Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France 9780226522890

Citation preview

opera and the political imaginary in old regime france

opera and the political imaginary in old regime france

olivia bloechl

the university of chicago press chicago and london

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17   1  2  3  4  5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­52275-­3 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­52289-­0 (e-­book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226522890.001.0001 This book has been supported by the James R. Anthony Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Bloechl, Olivia Ashley, author. Title: Opera and the political imaginary in old regime France / Olivia Bloechl. Description: Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017021805 | isbn 9780226522753 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226522890 (e-­book) Subjects: LCSH: Opera—­France—­18th century. | Opera—­France—­17th century. | Opera—­France—­Political aspects—­History—­18th century. | Opera—­France—­ Political aspects—­History—­17th century. Classification: lcc ml1727.3 .b56 2017 | ddc 782.10944—­dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017021805 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

contents

Editorial Principles Preface

vii ix

Introduction. Sovereignty and Government in the Tragédie en musique

1

The Politics of Glory: Angelic Citizenship and the Contemplative Chorus

22

2.

Choral Lament and the Mourning Public

53

3.

True Confessions: Opera’s Theater of Guilt and Remorse

85

4.

The Tormenting Orchestra

123

5.

Spectral Kingdoms: Poetics and Politics of Les Enfers

156

6.

Pluto, the Underworld King

174



Conclusion. A Theater of Precarity

200

Appendix. Operas and Ballets Cited Acknowledgments Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

205 211 213 215 255 279

1.

v

editorial principles

F

oreign-­language prose quotations are given in English translation through­ out, with the original text provided in an endnote when the source is not readily available. Poetry quotations are in the original language with prose translations beneath. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. When citing early modern French I have modernized the spelling and capitalization and expanded the ampersand. The most important sources for the operas discussed here are livrets printed for particular productions, full or reduced scores and parts issued by royal printers, manuscript scores and parts, and set and costume designs. Early livrets are generally the preferred source for cited lyrics, except when there are meaningful discrepancies with the underlaid text of the score. Modern score editions are not available for most of the operas discussed, although I have preferred them when they are. Where they are not, musical examples are based on authoritative early sources, with source details given in the caption to the example. I have aimed to provide reliable musical examples that transmit enough original detail for specialist reference while streamlining aspects of the score that would interfere with ease of realization. Choral parts are therefore mainly given in reduced format, and the often vague or contradictory orchestration in early scores has been established as precisely as possible, sometimes through recourse to alternate sources. The notation and bass figuration have also been partly modernized, although original meter signatures are preserved for tempo indications. Finally, I have silently corrected obvious pitch and rhythmic errors.

vii

p r e fa c e

W

e cannot seem to be rid of kings. Not when we contemplate opera in France under the Bourbons, and certainly not when we consider the political culture of the ancien régime, which ended infamously in the regicide of 1793. No genre of European opera is more closely associated with mo­ narchical sovereignty than the tragédie en musique, which originated as a courtly and public form of musical theater patronized by Louis XIV and pro­ duced by his music academy (the Académie Royale de Musique). Real-­life monarchs, legendary rulers and gods, and images of kingship recur in histories and revivals of this repertory because they were integral to it, but also because sovereignty continues to spark our political imagination, even those of us who live in liberal democracies that have formally dispensed with kings. Opera artists, patrons, and audiences in ancien régime France had their own imaginaries of the political, and these were nourished in part by the trag­ édies en musique produced at royal chateaus and at the civic opera house in Paris, the Palais Royal. In this book I set out to describe this genre’s imaginary by looking closely at a set of political themes that recur across its long history, from its beginnings in the 1670s through the eve of the Revolution. With such a broad chronological reach, this study does not attempt to give a comprehensive account of the repertory or its institutional history. In fact, it deliberately emphasizes the height of the tragédie en musique and related serious genres, from the inaugural productions overseen by Jean-­Baptiste Lully through the death of fellow composer Jean-­Philippe Rameau in 1764. This emphasis recognizes the iconic, foundational stature that the genre’s Lullian form enjoyed for much of the eighteenth century. After all, even when librettists, composers, and arrangers took the tragédie in new directions dur­ ing the reign of Louis XVI, they preserved the core features of a model that ix

x

preface

had been established under Louis XIV over a century before. Viewing the late tragédie from the vantage point of its earlier history also affords a fresh perspective on its continuities and especially its conservatism in an era whose artistry is more often celebrated for its consonance with liberal Enlightenment. Thus, while my discussion of serious French opera in the 1770s and ’80s is essential to the book’s historiography, a full study of these later works and their politics remains for another time. Instead, the chapters range widely ac­ross the tragicomic repertory before 1789 in pursuit of a kind of political phenomenology of the ancien régime, via its elite opera culture. At basis, the “phenomenon” that I identify and describe is an experience of sacral authority and power that, I find, structured the stories that opera told, pervasively and for a surprisingly long time. The book argues, in sum, that the artists who created tragédies en mu­ sique imagined the political through theological fantasies of sovereignty and its tactical counterpart, government. In the introductory chapter, I set out a framework for analyzing the repertory’s political thematics in these terms, which expand our sense of the genre’s politicality but also, I hope, bring greater clarity to how it worked. The chapters that follow focus on a number of recurring plot situations involving sovereign and governmental power, including scenes of glorification, mourning, confession, and punishment, as well as the descent to the underworld and the heroic confronta­ tion with death. Such plot situations, which are mostly derived from Greco-­ Roman epic and tragedy, invited librettists, composers, and visual artists to imaginatively engage many aspects of ancien régime political life. While the chapters do not exhaustively survey examples of each type of scene, they do examine a wide range of operas, spanning the period in question (see the appendix). The first two chapters are concerned with opera’s representation of publicness and modes of popular participation in public life, and they focus on contemplative choruses of glorification and mourning, respectively. Each chapter highlights a type of stage encounter between choral groups and figures representing glorious majesty. In the third and fourth chapters, I turn to scenes involving characters’ confessions of guilt and their punishment or pardon, and thus to themes of justice and freedom. The fifth and sixth chap­ ters form another topical unit, as both consider opera’s quasi-­pagan underworld as a setting for political theological fantasies of the sovereign power over life. Chapter 5 looks at the theatrical setting of les enfers (Hades) itself and places it within tragédie’s imaginative cosmography, in an adaptation of Edward Said’s classic concept (“imaginative geography”). The final chapter

preface

xi

focuses on a nonideal aspect of absolutist kingship—­emergency rule—­that librettists associated with the underworld god Pluto. It finds that tragédie artists envisioned hell as an eternal exercise of penal government, countered only by liminal figures like Orpheus who wield sovereign-­like powers of love, art, and beauty, as well as brute force. In the book’s conclusion, I reflect onstage encounters like these as fantasies that essay the alternate world-­making potential of mundane, human forms of power alongside transcendent ones. My analyses in these chapters emphasize thematics of government and in doing so draw especially on Michel Foucault’s political theorizing and its development in more recent work by Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and others. Foucauldian thought has been an influence on critical musicology since the 1980s, so much so that engaging with it in a study of European opera is nothing new. It is unusual, however, for scholars of early Eu­ropean music to work with Foucault’s later thought on governmentality, veridiction, and freedom, as I do here. A historically apropos concept of gov­ernmental­ ity in particular runs through this study as a major concern of the tragédie, both as a stage topic and as a rationale for the genre’s production. My analysis thus unearths a layer of political theater in serious French op­era—­pertain­ ing to government and its imaginary—­that has not usually been treated as such, mainly because it has been overshadowed by problematics of kingship and sovereignty. Characteristically for early modern courtly theater, the tragédie’s political storytelling was not realist, but had an aesthetic, analogical relation to political reality. It was shaped by an Aristotelian poetics and an aristocratic ethos of politesse, and thus it mostly presents the political as it should be, rather than as it is (or was). The genre’s aestheticizing impulse should warn us against assuming a too-­direct mimetic relationship between its fictions and historical politics. We can recover an understanding of past political experience from these operas, but with the caveat that this experience was filtered through their idealist and decorum-­governed conventions. Conventions are social arrangements, and the mediated, social experience of the political that I pursue cannot be attributed finally to a particular composer, poet, singer, censor, or patron. Individual people were, of course, responsible for opera productions, and empirical studies of these individuals and their institutions are very valuable. Yet they only give us access to certain kinds of truth about creative action, mainly those that are rationally verifiable. Past societies’ political experience and imaginaries are of a differ­ ent order: we can describe them, as they are attested in the archive, but we

xii

preface

cannot verify them. This is particularly so when they deal in the sacred or the nonrational. In the tragédie’s make-­believe worlds, characters experience the political most saliently in revelation and sacrifice. Such a vision of politics “speaks the language of the sacred,” as Paul Kahn puts it, and is not easily reconciled with the liberal political reason that French thinkers and artists helped to develop in the later eighteenth century.1 Enlightenment reformers of opera recognized this incompatibility when they critiqued the tragédie’s reliance on the marvelous, or the merveilleux. It is tempting to join them in dismissing the genre’s political merveilleux as ideological fantasy, as indeed it was in part. But the eighteenth century did not only belong to the philos­ophes, and their critique of ideology, which we have inherited, has only a partial ability to explain the power and evident appeal of the tragédie’s storytelling, not to mention its longevity in the Opéra’s programming. I tell another story, one that notes the Opéra’s longstanding hospitality to political theologies and to a contemplative modality of song and music that I theorize as “inoperativity.” Many scholars have discerned a polit­ical theology of kingship in French courtly theater under the Bourbons, but I note too how ambiguous are the tragédie’s thematics of charismatic kingship, encompassing what Georges Bataille would have labeled “left-­” and “rightsacred” forms.2 I also find that the repertory’s creators dispersed sovereign-­ like charisma and powers well beyond onstage rulers or gods, to lovers, magicians, and artists. And they persistently theologized government and its rationalities, so that by the later eighteenth century, stage figures could ex­ perience political economy itself as something sacral, not unlike opera’s gods and kings. The late tragédie did not prepare the way for revolution, but its theol­ ogies of law, morality, gender, and the family did accommodate the rev­olu­ tionary state and its society. My work in this book, then, is to theorize this repertory as the product of an adaptive political theology that lived and breathed via convention and its limits. This aesthetic imaginary of the political belongs unambiguously to the past. Indeed, the primary sources that I have consulted fall squarely within the opera historical archive, especially original print and manuscript scores, early livrets, costume designs, décors, and historical journalism. But my investigation of them and the imaginary they attest responds as well to the present. This is partly the familiar situation of opera historians who write about past productions with recent revivals in their ears. By respon­ siv­ity, though, I mainly mean something else: a mode of critical historical research on opera that is guided, but not overly limited by historicism. I have written extensively elsewhere about the limits of historicism in its stronger

preface

xiii

iterations. Here I will just repeat that I am aware of the risks involved in transhistorical critique but that, in this case, I find its benefits justify taking those risks. This is not, then, a presentist effort to erase historical difference or to claim ancien régime opera for late modernity. Rather, it pursues a recognition that if we care about past societies’ art forms, this is often because they call to us in some way: because we sense some affinity between their way of worlding the world and our own. We may have something to learn from artists working creatively in an authoritarian, Christian imperialist regime and its arts institutions—­in particular, the nonliberal forms of freedom and the human potential, beyond utility, that their operas sometimes envisioned. This book is partly an effort to work critically with that tenuous affinity with our own times, whose exigencies liberalism seems less and less able to address. If, in the process, it brings the tragédie en musique and its history into closer conversation with critical musicology and the wider humanities, so much the better.

introduction

Sovereignty and Government in the Tragédie en musique

S

pectacular, grandiose, and punctiliously deferent to the crown, the tragédie en musique was, without doubt, a kingly form of opera.1 Indeed, it is often taken to be the consummate artistic expression of Bourbon absolut­ ism and the values of an aristocracy that Louis XIV succeeded in bringing to heel, partly by bringing them to court and occupying them with lavish en­ tertainments like the tragédie. And lavish it was.2 Performances began with an extended prologue and proceeded through five fully sung, orchestrally accompanied acts, each with its own embedded choral and dance fête (the divertissement). Singers, choruses, and dancers were exquisitely costumed, and they worked their magic on sets and machines that had been crafted by the finest designers in Europe. As a lengthy and inordinately expensive kind of musical theater, tragédie en musique performances—­and the Opéra3 more generally—­embodied an ethos of uncalculated excess that served as a con­ stant reminder of their origins and their royal patronage.4 This ethos extended to the select audiences that attended court performances and frequented the boxes lining the Palais Royal theater. Of them, the Opéra and its premiere pro­ ductions demanded, above all, time, leisure, and enjoyment, those most sov­ ereign of human capacities.5 A considerable literature has grown up around a view of the tragédie en musique as a courtly entertainment whose basic purpose was to mytholo­ gize absolutist kingship in order to shore up the reigns of Louis XIV and his descendants. At this point, most opera historians take for granted the genre’s institutional and symbolic subservience to the French monarchy, whether as outright propaganda or as a subtler, subjective form of domination through the arts. Below I take a closer look at these approaches to the form’s politics, but, for now, it is simply worth noting the long shadow cast by the king and

1

2

introduction

absolute sovereignty, even where scholars have sought to loosen the bonds between the tragédie and its monarchical past.6 This monarchical past loomed large in Michel Foucault’s political thought as well, nowhere more so than in his mandate that, when it comes to think­ ing the political, “We need to cut off the King’s head.”7 Foucault’s character­ istically theatrical pronouncement invoked the revolutionary fervor behind the French regicide of 1793, but, speaking in the mid-­1970s, he claimed this regicidal passion for a critical philosophy that would challenge the dominance of statist theories of power, especially Marxian ones.8 He saw power as work­ ing most pervasively through what he eventually came to call governmental­ ity, rather than through the “juridical-­sovereign” model of domination and right that, he claimed, pervaded both Marxian and liberal thought. Indeed, his sustained critique of state-­centered conceptions of the political was so influ­ ential that it is justified to speak of theories of power as being “before” or “after” Foucault.9 Seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century France recurred in Foucault’s analy­ ses as a milieu in which a Renaissance “art of government” concerned with the preservation of the prince and his realm proliferated into a broad field of rational techniques for managing the conduct of individuals and populations. In one of his most cogent statements on this topic, the 1977–­78 lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault argued that Louis XIV’s regime was pivotal to the emergence of a distinct domain of calculative political action within a framework of monarchic sovereignty. Here I pursue this insight into the po­ litical organization of the regime that gave rise to French opera, as offering a compelling framework for analyzing the repertory’s political fictions. Specifically, I propose that the tragédie en musique’s artists installed a subjective experience of sovereign government at the heart of its storytell­ ing, which characteristically imagines power both theologically, as being, and economically, as efficacy. Certain recurring dramatic situations thema­ tize one over the other form of power, but a historically interesting feature of this repertory is its tendency to conflate glorious authority and effective power in a single, miraculous source (typically a prince or god). This confla­ tion is entirely in keeping with political thought under Louis XIV and XV; even those who sought political reform normally attributed responsibility for good government to the sovereign, as transcendent power made immanent. It is not surprising, then, to find that France’s most prestigious form of opera would dramatize this central mystery of absolutism. What is striking is how often the tragédie’s creators returned to this problem and how extensively they explored the economic-­governmental axis of power, which has not been recognized in this repertory.

sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique

3

In this introductory chapter I give an overview of the treatment of themes of sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique and other seri­ ous Francophone opera through the end of the eighteenth century. After a histo­riographic account of the literature on the politics of French opera in the an­cien régime, I explore some of the more prevalent themes pertaining to sov­ ereignty and government in the repertory, taking as a case study an iconic early opera, Thomas Corneille and Jean-­Baptiste Lully’s Bellérophon (1679), which nicely illustrates the bilateral framework that I want to flesh out. The discussion then turns to later trajectories of these thematics, particularly the emergence of properly political economic themes in the 1770s and ’80s. Despite my emphasis on government, sovereignty and the transcendent plane of power more generally are not neglected here either, because they are fundamental to the genre’s political content, as well as its past production and reception. Foucault will not take us very far in thinking this aspect of the political. His conception of sovereignty as repressive power is patently idiosyncratic.10 He also was dismissive of nonsecular political dimensions—­ especially the coarticulation of Catholic theology and politics in this pe­ riod—­as well as nonrational ones, such as affect and psychic experience more broadly—­all prominent components of the tragédie en musique’s political theater. In order to elucidate these features, I have turned to post-­Foucauldian and other writings on sovereignty and political theology, as well as on political emotion and the “psychic life of power.”11 So I will neither cut off the king’s head, as Foucault urged, nor try to restore sovereignty as the exclusive political concern of the tragédie en musique and related spectacle and ballet forms. The former would fail to re­ spond to the complex, evolving treatment of sovereignty in the repertory’s storytelling, while the latter would neglect what I find is a deep entangle­ ment with government and its fictions. Instead, I develop an ecumenical conception of the tragédie’s political imaginary as encompassing both sov­ ereign and governmental forms of power.

