing tradition from the Middle Ages. At the end of the seventeenth century they were at the Foire Saint-Germain (from 3 February to Palm Sunday) and the Foire Saint-Laurent (from 9 August to 29 September). Music played an important role in their repertoire of parades, animal and acrobatic shows (including tightrope dancers) and marionette plays. In 1672, Lully’s newly acquired royal privilege prohibited the use of instrumental and sung music at the fairs. In 1697, the Forains, or fair actors, took advantage of the expulsion of the Comédiens Italiens du Roi, a professional Italian company supported by the king, by appropriating repertoire and characters from the commedia dell’arte, a move that became possible after several Italian actors joined the fair theatres.8 The combined use of speech, singing, music and dance of the Italian repertoire quickly came to be seen as a threat to the Comédie-Française and the Opéra. The early eighteenth century brought a succession of bans on the fairs, of closings and reopenings, of conciliatory arrangements and compromises with the Opéra, the Comédie-Française and, from 1716, the newly reconstituted Comédie-Italienne. These led in part to the early success of the pièces en écriteaux, which arose when the fair theatres lost their permit (granted by the Opéra in 1708) to use speech, songs, dances and changes of scenery:9
The Comédiens-Français prohibited the performances [at the fair theatres], which were already attracting large audiences, and they successfully campaigned to change the law so that the fair actors were prohibited from performing spoken dramas. Forbidden to speak, the actors used placards [écriteaux]: … each actor had his lines written … on a placard that was visible to the audience. These lines were initially spoken. Then songs were added, which were also played by the orchestra and sung by the audience.10
The practice led to pièces en vaudevilles: existing tunes (timbres) chosen by the Forains were taken from tragédies en musique (Lully’s ‘Air des trembleurs’ from Isis, 1677, was a popular timbre) and from popular song, especially the vaudeville, a short song in couplets.11 While the audience sang the newly written lyrics to the tune, accompanied by a small ensemble of eight to ten musicians, the actors mimed the scene.
By the end of the seventeenth century, Lully’s monopoly had created an artificial situation for the Opéra repertoire, and his successors were inevitably compared with him after his death. Already established as a canonic repertoire, his tragédies en musique were regularly performed at the Opéra until 1779. Comparisons became a topos in eighteenth-century French musical life, as exemplified by the Querelle des Lullistes et des Ramistes of the 1730s and the critique of Armide’s monologue from Lully’s Armide (1686) that Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) included in his Lettre sur la musique française (1753). Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87) composed a new score to this same Armide, which was premiered at the Académie in Paris in 1777.
The rise of the opéra-ballet and, by the 1740s, the acte de ballet offered new possibilities. Drawing on the ballet de cour and tragédie en musique, an opéra-ballet opens with an allegorical prologue, albeit much lighter than that of the tragédie en musique and usually focused on the main theme of the work. The opéra-ballet retained the ballet de cour’s division into acts, usually three or four. André Campra’s L’Europe galante (1697), the first generally recognised opéra-ballet, opens with an allegorical prologue, a quarrel between Venus and Discord. The amorous galanterie referred to in the title is developed in the ensuing acts: ‘La France’, ‘L’Espagne’, ‘L’Italie’ and ‘La Turquie’. In a radical departure from the tragédie en musique, early opéra-ballet presented contemporary characters so far unseen on the Opéra stage: petits-maîtres, amoureux galants and characters from the commedia dell’arte, among others.12 By celebrating pleasure and amusement, while simultaneously rejecting the merveilleux and mythology, the use of machinery and the tragedy with its values of heroism, sacrifice and honour, opéra-ballet played an important role in the progressive introduction of comic elements on stage. Banned from the tragédie en musique since Lully’s third opera, Thésée (1675), the comic was frequently invoked in opéra-ballet – albeit in an expurgated form far removed from the comic elements of the early fair theatres. Les fêtes, ou Le triomphe de Thalie (1714), by Jean-Joseph Mouret (1682–1738), caused a stir at the Opéra by using its prologue to set Melpomene, muse of tragedy, in opposition to Thalia, muse of comedy, with the latter winning.
The repertoire of tragédies en musique and opéras-ballets constituted the main source for the Forains, who frequently parodied these works. This indicates the nature of their audiences, as full enjoyment of these parodies required knowledge of the original operas.13 From the 1700s to the 1730s, the main authors writing for the Foire were Alain-René Lesage and Jacques-Philippe d’Orneval; next was the playwright and librettist Louis Fuzelier (1672–1752), author of numerous parodies including Arlequin Persée (1722, a parody of Lully’s Persée).14
Police officers were regularly sent to ensure that the Forains did not overstep their privilege. One report, dated 3 February 1710, writes of a parody of Quinault and Lully’s Alceste (Versailles, 1674) at the Foire Saint-Germain. The agent describes ‘several ranks of seats’ and ‘three ranks of boxes’ of a ‘decorated theatre’, with an orchestra of at least eight musicians … accompanying several actors in ‘a comic divertissement … parodying several airs from the opera Alceste and other airs and dances alternatively’.15 The number of musicians corresponded to the musical forces usually hired at the Foire.16
After an annual payment of 35,000 livres to the Académie Royale de Musique, the fair theatres were permitted to call themselves the Opéra-Comique and to perform plays with musical accompaniment, dances and songs:17 with the permission of the Opéra, ‘plays only in vaudevilles were written, and the theatre took the name Opéra-Comique. Gradually prose [for the spoken dialogues] came to be used with verses [for the vaudevilles], so plays gradually became mixed.’18 The use of vaudevilles no longer implied that all songs were based on existing tunes: the finale, during which each main character returned to sing one verse of the vaudeville (frequently alternating with dances), gave opportunities for new tunes. Early examples are those composed by Jean-Claude Gillier (1667–1737), active at the Opéra-Comique from 1713 until 1735.
With the blossoming of the comédies en vaudevilles, characterised by spoken dialogue and song, the Opéra-Comique became dangerously successful competition for the two main royal theatres: for the opening of the season of the new Opéra-Comique at the Foire Saint-Laurent on 25 July 1715, Le nouveau mercure galant reported that ‘the Comédie[-Française] and Opéra were deserted’.
