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 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):

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:

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

The road to the Opéra Bastille

The Bastille: not the bricks and mortar of a prison long destroyed, but an urban space with symbolic resonance. Today, when left-wing political groups want to demonstrate in France, the Place de la Bastille remains a preferred destination. The idealistic juxtaposition of a bastion of elite art with a site of popular protest came from François Mitterrand after the historic Socialist victory of 1981, part of his ideologically marked grands projets to etch architectural modernity on the face of the capital.¹ An early presidential communiqué about the new house promised that the Opéra would appear ‘moderne et populaire’, allow a doubling of performances while reducing costs and maintain the global leadership of Paris in the vocal arts.² The Opéra Bastille’s inauguration on 13 July 1989 magnificently conflated international cachet with populist national overtones: it took place before seven heads of state during an economic summit folded into the bicentennial celebrations. But construction delays had hampered the project. Symbolic convergence mattered so much to the regime that the first performance actually occurred in an unfinished structure and was limited to unstaged operatic excerpts sung by some of the leading artists of the day. (The first production took place only the following spring when the building was finally finished: it was Berlioz’s Les Troyens, 1858, a work with its own set of associations with French grandeur.³) Then, on the evening of 14 July itself (Bastille Day), the same world leaders watched an open-air parade and spectacle, a ‘grand opéra-ballet’, entitled La Marseillaise, which featured over 6,000 participants representing various cultures. Thus was sustained the equilibrium between high art, popular culture and internationalism. The chosen genre evoked the ancien régime. The mass outdoor setting looked back to festivals of the Revolution, but now the whole was managed by that vital component of any capitalist enterprise, an advertising guru (in the person of Jean-Paul Goude).⁴

The story of the Opéra Bastille, one arm of the Théâtre National de l’Opéra (which also includes productions at the older Palais Garnier on the Place de l’Opéra), suggests several important themes in French opera since the Revolution: state control, modernity, access and audience, and international perspectives balanced against domestic ones. To consider the gigantic repertoire of French ballet and opera after Gluck entirely through the lens of the Opéra (under its various nomenclatures, e.g. Académie Royale or Académie Impériale) would of course be too narrow. Nonetheless, that venerable institution is a good point of reference simply because of the centripetal character of French culture: Paris at the hub, and the Opéra as its most prestigious venue. This is not to say that the house always lived up to this billing. A historian preoccupied with tracing musical progress might well say that it often fell short of leadership and novelty, and there were times when it even lost some of the lustre of social prestige. But when the Opéra flagged, there were plenty of people to draw attention to its shortcomings.

The decades of the 1950s and 1960s are representative. In a post-war period that saw a pronounced internationalisation of the opera business, the Opéra, operating largely with an in-house (and mostly) French company, began to seem like something of a backwater. As one group of French critics and historians noted: ‘in the 1950s and 1960s it would not have occurred to any snob to go to the Opéra and pretend to be interested in it, and the true music lover knew very well that he would find only meagre offerings there’.⁵ From the perspective of the historian of style this was not only a matter of productions and performance standards, but also related to another important shift after the war. For contrary to its long-standing practice of producing new works – thirty in the period 1919–39 under the much-respected director Jacques Rouché – Opéra world premieres slowed considerably; in the 1950s, for example, there were only three new operas: Bolivar by Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) in 1950, Kerkeb by Marcel Samuel-Rousseau (1882–1955) in 1951 and Numance by Henry Barraud (1900–97) in 1955. There were only six ballets, most of which were relatively short: André Jolivet’s L’inconnue (1950), Henry Barraud’s L’astrologue dans le puits (1951), Louis Aubert’s Cinéma (1953), Raymond Loucher’s Hop-frog (1953), Marcel Delannoy’s Les noces fantasques (1955) and Georges Auric’s Chemin de lumière (1957).⁶ To be fair, one should also note that the three-act blockbuster Dialogues des Carmélites by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) was produced in June 1957 after its world premiere at La Scala earlier that year. It became one of the few French post-war operas to enter the international repertoire. Inefficiencies in the administrative structure called the Réunion des Théâtres Lyriques Nationaux – a creation of the Popular Front government in 1936 that brought the Opéra and Opéra-Comique under a single umbrella – bore some of the blame for stagnation and questionable quality.⁷ A complex decision-making structure involving officials from both houses, a general director and government paymasters made repertoire planning cumbersome and negotiations with fractious unions difficult.