Opera’s Imaginary of Sovereignty and Government With the idea of the tragédie en musique’s “political imaginary,” I am refer­ ring to the background understanding that structured the “field of intelligi­ bility” for its political theater.12 This interest in the imaginary dimension of politics is concordant with a number of studies coming out of the humanities in the last few decades, many of which turn to cultural production as a source for gleaning an understanding of past political theologies.13

4

introduction

In the broadest terms, the historical imaginary I address here mythologized power as supreme and indivisible yet internally articulated along axes that Mitchell Dean labels “sovereignty-­reign” and “economy-­government.”14 The first of these, sovereignty, had the character of a gift or, in theological terms, a miracle, and represented power in its glorious, transcendent form. Its aim was the distinctly circular one of preserving the dignity and safety of the prince and his realm. In contrast, the second axis of this imaginary designated a rational, instrumental form of power that typically operated on an imma­ nent plane, organizing people, territories, and resources in order to achieve a desired order. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its characteris­ tic aim was enabling the perpetuation and well-­being of a princely domain, espe­cially through the stewardship of its resources and the pacification and formation of its populace. This imaginary appeared in ancien régime political commentary, includ­ ing official rhetoric, jurists’ writings, philosophy, and the press, and it also structured opera’s stage fictions, if differently than in contemporaneous writ­ ings about politics or even in spoken tragedy.15 Librettists did sometimes have characters or choruses voice vernacular concepts of sovereignty, justice, freedom, law, and public order; and prefatory matter in early printed livrets and scores is a rich source of political ideas attached to particular works or productions. Yet rational discoursing about politics is not what opera does best, as both critics and proponents of the tragédie en musique recognized at the time.16 Rather, it is good at dramatizing political relations, subjectivity, and experience in compelling ways. The tragédie particularly excelled at communicating strongly felt “passions,” including what we would call po­ litical emotions, and its affective and relational mode of engaging political themes was a signature of the genre. Further, the form’s much-­remarked orientation toward spectacle lent itself to stage displays of sovereign dignity, splendor, and authority; shows of absolutist publicity and obligation; and staged tableaus of ordered and disordered societies. These dramatic and spectacular processes unfolded in the course of char­ acters’ declamatory and lyrical exchanges in dialogue scenes, in the musi­ cally elaborate monologues that began many acts, and in the choral and choreographic sequences that characterized prologues and intra-­act diver­ tissements. Political thematics were most salient in the scripted interac­ tion and reflection of singing actors in their roles as characters, as well as the instrumental music that accompanied them and the chorus and dance corps. Also important for these productions’ political imagination was the dimension of movement, in singers’ stylized expressions and gestures and

sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique

5

in dancers’ choreographies, and the visual splendor of sumptuous costumes and décors, including the stage machines for which the Opéra was alternately praised and ridiculed.17 For the most part, the artists who collaborated to create these multi­ media extravaganzas did not set out to represent actual political life in the France they knew, although a number of scholars have identified contem­ porary allegorical references embedded in their prologues and tragédies.18 Rather, librettists in particular endeavored to present the classical and Ro­ manesque stories that they adapted for the lyric stage in ways that con­ formed to the neo-­Aristotelian principle of plausibility (vraisemblance) that governed serious theatrical works in France. As Catherine Kintzler has ar­ gued, they fulfilled this expectation with plots whose settings and action were analogous with real, or in the case of the merveilleux, possible, experi­ ence, conforming to an elite, literate commonsense view of how the world worked.19 Kintzler’s theory emphasizes the natural world, but this shared sense of what was plausible or possible also delimited opera’s fictive social worlds, as their imaginary horizon. This subjected the tragédie’s treatment of political matters to an aes­thetic filtration and evaluation that freed librettists by granting them a distance from the actualities of political life while at the same time constraining their li­ brettos by insisting on their conformity with a socially intelligible horizon. Paradoxically, it was this capacity to engage in plausible fantasy, beyond its limited ability to transmit ideas about matters of state, that disposed France’s most prestigious form of opera to function as a special kind of political theater, well suited to ancien régime society. From the outset, the tragédie en musique was devoted to the pleasurable experience of an aestheticized royal res publica, but its aesthetic formalization removed it far enough from familiar public life that its dramas could unfold with relative impunity.20

Experiencing the State In an influential article on the persistence of the tragédie en musique in the later ancien régime, William Weber surmises, “One might say that at the Opéra more than anywhere else the ruling classes experienced the state, liv­ing within its traditions and reinforcing its authority.”21 Weber’s incisive observation pertains most immediately to the eighteenth century, when the iconically louis-­quatorziens operas of Lully and Quinault were revived for successive generations. But even in the 1670s and ’80s, opera productions at the Palais Royal and in the theaters of the royal chateaus involved audiences

6

introduction

in an experience of the state, in multiple respects.22 The crown’s designation of the Académie de Musique as “Royale” in 1672 brought opera production nominally under royal patronage, with the exclusive license (privilège) granted to Lully as the surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roi.23 Before the mid-­1680s Louis XIV himself regularly attended performances of his acad­ emy’s productions in Paris and at court, and his presence associated the pro­ ceedings with the mystique of personal sovereignty.24 Members of the royal family also sometimes attended performances at the Palais Royal, which had originated as a court theater.25 Printing of the académie’s librettos and scores was entrusted by license to the Ballard family, who had served as music print­ ers to the king since the sixteenth century. And the royal dedications that nor­ mally appeared as front matter in Ballard prints evoked the king as a virtual presiding presence. Most importantly for my purposes, polite society experienced the state via the content of the académie’s productions, whether through reading a livret, attending a performance, playing transcriptions at the keyboard, or engaging in conversation about the latest performance. Theatrical experience is the best understood, and we know that opera spectatorship, and particu­ larly listening, tended to be fashionably intermittent and sociable before the 1760s and ’70s, although that varied by venue and social class.26 Neverthe­ less, the distinctively French practice of reviving older repertory meant that audiences at court and more habitual attendees in Paris would already know a number of the operas in production each season. At the Palais Royal, the company’s directors also repeated both new and revived operas during the season. Among other things, this manner of programming meant that by the end of a season box holders in particular would be very familiar with the content of programmed productions, having gotten to know them through extended, sociable immersion.27 The subject and rhetoric of librettos was generally vetted by the Petite Académie (later the Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles), a body that Jean-­ Baptiste Colbert charged with overseeing the other academies and imposing regularity on mediated representations of Louis XIV and his reign.28 As a re­ sult, the royal and heroic imagery of tragédies en musique is remarkably con­ sistent with that found in other representational arts patronized by the crown, such as painting, sculpture, engraving, literature, and design.29 Such imagery was most overt in the prologue, an elegant mini-­drama that preceded the main dramatic action through the 1740s. Prologues typically introduced and framed the subject matter of the following tragédie, but they also functioned socially as elaborate compliments to the Opéra’s royal patron, whom they normally celebrated in the guise of an abstract héros. Deciphering the pro­

sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique

7

logue’s royal imagery and allusions (and evaluating their manner of paying compliments to the king) would have been routine for courtiers and mem­ bers of Parisian mondain society accustomed to social contests involving witty interpretation à clef.30 Courtiers also often interpreted the plots of the tragédies themselves as alluding allegorically to court intrigues and other contemporary events, such as military victories or treaties. The most infa­ mous case was the scandal that erupted over Philippe Quinault’s libretto for Isis, which was interpreted as alluding unflatteringly to Madame de Montes­ pan’s jealousy toward her rival for Louis XIV’s affections, Madame de Ludres. Quinault was disgraced and did not provide Lully with librettos for the next two years.31 Research on the tragédie en musique’s political representation has focused overwhelmingly on the librettos’ imagery, personification, and allegories. But a number of studies have interpreted its visual, musical, and choreographic elements as politically meaningful. For example, artists’ and architects’ designs for the stage created fictional places that they tended to organize politically. The vertical dimension of the stage was normally ordered hierarchically, with supernatural, magical, and sublimated heroic characters occupying the high­ est level (typically in a mobile cloud machine known as the gloire). Stage settings, whether marvelous or mundane, were also often defined within an imaginative political geography that designates centers and peripheries of power, as well as associations with fictive groups recognizable as an “us” or “them.”32 As for music and dance, music historians have established that Lully’s disciplined orchestra, his iconically “French” ceremonial and dance idioms (used in overtures, preludes, and dance sequences), his harmonic and expressive restraint, and his conventionalism more generally reflected an ide­ alized image of Louis XIV’s reign back to itself and to the nascent operatic public.33 Whether the focus is on poetry, music, or other elements, scholars gener­ ally agree that the content of lyric tragedies was ideologically aligned with the absolutist monarchy. This emerged as a consensus in American music scholarship, in particular, following the 1973 publication of Robert Isher­ wood’s historical study, Music in the Service of the King. Earlier musicologi­ cal research had cited absolutism as the political background for the develop­ ment of French opera, often extending the term metaphorically to describe Lully’s privilège and his authoritarian management style.34 But Isherwood’s study and the research it inspired attributed a more thoroughgoing influence of politics on art, stressing the administrative centralization of opera produc­ tion and seeing the tragédie en musique as an ideological instrument of the monarchy.35

8

introduction

A distinct strand of Francophone research in the 1970s and ’80s under­ took ideology critique in a more explicitly Althusserian sense, analyzing seventeenth-­century court spectacle, theater, and opera as part of the “ideo­ logical apparatus” of the purportedly late-­feudal French state.36 Althusser’s influence is also felt more distantly in the many studies inspired by Louis Marin’s Le Portrait du roi, which presented a sophisticated argument that royal representation was constitutive, as well as reflective of monarchical power.37 Marin’s study was quite influential in the 1990s and after, partly because it opened a wide field of ancien régime artistry to political analy­ sis, including literature, the visual and performing arts, and architecture and landscape design. In the years since, some scholars have stressed the ritual di­ mension of tragédie en musique performance as key to its political efficacy,38 while others approach the genre as an aesthetic form inviting discursive, de­ constructive, or other textual analysis.39 Finally, the past decade has also seen political analysis of French opera extended beyond l’Hexagone, incorporating histories of French colonization, slaving, religious emigration, and diplomacy into our understanding of the genre’s politics.40 Several scholars have advocated a view of serious French opera as be­ ing more flexible than previously thought in its political meanings. Manuel Couvreur’s and Downing Thomas’s analyses of the tragédie en musique both discern a formal dramaturgy that tacitly admitted nonideal representations of the monarch.41 Georgia Cowart and Don Fader have taken this nonpropagan­ distic view further, tracing what Cowart terms a “clear, sophisticated pattern of opposition” to Louis XIV’s policies and artistic tastes in a group of operas and musical entertainments from the troubled last decades of his reign. Both stress the importance of other aristocratic patronage networks rivaling that of the king, especially in the last quarter century of Louis XIV’s reign, and they discern a submerged anti-­absolutist critique in operas that these networks sponsored.42 The extent to which these and earlier arguments are convincing hinges partly on what we mean by absolutism, a difficult term that is more current in political science and cultural history than political histories of the ancien régime. It usually refers to a principle of independent, indivisible sovereignty and the centralization and bureaucratization of monarchical government.43 Traditional historiography normally credits the Bourbons with transforming the fractious, war-­torn French kingdom into an absolutist monarchy that, with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, began to assume many of the charac­ teristics of modern states. However, beginning in the 1980s historians ad­ vanced an alternate view based on a series of regional studies showing that the crown generally collaborated with provincial notables, magistrates, and

sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique

9

other political stakeholders in the day-­to-­day work of governing.44 In the wake of this revisionist historiography, the consensus view among histori­ ans is that the theory of absolutism was never actualized to nearly the extent suggested by official rhetoric.45 Absolutism nevertheless had been an authorized discourse and ongoing aspirational project of the crown since the sixteenth century, and for most of the seventeenth century it remained a vibrant field of political thought about the nature and limits of monarchical authority and power.46 Johann Sommerville defines it as a constellation of theories that maintained that “the ruler in any state holds sovereign authority, cannot be actively resisted, can change existing constitutional arrangements in a case of necessity . . . and should be obeyed by his subjects provided that his commands are not contrary to those of God and nature.”47 This speaks essentially to sovereignty, but absolutist thinkers also addressed matters of government at length, espe­ cially in “attempts to elevate the (personal) authority of a monarch over other institutions.”48 Viewed as such, absolutism remains a relevant concept for understanding the politics of the tragédie en musique in the Île de France, if we keep in mind that its ideas were aspirational, prescriptive, and, to a lesser extent, descriptive of lived politics. The tragédie en musique can meaning­ fully be described, then, as an absolutist form of musical theater in its royal patronage, its institutional basis in a mercantilist academy, and its ritual affirmation of the monarchy. It also set the stage for an aesthetic experience of sovereignty and sovereign reign analogous to that envisioned in absolutist discourse.