Another threat emerged in 1716, when the regent, Philippe d’Orléans, brought Luigi Riccoboni’s Italian company to the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which had been deserted since the expulsion of the Comédiens Italiens in 1697. This ‘Nouveau Théâtre Italien’ or ‘Comédie-Italienne’ benefited from royal subsidies. It quickly turned to the French language for its repertoire, which included plays by Marivaux and pièces en vaudevilles, many of them with divertissements by Mouret, the music director of the new company. Thus began a long rivalry with the Opéra-Comique that ended in 1762 with the merging of the two theatres. This was at the expense of the Opéra-Comique, the Comédie-Italienne having obtained the privilege and repertoire of the former.
The popularity of the Opéra-Comique and the Comédie-Italienne inevitably affected the repertoire of the Opéra. The climate of the Regency favoured development of lighter and shorter forms characterised by a more flexible treatment of musical and dramatic conventions. The most remarkable instance of its similarity with the spirit of the early opéra-ballet is Campra’s Le carnaval de Venise (1699), on a libretto by Jean-François Regnard, the most successful writer of the Comédie-Italienne. Not a true opéra-ballet, as it presents continuous action throughout, Le carnaval de Venise anticipates Le carnaval et la Folie (1703) by André Cardinal Destouches (1672–1749), defined as the first comédie lyrique. Italy became a favoured place for the imagination of librettists and composers: the foundation of the Comédie-Italienne in 1716 filled a void left by the Comédiens Italiens since 1697. Appropriating the symbols of an imaginary Italy, opéra-ballet and the related comédie lyrique permitted a form of artistic and political escapism.19 Campra’s Le carnaval de Venise and his opéra-ballet Les fêtes vénitiennes (1710) can also be read as a criticism of French absolutism, as Georgia Cowart recently demonstrated.20
The end of the Regency marked a change in the aesthetics of opéra-ballet, reaffirming the heroic and progressively reintroducing mythological and allegorical characters.21 The opéra-ballet Les fêtes grecques et romaines (1723) by François Colin (or Collin) de Blamont (1690–1760) was defined by its librettist Fuzelier as a ballet héroïque. Subsequent opéras-ballets also brought back heroic and mythological values, as in Destouches’s Les stratagèmes de l’Amour (1726), Mouret’s Les amours des dieux (1727) and Rameau’s Les fêtes d’Hébé, ou Les talents lyriques (1739).
Waiting for Rameau
After Lully’s death, the tragédie en musique inevitably went through stylistic changes. The Italianism of Médée (1693) by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704) was seen as a threat by the Lullistes, who identified the work with the typical excesses of transalpine music.22Chromaticism and dissonance are more frequent in Médée than in any of Lully’s operas, and the vocal lines of its récits often break into brief arioso sections. Early eighteenth-century tragédie en musique is also characterised by an increase in the number of short airs within large recitative sections composed in the declamatory style of the récit non mesuré.23 Vocal technique grew with the appearance of ariettes, which arose from the influence of Italian vocal and instrumental music and cantata in France. The term ariette could be applied to a song following the binary AABB form or to the Italian da capo aria model. Ariettes are to be found in Campra’s Les fêtes vénitiennes, a work hugely popular and frequently performed up to the mid-eighteenth century.
The generous display of dances in opéra-ballet was echoed in tragédies en musique. Also prominent were symphonies descriptives, with a predilection for the description of natural phenomena, including sommeils (‘slumbers’; an early example by Lully is in Atys, Act III, scene 4) and earthquakes.24 The new generation of composers (Collasse, Campra and Marin Marais, 1656–1728) developed the role of the orchestra with a refined use of instrumental colour. Despite its modest size and relative simplicity, the instrumental tempest in Act III, scene 4, of Marais’s tragédie Alcyone (1706) was the most frequently cited example of symphonies descriptives throughout the eighteenth century. Other examples include the earthquake in Marais’s tragédie Sémélé (1709) and an earthquake with chorus in Campra’s Tancrède (1702). The most impressive earthquake belongs to an opéra-ballet by Rameau, ‘Les Incas du Pérou’ from Les Indes galantes (1735); because of its difficult instrumental writing, the earthquake was left out of the first performances. As for the ariette, it also made its way into the tragédie en musique. Instrumentation echoed Italian cantatas and instrumental music: the ariette ‘Amour, régnez en paix’ from Marais’s Sémélé (Act III, scene 4) requires two obbligato flutes.
‘My Lord, there is enough music in this opera to make ten of them’, was the purported bon mot from Campra about Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), Rameau’s first tragédie en musique.25 Indeed, with this work Rameau efficiently absorbed contemporary trends and opened a new chapter in the history of French opera. It also sparked off the Querelle des Lullistes et des Ramistes, the famous eighteenth-century debate that perpetuated the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. Denis Diderot’s libertine novel Les bijoux indiscrets, set in the kingdom of Banza (a mocking allegory of France), offered a spirited account in 1748 featuring ‘Utmiutsol’ and ‘Uremifasolasiututut’ as Banza’s most famous musicians, ‘the former starting to grow old’ and the ‘latter just born’; ‘the ignorant and the old fogeys’ favoured Utmiutsol, ‘the young and the virtuosos’ favoured Uremifasolasiututut, and ‘the gens de goût, whether young or old, mostly supported both of them’. While Utmiutsol, whose music is ‘simple, natural, even, sometimes too even’, is Lully, Rameau is ‘the young Uremifasolasiututut’, whose music is ‘singular, brilliant, made up, learned, sometimes too learned’: ‘Nature led Utmiutsol on the path to melody; study and experience led Uremifasolasiututut to discover the sources of harmony. Who has ever known how to declaim, and who will ever recite like the old man? Who will write light ariettes for us, voluptuous airs and characteristic symphonies as the younger?’26 Rameau departed from Lullian tradition, still ‘believ[ing] himself part of the Lullian tradition’.27 But his fondness for accompanied recitative, with its subtle variations of metre and accentuation of words through syncopations, is a novelty; the harmonic idiom is never short of dissonance; modulation and seventh and ninth chords are abundant. Rameau’s music acquired an expressive charge with an unprecedented evocative power which enhanced the sung text with descriptive devices and instrumental colour.