Moreover, after the war the paradigm of production had also suddenly changed so that it was now regional opera houses and French summer music festivals that premiered new operas, which then circulated nationally and internationally (if they circulated at all). The lion’s share of works by well-known opera composers such as Georges Aperghis (b. 1945), Maurice Ohana (1913–92), Antoine Duhamel (b. 1925), Claude Prey (1925–98) and Marcel Landowski (1915–99) certainly fall into this category. After 1964, a new and efficient association of regional theatres (the Réunion des Théâtres Lyriques Municipaux de France) fostered the sharing of resources, attracted funding from the centre and explicitly prioritised the production of new operas. The group initially comprised twelve members, including major houses in Lyons, Marseilles, Toulouse, Strasbourg and Nancy. In characteristic French dirigiste fashion, the number of personnel that was required in each department of an organisation in order to qualify for membership in the group was carefully codified (a minimum orchestra of fifty-five musicians, one lighting specialist and assistant, six electricians, one typist for the artistic director and so forth). Also to emerge and compete for state funding independently of opera houses were performing groups that explored the generic edges of opera in more loosely conceived frameworks of music theatre and theatrical music, where speakers, singers, dancers and instrumentalists often interacted.⁸Aperghis’s Atelier Théâtre et Musique, founded in a Paris suburb in 1976, became a particularly successful example. Certainly there were prominent foreign models for this in works by Mauricio Kagel and Luciano Berio, but the provocative salvo ‘Opera houses? – Blow them up!’ that Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) delivered to Der Spiegel magazine in 1967 undoubtedly had its role, at least insofar as the aesthetic position represented by this sensationalistic stance had a considerable following.⁹ (Sensationalism went awry many years later: the remark caused Boulez to be detained for a few hours by Swiss police a few months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.¹⁰) In yet another replaying of the perennial young Turk against old guard – one run-in between Boulez and André Jolivet (1905–74) at a Domaine Musical concert in 1958 became legendary¹¹ – Boulez made the case for an experimental, research-orientated approach to composition. All operas written after Alban Berg’s Lulu (1935) were derivative, the ‘difference between stage music and concert music [had] disappeared’, and a new kind of music theatre would be ‘a structural mixture of technique, aesthetics and theatrical art’, by which Boulez meant that it would stage a self-consciousness of its own structural properties and present itself in situ as a dynamic process of creation instead of a subliminal replication of past formulas.¹² Poulenc’s expression of indebtedness to Mussorgsky, Monteverdi, Claude Debussy (1862–1918) and Verdi in the dedication of Dialogues des Carmélites ten years before stands as an elegant counterpoise.

Meanwhile, there was still the matter of prestige at the centre. Unlike regional opera houses that were allotted substantial funds from municipalities, the Opéra and Opéra-Comique received and still receive subventions from national government, not the city of Paris. Faced with fading public interest in both houses in the late 1960s and early 1970s – indeed, the Opéra-Comique itself was formally closed in 1972¹³ – the ministry of culture snared the well-known Swiss composer and opera manager Rolf Liebermann (1910–99) to reinvigorate the Opéra from 1972 to 1980. Ironically, Liebermann had been one of Boulez’s targets in Der Spiegel (he, in turn, formally castigated the French composer not only for his ‘Beckmesser-like judgements’, but also for his lack of compositional productivity),¹⁴ and, not surprisingly, the new director made no secret of his respect for Clio’s muse:

The government subsidy spiked in Liebermann’s initial year. The Opéra swallowed a huge proportion of ministry grants to opera and even to music in general: by 1984 (after Liebermann’s tenure) this house garnered 76 per cent of all government support to opera in France and 22.5 per cent of the entire music budget.¹⁶ Liebermann instituted auditions for every position, modernised the mise-en-scène (renowned directors such as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Patrice Chereau, Jorge Lavelli and Giorgio Strehler would eventually come to work at the Opéra) and avidly courted international conductors and singers. What was gained in quality was perhaps lost in the sense of a local tradition; although répetiteurs and coaches continued to transmit locally embedded practices for the French repertoire, recordings produced by the company from earlier periods became ever more important witnesses of performing practices on the wane, as was the French repertoire itself at the Opéra. Administrative changes allowed Liebermann a freer hand than previous directors, and in 1978 the Réunion des Théâtres Lyriques Nationaux was disbanded. A clause in the 1978 statute even articulated a policy of encouraging new works. It is hard to argue that this was aggressively pursued in subsequent years, but one monument of late twentieth-century opera did result: Liebermann’s commission of the massive Saint François d’Assise by Olivier Messiaen (1908–92, first performed 1983). The work commanded international interest as the summation of technique and spiritual values (the two were entwined for Messiaen) espoused by a towering figure in twentieth-century music: ‘It contains virtually all the bird calls that I’ve noted down in the course of my life, all the colours of my chords, all my harmonic procedures, and even some surprising innovations.’¹⁷ More important, in a century of mass destruction and rampant inauthenticity, Saint François d’Assise glows as an icon of transcendent mystic joy, a sense of the divine even as human suffering is represented on the stage.¹⁸

During Liebermann’s tenure, a ticket for the Palais Garnier became a hot commodity. Aside from its ideological significance, then, the new opera theatre financed by the Mitterrand regime responded to real market interest. Some railed against the putative sterility of the new building, and the Palais Garnier (intended to become an unshared venue for the Opéra’s ballet company) began to see opera on its boards once again after 1993. Demand overflowed to the Opéra-Comique, which once again opened its doors as a separate company in 1990 with a mandate to perform French classics from the Baroque (Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, 1993), the nineteenth century (Gounod’s Mireille, 1993) and opérette.¹⁹ Enthusiasm has continued unabated since: after an uneven period in the early 1990s, the directorship of Hugues Gall (1995–2004) established the Opéra as a very well-managed and well-attended theatre of the highest international standard.²⁰

Institutions and genres

Not the least among the reasons adduced for Gall’s success was that the ministry of culture allowed him to run the Opéra with a minimum of bureaucratic oversight. State regulation of the Parisian opera industry has waxed and waned over the years, but, given its historic role as a flag-bearer of French culture, rarely with a self-effacing presence. Writing in 1862, the music critic Pier Angelo Fiorentino voiced a familiar argument for close state control of the institution, in a spirit not dissimilar from Liebermann’s assessment over a hundred years later: ‘The Opéra is a theatre like no other; in the eyes of people from the provinces and foreigners [it is] the grandest of all Parisian marvels … charged with bearing witness to the degree of civilisation, of well-being and of taste that our society prides itself in having achieved.’²¹ Few since the Revolution have disputed this goal: the question often became one of whether it was best achieved through the work of free-market forces (‘managed’ to various degrees) or of rigid rules, an issue often tied to the ideological proclivities of successive regimes. Regulation was a matter not only of monitoring financial ledgers, but also of controlling repertoires and the slippery business of defining genres – what kind of works were allowed in this theatre, disallowed in that.²² Throughout much of the nineteenth century, governments also exercised control of content through censorship.