Themes of Sovereignty and Reign Audiences’ most pragmatic exposure to dramatized kingship was through characters’ mimetic acts of reigning and their sung reflections on rule, both of which recurred in librettos. Librettists’ make-­believe princes and princely divinities commonly issue commands and judgments, receive oaths of fidel­ ity, declare war and peace, designate enemies, identify and act on exceptions and emergencies, and delegate or derogate authority, much like the real-­life ruler and his agents.49 For instance, in Lully’s Thésée the king of Athens, Aegeus, designates Theseus as his successor and receives his oath of fidelity on his sword, which leads to the pivotal moment when the king recognizes Theseus as his son.50 In another example, taken from the last act of Des­ marets’s Théagène et Cariclée, the king of Ethiopia, Hydaspes, at first con­ demns the titular characters to death for their supposed crime of murder, but then retracts his judgment when an oracle reveals their innocence.51 Equally

10

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striking are situations in which non-­sovereign characters arrogate sovereign or sovereign-­like powers for themselves. Magicians and witches are a peren­ nial example, as characters whose powers of enchantment mimic or surpass the powers of mortal rulers. Other sovereign-­like powers include eroticism, martial prowess, and artistic virtuosity, thematized especially in settings of the Orpheus or Amphion legends. In addition to depicting the exercise of sovereign power, tragédie en musique artists devoted considerable stage time to characters’ experiences of sovereignty and the sovereign-­subject relation, which on the subject’s side was mostly a matter of appropriate affect and conduct, or decorum. Ray­ mond Williams writes in his classic essay Modern Tragedy that neoclassical tragedy’s emphasis on noble dignity altered the nature of a tragic action so that it centered on decorum—­especially protagonists’ manner of handling suffering—­rather than “a physical condition or a metaphysical fault.”52 This insight is borne out in the tragédie en musique, where the drama often involves “conflicts of conduct” that, as Foucault put it, occur “on the bor­ ders and edge of the political institution” represented by sovereign figures.53 These conflicts typically take the form of characters’ personal struggles over feeling and behavior that are not necessarily political in themselves (e.g. a love triangle, conflicting obligations). But such dilemmas acquire an outsized gravity and generality when a sovereign power becomes involved.54 Then the question of how to comport oneself nobly becomes politicized as a question of how characters should best respond to sovereign power and transcendent authority. Reigning and responding to rulers’ actions constituted a pragmatics of sovereignty on the opera stage, but the transcendent plane of sovereign authority clearly also occupied a prominent place in the genre’s political imaginary. The tragédie en musique differed from the spoken tragedies of Corneille and Racine in its convention of theatrically manifesting the tran­ scendent source of political obligation in absolutist thought. As in spoken tragedy, French librettists and composers confronted tragic characters with an inexorable demand issuing from some exalted sovereign, or else from an abstract source sublimed as fate, destiny, or necessity. What is distinctive about the tragédie en musique is that it sought to realize this transcendence in the stage world via the genre’s techniques for representing the merveilleux, as well as through scenes of group acclamation and glorification that became conventional in prologues and divertissements. Many scholars have explored the political significance of the marvelous and princely glory in earlier musical theatrical traditions, and we thus know quite a lot about how such performances worked, both technically and po­

sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique

11

litically, in courtly venues across Europe.55 They generally owe a debt to reli­ gious and political ceremonial (coronations, royal entries, Te Deums) that took place outside of the theater throughout the early modern period, ceremonies whose music Kate Van Orden has analyzed in the context of late Valois and early Bourbon political culture in France.56 The tragédie en musique perpetu­ ated the practice, established in the ballet de cour and other court entertain­ ments, of translating royalist and Catholic ceremonial into theatrical idioms, with the difference that opera at least nominally integrated its spectacles of glorification into a surrounding drama. Moreover, beyond its imitation of col­ lective glorification, opera itself was justified as a means of glorifying the king and enhancing the splendor of his realm, a governmental function that was acknowledged in the form’s encomiastic prologues and the front matter of printed scores and livrets. The opposite of acclamation also occurred surprisingly often as charac­ ters’ outright defamation or, more often, refusal to acclaim a sovereign figure. To be sure, in most librettos ruler characters and their subjects voice an authoritarian stance on sovereignty as imposing an obligation to obey and honor a sovereign. However, many of the most memorable characters and choruses respond to crises by defaming figures of authority or even plot­ ting against them, in ways that went well beyond what was lawful for real-­ life subjects. For example, when Attis inveighs against Cybele and the other gods in Quinault’s libretto Atys, he maligns them as “cruels,” “impitoy­ ables,” and “injustes” before urging the assembled chorus and dance corps to drive out the gods and overturn their altars.57 Notably, Attis resists the gods’ authority not only by hurling insults, but by pressing the assembly to withhold worship. In the end the chorus of Phrygians declines to do so—­ instead repeating its bleak refrain, “Atys, Atys lui-­même,/ Fait périr ce qu’il aime”—­and Attis himself is transformed into a sacrificial object of lament and commemoration. More often, though, such resistant sentiments, intentions, or actions rel­ egated characters and onstage groups to the status of criminals or even, in some cases, public enemies.58 One of the repertory’s most notorious public enemies is Medea, the royal sorceress whose adventures in her native Colchis and in Corinth and Athens are the subject of multiple operas. In Corneille’s libretto for Charpentier’s Medée, for instance, Medea denies King Creon’s supremacy in her dialogue scene with him in act 3 and declares herself sov­ ereign over his realm by virtue of her magic: Tu prends une trompeuse idée De te croire en état de me faire la loi;

12

introduction

Quand tu te vantes d’être roi, Souviens-­toi que je suis Médée.59 [You are deluded / If you think yourself in a position to rule me; / When you boast of being king, / Remember that I am Medea.]

She also upends the convention of concluding an opera with an ensemble acclaiming a hero or sovereign, typically elevated in a gloire. Instead, Cor­ neille called for Medea to appear suspended in the air seated “sur un dragon” (on a dragon), with Jason cursing her futilely from below.60 No deity appears to restore order and receive the praise of an assembly. Instead, Medea disre­ gards Jason’s defamation of her, as her demons destroy the Corinthian palace in a rain of fire.

Interlude: Sovereignty and Reign in Bellérophon We see many of these themes in Lully’s second collaboration with Thomas Corneille and his nephew, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, in the opera Bellérophon. As in several of Lully’s earlier operas, much of the action in Bellérophon unfolds in public earthly settings. According to the libretto printed for the debut performance in Paris, the set that Carlo Vigarani designed for act 1 shows a courtyard of the royal palace, backed by a triumphal arch through which the capital city of Lycia (Patara) is visible in perspective. Act 3 takes place in Patara’s temple of Apollo, and the final act returns the action to the palace courtyard, this time with elevated seating and galleries along the sides where the “people of Lycia” gather to witness Bellerophon’s triumphal entry.61 The plot involves several public personas, including Iobates, the king of Lycia; Sthenoboea, the dowager queen of Argos; and Bellerophon, a hero of unknown birth. These characters exercise sovereign powers in conven­ tional ways, especially Iobates, who declares war and peace, reviews war cap­ tives, receives Bellerophon’s oath of loyalty, and names him as his successor. Charged with ensuring the succession, he decides on a spouse for his daugh­ ter, Philonoe, awarding her to his war captain. In his judicial capacity, the king initially condemns Bellerophon to death but then spares him for reasons of state. Finally, he hears Sthenoboea confess her crime in the last act and, when she commits suicide, consigns her death to oblivion. Bellérophon also includes sovereign interventions by Olympian gods (Apollo and Pallas Athena) who appear ex machina to restore order to the

sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique

13

stage world. And like many of Lully’s operas, its roster of princely charac­ ters includes an antisovereign, Amisodarus, whom the libretto describes as a “Prince Lycien, savant en magie” (Lycian prince, knowledgeable about magic).62 At the end of act 2, he conspires with a retinue of magicians to con­ jure the Chimera, a monster capable of laying waste to Lycia and its peoples. Like many other such magus characters, Amisodarus wields magical power that is sovereign-­like in its capacity for extreme destruction and that effec­ tively arrogates sovereignty by challenging the prince’s monopoly on force. The princely characters’ followers contribute to Bellérophon’s political theater with their ceremonial homage, which publicizes their princes’ sov­ ereignty. Each of the three “public” acts (1, 3, and 5) culminates in a diver­ tissement of this kind. In act 1, the king reviews captive troupes of Ama­ zons and Solymoi in a triumphal march led by their conqueror, Bellerophon. The hero frees his captives, who then perform a celebratory divertissement in his honor. By act 3, the Lycian people and territory are being ravaged by the Chimera, and priests of Apollo lead the people in a sacrificial rite in sup­ plication of the god, which culminates in an oracle. By far the most extensive glorification sequence occurs in act 5, which is dedicated to celebrating Bellerophon’s defeat of the Chimera. The king has just revealed Bellerophon’s divine parentage, and he calls on the Lycian people to hail the hero’s triumphant return. They comply with the chorus, “Viens, digne sang des dieux,” which is characteristic of such numbers in re­ ferring performatively to the act of choral hymnody itself (“Et pour chanter tes grands exploits / Nous allons tous unir nos voix”).63 After a pair of dia­ logues resolving the love and sedition subplots (5.1–­2), Pallas Athena de­ scends with Bellerophon in a chariot and solicits the assembly’s homage in gratitude for the gods’ intervention (5.3). Athena’s descent is accompanied by a symphonie with obbligato trumpets and timpani, martial instruments that also embellish the Lycians’ magnificent acclamation chorus, “Le plus grand des héros rend la calme à la terre.” A stately entry danced by a troupe of Lycians then ushers in the chorus’s final number, a gigue-­like chorus (“Les plaisirs nous preparent leurs charmes”) sung in alternation with a trumpet fanfare that shares its festive gigue character. Lully’s use of trumpets and drums in this final sequence enhances its general splendor, but his choice to pair them with gigues also suggests a more particular meaning in line with the chorus’s sentiment, that state warfare is necessary for domestic peace. However, if the final sequence models an ideal monarchical regime and its public, the opera also furnishes a counterexample of misrule and vicious publicity with the magicians’ divertissement. In the last two scenes of act 2, Amisodarus is the object of parodic acclamation by the magicians he has

14

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summoned—­the “ministres de mon art” (executors of my magical arts), he calls them—­and when they have successfully conjured the three monsters he enjoins them to praise the gods of the underworld, in a kind of witches’ sabbath:64 Rendons aux sombres déités Les honneurs que de nous elles ont mérités.65 [Let us give to these shadowy gods / The honors that are owed to them.]

Mimicking the popular acclamation that will greet Bellerophon and Apollo, a troupe of dancers costumed as magicians performs a pair of entries, the second of which is an unmarked corrente meant “to mark their joy over what the spell had achieved” (pour marquer leur joie de ce que le charme a réussi).66 The celebration concludes with a corrente-­like dance chorus (“La terre nous ouvre”) in which the choral magicians glorify themselves and revel in their power: Victoire, victoire, victoire, Nous avons la gloire De tout surmonter.67 [Victory, victory, victory, / We have glory enough / To overcome anything.]

In a classic early modern imagination of disorder through contrariety and inversion, the magicians’ performance reverses the usual vector of praise: rather than hailing the true sovereign’s power and glory, they diabolically contemplate it in themselves.

Themes of Economy and Government Much like sovereignty, government is a meta-­theme of the tragédie en musique, in that its stage fictions theatricalized its own ideal function as an art form instrumental to good government. The institution that became known under Lully’s 1672 charter as the Académie Royale de Musique was, first and foremost, an extension of Colbert’s efforts to enhance the glory of the monarchy, but it also incorporated aims that went beyond this tradi­ tional concern of early modern sovereignty.68 As explained to the nascent

sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique

15

opera-­going public in the foreword to the livret for Lully’s first production, Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, For the king, it is not enough to pursue warfare and conquests to such lengths; he cannot abide that there be any means lacking for promoting the glory and happiness of his reign. And even as he overturns his ene­ mies’ high estate and astonishes the whole world, he does not neglect any­ thing that could make France the most flourishing empire that ever was.69

The foreword justified royal patronage of French-­language opera as part of the king’s charge to ensure the flourishing and well-­being of his kingdom. Nor was this rationale confined to the front matter of printed livrets and scores. It was repeatedly voiced in prologues and divertissements celebrat­ ing the ability of a hero, prince, or god to restore order and foster the plea­ surable pursuits of peacetime. Operatic production in France was caught up from its beginnings in what Foucault referred to as “the government of men,” by which he meant a wide range of tactical endeavors mandated by raison d’état for the benefit of the public domain.70 For our purposes, what is most valuable about Foucault’s meditation on seventeenth-­century forms of government, and specifically raison d’état, is that it casts in relief a political economic rationality—­adjoined to, yet distinct from sovereignty—­that runs through justifications of opera as a public form, as well as its thematics.71 Broadly speaking, we can observe two strands of government thematized in opera prologues and plots: first, the crown’s management of foreign relations, especially through near-­constant warfare, and second, the management of domestic matters by means of police in order to ensure the splendor, flourishing, and good order of the realm.72 I will focus on the second of these strands, which we see in plots involving threats to the security and maintenance of a realm, and in plots hinging on the behavior and disposition of its inhabitants. Some of the most common situations involve the preservation of biolog­ ical or ecological life in the face of disaster, the direction of characters’ in­ teriority and conduct, and characters’ struggle to govern themselves.73 With the first type of situation, catastrophes of various sorts demand emergency measures from onstage powers, which usually take the form of calculated, extralegal, and often violent remedies carried out under sovereign authority. In one of the best early examples, Quinault and Lully’s Phaéton, the eco­ logical disaster caused by Phaeton’s mishandling of Apollo’s solar chariot is the central subject matter of the opera. Characteristically for this repertory,

16

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the cause of the disaster, its harmful effects, and its resolution are all per­ sonalized: Phaeton’s hubris causes his fall, the “Déesse de la terre” (earth goddess) protests his journey’s destruction of her rivers, towns, forests, and mountains (5.6), and a solution arrives in the form of Jupiter’s violent inter­ vention, as he strikes Phaeton from the sky. However, Jupiter also justifies his action in political economic terms: Phaeton’s loss, he sings in his final recitative, is necessary for the “bien de l’Univers” (good of the universe) and in order to prevent future recklessness of this sort.74 Phaeton’s death, in other words, is a coup d’état in the seventeenth-­century sense of “bold and extraordinary actions that princes are forced to carry out in difficult and seemingly desperate affairs, against common law, . . . for the public good.”75 This kind of action is a mainstay of the tragédie en musique, which reveled in its irruptive nature, its display of power, and the opportunities it pre­ sented for group reaction by choruses and dance troupes.76 Typically, such coups occur in prologues or at culminating moments in the tragédie itself, especially at the end, and they usually are met with collective celebration, or else mourning over the resulting loss and destruction. As this suggests, authors of tragédie en musique plots—­particularly those based on classical sources—­preferred to depict not ordinary conditions of public life but the extraordinary ones that were the special provenance of tragedy. When tragic catastrophes befall opera’s princely characters and their families, librettists often used these crises to initiate states of emer­ gency that threaten the prevailing order and demand exceptional restorative measures. These measures include violent or sacrificial acts that were nor­ mally distanced from the repertory’s ideal of the god-­like prince. In the case of Medée, Creon tries to exile the sorceress and remarry her husband to the king’s daughter, in the name of restoring his kingdom’s stability. Such drastic princely actions formed an antithesis to the acts of princely mercy that were so prominent in serious opera before the nineteenth century. As such, they put pressure on the Apollonian ideal of the “clement prince,” to borrow Robert Ketterer’s term, by eliciting its negative face: the emer­ gency ruler led by calculative raison d’état instead of mercy and other di­ vine virtues.77 This is not to suggest that tragédie librettists neglected to depict public life in a state of tranquility. Princely figures in opera are generally charged with ensuring the peace and prosperity of their domains, and one of the best vehicles for imagining this ideal state was the legend of the Golden Age, which embodied the dream of perfect government. In Quinault’s prologue for Phaéton, for example, the retinues of the Golden Age gods, Astraea and Saturn, praise “the greatest of heroes” (le plus grand des héros) for bringing

sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique

17

about a “sweet tranquility” (un si doux repos). Their chorus enjoins his subjects: Il faut que tout fleurisse. Mortels, vivez heureux.78 [Let everything flourish. / Mortals, live in contentment.]