Pygmalion’s ariette ‘Règne, Amour’ in Pigmalion (1748), an acte de ballet, reveals the demanding vocal technique that Rameau’s ariettes had reached from the 1740s onwards, culminating in ‘Un horizon serein’ from his last, unfinished tragédie Les Boréades (1763). Rameau also expanded the use of duets, vocal ensembles and choruses. This was not always appreciated by his contemporaries: Hippolyte was severely pruned after its premiere, especially the duets, which were criticised for their expression of contradictory ideas in the two voices; and the second ‘Trio des Parques’, famous for its use of enharmonics, was suppressed because it was too difficult to sing and accompany.
The acte de ballet
Appearing in the 1740s, the acte de ballet was a one-act stage work, often treated as a divertissement filled with dances, airs, ensembles and choruses. The appearance of actes de ballet encouraged a vogue for spectacles de fragments that paralleled the decline of the opéra-ballet, whose focus on a unifying subject disappeared after the 1730s. The spectacle de fragments consisted of putting acts together from different ballets. An example is the fragments given on 20 November 1760, which started with the prologue of Rameau’s three-act opera Platée, continued with Rousseau’s one-act opera Le devin du village and concluded with Pigmalion, Rameau’s acte de ballet. Rousseau, however, severely criticised the practice, echoing a growing concern that the repertoire of the Académie Royale lacked imagination: ‘Only a man without taste could imagine such a jumble, and only a theatre without standards could endure it.’28
The function of dance in Rameau’s works echoed ideas that had emerged before mid-century, especially the danse en action promoted by Louis de Cahusac (1706–59). It was less decorative and more orientated towards narration than the belle danse promoted by Louis Dupré, one of the best dancers of the Opéra in the 1730s. Cahusac’s 1754 treatise La danse ancienne et moderne offered the first thorough theoretical appraisal of the danse en action.29
Such new conceptions of dance paved the way for Gaspare Angiolini in the 1760s in Vienna and Jean-Georges Noverre in Stuttgart. These were the main practitioners of the ballet en action, which eventually supplanted opéra-ballet.30 The dancer Gaëtan Vestris from the Opéra, one of Noverre’s disciples, filled the principal role on 26 January 1776 of the first ballet en action ever performed at the Opéra, Médée et Jason (a potpourri score).31
From Rameau to the Querelle des Bouffons
The characteristics of the comédie lyrique were perpetuated by, even absorbed into, Rameau’s three-act opera Platée (1745). Most frequently defined in contemporary sources as a ballet bouffon, Platée is an acerbic parody of the conventions of the tragédie en musique, additionally mocking the excesses of Italian virtuosity of La Folie’s Italianising air ‘Aux langueurs d’Apollon’.32Platée is a major adumbration of the comic issue that was to be at the heart of the Querelle des Bouffons of 1752–4. In 1752, the Opéra, competing against the Opéra-Comique and the Comédie-Italienne, hired Eustachio Bambini’s Italian company to perform intermezzi comici after revoking a contract made between Bambini and the Académie Royale in Rouen. On 1 August 1752, the Bouffons performed Pergolesi’s La serva padrona (1733). This was not the first time intermezzi comici were performed in Paris: Orlandini’s Bacocco e Serpilla (Venice, 1718) had been performed at the Opéra in 1729 (as Le mari joueur et la femme bigotte) and parodied by Biancolelli and Romagnesi at the Comédie-Italienne; Pergolesi’s La serva padrona had already been performed in 1746 at the Comédie-Italienne in a ‘Frenchified’ form, with added divertissements and spoken dialogue replacing Italian recitatives.
The role of La serva padrona in triggering the Querelle des Bouffons must not be overemphasised, however: it was merely a welcome pretext for igniting a debate that could not be avoided any longer. Carefully circumscribed in specific works since the early opéras-ballets and comédies lyriques, comedy had been unexpectedly brought back by the Bouffons.
The Opéra-Comique and Comédie-Italienne: Monnet and Favart
Before the Querelle des Bouffons, the Opéra-Comique hosted two main figures who were instrumental in the development of the genre: Jean Monnet (1703–85) and Charles-Simon Favart (1710–92). Monnet’s tenures at the Opéra-Comique (1743–4 and 1752–7) orientated that institution towards a more elevated genre. In his Mémoires (1772), Monnet tarnished his predecessor, Ponteau, by saying he had let the Opéra-Comique ‘fall into a major state of disrepair’. Stressing that during Ponteau’s tenure the domestic staff, who were recognisable by their livery [or livrée], had taken over the parterre, Monnet suggests that he aimed to elevate the social level of the audience. The orchestra, he continues, was made up of musicians ‘who used to play at weddings and guinguettes’, and the dancers were poorly dressed; in short, concludes Monnet, ‘nothing was dirtier, more disgusting than the accessories of this theatre. Wishing to bring decency and order … [he] obtained a royal ordonnance prohibiting the entrance of domestic staff.’33
Monnet’s debut in 1743 was highlighted by major changes: a new amphitheatre was built, redecorated and refurbished. Brilliant appointments included Favart as régisseur (in charge of supervising the rehearsals and performances) and author; the painter François Boucher for costumes and decor; Dupré as maître de ballet with his pupil Jean Georges Noverre; and as conductors the composers Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (1743–5, at the Foire Saint-Laurent, then the Foire Saint-Germain) and Adolphe-Benoît Blaise (d. 1772; at the Foire Saint-Germain in 1743 and the Foire Saint-Laurent in 1744). By then the Opéra-Comique, which had become one of the richest and most innovative theatres of Paris, boasted an orchestra of as many as eighteen musicians. Feeling this threat, the Opéra and the Comédie-Française had its privilege abolished, forcing the Opéra-Comique to close between 1745 and 1751.