During the Revolution, however, the impulse was to throw off the fetters of regulation altogether. A law of 13–19 January 1791 allowed any citizen to set up a theatre for the performance of any kind of work:²³ ‘The improvement of art is necessarily linked to competition’ said the députéLe Chapelier who introduced the legislation.²⁴ As it turned out, in the hothouse of rapidly changing political alignments that ensued, authorities frequently moved to close down productions. The continuing value of censorship as a preventive tool thus became clear enough, and by 1797 politicians were also calling for tighter control of a frenzied market that had driven many theatrical entrepreneurs to their ruin. Napoleon, who took a great interest in theatrical life, moved to regulate the entertainment industry even before he became emperor by addressing the dire straits of opéra comique. The company which gave the genre its name faced redoubtable competition in 1791 from a group at the Théâtre Feydeau that also performed French opera with spoken dialogue (which continued to be the primary distinguishing characteristic of the genre, regardless of whether plots were comical or serious). The two houses were able to coexist for a while because the Feydeau performed new serious works during the period when the Opéra experienced a deceleration of production. One of the best-remembered jewels of its repertoire was Médée (1797) by Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842), with its terrifying, knife-in-hand appearance of the heroine in the final act and its virtuosic orchestral writing that so impressed Beethoven. Another Beethoven connection was Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal (1798) by Pierre Gaveaux (1760–1825), a forerunner to Fidelio. The Opéra-Comique at the Salle Favart continued with somewhat lighter repertoire,²⁵ but notwithstanding this division of repertoire, the rival houses both went bankrupt in 1801. Under Napoleon’s auspices the two companies were conflated almost immediately and took up residence under the name Opéra-Comique at the Théâtre Feydeau.

Napoleon’s most important administrative change related to the theatre: after he became emperor, a law of 29 July 1807 set up a regulated system that in many of its essentials remained in effect until 1864. Paris theatres were classified into two large categories: grands théâtres and théâtres sécondaires. The first – the Académie Impériale de Musique (that is, the Opéra), the Théâtre-Français (also known as the Comédie-Française), the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique and the Théâtre de l’Impératrice (a house for Italian opera buffa²⁶) – were placed under the direct patronage of the emperor himself and received a state subsidy. The second group, without subsidy, comprised the Théâtre de Vaudeville, Théâtre des Variétés, Théâtre de la Gaîté and Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique. Other companies were required to relinquish the word théâtre or face closure. The law spelled out genre and repertoire, stipulating the exclusive jurisdiction of each house over its historical repertoire and protecting the Opéra’s monopoly over French works that were sung throughout. Like the Opéra-Comique, the Théâtre de Vaudeville was authorised to present plays that combined spoken dialogue and music, but only with music based on tunes, called timbres, already known to the public. Ticket prices were higher at the grands théâtres, and the clientele of more elevated social standing than at the théâtres sécondaires.²⁷ Within the group of grands théâtres, the level of government subvention underlined the prestige accorded to the Opéra: whereas just after the 1807 legislation it received 600,000 francs annually, the Comédie-Française netted 200,000, the Opéra-Comique 96,000 and the Théâtre de l’Impératrice (Odéon) 50,000.²⁸ Amounts fluctuated with time, though always preserving the Opéra’s substantial lead (the Opéra-Comique was to see periods of more generous support).

Yet differences in legislated status and a policy of protectionism did not mean that the theatres were aesthetically isolated from each other. For example, although the presence of newly composed musical numbers (including many elaborate ensembles that had already been de rigueur in the genre for many years) elevated opéra comique in stature over vaudeville, in other respects at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the two genres could be quite similar in tone, setting and dramatic organisation.²⁹ Indeed, Eugène Scribe (1791–1861), who would become the period’s most widely performed librettist for opéra comique (and grand opera), actually cut his professional teeth in vaudeville, and brought many of the techniques of the so-called ‘well-made play’ from théâtre sécondaire to grand théâtre.³⁰ Much the same might be said of the spoken genre mélodrame, the main exponent of which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was Guilbert Pixérécourt (1773–1844). The title alone of Emilio Sala’s important monograph on melodrama, L’opera senza canto (‘Opera without song’),³¹ speaks volumes about fertile ground for composers and librettists, who savoured its sharply defined distinctions between good and evil, trials faced by innocent and virtuous heroines, noble fathers, mysterious protectors, skilful manipulation of plot crises and contrasting scenes, wildly gesticulating actors and general cultivation of astonishment and extravagance. The impact of mélodrame on the explosion of Romantic spoken theatre and music in the late 1820s was substantial, but cross-fertilisation among low and high genres occurred before this.