The Golden Age theme recurred as late as Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie (1733 version), where Diana alludes to it in the last act set in Aricia’s forest. More broadly, the fantasy of an everlasting kingdom, after the need for princely prudence and government has passed, appeared in any number of celebra­ tory fêtes. As I argue in the following chapter, fantasies like these accom­ modated an inoperative modality of song and spectacle that was character­ istic of courtly musical theater under the Bourbons. They invited audiences to enjoy a theatrical experience of leisure, timelessness, and plenitude that operas’ sung texts attributed to sovereign being, but that could easily be put to other uses—­or none at all.79 One of the most common governmental themes appeared in situations where characters attempt to direct others’ (or their own) behavior and feel­ ing for the benefit of the public. This could occur in interactions between the principals and the chorus or corps or in dialogue exchanges between in­ dividual characters, especially between protagonists and confidantes. In the earlier repertory, the aim of behavioral and affective formation was to so­ licit appropriate public display, as a duty owed to the prince and to society. Perhaps the most prevalent object of such formation was love understood as a public virtue. Indeed, love of country and king was a recurring theme in scenes of celebration and mourning alike, echoing absolutist thought under Louis XIV. (The great apologist for divine right absolutism, Jacques ­Bénigne Bossuet, proposed in the sixth book of his Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Ecriture sainte, “The prince must be loved as a public good, and his life is the object of the people’s good wishes.”)80 While such expressions of love persisted in operas from the second half of the century, they were often di­ rected by that point at the nation or patrie. Moreover, in the course of the eighteenth century, public feeling and conduct became a matter of subjec­ tive truthfulness, where it was the inward reality of the citizen that was ideally expressed. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau pinpointed the political stakes of such ethical formation in his article “Political Economy” in the Encyclopédie, writing, “Form men if you want to command men: if you would have the laws obeyed, see to it that they are loved.”81

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The government of feeling and behavior occurred most often in dialogue scenes and in musically elaborate, reflective monologues, in which protago­ nists disclosed their true inner state under pressure from an actual or imagined interlocutor. Foucault theorized such high-­stakes disclosures of a self as secu­ larized forms of Catholic confession, speech acts that, he argued, controlled individuals by subjecting them to self-­government by norms.82 Many laments were examples of such high-­stakes, self-­defining disclosure, as were scenes in which guilty characters confess their wrongdoing. Love scenes too could take a confessional turn when telling a beloved their true inner state defines characters in ways that constrain them and expose them to significant risk. While such confessional exchanges emerged even in Lully’s operas, they were much more frequent and more powerfully normative in the eighteenth cen­ tury, nowhere more so than in the moralized noble sensibility of characters in the 1760s and after.

Interlude: Economy and Government in Bellérophon Bellérophon offers several examples of the thematics of government that I have described. One of the most striking such moments is the lament that two nymphs perform in act 4 for the devastating effects of the Chimera on Lycia and its people. According to the livret for the first production, the stage décor showed “very high and very steep rocks, covered in pines and other sol­ itary trees,” with another similar rock and three grottos in the background.83 The nymphs enter in scene 3 and sing their plainte—­an A-­minor duo with obbligato flutes—­that there is no more vegetation and no more water, noth­ ing but death and silence: Une Napée et une Dryade Plaignons, plaignons les maux qui

Weep, weep over the evils that

désolent ces lieux;

desolate these parts;

Les pleurs qu’ils font couler

The tears that they cause to fall

devraient

must

toucher les dieux.

move the gods.

dryade: Il n’est plus d’herbes dans

There is no more grass in the

les plaines. napée: Il n’est plus d’eaux dans les fontaines.

plains. There is no more water in the fountains.

dryade: Tout périt.

Everything is dead.

napée: Tout tarit.84

Everything runs dry.

sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique

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They are joined in the following scene by two forest gods who sing their own low-­voice lament duo before forming a quartet with the nymphs to deliver their final plea to the gods for mercy. And their plea is effective: in a divine coup d’état, Pallas Athena sends Bellerophon on a sacrificial mission to fight the Chimera and restore order to the land. “Viens, monte dans ce char,” she sings, “et t’abandonne aux dieux” (Come, get up in this chariot, and give yourself over to the gods).85 The prologue to Bellérophon likely alludes to the Peace of Nijmegen (1678–­79), which gave France control over the Franche-­Comté and initiated a temporary respite from warfare. The ecodisaster lamented by the nymphs and forest deities may well refer to the havoc wreaked by the war or to some other crisis. Yet in the opera this disaster is caused not by state warring but by Stheneboea’s jealousy and desire for vengeance, which personalizes and feminizes the threat to the realm. If the ultimate cause of the Chimera’s devastation is a queen’s illicit desire (for an enemy and a younger man) and unruly passions in the face of erotic rejection, then the government of the queen and other such women is essential for the well-­being of Lycia.86 In this respect, Stheneboaea resembles Racine’s Phaedra, up to and includ­ ing her false accusation of Bellerophon in revenge for his rejection of her (1.1). She also anticipates the Phaedra of Hippolyte et Aricie in her extended confession of wrongdoing before a crowd of onstage witnesses in Bellérophon’s last act. The king asks her why she is not celebrating with everyone else, and she responds by confessing her jealousy and her conspiracy with Amisodarus, who has fled the kingdom. Near the end of a long recitative confession, she turns rhetorically to accuse the gods, after admitting to hav­ ing poisoned herself “to expiate the crime” (pour expier le crime): Vous, de qui la rigueur m’a toujours poursuivie Avec ses plus funestes traits, Dieux inhumains, j’abandonne la vie; Êtes vous satisfaits?87 [You whose severity has always pursued me / With its deadliest arrows, / Inhuman gods, I give up my life; / Are you satisfied?]

Her confession confirms her status as an enemy of the state, but rather than castigating herself, as so many later confessing characters do, Stheneboaea dies cursing the Olympian gods and seeking to escape their rule through suicide.

20

introduction

Trajectories of Opera’s Political Imaginary Politics was part of the warp and weft of neoclassical opera in the seven­ teenth and eighteenth centuries, in its conditions of production, its recep­ tion, and its content. Even restricting our inquiry to the latter, as I do here, the field of political relations theatricalized in the tragédie en musique was quite varied, extending across the familiar modern divide between state and social politics and encompassing the exercise of power at both macro and micro levels. By offering a new model of the repertory’s political thematics, as articulated along axes of sovereignty and government, I hope to clarify how its representation worked and begin to do justice to the richness and complexity of its theatricality. As we might expect, the political imaginary of the tragédie en musique did not remain static across its long history, but changed in ways both subtle and unsubtle. Perhaps the most important change is evident in its represen­ tation of political authority. Broadly speaking, tragédies en musique from Lully through Rameau tended to legitimate staged acts of governing with ref­ erence to a transcendent sovereign authority, characteristically embodied in the genre’s human and supernatural ruler personas. The familiar convention of the deus ex machina was a quintessential means of presenting transcen­ dent authority onstage, one that lent intelligibility to opera’s storytelling by presenting sovereignty in the personalized, yet transcendent form that audiences took for granted before the mid-­eighteenth century. As I show in the following chapters, librettists tended to emphasize a more distant, providential form of authority and power in new operas of the 1770s and ’80s. In a related development, ministerial, military, and bureaucratic figures who governed in the name of the prince (or deity) were more numerous and dra­ matically prominent in the same decades. Opera’s collectivities in these decades also sometimes evoked the patrie or nation as a locus of sovereignty. And in many librettos sovereign supremacy itself competed with the nonpo­ litical, sublimed authority of Nature, Love, or Conscience, which characters often treated as more effective sources of legitimacy and obligation. Weber and Solveig Serre have discerned in this later de-­emphasis on per­ sonified sovereign authority a parallel with the depersonalization of French sovereignty in the course of the eighteenth century.88 My analysis of the later repertory will bear out their point, but I frame this trend toward de­ personalization somewhat differently, as indicating a changing imaginary of the relationship of sovereign and economic forms of power in the last third of the century. In short, I see the new prominence of lower-­status governing powers and abstract forms of sublime authority in later tragédies as register­

sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique

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ing a gradual liberalization of politics in the reigns of Louis XV and XVI. The key marker of a liberal political paradigm, for my purposes, is the separation of sovereign power and its thematics from economy-­government, which we see underway—­but not fully achieved—­in any number of dramatic actions in operas of this period, especially in works from after the debut of Gluckian opera in 1774.89 This does not mean that gods and kings were banished from the opera stage, or that sacral authority faded away as part of opera artists’ political imaginary. On the contrary, the later serious repertory distinctively juxtaposed stories of ever more autonomous governmental power with old-­fashioned ruler and divine personas. This juxtaposition does attest, however, to the copresence of new possibilities and old limits for thinking power and the political in the twilight of the ancien régime.

chapter one

The Politics of Glory: Angelic Citizenship and the Contemplative Chorus

L

ully’s opera choruses, though beloved by spectators in the parterre who reportedly sang along, are rarely regarded as political, except as the bald­ est form of monarchical propaganda.1 Choruses in praise of a royal “héros” (hero), like this one from the prologue of Armide, are ubiquitous in the early tragédie en musique: Chantons la douceur de ses lois, Chantons ses glorieux exploits.2 [Let us sing of the leniency of his laws, / Let us sing of his glorious exploits.]

A glance at the verses for such numbers confirms the commonplace view that their main purpose was to glorify the French sovereign. Choruses lo­ cated in the prologue were especially given to princely encomium, but glori­ fication choruses appeared as well in the form’s spectacular divertissements. Regardless of their location, such choruses have long been taken as support for the ideological nature of the tragédie en musique. Hearing these choruses as ideological is well justified, of course. Their idealization of kingship and monarchical government is clearly in line with official rhetoric lauding the Bourbon dynasty (an alignment that was first facilitated by the crown’s censoring body, the Petite Académie).3 What is less clear, though, is why opera choruses’ adoration of the monarch and his reign should be so salient to the interests of the French kingdom. Why, in other words, did the monarchical state need the glorifying choruses that opera rou­ tinely supplied?

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This paraphrases the question driving Giorgio Agamben’s recent work on the “archaeology of glory,” namely, “Why does power need glory?”4 If there is no direct causal link between glory and effective political control, then its value for politics is unclear. Agamben explains: If power is essentially force and efficacious action, why does it need to receive ritual acclamations and hymns of praise, to wear cumbersome crowns and tiaras, to submit itself to an inaccessible ceremony and an immutable protocol—­in a word, why does something that is essentially operativity and oikonomia need to become solemnly immobilized in glory?5

The usual answer, in early modern and modern political thought, is that glory was instrumental to good government, inspiring respectful obedience in subjects and impressing foreigners with a prince’s power and resources.6 Bossuet, for example, saw displays of “magnificence and dignity” as “neces­ sary for the sustaining of majesty in the eyes of peoples and foreigners,” and he thought that the ostentation of kings was divinely willed, in order “to impress a certain respect on peoples.”7 Such rationales were repeated often enough in French writings on opera and other courtly musical theater as well, especially in the prefatory ma­ terial of livrets and scores printed for académie productions. Glorification choruses in these productions also seem designed to serve governmental purposes, as I discuss below. Yet purely economic (meaning, instrumental and calculative) explanations for choruses like these are not ultimately sat­ isfactory, despite their appeal for critical thought. In this chapter I offer an alternate view of the tragédie en musique’s glorifying choruses as vital to both sovereign and governmental forms of power on the French lyric stage. Taking Agamben’s archaeology of glory as a starting point, I argue that the core function of the genre’s choruses of praise, celebration, and accla­ mation—­which I will refer to as “contemplative choruses”—­is their presen­ tation of an angelic model of citizenship, which had long furnished an ideal for Catholic absolutist thought. Encounters between choruses and glorious figures like gods, heroes, or rulers were a mainstay of the genre. In scenes like these, the choral groups who attend these figures nearly always greet them with contemplative song, which gives voice to choruses’ leisurely, wondering reflection on the splendor they witness. If the tragédie en mu­ sique can rightly be said to have elaborated a theological myth of ruler sov­ ereignty, its librettists and composers likewise crafted a doxological myth

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of citizenship with the groups they arrayed around their icons.8 Contempla­ tive choral song was an integral part of the tragédie’s secular liturgy of glory, where the chorus took the part of the angels. Reducing the genre’s contemplative numbers to their strategic functions implies that the glory they hail is ultimately mundane and instrumental, when in Christian polities glory had long figured a transcendent dimension of power. As Agamben points out, glory was most properly recognized in these contexts not with submission but with ritual acts of acclamation, celebration, or supplication that “constitute a threshold of indifference be­ tween politics and theology.”9 Princely glory in particular was felt in the ancien régime to have an integral, if mysterious, relation to the glory of di­ vinity.10 The theological-­political nature of glory was especially important for divine right discourse, which framed the mundane workings of princely government within the beyond-­human reality of the heavenly kingdom. In the Politiques, for example, Bossuet justified princely glory by appeal­ ing to state necessity, but also to the divine ordination of kings. Referring to the French coronation ceremonial, he paraphrased the prayer offered for the king’s splendor and magnificence, “such that the glory and majesty of the royal dignity will shine in the palace in the eyes of everyone, and cast everywhere beams of the royal power.” He concluded by justifying royal éclat in both rational and theological terms, writing, “This splendor must convey to all minds an impression of the power of kings, and seem to be an image of the celestial court.”11 Bossuet’s metaphor of the celestial court serves as a clef for my analysis of opera’s contemplative choruses. With it, he likened royal glorification—­ whether in coronation ceremonies or in opera prologues—­to the adoration of God by hosts of angels and the blessed in heaven. His reference to a heav­ enly “court” drew on an angelological strand of Christian political thought that, by the late seventeenth century, had a venerable legacy dating from the Patristic era and flourishing especially in late-­medieval scholasticism. In the wake of the Wars of Religion, this legacy offered French royalists an authoritative model for the charismatic publicity many attributed to king­ ship, as well as for the well-­ordered government that supposedly flowed from it. Specifically, the model of the heavenly court reestablished a sacral relationship among “God, the king, and the people” that the Reformation and the Wars of Religion had placed in question, while still “preserving the unity and uniqueness of the monarch” that was so important for divine right theory.12 Angels were perfectly attuned to divine will, their offices reflected the mystery of the Trinity, and their society was harmonious despite its

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intricate hierarchical divisions.13 What better model for the realm and its people following the upheavals under the Valois? Following Patristic precedent, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure di­ vided the hosts of angels into contemplative and administrative types. The adoring seraphim and cherubim were the paradigmatic attendants, while the lower orders of principalities, archangels, and so forth were charged with carrying out administrative functions. Aquinas wrote in Question 112 of his Summa Theologiae, The angels are spoken of as assisting and administering, after the like­ ness of those who attend upon a king; some of whom ever wait upon him, and hear his commands immediately; while others there are to whom the royal commands are conveyed by those who are in attendance—­for instance, those who are placed at the head of the administration of vari­ ous cities; these are said to administer, not to assist.14