It fell to Favart, who became the new director of the Opéra-Comique in 1758, to bring to fruition the changes that had started in the 1740s. He pursued the reform of the genre, aiming at moral elevation and departing from the esprit gaulois that had characterised the repertoire at the beginning of the century. ‘Favart [was] the first to drag opéra comique out of the humble status that it had occupied for so long.’34 He defined his first work as belonging to the genre galant et comique; it anticipates his later contributions to the genre and the emergence of a Rousseauian sensibility,35 epitomised by Rousseau’s Le devin du village (Fontainebleau, 1752; Académie Royale de Musique, 1753), a one-act intermède. The combined influences of Favart’s early works and Le devin du village reshaped opéracomique from the 1750s onwards through a series of oppositions between the rural and the urban and the exaltation of simplicity, the naturel, over the artificiality of the aristocracy.
The Querelle des Bouffons and its aftermath
Le devin du village caused a sensation by introducing to the Opéra a new sensibility with a moralising subtext that would become prevalent in Favart’s later style. Based on the tale of that name in Marmontel’s Contes moraux, Annette et Lubin, with music by Blaise (1762), was one of Favart’s major successes. Its performance at court in 1762 testifies to the level of decency and morality that was now attached to this repertoire, though by the 1760s the encyclopédistes (a group of over a hundred writers who contributed to the Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert) grew more critical of a naivety in it that they found artificial.
Because of its novelty, Le devin du village was assimilated into the category of intermezzi comici, whose comic quality was of a different stock from Rousseau’s intermède. Favart’s parody of Le devin du village, Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne (1753), in which Favart’s wife Marie-Justine Du Ronceray caused a sensation by appearing on stage in a rustic costume and clogs, greatly detracting from the magnificence of the ‘bergères d’Opéra’, became as successful and influential as Le devin du village.36
Le devin du village also started the vogue for the vocal romance at the Académie Royale: Colin’s ‘Dans ma cabane obscure’ is characterised by its strophic form, archaic devices, simple accompaniment, modal harmonies and absence of ornamentation, all enhancing a ‘sweet, natural, champêtre melody’.37 The popularity of the romance became a major feature of opéra comique in the 1760s, and it was widely used in the works of François-André Danican Philidor (1726–95; Le sorcier, 1764) and Pierre-Alexandre de Monsigny (1729–1817; Le roi et le fermier, 1762). It also matched the sensibilité, if not the frank sentimentalisme, of the late eighteenth-century opéra comique, embodying the topos of local colour and archaism. This is seen in two works by André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741–1813), Aucassin et Nicolette, ou Les moeurs du bon vieux temps (1779) and Richard Coeur-de-Lion (1784), in which the romance ‘Une fièvre brûlante’ is invested with an important structural role through its nine occurrences in the work. A late opéra comique by Nicolas Dalayrac (1753–1809), Léhéman, ou La tour de Neustadt (1801), also uses a romance (‘Un voyageur s’est égaré’) as a recurring motif throughout the work.
A large portion of the debate during the Querelle des Bouffons concerned the differences between French and Italian recitative. The most extreme position was held by Rousseau, whose Lettre sur la musique française (1753) dismissed the possibility of French music altogether, arguing that the French language was unsuitable for setting to music. Another important work, this one truly born of the Querelle, was Les troqueurs (1753) by Antoine Dauvergne (1713–97), on a libretto by Charles Vadé. Defined as both intermède and opéra bouffon, and sung throughout in recitatives instead of spoken dialogue, the work was nevertheless assimilated into the repertoire of the opéra comique. Monnet had carefully launched the publicity for the work, pretending to have commissioned an Italian composer to write an opera with French words in order to demonstrate the viability of writing French music to a French text.38 After the premiere, the Mercure de France judged Les troqueurs to be the first intermède written in France ‘in a purely Italian manner’.39 The recitative of Les troqueurs is fast and fluctuating, indeed à l’italienne, but it maintains the metre appropriate to the récit non mesuré, with the changes of time signature required by French prosody. Dauvergne created a French recitative à l’italienne by sticking to traditional French musical declamation.
The 1750s saw the development of ariettes in opéras comiques (which should not be confused with the ariettes that had been used in opéra-ballet and tragédie en musique since early in the eighteenth century). Arias from the intermezzi comici in 1752–4 provided new models for the ariettes in opéras comiques, and were also frequently parodied from 1752 onwards, with spoken dialogue instead of recitative. Favart adapted Orlandini’s Serpilla e Baiocco (1715) as Baïocco et Serpilla (1753), and Rinaldo di Capua’s La zingara (1753) was performed at the Comédie-Italienne in 1755 as La bohémienne.40
Similarly, all the ariettes in Michel Blavet’s Le jaloux corrigé (1752) were parodies of arias from intermezzi performed by the Bouffons since 1752 (La serva padrona,Il maestro di musica and Il giocatore). The only original music in the entire score was Blavet’s recitative (Le jaloux corrigé not being an opéra comique), supposedly ‘made in imitation of the Italians’.41Ariettes in opéra comique were not necessarily for solo voice: Philidor wrote ariettes en duo at the beginning of Blaise le savetier (1759) and in Sancho Pança dans son île (1762). Whereas ariettes in the Opéra repertoire established a moment of dramatic stasis with emphasis on vocal display, ariettes in opéras comiques were justified by a dramatic and narrative purpose, hence their avoidance of strophic form. The use of vocal ensembles also expanded, while maintaining their narrative role: an early example is the ariette en quatuor ending Dauvergne’sLes troqueurs – described by David Charlton as an ariette d’action.42 The most famous of such vocal ensembles remains the septet in Philidor’s Tom Jones (1765).43
After the Querelle, Italian recitativo accompagnato made its way into opéras comiques, often appearing between a passage of spoken dialogue and an ariette. Philidor frequently used it with a parodic intention, as in the magic scene of Le sorcier in which the technique enhances the mock-solemnity of the invocation made by Julien, disguised as the sorcerer.