The shadow of mélodrame falls across many of the period’s opéras comiques: Le solitaire (1822) by Michele Carafa (1787–1882), with the hero as an unknown outcast falsely accused of a crime; Léocadie (1824) by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782–1871), with the seduction of an innocent heroine by a dastardly nobleman; the very popular La dame blanche by Adrien Boieldieu (1775–1834), with a stranger, ghostly apparition and rapacious steward. Melodramatic themes in the latter harmonised with Walter Scott novels well known to the Opéra-Comique public. Portraying virtue oppressed and then triumphant, the melodramatic impulse seems at least subliminally to have echoed Revolutionary sentiment. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Opéra was slower to respond to the boulevard theatres. The operas La vestale (1807) and Fernand Cortez (1809) by Gaspare Spontini (1774–1851) did well, as did Le triomphe de Trajan by Louis-Luc Loiseau de Persuis (1769–1819), commissioned by Napoleon to celebrate the battle of Jena in 1807. The emperor used the institution as an extension of his own grandeur and, it has been argued, as a way to reconcile returned émigrés and ex-revolutionaries by force of opulence, a kind of brilliant aestheticisation of the new police state.³² But as the stock of mélodrame continued to rise in value during the Restoration, the Opéra offered Gluck revivals as well as solemn and stately – and commercially unsuccessful – new works on classical subjects by figures such as Antoine Reicha (1770–1836) and Rodolphe Kreutzer (1766–1831).³³

Pressures soon began to be applied to Napoleon’s 1807 systemisation of theatrical life. In the Restoration new ventures petitioned the government for authorisation to call themselves theatres. One of them was the Théâtre du Panorama-Dramatique, which flourished in the early 1820s with a repertoire officially authorised as ‘scenes with [spoken] dialogue for two people in order to provide a narrative context for silent characters that form groups [i.e. tableaux vivants] and for pantomime’.³⁴ In practice ‘pantomime’ was ballet-pantomime, the usual term for free-standing ballet in this period: the Panorama-Dramatique reminds us that, far from having an exclusive association with the Opéra, with which it is most famously linked, French ballet was performed at many smaller theatres throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – a practice little researched by specialists today. By the early 1820s the Théâtre de l’Impératrice had become the Odéon and its jurisdiction changed from Italian opera buffa to spoken theatre linked to the Comédie-Française. In 1823 the director of the Odéon, Claude Bernard, requested permission to add operas to this repertoire. Approval came in a typically protectionist vein: he could stage opéras comiques in the public domain (which meant those by composers and librettists who had been dead for more than ten years) and foreign works in translation. Despite the cost of maintaining troupes for both spoken theatre and opera, Bernard’s initiative flourished for a few years.³⁵ Through it French musicians and audiences became acquainted with some of the latest German operas, including in 1824 Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, translated, slightly modified and geographically transplanted to Yorkshire, England, at the end of the reign of Charles I as Robin des bois.³⁶ Also popular on the Odéon stage were pasticcios (operas stitched together with excerpts from several pre-existent works by, say, Rossini and Mozart), a little-studied phenomenon given short shrift by historians undoubtedly because criteria such as originality and close association between word, character and music in the creative act have dominated narratives of operatic history.

Grand opera

With refreshing artistic stimuli emerging from the Odéon to meld with the continued popularity of boulevard theatres, the Opéra eventually embraced change as well. The Parisian ambitions of the two leading composers for the Italian stage – Rossini and Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) – were instrumental in encouraging new styles. Auber’s La muette de Portici (1827, libretto by Scribe and Germain Delavigne), Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829, libretto by Étienne de Jouy and Hippolyte-Louis-Florent Bis) and Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1831, libretto by Scribe and Delavigne) brought new models of dramaturgy and musical style to France’s first stage – early examples of grand opera. Such works, always in four or five acts, showcased carefully drawn historical contexts, individuals confronted by political, epic and supernatural forces, sharp contrasts, choral writing, long ensembles, orchestral colour, evocative musical atmospheres and virtuoso singing – all with the continued cultivation of ballet and scenic splendour fostered by Napoleon and previous rulers. Administrative reform soon accompanied the aesthetic shift. Whereas during the Empire and Restoration the Opéra had been managed as an arm of the civil service, indeed directly from the emperor’s or king’s own court budget, the July Monarchy turned the Opéra into a business, first run by the entrepreneur Louis Véron, albeit with an outsize subsidy and loose supervision in the form of a cahier des charges (contract) that laid ground rules for repertoire and tone. An enlargement of the subscriber base became one of the first priorities. Whereas no fewer than 502 people had free passes to attend the Opéra before the regime change – a telling sign of its status as an appendage of the court – Véron whittled that number down to just over a hundred.³⁷ Some interpretations of these developments have given preponderant weight to political factors; in the words of one scholar: ‘The desire to popularize the Opéra grew from a concern with public perceptions of political legitimacy … It was hence incumbent on the state to prove that its symbol, the Opéra, was … not a fossilized institution alienated from modern France.’³⁸ With only slight modification the statement might just as well apply to the creation of the Opéra Bastille mentioned at the outset. Given its history, politics were and continue to be woven into the very fabric of the institution, but explanations that excessively reduce aesthetic phenomena to political origins risk missing factors such as taste, fashion and sensibility that are important markers of identity and of various social and class groupings. As Frédéric Soulié noted at the time: ‘M. Véron’s great talent is to have persuaded fashionable society that it was important to have an opinion about the Opéra, its singers, its ballerinas, its orchestra.’³⁹ ‘To have an opinion’ was a mode of social discourse, a mark of ‘distinction’ as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would have said. From this perspective, politics is only one factor among many in the formation and projection of identity – an observation that might be transposed to the actual composition of new works as well, where ‘identity’ in the previous formulation might be substituted by ‘aesthetic qualities’. Music in general, and grand opera in particular, did of course interact with the real-life experiences of consumers. In his ground-breaking study of French grand opera, Anselm Gerhard suggested how the urban environment fostered changing aesthetic predispositions.⁴⁰ Some of this is related to politics; grand opera, for example, contains many compelling scenes of mass revolt obliquely redolent of the Revolution on Parisian streets, but urban sensibilities go much further. Nor can the impact of style history and the creative response of composers to one another as music professionals – currently unfashionable methodologies in opera studies – be discounted in accounts of how grand opera was forged.