This division of contemplative and ministerial angelic functions proved very useful for absolutist political thought, and it also takes us a long way toward defining a political typology of the chorus in the tragédie en musique. Like the nine traditional angelic orders, the tragédie’s choruses were mainly given to contemplation, especially in its prologues and fêtes. It is true that choral groups in the main acts were sometimes more active, as when they implemented noble personas’ projects, transmitted information, inter­ preted events, or voiced judgments. However, in tragédies composed through Rameau’s lifetime, choral agency stemmed mainly from the higher-­ranked personas in whose name they acted, recalling the ministerial function of the lower angelic orders. This capacity for action notwithstanding, the cho­ rus’s most salient purpose in this tradition was its enjoyment of glorious pres­ ence. As Aquinas noted of the angelic offices, “We must . . . observe that all the angels gaze upon the Divine Essence immediately; in regard to which all, even those who minister, are said to assist.”15 The resemblance of fictional choral collectivities to the angels consisted in this, that their massed, adoring song bore witness to the glory of sov­ ereign being and its government. In so doing, the chorus consecrated and publicized sovereign government and, by extension, itself. Indeed, the trag­ édie’s political theater can be said to have depended in a sense on contem­ plative choral groups as the avatars of an admiring citizenry without whom charismatic authority could not work. Absolutist apologetics depicted the

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attraction of majesty as so powerful that citizens’ admiration was spontane­ ous and even passionate. But the civil conflicts that rocked France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a reminder that the glorious im­ age of French kings was not universally affirmed. The virtuously devoted choruses of the tragédie en musique reflected an ideal of monarchical citi­ zenship; yet, reasoning a contrario, librettists also presented their opposite in the retinues of evil magicians, rebels, and tyrants whose vicious publicity they modeled on the fallen angels. Virtuous choral citizenship is prominent in Quinault and Lully’s first tragédie en musique, Cadmus et Hermione, especially its mythological pro­ logue. After discussing the example of Cadmus, I offer some historical back­ ground on the angelological strand of political thought and ceremonial in the ancien régime as it bears on opera’s contemplative choruses. A sampling of contemplative choruses in the next section reveals their remarkable sta­ bility across the repertory, as well as important shifts in the objects of their hymnody. One of the most striking findings of this overview is that the doxological orientation of the tragédie’s choruses survived the major formal and aesthetic reinvention of the genre in the mid-­1770s, and even adapted to the liberalizing political climate in those years.16 The chapter concludes with thoughts on contemplative singing as the particular vocation of the opera chorus and an unexpected source of its po­ liticality. From the longevity of contemplative choral song across the eigh­ teenth century we can surmise that it must have held some appeal beyond its usefulness for various powers, whether real or make-­believe. The fact is, the repertory’s choral writing is often very enjoyable and, more to the point, enjoyment was one of its recurring meta-­themes. Although librettists and composers typically aligned choral groups’ enjoyment with angelic citizen­ ship, enjoyment is not so easily harnessed and put to use. This is because it is an inoperative dimension of experience, which tends to exceed or suspend whatever useful purposes are found for it, including ideological ones. I propose in the last section, then, that the political core of contemplative song was its basic “inoperativity,” in which singing with others—­and enjoying singing—­ opens a human potentiality beyond any governing purpose.

Choral Citizenship in Cadmus et Hermione Contemplative choruses did not originate with the tragédie en musique, but they were an important element of the first tragédie, Cadmus et Herm­ ione. Cadmus opens with a spectacular prologue on the subject of Apollo’s slaying of the Python, which its librettist, Quinault, worked into a fable of

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the sovereign miracle. Framing the prologue’s central catastrophe—­the Py­ thon’s destruction—­and its resolution are contemplative choruses acclaim­ ing Apollo as the sun god and reveling in his presence. The prologue begins as the sun has risen in the background of a rustic stage set during the overture, and the assembled pastoral deities and their retinues of nymphs and shepherds hail Apollo’s rejuvenating power as the sun god, in an overt allegorization of the king:17 Admirons, admirons l’astre qui nous éclaire, Chantons la gloire de son cours? Que tout le monde révère Le dieu qui fait nos beaux jours.18 [Let us marvel, let us marvel at the star that shines on us, / Shall we sing the glory of its passage? / Let the whole world revere / The god who makes our beautiful days.]

Scored for three soloists (an haute-­contre and two dessus), four-­part chorus, and strings, this was the first ensemble number dedicated to glorification in a tragédie en musique, although certainly not in Lully’s output. Its G-­ minor tonality and recurring dotted rhythms lends it an air of elevated gran­ deur appropriate to the ensemble’s performative wonderment over the god (example 1.1). Following the trio and chorus, Lully shifts registers with a rustic triple-­ meter dance and dance air sequence for the god Pan and his retinue. How­ ever, an earthquake and sudden darkness interrupt the festivities, and the figure of Envy (a transparent proxy for William of Orange)19 summons the Python and tempestuous Winds to ravage the countryside. Their assault is executed with all the bombast that Vigarani’s machines and Lully’s music could muster, but then the sun god’s intervention brings about a stunning reversal, as flaming arrows slay the Python and solar fire rains down on Envy and the remaining Winds. Quinault derived this story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the com­ bat of Apollo and the Python was also a recurring theme of royal iconogra­ phy and art in the seventeenth century, where it proved convenient as an allegory for the crown’s involvement in foreign and domestic conflicts.20 Royal Apollonian imagery in paintings, sculpture, and prints showed the violence of the god’s combat with the serpent, but in neoclassical spoken tragedy bloodshed was normally narrated rather than shown, in deference to the principle of bienséance (propriety). Even the more spectacle-­oriented

example 1.1 Jean-­Baptiste Lully, Cadmus et Hermione, prologue (from F-­V Manuscrit musical 91)

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tragédie en musique would generally limit onstage displays of violence ex­ ercised by a ruler or ruler god.21 Yet the stage directions in the livret for Cadmus indicate that Vigarani furnished a dazzling pyrotechnical display (the rain of fire) to depict the sun god’s assault on Envy and the Python.22 Moreover, Lully’s symphonie for this deluge is exceedingly brief, occupying a mere five measures, so that the sun god’s destruction must have flashed by with a rapidity as shocking as the exorbitance of its violence (example 1.2).23 Both the suddenness and the excessive force of the god’s action corre­ spond precisely to seventeenth-­century descriptions of the princely coup d’état. As Gabriel Naudé wrote in his Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état (1639), “In coups d’état the lightning bolt falls before the thun­ der has been heard rumbling in the skies, it strikes before flashing; matins are said before the bell is rung; execution precedes sentencing.”24 In the preface to the livret, Quinault justified this outbreak of stage violence by the extremity of the threat it answers, yet the sun god’s destruction remains a super-­rational, singular action that cannot really be integrated into the opera’s poetic framework, because it poses the limits of that poetics itself.25

example 1.2 Jean-­Baptiste Lully, Cadmus et Hermione, prologue (from F-­V Manuscrit musical 91)

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Wonder and acclamation are the only appropriate response to such an epiphany in this context, and the prologue’s pastoral retinues oblige with a celebratory divertissement, commencing with their entry gavotte. The nymphs and shepherds then join the deities in a more solemn ceremonial chorus memorializing the god’s defeat of the Python: Conservons la mémoire De sa victoire. Par mille honneurs divers: Répandons le bruit de sa gloire Jusques au bout de l’univers.26 [Let us preserve the memory / Of his victory. / With a thousand differ­ ent honors: / Let us herald his glory / To the ends of the universe.]

Their glorification chorus would become the standard response to greatness in later operas. However, here the ceremony culminates in a moment of col­ lective silence, as the sun god himself descends ex machina: palès: Mais le soleil s’avance, Il se découvre aux yeux de tous. le chœur: Respectons sa présence Par un profond silence, Écoutons, taisons-­nous.27 [But the sun moves forward, / He reveals himself to the eyes of all. / Let us respect his presence / With a deep silence, / Let us listen, be silent.]

Beginning at “Respectons,” Lully’s setting reprises the elevated manner and G-­minor tonality of the earlier glorification chorus (“Admirons, admirons l’astre”), except that here the chorus soon exchanges the mimetic dignity of their hymnody for a hushed awe. Their verses imply that the deity’s pres­ ence is so glorious that even their song of praise is less appropriate than the ensuing silence. What is the most superlative testament of glory if not si­ lent adoration? And how better to allegorize the glory of the king whom Apollo

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represents, a king whose “grandeur” and “brilliance,” Quinault wrote, placed him “beyond ordinary praise”?28 Quinault’s turn of phrase in the chorus’s vers—­“Respectons sa presence / Par un profond silence”—­signals a theological orientation of his political allegory in ways unmistakable to his contemporaries. The chorus echoes an apophatic strain in medieval and early modern mystical theologies of divine love, which advocated contemplative silence as the most appropri­ ate approach to the divine presence.29 For example, in a 1661 commentary on the Song of Songs, the Capuchin Léandre de Dijon wrote that the soul’s experience of divine love “reveals truths so high that it is astonished and falls silent in its astonishment, respecting through a profound silence [pour respecter par un profound silence] what is incomprehensible to its thought and its reasoning.”30 This affective Catholic mysticism had close parallels in absolutist thought in the second half of the seventeenth century, particularly among proponents of divine right. The Abbé Aunillon’s oraison funèbre for Louis XIV waxed lyrical on the respect that the king’s presence inspired in his people: “The impression that [his greatness] made on the princes of the blood, and on his people, kept them always in a silence that resembled, in a way, the veneration that one has for God, of whom he was the image.”31 The awestruck chorus of Cadmus’s prologue embodies the zealous pub­ lic envisioned by theorists of absolutism and the crown’s cadre of apolo­ gists, among whom we must count both Quinault and Lully. “Écoutons,” the chorus sings, “taisons-­nous, taisons-­nous,” and after a grand pause, a D-­ minor ritournelle in trio texture with gracefully descending parallel thirds accompanies the god’s appearance. Yet when he addresses the assembly, he calls on them to honor him not with high ceremony, but with enjoyment (jouissance): Pour prix de mes travaux ce me doit être assez Que chacun en jouisse; Je fais le plus doux de mes vœux De rendre tout le monde heureux.32 [As the price of my labors it is enough / That all enjoy them; / I make it the sweetest of my wishes / To bring happiness to everyone.]

The ritournelle is heard once more, introducing his second stanza (“Dans ces lieux fortunés”), and he concludes with a couplet that also appears on Fran­ çois Chauveau’s frontispiece for the livret, captioning the epiphany of the

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figure 1.1 François Chauveau, frontispiece for Philippe Quinault, Cadmus et Hermione (Paris: René Baudry, 1674; Bibliothèque nationale de France)

sun god in his chariot: “Tandis que je suivrai mon cours, / Profitez des beaux jours” (As long as I pursue my course, / Enjoy beautiful days”) (figure 1.1). Chauveau’s engraved scene shows a rustic setting peopled by musicians and dancers arrested in wonder. The coming of the sun god, it suggests, brings contingency and time itself under control. With the work of governing com­

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pleted and communal redemption achieved, all that is left is enjoyment, ex­­­ pressed with the words jouir, profiter, and above all, aimer. Love whom? Each other, of course, because Quinault’s inaugural sung trag­ édie is a tragicomedy, and love subplots will comprise a major part of his art. Yet in Cadmus (and arguably all of Lully’s operas through the early 1680s), it is the king who appears, via his allegorical and mimetic proxies, as the love object of a citizenry obliged by duty and princely merit to express amour. As the choruses sing in the prologue for Armide, Dès qu’on le voit paraître, De quel cœur n’est-­t’il point le maître? Qu’il est doux de suivre ses pas! Peut-­t’on le connaître Et ne l’aimer pas?33 [From the moment he appears, / What heart does he not command? / How sweet it is to follow his lead! / Is it possible to know him / And not love him?]

Bossuet articulated this affective political theology in only slightly less rhap­ sodic terms. He concluded his fourth proposition (“On the service one owes to the king”) in book 6 of his Politiques with a meditation on love as a politi­ cal virtue: “Thus a good subject loves his prince as he loves the public good, as he loves the safety of the whole state, as he loves the air he breathes, the light of his eyes, his life and more than his life.”34 What kind of citizenship is this that consists in affective tribute to a sov­ ereign, based not just on duty, but on love? An angelic one.

The Angelic State In his eulogy for Louis XIV at the Cathedral d’Evreux, Aunillon drew a com­ parison between male members of the extended royal family (the princes du sang) and the angels attending the throne of God: “The princes of [the king’s] blood,” he declared, “arranged themselves around him, much like the angels who surround the Eternal, and [were] ready to carry his orders everywhere where they were sent, being occupied solely with the idea of his glory.”35 The abbé’s reference to the celestial court rehearsed a very old parallel between angelic and human citizenship that, by 1715, must have struck at least some of his listeners as rather threadbare, particularly given the distance between this image and the realities of the late reign. Nevertheless, angelic assistance

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and ministry remained the public ideal for these most exalted of the king’s subjects. A 1908 essay by Berthold Vallentin, “Der Engelstaat,” gives a genealogy and analysis of this parallel, focusing on the angelology of William of Au­ vergne, who served as bishop of Paris in the second quarter of the thirteenth century.36 But Christian speculation about celestial order as the source or model for the human one dates back to the Patristic writings of the early Church.37 The celestial hierarchies devised by pseudo-­Dionysius the Areop­ agite and Gregory the Great were particularly influential, and later Catholic theology, mysticism, and apologetics commonly related the nature and offices of the angels to the order of life on earth.38 Medieval angelology routinely borrowed political vocabulary—­as in the image of heaven as a court—­but the tradition of mapping the celestial hierarchy onto human politics was a thirteenth-­century development, especially in Aquinas’s and Bonaventure’s great scholastic inquiries into the nature of angelic society. Early modern thought in turn drew freely on this late-­medieval angelological inheritance as a resource for conceptualizing the dynastic monarchical state. The celestial order elaborated by the scholastics also furnished a model for the art of princely government, because, as Bonaventure conceived it, “The heavenly hierarchy exists in a perfect concord and benevolence wherein su­­ periors and inferiors all agree and all love one another.”39 This angelic com­ munity cohered despite distinctions of rank and office, of which the most significant was the difference between assistants, who attended the divine presence, and ministers, who carried out its work. Medieval writers disagreed about the primacy of angelic contemplation over angels’ activity in the cos­ mos, but Bonaventure’s Franciscan take on their existence as a “perfect com­ bination of activity in the world with their perfect contemplation of the di­ vine” articulated a typology of angelic offices that would recur in later French theological and secular thought.40 The Capuchin Yves de Paris replicated this distinction in La Théologie naturelle (1635), where he argued that God created the higher angels for the contemplative purposes of “knowing, praising, and magnifying” the divin­ ity’s “infinite perfections,” while lesser orders were charged with carrying out the divine government of the cosmos.41 Yves tacitly acknowledged the relevance of this distinction for contemporary politics with an analogy be­ tween divine government and a princely state that very much resembled the kingdom of France under Louis XIII. Like God, he noted, princes enjoyed two kinds of service from their subjects, whom they employed in courtly pursuits and government respectively:

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Princes have favorites who are constantly near their persons and whose only occupation is to receive princely gifts among the delights of the court and exchange pleasantries. But they have others whom they employ in the government of the provinces, in embassies, in negotiations, in lead­ ing armies and in other difficult, but glorious encounters, if they acquit themselves with the necessary courage, prudence, and fidelity.42