Downing A. Thomas has described how the development of opéra comique from mid-century was connected with a change in audience attitudes, permitting a stronger sense of identification between dramatic characters and audience: opéra comique was ‘particularly well suited to sympathy’.44 Because it was inextricably linked, both socially and politically, to its origins in royal power, the tragédie en musique came under attack in the 1750s from the Enlightenment thought of the encyclopédistes, which gave musical debates a political dimension. The Querelle des Bouffons was also known as the Guerre des coins (‘War of the corners’), this name referring to the royal boxes at the theatre. The coin du roi gathered the partisans of French music, now all united behind Rameau, who embodied the new ‘conservatism’; the coin de la reine gathered the encyclopédistes, primarily Friedrich-Melchior Grimm and Diderot.
Another element of stylistic change in the mid-eighteenth century was the rise of the théâtre larmoyant, which was inaugurated by Nivelle de La Chaussée’s Mélanide (1741). Jean-Michel Sedaine’s libretto Le déserteur (described by Sedaine as a drame), set to music by Monsigny (1769), stretches verisimilitude for the benefit of the pathétique. It was an important step towards the vogue for melodramatic aesthetics that would appear in the 1770s and reach its peak during the Revolutionary period. The title role of Dalayrac’s Nina, ou La folle par amour (1786) is the prototype of the mad heroine popular in nineteenth-century opera. Dalayrac’s Nina was the model for Paisiello’s Nina, o sia la pazza per amore (1789).45Les rigueurs du cloître (1790) and Le délire (1799) by Henri-Montan Berton (1767–1844) drew on the type of melodramatic plots also found in the works of the dramatist Nicolas Bouilly (to whom Sedaine gave the title poète lachrymal). This trend in opéra comique found its finest achievements in the 1790s in the repertoire of the Théâtre Feydeau: the drames lyriques La caverne (1793) and Paul et Virginie, ou Le triomphe de la vertu by Le Sueur (1794); three by Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842), Lodoïska (1791), Eliza, ou Le voyage au glacier du Mont Saint-Bernard (1794) and Médée (1797); and the opéra comique Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal (1798) by Pierre Gaveaux (1760–1825), the source of Beethoven’s Fidelio.
The seeds of the development of opéra comique during the Revolution had been budding since the 1750s: Diderot’s statement ‘we speak too much in our dramas; as a consequence our actors don’t act enough’46 reflects the search for expressive immediacy at the expense of verbal continuity. Thus gesture, interjections and interfering with and interrupting the speech (known by then as the style entrecoupé, with its eloquent silences and gestures) are musically rendered by accompanied recitatives, which provide greater variety in spoken dialogues. These are symptoms of an expanded expressivity that goes straight to the heart of an audience and colludes with it. Charlton points out this quality in a scene from Philidor’s Le sorcier, in which Agate is unable to recognise the disguised Julien, whereas ‘We, the audience, see him in both his roles … his words (sung as sorcerer) assert Julien’s fidelity to Agate in the face of her apparent infidelity, while his music tells us that this is also a love-declaration.’47
Waiting for Gluck: embracing the Italian faction and ‘an absolute tolerance of all genres of music’
Under Favart’s tenure, the Opéra-Comique merged with the Comédie-Italienne in 1762 and was relocated to the Hôtel de Bourgogne (in 1783 the theatre moved to the new Salle Favart). Despite the dominance of the Opéra-Comique repertoire and indeed a royal edict of 1780 renaming the company Opéra-Comique, the new theatre continued to be referred to as the Comédie-Italienne or Théâtre-Italien.48 In the 1760s its repertoire combined the new comédie mêlée d’ariettes with the opéras comiques en vaudevilles. The inexorable progress of ariettes over vaudevilles and other simple airs inherited from the Foire was the subject of much debate, as illustrated by Le procès des ariettes et des vaudevilles, a one-act play by Favart and Louis Anseaume first performed in 1760.
The issue of declamation and recitative was still a hot topic, being treated in texts such as Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau (written probably in 1761 or 1762):
But … isn’t it a really strange oddity that a foreigner, an Italian, a Duni [Egidio Duni, 1708–75], comes to teach us how to give accent to our music, to subject our way of singing to all tempi, meters, intervals, declamatory passages, without hurting our prosody? … Anyone who has ever heard a beggar asking for charity in the street, a man in the grip of rage, a jealous, furious woman, a lover in despair, a flatterer – yes, a flatterer softening his tone, drawling out his syllables, his voice like honey; in a word, a passion, no matter what kind, provided that by its energy it deserved to serve as a model for the musician, should have noticed two things: first, that syllables, whether long or short, have no fixed duration, and are not even in any necessary proportional relationship to each other; second, that passion can mould prosody more or less at will; it accommodates the very longest intervals, and the man who cries out in deep despair: ‘Ah! Wretched that I am!’ would raise his voice on the first exclamatory syllable to its highest, sharpest pitch and sink down on the others to the gravest and lowest, ranging over an octave or even a greater interval, and giving each sound the quantity appropriate to the melody, without offending the ear or letting the syllables, be they long or short, preserve the length or brevity of unemotional speech. We’ve come a long way since the days when we would cite, as miracles of musical expression, the parenthetical remark in [Lully’s] Armide: ‘Renaud’s conqueror (if any such exists)’, or ‘Let’s obey without hesitating!’ from [Rameau’s] Les Indes galantes. Now, those miracles make me shrug my shoulders with pity. The rate at which the art is moving ahead, no one can predict where it’ll get to.49
In 1757 Diderot had published Entretiens sur le fils naturel, a text in the form of three dialogues (‘entretiens’) discussing his theoretical views on theatre as exemplified in his own play Le fils naturel of that same year, and the new poésie lyrique yet to come that he predicted has been often identified with Gluck’s Parisian operas (1774–9). The prevalent notion that by the 1750s the tragédie en musique had reached a dead end is essentially due to the indisputable fact that there was no composer able to build on Rameau’s oeuvre.