Grand operas were popular at the Opéra, indeed throughout Europe, during the July Monarchy and beyond. Meyerbeer delivered Les Huguenots (1837), Le prophète (1849) and L’africaine (1865); Fromental Halévy (1799–1862) scored a huge success with La juive; and Verdi followed suit with Les vêpres siciliennes (1855) and Don Carlos (1867). The number of foreign composers eager to work in Paris reflects the international status of houses such as the Opéra; it was the kind of appeal that harmonised with the wide European following of French theatrical life generally. Ballets continued to form an important part of the repertoire. As incorporated into grand operas they were called divertissements, a term loaded with both aesthetic and social implications. The generic designation clearly signalled a different set of pleasures from the main body of the opera, suggesting relief from plot and ideas that effectively mirrored the escapist role that ballroom dancing assumed in real life. Many of the ensemble numbers in operatic ballet at mid-century were similar to the dance types composed for balls, and not much more difficult choreographically than them.⁴¹ For important male subscribers, the hiatus from quotidian pressures took the form of voyeurism, hobnobbing with dancers backstage and taking them as mistresses. The type lives on in Irène Némirovsky’s novel Suite française, which is set in Paris on the verge of invasion in June 1940. She writes of the banker Monsieur Corbin: ‘All his mistresses were dancers. He seemed not to be interested in women of any other profession. Not one secretary, no matter how pretty or young, had ever managed to lure him away from this particular penchant.’⁴² Independent ballets-pantomimes – of which the most successful at mid century was Adolphe Adam’s Giselle (1841) – adopted many of the conventions of opera, including instrumental recitative to accompany gestured dialogue that echoed (in different ways) the music associated with mute characters such as Fenella in La muette de Portici, the gestural language of melodrama, the ballet d’action of the eighteenth century and instrumental compositions such as the scène d’amour in Berlioz’s hybrid dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette.⁴³ Cross-fertilisation between opera and dance occurred in another way as well, as a fair number of lighter works in the repertoire of the Opéra-Comique – for example, Auber’sLéocadie mentioned before – were converted into ballets.

Other theatres at mid-century

The Paris population expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century, doubling in size from 1807 (580,609) to 1856 (1,174,346).⁴⁴ Both the Théâtre-Italien and Opéra-Comique accommodated the burgeoning demand. The former cultivated a reputation of an expensive, high-status theatre especially appropriate to true music lovers – Soulié observed that whereas the Opéra was about ‘fashion and taste’, the Théâtre-Italien was a ‘need’ and a ‘passion’⁴⁵ – and the latter attracted large audiences, in part by virtue of the fact that it put on performances almost every night of the year. Steering a course between, on the one hand, low, bawdy and satirical humour and, on the other, the self-conscious importance of grand opera, opéra comique composers such as Auber, Ferdinand Hérold (1791–1833), Ambroise Thomas (1811–96) and Adolphe Adam (1803–56) produced a durable and variegated repertoire with an accent on sentimental comedy. The Opéra-Comique was often the first stop on the career path of young composers, a practice codified in a ministerial injunction of 1832 that required its director to give special consideration to recent Prix de Rome laureates.⁴⁶ But growing demand caused a continuous stream of requests for authorisation of new theatrical ventures. One such was the Théâtre de la Renaissance in 1838–41, which, like the Odéon, provided a venue for German and Italian opera in translation and, like the Opéra-Comique, promised to look after young composers,⁴⁷ as did the Opéra-National in 1847–8. The immediate successor of the latter, and with the same mandate, was from 1851 to 1870 the much more important Théâtre Lyrique, whose directors were also allowed to commission new works in French.⁴⁸

Both the Opéra-National and the Théâtre-Lyrique responded to another leitmotif of French operatic life after the Revolution that extended to the Opéra Bastille: repeated calls to make opera accessible to a broader public. This was accomplished through the creation of two large amphitheatres with cheaper seats behind the second and third tiers of boxes.⁴⁹ One should not imagine, however, that many from the working class were disposed to attend: opera is a matter of social practice as much as affordability. High culture and mass culture have mixed in various ways over time. In the late twentieth century the Opéra company performed Carmen in sports stadiums, and its world premiere production of Berg’s completed Lulu (one of Liebermann’s real coups) drew around 340,000 television viewers in the summer (!) of 1979.⁵⁰ In the nineteenth century it was arrangements of operatic hits in park bandstands and the inclusion of collectors’ cards with pictures of operatic tableaux or portraits of composers in boxes of biscuits – difficult though it is to imagine the same practice today.