He thus maps the angelic hierarchy of assistants and ministers onto the po­ litical division between the court nobility (particularly the “favorites” who notoriously surrounded Louis XIII) and officials, diplomats, military leaders, and others charged with ensuring the preservation and flourishing of the realm. Political reasoning on the nature and functions of angels persisted in theo­ logical, devotional, and philosophical writings under Louis XIV. One such ac­­count appears in Jean de Sainte Geneviève’s Docte et dévot traité de la sublime nature, et de la digne occupation des SS. Anges dans le ciel, et dans la hiérarchie de l’Eglise (1675).43 Jean was a member of the ultra-­reformed Cistercian Congrégation de Notre-­Dame des Feuillants, an order that was notable for its mystical defense of royal absolutism.44 In his explication of the angelic hierarchy, he wrote: The angels of the first [order] have the privilege and the honor of being at­­ tendants, and approaching very near the divine majesty, and gazing most fixedly at the inaccessible light, which is his dwelling place. Those of the second [are] like intendants and principal officials, regulating and arrang­ ing everything there is to do in the service of God and the accomplish­ ment of his holy will. The others of the last hierarchy are charged with the execution of mandates and orders that they receive from their supe­ riors, who are in the other hierarchies, so that the first has as a livery and its special benefit the confidence of and familiarity with the creator, mon­­ arch of the universe: the second has the authority, power, and right to com­­ mand in what concerns the service and will of God: and the third has for its part subjection and obedience, to take in hand the execution of things ordained for the service and the glory of God.45

The powers of the second order, he continues, are “like Magistrates charged with the immediate government of the inferior angels of the third hierarchy, which are solely destined, like lower officers, to execute the mandates that they receive.”46 But as in his principle source, pseudo-­Dionysius, Jean gave

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precedence to the contemplative Seraphim, charged with adoring the divinity and leading the angelic hosts in the Sanctus: The Seraphim closest to God and higher than all the other creatures, seized by the ardor of an incomparable love that they have for his divine majesty, carry out their office and ministry in flames and the outbursts and trans­ ports of love, which makes them shine and sing unceasingly the holy Tri­ sagion: Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth. . . . They also take the superius in this wondrous music, and the Cherubim, mixing their angelic voices with the Thrones in the same tone, create together a mel­ ody of praise so charming that they draw all the hearts and voices of the other inferior angels: they enter and each hold their part in this ravishing concert of angelic music, composed of diverse graceful gestures, such as agreeably varied tones, to the praise and glory of the Creator.47

Jean de Sainte Geneviève followed convention in generalizing contemplative adoration as the ultimate vocation of all angels, even if the Seraphim repre­ sented its purest fulfillment. The clear implication is that the ruler-­ruled relationship in Louis XIV’s France was at basis doxological and thus not really subject to rational scru­ tiny.48 This mystification of political relations was pervasive in monarchist rhetoric under Louis XIV, which rehearsed the old tropes of the celestial court and angelic publicity in support of a newly puissant mystère d’état. For ex­ ample, the Augustinian Jean-­François Senault published his treatise on sov­ ereignty, Le Monarque, ou les devoirs du souverain, just after Louis XIV’s as­­sumption of personal rule, and he characterized the Conseil du roi as the highest order of angels gathered around the throne: “I imagine thus that [the king] is in the midst of his counselors, as holy Scripture represents God in the midst of his angels. . . . He is seated on a throne of light surrounded by these blessed Spirits.”49 Four years later, the Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne’s L’Art de régner drew a similar parallel but reserved the fiery, exalted nature of the highest angels for princes and recommended that royal counselors emulate the effectiveness of the lower angelic orders.50 Royal iconography rendered this angelological political imaginary more literally. In many commemorative and calendrical engravings issued by royal printers in the first decades of the reign, the king was shown crowned, pro­ tected, or acclaimed by angels.51 For instance, an almanach of 1667 shows Louis blessed and heralded by angelic attendants, and at the king’s feet a cherub leads a mixed ensemble in a “chorus d’une harmonie parfaite” (cho­ rus of perfect harmony), while another cherub holds a partbook inscribed,

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“Chantons sa gloire / Admirant sa virtu” (Let us sing his glory, / Admiring his virtue).52 Other almanachs show peoples glorifying the king in concert with the angels. Many of these have a strong imperial bent, featuring allegorical foreign states or the “parties de la terre”—­Africa, America, Asia, Europe—­ contemplating Louis’s supremacy, majesty, or virtue.53 The almanach of 1679, “L’Accord des nations par le moyen de la paix,” has just such an image, com­ memorating the Treaties of Nijmegen ending the Dutch War (figure 1.2). An­ gels with trumpets issuing the words “Vive le roi” surround “La France,” and a portrait of the king, whose power the engraver mystically represents as an eye emitting a solar corona flanked by fleurs de lys and framed by clouds. The assembled European nations take up the angels’ acclamation, while in the foreground a mixed consort—­including a Flemish harpsichordist, Spanish guitarist, and singers whose exotic costumes suggest the parties du monde—­ performs a vocal minuet that the engraver has notated legibly at the bottom of the print. Scored for a dessus and basse, their minuet, “Vive le roi,” is well within the capacity of skilled amateurs, and its presentation within a scene of music-making seems to invite the almanach’s users to join in.54 The musical praxis that most closely approached the angelic contempla­ tion idealized in the almanachs and other prints occurred in royal ceremonies and liturgical rites.55 This long history includes the medieval tradition of the laudes intoned at the coronation of French kings, whose acclamatory func­ tion was documented in Kantorowicz’s classic study, Laudes Regiae.56 In the century of Louis XIV, festive settings of the Te Deum marked French victo­ ries, royal entries, dynastic births or recoveries, and other public events, and, as a number of musicologists have noted, their performance on such occa­ sions repurposed the hymn’s angelic cry of praise as popular royal acclaim:57 Tibi omnes Angeli, tibi Caeli: et universae Potestates: Tibi Cherubim et Seraphim incessabili voce proclamant: Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus: Dominus Deus Sabaoth. Pleni sunt caeli et terra majestates gloriae tuae.58 [To you all angels, the heavens, and all the powers therein, / To you cherubim and seraphim cry without ceasing: / Holy, holy, holy: Lord God of armies, / Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of your glory.]

A similar operation occurs in encomiastic music for services at the Cha­ pelle Royale, including the Sanctus item of the Ordinary, psalms given in royalist paraphrase, the Domine salvum fac Regem that concluded the Mass,

figure 1.2 L’Accord des nations par le moyen de la paix: Almanach de 1679 (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

39

the politics of glory

Petit Chœur

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example 1.3 Henri Du Mont, Magnificat, “Gloria patri” (ed. Jean-­Paul C. Montagnier [Stuttgart: Carus-­Verlag, 2003])

as well as glorifying sections of grands motets.59 An example of the latter is the Lesser Doxology that normally concluded settings of the Magnificat: “Glo­­ ria patri, et filio, et spiritui sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et sem­ per, et in sæcula sæculorum. Amen.” Henri Du Mont’s Magnificat setting (pub. 1686) distinguishes the doxology musically in ways that seem to mark it as exceptionally sacred: it is assigned to the grand and petit chœur in the

œ

40

chapter one

ú.

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3

example 1.3 (continued)

longest choral section (103 measures) of any of Du Mont’s motets, and its stile antico manner contrasts with the surrounding sections, especially the solemn fugato for the “Gloria patri” itself (example 1.3).60 Moreover, a ver­ sion of the “Sanctus motif” (ut re mi fa mi re) that Montagnier has identified in contemporary Te Deum settings makes an appearance here as well, be­ ginning with the solo haute-­taille in measure 247, underlining the scrip­

the politics of glory

41

tural and political link with Seraphic praise.61 Finally, with the concluding choral “amen,” Du Mont returns to the fugato texture of the “Gloria patri,” evoking the ceaseless praise of the angels in glory. In Du Mont’s setting, as elsewhere, the “amen” elides distinctions among angelic, ecclesiastical, and citizen acclamation, and its flowing counterpoint and buoyant triple meter suggest the intrinsic joy attributed to the angels.62

An Angelology of the Contemplative Chorus French-­language opera inherited the contemplative chorus from the sixteenth-­ and seventeenth-­century ballet de cour, machine play, and mythological pas­ torale, as well as from Renaissance humanist tragedy and, more distantly, the classical Greek paean, hymn, and encomium.63 Cambert, Lully, and their poet collaborators, especially Benserade, Perrin, and Quinault, were most directly responsible for this transmission into French opera, but Mazarin’s Italian-­ language productions in the 1640s and ’50s must also have contributed, with their encomiastic prologues and French-­style ballets. As in these earlier forms of courtly musical theater, choruses of glorifi­ cation, supplication, and so forth in tragédies en musique were nearly always self-­referential, and their content was often highly emotional.64 Indeed, they typically combined what classicist Claude Calame labels, in his taxonomy of Attic tragic choruses, “performative” and “emotive” voices, the latter of which was heavily supplemented in opera by composers’ musical settings.65 Beyond their similar modes of address, contemplative choruses were distin­ guished by the varying “enunciative levels” of their lyrical “I/we,” which French librettists nearly always rendered as nous (or the first-­person plural conjugation, as in “parlons”).66 Articulating this “we” in glorification cho­ ruses established a public of a particular sort, one that potentially extended beyond the stage reality and was defined by its ardor toward the majesty that it contemplates (e.g., the gods, Louis XIV). The affect-­based publicity that such choruses summoned was one of their main political functions. But the chorus’s enunciative “we” was not only defined by its relationship with glo­ rious sovereignty or its proxies; it also took its place within onstage cosmic and social hierarchies that were themselves politicized. Furthermore, to the extent that the chorus conducted itself appropriately for its social location, it affirmed the rightness of the fictive hierarchical order as well as the power that brought it into being. As Kintzler points out, onstage choruses and dance troupes most often represented the middling dimension bourgeoisie that was otherwise miss­ ing from most lyric tragedies through the mid-­eighteenth century.67 Many

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choruses were designated by their social roles (e.g. guerriers/guerrières), while others occupied a hierarchy of allegorical or supernatural beings. In its hierarchical organization as well as its politicized ardor, the contemplative chorus showed an affinity with ancien régime commentary on the angels and their offices. Still, lyric tragedies did not organize their fictive worlds with anything like the comprehensiveness or precision of the celestial/earthly hi­­ erarchies of angelological thought. The concern of most librettos is with the aristocratic or crypto-­aristocratic dramatic personas and their internal hier­ archies of rank, gender, and religion. One gets the impression, in fact, that all other occupants of the stage were, in some sense, negligible. And yet, opera’s onstage groups were indispensable as well. They were in every respect sup­ plementary to the political and social vision of the tragédie en musique, and like most supplements they were both marginal and integral to it. The five-­act tragédies that Lully composed in the 1670s and ’80s featured many choruses of glorification, acclamation, or supplication, which served as the model for contemplative choruses through the 1780s. Lully and Qui­­nault’s Thésée is an early work that included all three types of choral address. In act 1 of the 1675 court production the high priestess and her priestesses im­­­plore Minerva’s protection (1.9–­10), in an example of choral supplication. Act 2 fea­ tures the Athenian populace (“La Populace d’Athenes”) acclaiming Theseus as their future king. Although acclamation choruses were common, this par­ ticular sequence is unusual in depicting popular election (a departure that is perhaps explained by the democratic character of historical Athens). In fact, Quinault cast doubt on this election’s legitimacy by portraying the Athenians as fickle in act 2, scene 5, and by concluding the opera with the gods’ success­ ful nomination of Theseus as the king’s successor. In this culminating scene, Quinault deployed a double chorus of Athenians and divinities in Minerva’s train, who jointly celebrate the rightness of Theseus’s dominion and the well-­ ordered nature of the world under his government.68 Lully augmented this celebration with a large complement of instruments accompanying the gods, including pairs of basses de violon and theorbos, as well as four trumpets.69 Choruses like these in praise of a ruler, god, or hero were most common in the Lullian tragédie en musique, and it was in the prologues where this type of choral song really shone. The performative nature of most such choruses means that their vocal texts read like a catalogue of glorifying acts. The pro­ logue of Isis, for example, is set in the palace of Renown, and the first word of its opening chorus is “Publions”: “Publions en tous lieux / Du plus grand des héros la valeur triomphante” (Let us publicize everywhere / The trium­ phant valor of the greatest of heroes).70 Following their opening chorus, the figure of Renown (La Renommée) reminds the assembly of their obligation

the politics of glory

43

to admire their hero and recount his virtues and deeds. And Renown’s reti­ nue complies with a chorus modeling happiness as the most appropriate af­­ fective response to the king, in his role as the roi justicier: Heureux l’empire Qui suit ses lois! Il faut le dire Cent et cent fois.71 [Contented is the realm / That obeys his laws! / Let it be said / Hundreds of times over.]

Once again, Lully embellished the solo and chorus with interjected passages for trumpets and strings, and the whole unfolds in a dancelike triple meter that underscores the joyfulness of the text. A number of operas from the last years of Louis XIV’s reign also included such choruses, but in these works, as well as in the opéras-­ballet that gained in popularity in these decades, choral groups tend to laud peace and love in ways that were more loosely connected to the monarchy. Georgia Cowart presents a compelling argument that thematics of love, peace, and pleasure in many operas created during these years articulated a growing distinction of the Parisian beau monde (and certain court factions) from Louis XIV’s Versailles establishment.72 Public enjoyment, in particular, seemed increas­ ingly autonomous from festive sovereignty in opera. For my purposes, what is most noteworthy in this development is artists’ appropriation of the con­ templative chorus as part of a political theology for an emerging civil society, which was starting to distinguish itself from the state and its sovereign. In the opéras-­ballet and certain lyric tragedies of the late reign and the Regency, the chorus began to contemplate the glory of society itself and articulated its publicity in relation to this new governmental order, as well as to monarchi­ cal sovereignty.73 Contemplative choruses addressed to gods and princes persisted in trag­ édies en musique created during the Regency and the early years of Louis XV’s personal reign. A more prominent theme in these years was popular ac­ clamation of a ruler’s ascent to the throne. Jean-­Baptiste Stuck’s Polydore (1720), with a libretto likely penned by Simon-­Joseph Pellegrin, includes an acclamation chorus in its last act. The third scene of act 5 is set in the pal­ ace of Polymnester, where a chorus of Thracians and Trojans passionately hails Polydorus as their king.74 Twelve years later, Michel Pignolet de Mon­ téclair and Pellegrin debuted their biblical opera Jephté, which was noted at

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the time for its choruses. In the act 3 divertissement, the tribes of Israel and their leaders acknowledge Jephtha as their king in a magnificent polychoral sequence (example 1.4): Pour le vainqueur, signalons nôtre zèle, Il fait le bonheur de ces lieux; Célébrons sa gloire immortelle, Que son nom vole jusqu’aux cieux.75 [Let us signal our zeal for the conqueror, / These locales owe their hap­ piness to him;/ Let us celebrate his immortal glory, / May his name rise to the heavens.]

example 1.4 Montéclair, Jephté, act 3, scene 5, from the second printed edition (Paris: Boivin, [1733])

the politics of glory

45

example 1.4 (continued)

As in many earlier acclamation divertissements, dance and its music are an important support for the choruses’ contemplation of glory. Here, a chaconne performed by a troupe of Hebrews following the double chorus contributes the dance’s conventional associations with ardor and festive sovereignty.76 And the chorus augments the dance in turn with its vocal chaconne, “Que nos chants dans les airs retentissent.” In the 1740s, through the upheavals at the Opéra in the 1750s and ’60s, new serious works continued to feature choruses of glorification, although the old tragédie was rapidly losing ground to opéra-­comique and other lighter genres during these years.77 Jean-­Marie Leclair’s Scylla et Glaucus (1746) has a late example of an encomiastic prologue that includes a concluding chorus in praise of Louis XV and the Dauphin, “Que digne fils du plus grand des

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example 1.4 (continued)

vainqueurs.”78 After 1749, académie productions no longer included prologues, but contemplative choruses remained part of the acts themselves, especially in onstage fêtes. Dauvergne’s operas often included such choruses, as in Enée et Lavinie (1758), Canente (1760), and Polyxène (1763).79 Other important changes were taking place in choral performance at the Opéra in these years. Mary Cyr points out that the size of the chorus (espe­ cially the dessus and basse sections) deployed in académie productions in­ creased dramatically by the 1750s.80 Did these larger choral forces influence how composers or even librettists created contemplative choruses in new (or significantly revised) works? These decades also saw experiments with choral movement, gesture, and greater participation in the dramatic action, as studies by Antonia Banducci, Thomas Betzwieser, Cyr, and others have demonstrated.81 Did the acting chorus of the later eighteenth century per­

the politics of glory

47

form contemplative choruses differently? And, if so, how might this have affected their representation of publicity? These questions are beyond my purview here, but it is at least worth not­ ing the persistence of contemplative choral numbers in new serious reper­ tory of the 1770s and ’80s, both in old-­fashioned divertissements and in the more integrated tableaus that Gluck introduced at the Opéra. The latter’s Iphigénie en Aulide for Paris in 1774, for example, included a popular cel­ ebratory fête in praise of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia in act 1. Placed initially in the wings before they process onto the stage, the chorus of Greeks sings: Que d’attraits, que de majesté! Que de grâces, que de beauté! Qu’aux auteurs de ses jours elle doit être chère! Agamemnon est à la fois Le plus fortuné père, Le plus heureux époux et le plus grand des rois.82 [What allurements, what majesty! / What grace, what beauty! / How dear she must be to her parents! / Agamemnon is at once / The luckiest father, / The happiest spouse / And the greatest of kings.]