Philidor’s Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège (1767) completely abandons the merveilleux. Poinsinet’s libretto adopted a three-act structure in its first version (the 1773 version was in five acts). Philidor made larger concessions to the Italian style of aria, without suppressing the ballet so dear to the French. Ernelinde was praised by the encyclopédistes (above all Diderot, who saw in it the nouveau stile).50
However, the fate of tragédie en musique before the Revolution fell into the hands of Gluck, who settled in Paris in 1774. Paris needed him as much as he needed Paris. Familiar with French musical aesthetics since his Viennese stay, Gluck had already been composing original scores for opéras comiques for the Viennese Burgtheater from 1758 under the tenure of the Genoan Count Giacomo Durazzo, who indefatigably advocated French music in Vienna. Gluck’s new concept of opera was shaped during his collaboration with Calzabigi for his three Viennese ‘reform operas’ Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), Alceste (1767) and Paride ed Elena (1770). He set it out clearly in the preface to Alceste: the rejection of vocal repetition occasioned by da capo arias and gratuitous virtuosity, which impeded the comprehension of the text; the avoidance of the alternation between recitative and aria by a more frequent use of arioso sections and accompanied recitatives; and better dramatic integration of chorus and overture.
Gluck espoused the tragédie en musique because of its potential, especially in the flexible use of the récit, which offered subtler gradations than the traditional alternation between recitative and aria, and the chance to shape large-scale structures within scenes. For the Académie Royale de Musique he adapted two of his Italian reform operas (Orphée et Euridice, 1774; Alceste, 1776); he also wrote new ones: Iphigénie en Aulide (1774); Armide (1777), which reset Quinault’s libretto for Lully and proved that Gluck had carefully read Rousseau’s 1753 critique of Armide’s monologue;51 and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779).
Iphigénie en Tauride best exemplifies Gluck’s Parisian manner. The drama begins in medias res with what seems to be an innocuous overture, a light minuet suddenly interrupted by a storm and leading to Iphigénie’s entrance. Gluck’s masterful use of recitative culminates in Orestes’ arioso (Act II), with another major Gluckian feature, the voice of the orchestra superimposed on and contradicting the characters – here a restless viola figure betrays Orestes’ inner torment. The integration of ballet and the choeur dansé was another salient feature that recalled Gluck’s collaboration with Angiolini for his ballets d’action in Vienna (Don Juan,Sémiramis).52
Gluck’s Parisian stay was the last chapter of the tragédie en musique before the Revolution. The Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes, which had started in 1777 and pitted Gluck against the Italian composer Niccolò Piccinni, went back to the topical opposition of French versus Italian.53 Piccinni, who had moved to Paris in 1777, was supported by the large Italophile party. Among them was Marmontel, who was instrumental in forging the aesthetic manifesto of the Piccinnistes, promoting musical unity and periodic structure (périodisme) and adapting several of Quinault’s librettos for Piccinni.54
The Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes
‘Let’s study then, and encourage the genius, if we want it to hatch … Let’s work tirelessly to make our Music triumph, but when gathering the harvest, let’s not forget who gave us the seed.’55 In 1770, this statement from Nicolas-Étienne Framery, exhorting French musicians to follow Italian aesthetics, prefigured a central tenet of the Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes, which turned out to be the last manifestation of the long-standing French–Italian confrontation. A perfect example was the fifteen-month season of Italian operas presented in 1779–80 by the director of the Opéra from 1778, Anne-Pierre-Jacques de Vismes du Valgay, who appointed Piccinni as musical director for the season.56 Having wisely learned the lessons of the former Italian intrusions in France, de Vismes decided to counterattack by widening the repertoire of the Opéra, increasing the number of weekly performances from three to five and offering a variety of genres, including opéras anciens and opéras nouveaux, Italian opera buffa, ballets, pantomimes and concert music (to rival the several institutions dedicated to instrumental music in the capital). Finally, de Vismes managed to impose a series of drastic restrictions on the Comédie-Italienne, the main one being the prohibition of performances of Italian operas and parodies of Italian operas (with French lyrics), which had been permitted at the Opéra.57 In so doing, he alienated those who should have been his allies, including defenders of Italian opera like Framery, who had already adapted several Italian works into French.58 From 1778, Framery was able to pursue his career by offering adaptations of Italian operas to the Théâtre de Versailles, which evaded de Vismes’s restrictions. Inaugurated in 1777, this theatre benefited from the clever direction of the actress and theatre director Mademoiselle Montansier (Marguerite Brunet) and from the protection of one of its most frequent attenders, Queen Marie-Antoinette. As a result of de Vismes’s season, the 1780s saw the inexorable rise of Italian opera in France, first from the Théâtre de Versailles, then from the Théâtre de Monsieur (1789–92), which was dedicated to Italian opere buffe adapted for the French audience with ‘substitution arias’ and new ensembles mostly composed by Cherubini, who was recruited by Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824) and was established in Paris from 1786.59 The period 1789–92 definitively secured the ground for Italian opera in France.60
The consequences of de Vismes’s fruitful Italian season altered what had seemed unalterable since Lully’s time. A profound breach had been made in the repertoire of the Opéra, as expressed in this (unsigned) review published in March 1779 in the Correspondance littéraire:
But what are the sources of [the Opéra’s] great prosperity? It must be admitted: an absolute tolerance for all genres of music, for the old music and for the new, for Gluck’s music and for Piccinni’s, for the grand opéra and for the opéra bouffon, for the ballets with chaconnes and for the ballets-pantomimes; no genre is proscribed, no talent is persecuted.61
In this new landscape, the Comédie-Italienne was defined by an adjective that had lost its raison d’être, so a royal edict renamed it Opéra-Comique in 1780. The core of its repertoire during the last decade of the ancien régime was Grétry’s opéras comiques, followed by those of Dalayrac. It was in this decade and under Grétry’s influence that opéra comique acquired the decisive stylistic features that would secure the Romantic development of the genre: the choice of plots, which now used historical subjects with political subtexts, and the expansion of the orchestral and choral forces.62
Notes
1 , Poétique de l’opéra français de Corneille à Rousseau (Paris: Minerve, 1991), 203.