The Théâtre-Lyrique evolved in the Second Empire to compete with the Opéra and Opéra-Comique in prestige. A good deal of this was due to the effective management of Léon Carvalho (né Carvaille), an important figure about whom we still know little. (As with Véron before and later with the Opéra-Comique director Albert Carré, the Opéra director Jacques Rouché and Gabriel Astruc, key Parisian impresarios deserve more attention from historians than they have so far received.) Carvalho astutely picked up works that the Opéra administration had dithered over. To this we owe the premiere of Faust (1859) by Charles-François Gounod (1818–93) – the most frequently performed French opera at the end of the century – and Berlioz’s Les Troyens (1863), or at least the second part of this mammoth work, which had to wait until the twentieth century to be done justice. In the mean time, Faust, which began life with spoken dialogue at the Théâtre-Lyrique, got transferred in 1869 to the Opéra, where the recitative passages composed initially for foreign performances were naturally included. Carmen (1875) by Georges Bizet (1838–75) would later undergo the same transformation, but would continue life on the stage of the Opéra-Comique, which began increasingly to admit works with continuous music towards the end of the century. Carvalho also promoted the young Bizet by producing Les pêcheurs de perles (1863). With the lifting of Napoleon’s protectionist approach to theatre life in 1864 in favour of a more flexible (though not completely unregulated) system – in line with the general liberalism of Louis-Napoleon’s regime at this time – Carvalho also aggressively expanded his repertoire to include more foreign works in French translation. The effects of deregulation were soon felt: in 1866 Parisians could attend no fewer than three different productions of Don Giovanni – at the Opéra, Théâtre-Italien and Théâtre-Lyrique – and the press seemed to agree that the last was the strongest.⁵¹

The period of the Second Empire also witnessed the efflorescence of opérette. Jacques Offenbach (1819–80) gave it a home at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens, created with very strict conditions at the end of 1855: maximum of four characters, limit of five dancers, no chorus, restriction (at first) to one-act works.⁵²Opérette, opéra bouffe, lighter examples of opéras comiques and vaudeville all rub shoulders in the French repertoire. Honour for creating the first exemplar of the genre should go to the composer Hervé (real name Florimond Ronger, 1825–92). Approached by a short and stout friend in 1847 to put on a show at a small theatre in Montmartre, Hervé, very tall and thin himself, proposed they could play up their physical differences for a laugh with a parody of Cervantes: thus was born the Don Quichotte et Sancho Panza, a tableau grotesque for which Hervé illegally wrote new music instead of arranging pre-existing tunes as usual for vaudeville.⁵³ The Opéra-National legitimised his effort by taking up the piece the next year. Dozens of other comic works would flow from Hervé’s pen, including a famous parody of Gounod’s opera called Le petit Faust. But it was Offenbach’s opéras bouffes – such as Orphée aux enfers (1858), La vie parisienne (1866) and La grande duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) – that garnered greater international attention, in part for their trenchant unmasking of the putative phoniness of Napoleon III’s Second Empire regime.⁵⁴

New directions and Wagner

Following the lead of musicians involved in the creation of the Société Nationale in 1871, who sought to distance themselves from the discredited Second Empire, French musical historiography has tended to see 1870 as a sharp line of division, but for all Offenbach’s relevance to the Second Empire, no fewer than twenty-two of his works were performed during the 1870s, some with great success.⁵⁵ At the Opéra, grand opera proved obstinately tenacious – another element of continuity – and the Théâtre-Lyrique went bankrupt. Even so, a break with the past did occur to the extent that success in the opera house increasingly became less crucial to the establishment of a career as a composer: operas do not form a significant part of the oeuvre of César Franck (1822–90), Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) wrote only two (Prométhée, 1900; Pénélope, 1913), and the two short pieces by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), L’heure espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilèges, were not decisive to the advance of his career. It fell to the Opéra-Comique to produce the most challenging new French operas. Spanish local colour, fatalistic gypsies, soldiers and exotics, the death of a main character – all had been seen on the stage of the Opéra-Comique before,⁵⁶ but Bizet’s Carmen nonetheless struck a new tone in the stark confrontation of a strong woman with male hysteria. The dramatic parameters at the house had become very wide indeed, as light chestnuts like Auber’s Fra Diavolo (1830) also continued to find favour. Bizet’s early death that year left the arena free for the ascendance of Jules Massenet (1842–1912) as the major composer for the Opéra-Comique stage at the fin de siècle, much of the time under the directorship of Carvalho, with works such as Manon (1884) and Werther (1892). A virtuosic command of pastiche, unique melodic style and elegant balance of progressive and conservative syntax assured Massenet’s success, much envied by that other major composer of the fin de siècle, Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921), whose operatic star did not rise nearly so high. One can well imagine the frustrations of one whose first opera Samson et Dalila (1877) did well, after a rocky start, but who suffered through the lukewarm reception accorded twelve others. While composers of opérette such as André Messager (1853–1929), Charles Lecocq (1832–1918) and Claude Terrasse (1832–1923) continued to ply their trade in a repertoire little known today, especially outside France, others such as Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–94), Vincent d’Indy (1851–1931) and Ernest Chausson (1855–99) debated and tested the relevance of Wagnerian opera to the French stage. Because of the requirements and conventions of choreography, ballet remained more isolated from Wagnerian influence. The great master at the beginning of the Third Republic was Léo Delibes (1836–91), whose ballets Coppélia (1870) and Sylvia (1876) were admired by Tchaikovsky and have indeed joined the international repertoire to assume a place equal to that of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. But ballet was also inevitably to face the challenges of new and extended tonal languages, as in Namouna (1882) by Édouard Lalo (1823–92), but also those emerging from Russia as an alternative to Wagner. With the stimulus of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, ballet music by French composers (for example Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé and Debussy’s Jeux) joined the ranks of truly progressive art after the turn of the century, a new focal point for high society and snob appeal. The ballet Le sacre du printemps by the ex-patriot Russian Stravinsky, premiered as a stage work in Paris in 1913 to an uproar in the hall and then very successfully resurrected as a concert piece in 1914, marks the apex of French engagement with musical modernism.