The chorus’s sentiments would not have been out of place in one of Lully’s divertissements, even if their simple, periodic vocal setting is unmistakably Gluckian and galant. In contrast, “Chantez, célébrez votre reine,” sung by Achilles and the Thessalians in honor of Iphigenia in act 2, is a C-­major march embellished with horns, trombones, and timpani.83 Piccinni too included a complex scene of choral homage in his setting of Marmontel’s Didon, which debuted at Fontainebleau in 1783. Near the end of act 2, Marmontel devises a ceremonial scene featuring a double chorus of Carthaginians and Trojans, who come together to sing in praise of queen Dido’s consort and military defender, Aeneas: Au fils d’une grande déesse, Rendons un hommage éclatant. Qu’il règne et triomphe sans cesse. Jusqu’aux cieux sa gloire s’étend.84 [To the son of a great goddess, / Let us pay brilliant homage. / May he reign and triumph unceasingly. / His glory reaches up to the heavens.]

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Piccinni set their song of homage as a D-­major march, sung by the combined six-­part chorus and accompanied by trumpets, horns, and timpani, in addition to a full complement of strings and winds. Even more than Gluck’s act 2 di­ vertissement for Iphigénie en Aulide, Piccinni’s chorus was all martial pomp and brilliance, anticipating the showy spectacles of postrevolutionary grand opera. Military figures were generally more prominent as objects of glorification in operas of the late eighteenth century. Nicolas-­François Guillard’s adapta­ tion of Corneille’s celebrated tragedy Chimène, ou le Cid was set by Sacchini in 1783 and performed at Fontainebleau just days after Piccinni’s very suc­ cessful Didon. It too included an extended divertissement sequence in hom­ age to a military leader, Rodrigo, who successfully defends Seville against an army of North African “Moors.” Like Piccinni, Sacchini set the choral passages of the divertissement as a D-­major vocal march, accompanied by ceremonial brass and winds. Guillard’s 1786 libretto for Salieri, Les Horaces, likewise contrived a celebratory divertissement in honor of the war hero, Horace, near the end of act 3. The opera was a failure, but the composer’s startlingly original Tarare, with its libretto by Pierre-­Augustin Beaumarchais, took Paris by storm. In it, Beaumarchais repurposed the convention of the glorifying chorus for a new political moment. The penultimate scene concludes with a chorus cel­ ebrating the coronation of Tarare, who has displaced the tyrannical ruler Atar. “Quel plaisir de nos cœurs s’empare,” sung by the “chœur general,” functions much like glorification choruses in the tragédie en musique rep­ ertory. Yet Tarare is a common soldier, and in the 1787 version of the opera, he reluctantly assumes leadership of a reformed monarchical state in which succession is no longer dynastic, but elective. In Beaumarchais’s version of a coronation, it is the chorus of militiamen and citizens that delegates authority to the king. They even take a collective oath of allegiance, in an unmistakable claim to popular sovereignty.85 Beaumarchais’s first version of the final scene also revised serious opera’s convention of tying glory to regality or nobility. The poet called for Nature and the Genie of Fire to descend in a gloire, accompanied by thunder and lightning, and they articulate a new, patently bourgeois basis for glory: Mortel, qui que tu sois, prince, Brame ou soldat; Homme! Ta grandeur sur la terre, N’appartient point à ton état; Elle est toute à ton caractère.86

the politics of glory

49

[Mortal, whomever you are, prince, Brahmin, or soldier; / Man! Your greatness on earth, / Is not due to your status; / It is owed entirely to your character.]

Salieri had the voices intone this principle in imposing octaves doubled by the brass, winds, and timpani—­a texture and instrumentation that clothes Nature’s dictum in a musical dignity previously reserved for rank (état). In the denouement of Tarare, glory is delinked from status and democratized as a function of citizenly virtue. It would be a mistake to see such choral tableaus in the prerevolutionary years as representing a total disenchantment of the Opéra’s political imagi­ nary. The appeal to nature and a morality unmoored from divinity secular­ ized the scene of choral glorification but did not profane it.87 The choruses in Tarare’s final scenes preserved their old sacralizing and publicizing func­ tions, except that the majesty they hailed issued sublimely from their collec­ tive nous. La liberté, la patrie, le peuple, and la loi would all receive similar choral homage in operas produced during the Revolution, where the role of collective song on and off the lyric stage arguably remained, at basis, doxol­ ogical. For the most part, artists simply adapted the sacral form of opera’s glory machine to a republican context. As a review of Lemoyne’s one-­act “tableau patriotique,” Toute la Grèce, ou Ce que peut la liberté (1794), put it, “All the arts should celebrate Liberty, and Music too. It is through songs that peoples honor Divinity, and Liberty is the Divinity of Republican Peo­ ples.”88 The glorious power adored by opera’s choruses may have changed, but their angelic vocation did not.

Contemplation as Choral Vocation One of the most striking features of choruses in French prologues and diver­ tissements is how little they did as a component of the drama. This quality has often been remarked in their general inactivity, their spectacular orien­ tation, and the festive or ritualistic music that composers tended to give them. While choruses elsewhere in lyric tragedies certainly contributed to the action, the contemplative choruses of opera’s fêtes were, for the most part, preoccupied with glorious being and its enjoyment. I have argued that the contemplation of glory was the chorus’s most es­ sential purpose in this tradition, a purpose that aligned it with the doxologi­ cal vocation of the angels in Christian thought. If this is true, it would hardly dispel the chorus’s reputation as a nonpolitical element of ancien régime

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opera. Kintzler’s assessment of the chorus and dance corps in a recent essay on “le peuple” in the tragédie en musique is representative of this posi­ tion. While “there are a lot of people on stage” in tragédies, she writes, “the collective presence . . . does not act as an agent; it is an object, an indirect part of the drama.”89 For Kintzler, the spectacular ontology of group perfor­ mance in the tragédie en musique manifests in a lack of onstage political power: opera’s collectivities, she argues, are essentially passive objects of the protagonists’ action, rather than actors themselves.90 This collective stage presence, therefore, cannot translate into a proper political community in an Aristotelian sense. Lacking the ability to influence the action (dramatic agency), opera’s collectivities are disqualified from acting authoritatively and effectively within their fictional polities (political agency), whose true agents are royal and noble personas. Kintzler’s assessment of the opera chorus as largely inactive does not take into account the many instances when it does influence the dramatic action.91 Nevertheless, her core argument about the chorus’s inactivity is very insightful, especially with regard to the modes of choral song that I dis­ cuss here. Choral praise, supplication, or celebration are essentially static elements of lyric drama. In fact, developing Kintzler’s insights, we could say that the prominence of the contemplative chorus inclines opera’s prologues and divertissements toward oratorio, in a deep sense of the term as stem­ ming from oratio, or prayer.92 This oratorical penchant removes choral song from the canonic ideal of voice as a medium of rational agency, which was key to the classical and neoclassical legitimation of tragedy. Where I differ from Kintzler is in the conclusions that I draw from this observation. Rather than disqualifying the tragédie en musique as a kind of political theater, I see the inoperativity of the contemplative chorus as central to its politics. “Inoperativity” shifts the discussion from the agency of choral song toward its role in governmental economy, as a means to a political end. As Agamben develops the idea (building on Alexandre Kojève’s concept of désoeuvrement), inoperativity suspends activity calculated to achieve certain ends, which may mean nonactivity, diverting an act from its proper function, or activity that is purposeless, like play.93 He uses the term “sabbatism” to describe this suspension of purposeful action in pure potentiality and, in a critical revision of Aristotle, locates it at the heart of political life.94 Agamben’s conception of inoperativity stems from a twentieth-­century philosophical tradition critical of late capitalism, which he sees as “gigantic apparatus for capturing pure means.”95 Nevertheless, antecedents for the idea of inoperative life are present in early modern political thought, where a Sabbath-­like state of repose was commonly held to be the highest end of

the politics of glory

51

well-­governed individuals and states. As Bodin pointed out, God blessed the Sabbath “above all other days as the holy day of rest, so that men might then have leisure to contemplate His works, His law, and His glory.” He concluded, “Such is the final end of well-­ordered commonwealths, and they are the more happy the more nearly they come to realizing it.”96 Bodin knew that such a state was unattainable in human societies, as contemplative life was not easily reconciled with the purposive action re­ quired for government (whose work seemed increasingly without end).97 But opera a century later did not limit itself to the practicable. With its spectacu­ lar ceremonies and fêtes, opera’s creators freely imagined the end of govern­ ment as an angelic sabbatism realized in the here and now, and contempla­ tive song was integral to its vision. If we return for a moment to Cadmus, we find this fantasy in the revelry that concludes the prologue. Recall that the sun god’s epiphany interrupts the solemnities following his defeat of the Python, and he demands the assembly’s ecstatic contemplation, “pour prix de mes travaux.” With the god’s coup, order is restored, good government is achieved, and the community is renewed. What could the enjoyment of nymphs and shepherds, expressed in song and movement, possibly add to this state of perfection? Yet the fête goes on, because in the prologue’s sacral­ ized vision of power even when the need for government and its economy has passed, there remains the sheer splendor of being. The choristers sing, then, for no good reason. Even the meaning of their verses and music matters less, in this respect, than their diegetic performance itself. “Profitons des beaux jours” (let us enjoy lovely days), they sing over and over in their vocal minuet, reveling in the awareness of their enjoyment (or future enjoyment) as much as in enjoyment itself. In the process, they evoke a “we” that is capable of enjoyment and that regards itself, as such, with sat­ isfaction. Agamben recalls a dictum of Spinoza’s Ethics that is apropos here as well. “Self-­satisfaction,” Spinoza wrote, “is the joy that is produced by con­ templating ourselves and our own power of action.”98 What generates this joy, Agamben adds, is a leisurely experience of the “act-­ability” or “live-­ability” of an “I” or, in the case of the opera chorus, a “we.”99 Beyond and beneath their utility for governmentalities of various sorts, then, contemplative choruses in this repertory hold out a promise of life turned to no end at all. This promise is just discernible in choruses’ frequent use of a performative voice, where they enunciate a subjective “we” that has the capacity to carry out whatever action is described. Singing is, of course, the most elementary choral act, and many numbers begin with an energetic anacrusis on “chantons,” as in the chorus from Armide cited near the be­ ginning of this chapter. Prior to praising anything, an ensemble or fictive

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group joyfully contemplates itself as a body that sings together. It passes in a moment, and Lully controlled the setting of “Chantons la douceur de ses lois” so carefully that its performance seems almost entirely given over to the purpose of praise. Later composers, though (especially Rameau), allowed glorifying choruses to revel much more in their own capacities, repeating or heavily embellishing performative words (such as “chantons”), perform­ ing gratuitously complex textures with little bearing on meaning; or singing less-­directed, repetitive, or static harmonies.100 Such musical inoperativity is not limited to opera’s choruses, of course.101 In many ways it is the feature that most distinguished lyric tragedy from its spoken counterpart. However much French critics tried to rationalize the musicality of opera’s sung verse and symphonies, they acknowledged mu­ sic’s propensity to divert tragic expression from its purpose of truthfulness and ethical efficacy. Typically they laid this on the Italians. As d’Alembert opined in De la liberté de la musique, “The Italians are less fortunate than us. The prodigious quantity of sonatas we have by them count for nothing. All this purely instrumental music has no purpose or aim, speaks neither to the mind nor to the soul, and begs the question posed by Fontenelle: ‘Sonate que me veux-­tu?’” At basis, his worry about the purposelessness of nontexted music was a concern over its inoperativity.102 In music and the “songish” dimension of lyric poetry French commentators sensed a gratu­ itousness that threatened to suspend the regularity of their poetics.103 Music’s gratuitous nature, which potentially upends opera’s expressive economy, was seen by Fontenelle’s contemporaries as an ontological trait. It is nonetheless true that the Opéra’s artists readily put contemplative cho­ ruses to work in support of sovereign and other governmentalities, seizing on their political utility. Indeed, for much of its history, the tragédie en mu­ sique’s fêtes presented a fantasy of eternal repose that could be turned to any number of ideological ends, but that most often served as a telos of absolut­ ist government. Yet the repose of the chorus in contemplating its own pow­ ers had an anarchic tendency as well. The chorus’s leisurely enjoyment was, paradoxically, both the basis for its political value and what potentially di­ verted its singing from all economy. What does the chorus’s melic contemplation do, then, for power? Noth­ ing much at all, and that is precisely the point.