2 On Perrin’s arguments for the establishment of a truly French opera, see , The Lyric Art of Pierre Perrin, Founder of French Opera (Henryville, PA: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1986).
3 , ‘“Dealing in shepherds”: the pastoral ploy in nascent French opera’, in (ed.), French Musical Thought, 1600–1800 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989), 53–79.
4 The full text of Louis XIV’s lettres patentes is given in , Histoire du théâtre de l’Académie Royale de Musique en France, 2 vols (1757; Geneva: Minkoff, 1972), vol. I, 77–81.
5 Ordinance of 22 April 1673, Saint-Germain-en-Laye; see , Musiques de cour: chapelle, chambre, écurie, 1661–1733 (Paris: Picard, 1971), 41.
6 Trois siècles d’opéra à Lyons de l’Académie Royale de Musique à l’Opéra-Nouveau, exhibition catalogue (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyons, 1982).
7 , Théâtre et opéra à l’âge classique: une familière étrangeté (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 165.
8 They were expelled for announcing the play La fausse prude, which targeted Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s morganatic spouse. The repertoire of the Comédiens Italiens is published in (ed.), Il Théâtre Italien di Gherardi (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1966).
9 , Le ‘pièces par écriteaux’ nel teatro della Foire (1710–1715): modi di una teatralità (Venice: Cafoscarina, 2007).
10 , ‘Préface’, in , Théâtre de la Foire, 10 vols (Paris: Pierre Gandouin, 1737), vol. I. This practice is also described in , ‘Popular musical entertainment in eighteenth-century Paris’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 9 (1978), 305–6.
11 : ‘Vocal music at the “Théâtres de la Foire” 1697–1762’, part 1, Recherches sur la musique française classique, 8 (1968), 141–60.
12 A frequently cited predecessor to L’Europe galante is ’s Ballet des saisons (1695). This ballet à entrées was one of the first ballets to present a different plot for each one of its entrées, ‘Spring’, ‘Summer’, ‘Autumn’ and ‘Winter’. Others were ’s Les amours de Momus (1695) and Les jeux à l’honneur de la victoire by (1691, music lost). See , ‘Les jeux à l’honneur de la victoire d’Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre: premier opéra-ballet?’, Revue de musicologie, 81 (1995), 235–47.
13 The classic study remains , Le théâtre et le public à Paris sous Louis XIV, 1659–1715 (1934; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1976); see also , Paris Theatre Audiences in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford University Press, 1957).
14 Spaziani’s anthology provides a musical appendix. See , Il teatro della ‘Foire’: dieci commedie di Alard, Fuzelier, Lesage, D’Orneval, La Font, Piron (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1965).
15 , Les spectacles de la Foire, 2 vols (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1877), vol. I, 6–7.
16 , ‘Instruments and instrumental music at the “Théâtres de la Foire” (1697–1762)’, Recherches sur la musique française classique, 5 (1965), 142–68.
17 Henceforth the term opéra comique will refer to the genre, and ‘Opéra-Comique’ to the institution. On the history of this institution in the ancien régime and beyond, see (ed.), L’opéra-comique en France au XVIIIe siècle (Liège: Mardaga, 1992); and and (eds), Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique Paris: répertoire 1762–1972 (Liège: Mardaga, 2005).
18 Orneval, ‘Préface’.
19 See , ‘Staging Venice’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 15 (2003), 297–316.
20 See , ‘Carnival in Venice or protest in Paris? Louis XIV and the politics of subversion at the Paris Opéra’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 54 (2001), 265–302.
21 The reintroduction of the heroic character in Les fêtes grecques can be related to the recent coronation of Louis XV at the age of thirteen. See , ‘The French opera-ballet in the early 18th century: problems of definition and classification’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 18 (1965), 197–206.
22 The topical opposition between Italian and French music at the turn of the century is illustrated by the pro-French ’s Paralèle des Italiens et des François, en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéras (1702; repr. Geneva: Minkoff, 1976); and the response from the pro-Italian , Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique françoise, 3 vols (1704–6; repr. Geneva: Minkoff, 1972), which provoked the same to his Défense du parallèle des Italiens et des François en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéra (1705; repr. Geneva: Minkoff, 1976).
23 French vocal declamation established a clear distinction between the récit (or récitatif) non mesuré and récit (or récitatif)mesuré. In the récitatif non mesuré the musical metre follows the prosody of the text strictly, and is thus subjected to continuous changes of time signature. The récitatif mesuré is closer to a fully sung style, with the use of a constant time signature. Such treatment of vocal declamation was viewed by foreign listeners as extremely idiosyncratic and properly French when compared with the treatment, in Italian opera, of recitative and aria. Indeed, non-French listeners were often at pains to distinguish between the two types of French recitative. The often-quoted anecdote told by the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni, while attending a performance at the Académie Royale in 1763, offers a case in point: ‘I waited for the arias … The dancers appeared; I thought the act was over, not an aria. I spoke of this to my neighbor who scoffed at me and assured me that there had been six arias in the different scenes which I had just heard. How could this be, say I, I am not deaf; instruments always accompany the voice … but I took it all for recitative.’ Quoted in , French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau, rev. edn (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1997), 111.
24 , ‘Orchestra and spectacle in the “tragédie en musique” 1673–1715: oracle, “sommeil” and “tempête”’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 108 (1981–2), 25–46.
25 Quoted in , Jean-Philippe Rameau: His Life and Work (New York: Dover, 1969), 191.
26 , Les bijoux indiscrets, in , Œuvres, ed. , 5 vols (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994), vol. II, 52.
27 , Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1998), 56.
28 , ‘Fragmens’, in Dictionnaire de musique, ed. , in Ecrits sur la musique, la langue et la théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, (1995), 831.
29 , La danse ancienne et moderne, ou Traité historique de la danse, ed. , and (Paris: Desjonquères, 2004).