Because of the German nationalist bravado surrounding Wagner’s career, performances of his operas in Paris became the hottest issue, tinged as they were with politics in French operatic life at the fin de siècle. Strong political overtones had resonated as early as the Tannhäuser debacle of 1861 when Wagner’s opera, adapted by the composer for the Opéra stage, was cancelled after merely three performances. The imperial household had supported the production and agitation against it was one way to express disapproval of the regime.⁵⁷ A production of Lohengrin at a secondary theatre in 1887 had to be cancelled because of riots, this time spurred by a diplomatic incident between France and Germany, and it was only in the 1890s that Wagner’s operas settled in to the repertoire of the Opéra, now finally displacing the older roster of grand operas. The young Debussy was inevitably caught up in such debates as well, wavering between admiration of Wagner and a desire to take French opera in new directions. The result was Pelléas et Mélisande, premiered at Albert Carré’s Opéra-Comique in 1902, a work that does not eschew leitmotivic recurrence altogether but distributes such motifs sparsely in the context of declamation that aims for understated nuance. Debussy’s masterpiece is another sign of the house’s breadth of repertoire because of its lyric exploration of a bleak existential dilemma with new musical syntax.

National thumbprints

The character of French opera and ballet has been shaped not only by institutional imperatives but also by the interaction of local practice with foreign repertoires, largely Italian and German. Spontini retained Gluck’s solemn dignity, especially felt in ritualistic choruses and the style of accompanied recitative, and combined this with arias displaying a more Italianate sensibility that fluently incorporated conjunct melismas into melodic lines that he shaped with carefully calibrated peaks. In this he satisfied Napoleon’s own taste for Italianate singing, an aesthetic taken even further during the Restoration when Rossini was hired to manage the Théâtre-Italien during its period of joint administration with the Opéra. The acquisition of florid technique by French singers such as Laure Cinti-Damoreau in the 1820s changed the physiognomy of works not only at the Opéra but also at the Opéra-Comique, where the première chanteuse à roulades became a popular voice-type.⁵⁸ Musical-dramatic organisation also became transformed. Spontini’s choral scenes were long and impressive, but his arias and ensembles tended to be smaller. Under the influence of Rossini and Meyerbeer, large Italianate multipartite forms would become the norm in grand opera. These facilitated the inclusion of secondary characters and choruses to urge the drama forward, the exploration of changing affects and textures within a single large set piece and long tonic-prolongational coda passages that allowed florid singing.⁵⁹

In the 1820s composers paid increasing attention to ‘characteristic’ music particular to geographical, historical and social settings as they moved away from the standard classical fare of the past. Orchestral colour became an important resource. Weber’s example in Der Freischütz, and the influence of German music in general on expanded orchestral writing, has sometimes been cited as decisive. But it is also important to remember that Paris had built an effective training system for orchestral musicians at the Conservatoire which supplied orchestras in the capital, and the city was also an important centre for the manufacture of musical instruments. Auber worked a tarantella into the marketplace of Naples for La muette de Portici, but the instrumental hues in this opera seem modest when compared with Meyerbeer’s infernal colours on the brass instruments in Robert le diable. The evocation of a voice from the past through the use of two trumpets ‘coming from a distance’ as Robert reads a letter from his mother – a technique right out of melodrama – earned praise from Berlioz, who more generally held up Meyerbeer’s orchestration as a stick with which to beat decadent Italian art.⁶⁰Rossini also adapted his style in his splendid evocations of the alpine setting in Guillaume Tell. Passages of slow harmonic rhythm and a concluding paean to liberty give some of the music an elevated symphonic character. An analogy to Beethoven is not inappropriate, for just at this moment his symphonies – and the quasi-spiritual claims they made – gained a large following in Paris.

Meyerbeer’s operas were understood as eclectic works at a time when eclecticism was not a pejorative aesthetic quality – a leitmotif in French music history since the Revolution that perhaps deserves more attention from historians. The concept goes beyond German and Italian influence to link up with the pastiche of a Massenet or a Saint-Saëns, the wide-ranging musical references in Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, the stylistic variety in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites and the postmodern tendencies of recent operas by Antoine Duhamel – whose Gambara (1978) after Honoré de Balzac centres on a composer of Meyerbeer’s period. Darius Mil haud’s Christophe Colomb (1930, revised 1968, Paul Claudel) dwarfs even the operas of Meyerbeer in epic scope with twenty-seven scenes and a demanding choral part, range of styles and technological requirements (including films projected on backstage screens). But what is perhaps more difficult to discern in Meyerbeer than in these later composers (except perhaps for Saint-Saëns) is a strongly marked personal sound. For many contemporaries he wrote ‘learned’ music – a Germanic trait – a tradition of criticism echoed in the late twentieth century by Sieghardt Döhring and Sabine Henze-Döhring, who see Meyerbeer’s operas as ‘operas of ideas’, though these authors wisely avoid the older Teutonic stereotypes.⁶¹ Indeed, it was only after the nineteenth century that French critics themselves finally discarded the reductionist association of ‘idea opera’ with German music. Marcel Landowski’s important Le fou (1957), for example, deals with the paradox of spiritual yearning and innocence juxtaposed with sophisticated science that allows apocalyptic destruction. No critic of his day would have thought to attribute this philosophical bent to Germanic taste. Le fou can also claim to share in a tradition of French taste for experimentation with colour: it is the first opera ever written to incorporate taped sounds.

Charles Rosen has suggested a different perspective on grand opera by accentuating its populist and frankly sensationalist aspects, broadly defined as ‘cheap melodrama dressed up as aristocratic tragedy’.⁶²Rosen perhaps draws high/low aesthetic criteria and social markers too sharply without recognising enough intermediate shades that are more flattering to the Gallic muse. Olivier Bara, for example, has written an entire monograph on Restoration opéra comique as a genre moyen without a pejorative hint. For his part, Hervé Lacombe has understood Auber’s opéras comiques as exhibiting a particularly French ‘esthétique de la conversation’: ‘nothing out of measure, no overblown emphasis nor pedantry, but finesse, nuance, restraint’.⁶³ The aesthetic world of brilliant and witty conversation may not explore the sublime, but affords its own pleasures that one would be hard pressed to squeeze into a high/low binary. Heinrich Heine wrote of the distrust of heroism exhibited by the nineteenth-century French bourgeois,⁶⁴ an observation that might be extended to a privileging of the real over the ideal. A strong national school of realism and then naturalism in literature had reverberations on the operatic stage in a genre moyen with its ingénues, thundering fathers and servants. In Carmen an older opéra comique character type not only lives on in Micaëla but coexists with a much fuller extension of the realist line away from the sublime in Carmen and Don José. Small wonder that French opera composers became especially adept at local colour (an extension of the ‘characteristic’ mode) and the exotic – as in Carmen and Léo Delibes’s Lakmé (1883), where the dream-world bubble of the Indian setting is punctured by the chattering European characters. As in other national operatic traditions, the exotic – but often merely ornamental – couleur locale of the nineteenth century became the more thoroughgoing syntactical challenge of world music in the twentieth century. The opéra-balletPadmâvâti (1923) incorporates the substantial ethnographic knowledge of both its composer Albert Roussel (1869–1937) and its librettist Louis Laloy (1874–1944) on the level of plot, rhythm, harmony, melody and orchestration. Later, as an alternative to structuralism, Ohana’s range was particularly cosmopolitan and – the word, once again, does not seem inappropriate – eclectic.⁶⁵ Japanese Noh play meets Euripides in Syllabaire pour Phèdre (1968); Chinese opera informs the music theatre piece Trois contes de l’honorable fleur (1978); multiple languages combine with microtones and influences of medieval music in his largest work for the stage, La Célestine.⁶⁶

Critics consistently identified opéra comique with a ‘national spirit’ throughout the nation-conscious nineteenth century. Albert Soubies and Charles Malherbe concluded their mammoth study of the institution that was home to the genre by writing of ‘a group of qualities that belong to the real essence of our race – charm and finesse, wit and clarity’; all very different, they go on to note, from Italian opera buffa and Viennese operetta.⁶⁷Opéra comique as a genre remained much more resistant to Italian formal types than grand opera. Overt Italianisms were frequently scorned. At the turn of the century, the naturalist composer Alfred Bruneau (1857–1934) was vociferous in distinguishing his brand of realism from the veristi. Offenbach also thought that opéra comique at its best was ‘éminemment française’ – more refined than Italian counterparts. His complaint in 1856 was that its pretensions had become too lofty; in setting out the parameters for opérette he appealed to tried and true eighteenth-century models.⁶⁸ Yet perhaps a latent and perennial cause for anxiety was that the French public had always flocked to the Italian repertoire. French management would, after all, aggressively court Verdi and Puccini. A recent opera by Philippe Hersant (b. 1948), Le château des Carpathes (1993; after Jules Verne), seems a poignant testimony to this historical attraction: an Italian lament sung by a famous opera star gets transformed into a voice-object produced by an elaborate music box that lures the protagonist to his destruction (somewhat redolent of the maternal voice at the end of Robert le diable via Les contes d’Hoffmann).

Around Offenbach’s time Gounod sought to achieve a greater sense of interiority in works such as Faust and Roméo et Juliette (1867). Again this should not be confused with a quest for the sublime: a relatively quotidian devil and philosopher inhabit Goethe’s premise. The new-found interiority produced a responsive chromatic harmonic language, delicate part-writing in the orchestra and, even more, attention to nuance of prosody and melodic expression. The nationalist claim could, then, be applied here as well, especially at a time of increasing internationalisation of opera. Gounod pointed the way ahead to later French composers with regard to the melodic suppleness that could be carved out of the French language itself. The preoccupation remains germane today, though in the past, suppleness sometimes became equated with effeminacy, particularly with a later figure such as Massenet, where a languid style and supposedly low intellectual level cast French music as a kind of ‘Other’ to Teutonic repertoires. The influence of Wagner would exacerbate such tendencies. After an initial generation of critics hostile to Wagner’s brand of the sublime, myriad debates at the fin de siècle centred on how best to conflate his achievement with the French spirit.⁶⁹ For a figure like d’Indy it was through the cultivation of Catholic transcendence, still manifest, though in a much less self-conscious and confrontational way, in Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise. For Debussy it was through a Symbolist alchemy of rationalism and suggestion. Boulez views the vocabulary of Pelléas as deeply indebted to Parsifal,⁷⁰ but the restraint and understatement of the score lend themselves to French nationalist rhetoric. Wherever one wishes to put the emphasis, it is difficult to deny that admiration for Debussy’s work has been nearly unanimous from later French composers, its influence so rich and wide-ranging that one might speak of this single work as a unifying feature for the later French opera repertoire.