30 , Lettres sur la danse (Lyons: Aimé Delaroche, 1760); English trans., Letters on Dancing and Ballets, trans. (Brooklyn, NY: Dance Horizons, 1966). On Noverre and the ballet en action, see , ‘Jean-Georges Noverre: dance and reform’, in (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ballet (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 87–97; , ‘“Choreography” is narrative: the programmes of the eighteenth-century “ballet d’action”’, Journal of the Society for Dance Research, 26 (2008), 42–59; , ‘Les Philosophes and le savoir: words, gestures and other signs in the era of Sedaine’, in and (eds), Michel-Jean Sedaine (1719–1797): Theatre, Opera and Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 39–51. On Angiolini, see , ‘The speaking body: Gasparo Angiolini’s rhétorique muette and the ballet d’action in the eighteenth century’, in (ed.), Critica Musica: Essays in Honor of Paul Brainard (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1996), 15–56.
31 Médée et Jason had been premiered at the Hoftheater in Stuttgart in 1763, with choreography by Noverre and a score by Jean-Joseph Rodolphe. The Paris premiere did not keep the original music, but instead used a series of dances by La Borde; Gardel and Vestris adapted Noverre’s choreography. See , ‘Gossec et les premiers pas du ballet-pantomime français: autour du succès de Mirza (1779)’, in (ed.), François-Joseph Gossec, 1734–1829 (Versailles: Centre de Musique Baroque, 2002), 101–16.
32 , ‘Rameau’s Platée returns: a case of double identity in the Querelle des Bouffons’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 18 (2006), 1–19.
33 , Mémoires de Jean Monnet, directeur du Théâtre de la Foire (Paris: Louis Michaud, 1909), 78–9.
34 , Lycée, ou Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne, 16 vols (Paris: Depelafol, 1825), vol. XII, 277.
35 ’s repertoire is given in , Théâtre de Monsieur Favart, ou recueil des comédies, parodies et opéra-comiques qu’il a donnés jusqu’à ce jour, avec les airs, rondes et vaudevilles notés dans chaque pièce, 10 vols (1763–72; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1971).
36 See , ‘Les parodies du Devin du village de Rousseau et la sensibilité dans l’opéra-comique français’, Revue de la Société liégeoise de musicologie, 13–14 (1999), 123–41.
37 Rousseau, ‘Romance’, in Dictionnaire de musique, 1028–9; , ‘The beginnings of the operatic romance: Rousseau, Sedaine, and Monsigny’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1981–2), 149–78; , ‘The romance and its cognates: narrative, irony and vraisemblance in early opéra comique’, in French Opera 1730–1830: Meaning and Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 43–92.
38 The whole episode is related in ’s memoirs: Supplément au Roman comique, ou Mémoires pour servir à la vie de Jean Monnet, ci-devant directeur de l’Opéra-Comique de Paris, de l’Opéra de Lyons, & d’une Comédie Françoise à Londres. Écrits par lui-même (Paris: Barbou, 1772), 63–73.
39 Mercure de France, September 1753, 173–9.
40 For a list of these parodies, see , Histoire de l’opéra italien en France (1752–1815): héros et héroïnes d’un roman théâtral (Paris: CNRS, 2006), 238.
41 ‘Avertissement’, in , Le jaloux corrigé, opéra bouffon (Paris: aux adresses ordinaires et chez Mr Blavet, [1753]), [ii].
42 , ‘Ariette’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (accessed 22 May 2014).
43 , Duet and Ensemble in the Early Opéra-Comique (New York: Garland, 1995).
44 , Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 203.
45 The relations between both works is explored in , ‘From Nina to Nina: psychodrama, absorption and sentiment in the 1780s’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 8 (1996), 91–112.
46 , Deuxième Entretien sur le Fils naturel (1757), in Œuvres esthétiques, ed. (Paris: Garnier, 1988), 100.
47 Charlton, ‘The romance and its cognates’, 87.
48 We will, however, use the name Opéra-Comique when referring to the former Comédie-Italienne from 1780 onwards.
49 Translation slightly emended from , Rameau’s Nephew and First Satire, trans. (Oxford University Press, 2006), 72.
50 , ‘Diderot et le Théâtre lyrique: le “nouveau stile” proposé par Le neveu de Rameau’, Revue de musicologie, 64 (1978), 229–52.
51 , ‘From Garrick’s dagger to Gluck’s dagger: the dual concept of pantomime in Gluck’s Paris operas’, in (ed.), Musique et geste en France de Lully à la Révolution: études sur la musique, le théâtre et la danse (Berne: Peter Lang, 2009), 55–92.
52 , ‘Musical setting and scenic movement: chorus and chœur dansé in eighteenth-century Parisian Opéra’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 12 (2000), 1–28.
53 Texts published during this quarrel are gathered in the anthology by (ed.), La Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes, 2 vols (Geneva: Minkoff, 1984).
54 See , ‘The theory and practice of Piccinnisme’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 98 (1971–2), 31–46.
55 , ‘Quelques réflexions sur la musique moderne’, Journal de musique, 5 (1770), 17–18.
56 For the list of works planned for the season (by Piccinni), see Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien en France, 81.
57 , Les comédiens du roi de la troupe italienne pendant les deux derniers siècles: documents inédits recueillis aux Archives Nationales, 2 vols (1880; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), vol. II, 350–8.
58 On Framery’s adaptations, as well as his involvement in the Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes, see , Nicolas-Étienne Framery and Lyric Theatre in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003).
59 For an overview of the consolidation and dissemination of Italian opera in France, see Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien en France, 71–145.
60 See Michael McClellan, ‘Battling over the lyric muse: expressions of revolution and counterrevolution at the Théâtre Feydeau, 1789–1801’ (PhD thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Reference McClellan1994).
61 and , Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique de Grimm et de Diderot depuis 1753 jusqu’en 1790, ed. , 16 vols (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–82), vol. XII, 231.
62 See , Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique (Cambridge University Press, 1986); , Grétry et l’Europe de l’opéra-comique (Brussels: Mardaga, 1992).