c h a p t e r t wo

Choral Lament and the Mourning Public

I

f the public virtue of opera’s choruses was expressed consummately in praise, the loss of their glorious icons elicited an outpouring of grief in song. Grieving the deaths of princes, heroes, and other public figures was a main­ stay of tragédie en musique plots, as it was in other forms of early modern opera and courtly spectacle. However, unlike in these other forms, mourning in French opera was fundamentally collective. While the creators of dramma per musica and other Italianate opera preferred the solo lament for express­ ing grief, the French envisioned mourning as a dialogical exchange between personas and a community represented by the chorus and dance corps. When a protagonist in a tragédie en musique dies, then, he or she is mourned not only in moving lament monologues but in choral laments that are among the most passionate and musically adventurous numbers in the repertory. The collective nature of mourning in the tragédie en musique formed the chorus into a fictive public in ways that recalled the glorification choruses discussed in the last chapter. Like those choruses, choral laments could con­­ fer legitimacy, they expressed collective feeling, and they usually affirmed a hierarchical social order. In fact, choral lament can be thought of as a spe­ cial mode of glorification in opera, because it also engaged onstage groups in contemplating glorious being and articulating a collectivity in the process. The main difference is that lamenting choruses voice a collective “we” be­ reft of this presence. In both praise and mourning, choruses forged a doxo­ logical relationship with an exalted other, but in mourning they expressed strongly negative feeling in response to absence and loss. The loss that provokes choral lament in tragedie librettos generally stems from the kind of plot-­defining “destructive or painful action” that Aristotle described as a pathos.1 Theatrical experience of pathos had a cathartic func­ tion in Aristotelian poetics, and neoclassical theorists of spoken tragedy often 53

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repeated this aim, reinterpreting it in accordance with a Cartesian mecha­ nistic model of the passions.2 As Blair Hoxby points out, early modern com­ mentators on Aristotle routinely conflated pathos with the kind of passion it provoked, and they generally stressed pathetic experience as the chief plea­ sure and purpose of tragedy.3 The tragédie en musique was even more closely associated with the imitation of the passions, including the “emotional dis­ turbance or spiritual pain” of pathos and the expressive laments performed by soloists and choruses naturally supported this aim.4 The pathos of choral lamentation had a political character that stemmed from its communal, public nature in the stage world as much as from the exalted status of the personas that choral groups mourned. To take just one well-­known example, Jean-­Philippe Rameau’s Castor et Pollux (1737) opens with a funeral scene in which the people of Sparta mourn the death of their king, Castor. The orchestral prelude for this scene is itself a portrait of grief, with its slow march rhythms and mournful chromatic descents.5 But it is the choral lament, “Que tout gémisse,” that stages the Spartan citizens’ re­ sponse to Castor’s death (example 2.1a): Que tout gémisse, Que tout s’unisse: Préparons, élevons d’éternels monuments Au plus malheureux des amants: Que jamais nôtre amour, ni son nom ne périsse; Que tout s’unisse, Que tout gémisse.6 [Let everyone groan, / Let everyone join together: / Let us prepare, let us raise eternal monuments / To the most unfortunate of lovers: / May neither our love nor his name ever perish; / Let everyone join together, / Let everyone groan.]

Although the Spartans’ chorus, like the opera as a whole, emphasizes the ill-­ fated love of Castor and Télaïre, Castor’s death is also a loss for the city, and his pompe funèbre (funeral ceremony) brings the onstage group together as a fictive political community. This is an unusual kind of political community, as what unites it is not a shared purpose, leader, or identity so much as an awareness of common loss and vulnerability, of the sort that Judith Butler has described in her work on precarity.7 Characteristically, mourning choruses in opera come together in the course of expressing pathetic feeling and contemplating their own collec­­

choral lament and the mourning public

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example 2.1a Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Castor et Pollux (1737 version), act 1, scene 1 (from ROC, vol. 8 [Paris: A Durand et fils, 1903/New York: Broude Brothers, 1968] and Rameau, Castor et Pollux [Paris: Prault fils et al, (1737)])

tive capacities, especially through use of the performative voice that librettists so often gave them at these moments. In the example from Castor, Rameau’s librettist, Pierre-­Joseph Bernard, gave the chorus verses that are little more than stage cues, voicing their determination to cry out in suffering (gemir), to draw together as a community, and to love and remember their king. Very little of this actually concerns the deceased: as is often the case, this mourn­ ing chorus is about mourning itself, as well as vulnerability to loss and the suffering that it brings. Words have mainly an annunciative purpose here, and so it is Rameau’s music that does the work of communicating the Spartans’ pathos. His solemn setting depicts their collective shock and sorrow with its F-­minor tonality,

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example 2.1a (continued)

prominent diminished harmonies (e.g., on “gémisse” in measure 14), and skill­ ful use of stasis and silence. In the final statement of “Que tout s’unisse” (mea­ sures 45–­49), for example, the chorus’s flat affect and rhythmic inertia sug­ gest a community drawn together by trauma and, perhaps, an inability to respond, with the work of lamentation left temporarily to the orchestra and its chromaticism (example 2.1b). Indeed, at several points in the re­­frain the entire ensemble falls silent following stark tutti chords, as even the orchestra joins in the communal mourning. Choruses like “Que tout gémisse” raise questions about the aesthetic imag­­ ination of publicness in moments of collective loss, whether in the ancien régime or the recent past that is Butler’s focus. In fact, opera artists’ repre­ sentation of collective mourning mediated entrenched patterns of partici­

57

choral lament and the mourning public

pating in state funerary culture in ways that illustrate an unusually strong interdependence of operatic representation and social practice. A clear ex­ ample of this relationship, as it pertained to music, is the likeness between Rameau’s chorus, “Que tout gémisse,” (example 2.1a) and the initial verset of Michel-­Richard de Lalande’s De Profundis setting (S23) (example 2.2). In this particular instance, the stylistic and registral resemblance is so close that it suggests the De Profundis as a possible model for Rameau’s chorus, as Graham Sadler has proposed.8 Moreover, if opera sometimes borrowed from funeral media, the latter also took their cue, to an extent, from opera.9 “Que

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example 2.1b Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Castor et Pollux (1737 version), act 1, scene 1 (from ROC, vol. 8 [Paris: A Durand et fils, 1903/New York: Broude Brothers, 1968] and Rameau, Castor et Pollux [Paris: Prault fils et al, (1737)])

-

example 2.2 Michel de Lalande, De Profundis (S. 23), “De profundis” (ed. Louis Castelain [Versailles: Éditions du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, 2011])

example 2.3 Attr. François Rebel and François Francoeur, arrangement of Gilles, Messe des morts (Kyrie II), 1764 version (from F-­Pn D-­11135 and F-­Pn H-­494 [A-­B])

choral lament and the mourning public

59

tout gémisse” itself was later adapted as the second Kyrie for Rameau’s own Funeral Mass at the Oratoire du Louvre in 1764, bringing the connection be­ tween funeral ceremonial and the operatic stage full circle (example 2.3).10 Of course, given the poetic constraints of the tragédie en musique and the success of Rameau’s chorus, we can assume that he and Pellegrin sought to present public mourning as it should be, in accordance with the principle of vraisemblance. To the extent that choruses like this fulfilled expecta­ tions of plausibility, then, they offer us a sense of ideal public comportment and participation when prominent deaths threatened dynastic continuity, state stability, or security. They also challenge our own assumptions about what it means for a loss to be collective in the first place. Who was this “we” who sustained public loss, properly speaking, in a monarchic state with no real public representation? And how did opera artists translate an elite under­ standing of this collectivity for the lyric stage? For answers we need to know something about practices of public mourn­ ing in France, which differed significantly from our own. The tragédie en mu­ sique’s mourning scenes hew closest to historical practices in their stylized mimesis of state funerals. Librettists’ and designers’ imaginings of collective mourning adopted specific aspects of state funerary ceremonial under the Bourbons, as I discuss below. But their most significant borrowing was the obligatory, hierarchical participation that they envisioned for opera’s onstage mourners.

Mourning in French Public Life Death and its ceremonial were an everyday part of Parisian life. Between fifteen to twenty thousand burials took place each year in Paris during the late seventeenth century, or forty to fifty-­five per day on average, in a com­ pact urban environment inhabited by some half a million people.11 Yet state funerals were anything but ordinary events. They were reserved for persons whose deaths were of dynastic or political significance, especially members of the royal family, and they were ordered directly by the crown.12 In his 1683 treatise on funerary design, the Jesuit writer Claude-­François Ménestrier summarized the main components of state funerals as “the in­ vitation, the convoy, the service, the eulogies, and the interment.”13 In re­ ality, state death ceremonial began well before death.14 In his or her final hours, the dying gave a final confession and received last rites and extreme unction, often with great ceremony. Upon death, the body was prepared for display in the death chamber, and members of the family and the court ar­ rived to sprinkle holy water over the corpse while the clergy psalmodied and

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celebrated Low Masses nearby. Within a day or two the body was opened and examined by court physicians, and the corpse, heart, and entrails were embalmed. The shrouded corpse and embalmed remains were moved to a room set up for mourning (the grand cabinet de deuil), where they were dis­ played more formally on a raised platform surrounded by candles, flowers, and basins of holy water, and in the presence of continual masses and psalm­ ody performed by the clergy and, sometimes, royal musicians. Shortly after­ ward, the embalmed heart was transported via convoy to Val-­de-­Grâce—­where the hearts of most of the Bourbons were interred until the Revolution—­or to another resting place. The body and entrails were later taken by convoy to the royal Basilica of St. Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, where the office and the Mass were celebrated over these remains during the period leading up to the service of interment, which traditionally occurred forty days (a quar­ antaine) after death. The office and High Requiem Mass of interment at St. Denis was one of two elaborate services mandated for state funerals; the other was held at the Cathedral of Notre-­Dame in Paris. The ceremonies themselves centered on the vigils, the Requiem Mass, the eulogy, and the inhumation. By the late sev­ enteenth century it was customary to perform High Masses polyphonically and with instrumental accompaniment at state funerals.15 The Mass was sometimes interspersed with dramatic motets, such as the threnody (Surrexit vir bellator) performed during commemorative services for Turenne at Rouen in 1675, or Charpentier’s occasional motet, In obitum (H. 409), and his setting of the De profundis (H. 189), both performed during memorial services for Louis XIV’s queen consort, Marie-­Thérèse (d. 1683).16 Following the offertory, a prominent orator delivered the eulogy (oraison funèbre), widely regarded as a high point of the services. After the completion of the Mass, the corpse was interred in the crypt, and, in addition to the usual prayers performed by the officiant, attending musicians often performed a polyphonic De Profundis. Immediately after the interment and the retrieval of regalia, the roi d’armes (royal herald) formally dissolved the political status and familial and patron­ age ties of the dead through ceremonial proclamation. At the inhumation of Louis XIV the herald famously cried out three times, “The king is dead” [“le Roi est mort”], and a moment later, “Long live the King” [“vive le Roi”], three times; then the kettledrums, trumpets, oboes, and drums that were in the nave sounded; [the herald] cried again, “Long live Louis XV, king of France and of Navarre”; and the ceremony having finished at five o’clock, everyone went to dinner.17

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Several weeks later the entire ceremony (minus the interment) was repeated in Paris at Notre-­Dame. Public attendance at ancien régime state funerals was semi-­compulsory, more a function of corporate privilège and royal mandate than of spontane­ ous participation. Indeed, public mourning was characterized at the time as a kind of tribute to the sovereign and as the duty of any good subject. Mé­ nestrier wrote, “The command [to mourn] is appropriate when it is in the name of the sovereign that subjects are invited to weep and grieve, which is required of them as a kind of tribute.”18 The composition and organization of attendees at enclosed ceremonies was decided by the royal grand maître and maître des cérémonies, who en­ sured that the corps and other groups traditionally privileged to attend were present, down to and including the poor and orphans, who were paid to carry torches.19 By order of the king, royal heralds and public criers ceremonially announced impending state funeral proceedings to each of the main clerical, municipal, and corporate bodies of Paris, as well as to royal officials and the grands. Admission to these services was hypothetically controlled by tick­ ets (cartons or billets) issued by royal officials, although at the 1712 service for the Dauphine (Marie-­Adélaïde de Savoie) at Notre-­Dame, the press of peo­ ple was so great that the guards let the general public into the loges, and many of those with tickets were turned away, to the king’s displeasure.20 Although royal control over outdoor ceremonies such as funeral convoys was much less complete, the crown still took measures to control public attendance and behavior. This included stationing large numbers of men-­at-­ arms in order to control crowds, but also commanding the presence of lo­ cal inhabitants along the route. Historian Vanessa Harding reports that the bourgeoisie of Paris were expected to drape their houses with black and stand outside holding lit torches when a royal funeral convoy went past. Before Henry IV’s funeral they were also told to rid the streets in front of their homes of sewage and other filth before the cortège passed.21 This explains why the Abbé Raguenet was so astonished when the bourgeoisie of Langres volun­ tarily undertook the expense of adopting mourning garb in honor of Turenne as his convoy passed through their town, “without having received any order from the court.” Madame de Sévigné was similarly amazed by this news, ask­ ing her daughter, the Comtesse de Grignan, “What say you to these natural marks of an affection based on an extraordinary merit?”22 Such “natural,” or spontaneous, public mourning was noteworthy because exceptional. From the perspective of the crown, then, the public mourning that counted did not center on a spontaneous outpouring of personal feeling over

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the loss of a fellow human life, which is what we tend to look for in mourning that takes place in public (especially televised mourning). Rather, it involved status-­appropriate participation in funerary rituals organized, for the most part, by the state. This is not to suggest that mourners necessarily behaved as they were supposed to do. It does suggest, however, that the success of state funerals depended at basis on the public’s insertion into the highly orga­ nized ritual of funeral proceedings. This relatively passive role of the public as a witness of ritual mourning by social and political elites was by far the dominant model during the ancien régime, although it did not preclude other, subjectively directed modes of participation. Even given the semi-­compulsory basis of public mourning, interest in the most high-­profile state funerals must have been to a certain extent genu­ ine. Well-­publicized through print media and, no doubt, rumor, these funer­ als drew large numbers of spectators. The funeral of Queen Marie-­Thérèse is an example, as all of Paris came out to witness the series of ceremonial events following her death on July 30, 1683 (figure 2.1). The royal maître des cérémonies, Nicolas de Sainctot, noted that the procession transporting the queen’s embalmed heart from Versailles to the royal convent of Val-­de-­ Grâce was met by large crowds everywhere it passed, despite the fact that the convoy traveled by night.23 And the Mercure galant reported that four hundred thousand people came out from Paris to witness the cortège carry­ ing her body to St. Denis, where it was to be interred.24 The massive numbers of attendees reported at high-­profile convoys sim­ ply could not have been orchestrated by royal ministers, assuming contem­ porary reports are reasonably accurate. And we have many accounts of appar­ ently spontaneous and sincere public grieving, although few equal reports of the passage of Turenne’s convoy from the battlefield in Alsace to St. Denis in 1675. Witnesses noted the unprecedented turnout everywhere along the route. Madame de Sévigné wrote that “wherever this illustrious bier passes there are tears, cries, crowds, processions, so that they are obliged to travel and arrive by night,” and she warned, “there will be great sorrow if it passes through Paris.”25 Sévigné’s prediction was well founded. Abbé Raguenet re­ called that when Turenne’s body arrived in Paris, daily life in the capital came to a halt, and he concluded that “all of France . . . sounded a common cry of sorrow, its peoples deploring in lamentable tones the danger they believed they had fallen into with such a great loss.”26 While Raguenet’s account in particular had an interest in representing Turenne’s death as a national tragedy, there is no reason to suspect that his depiction of popular grief, if somewhat exaggerated, is not otherwise accurate. Reports like these, extraordinary as they are, point to popular participation in

figure 2.1 Les Derniers soupirs de la très haute, très puissante, et trés vertueuses princesse Marie-­Therese d’Autriche (Paris: Veuve Bertrand, [1684]; Bibliothèque nationale de France)

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state funerals that was not just the product of direct mandate or an exercise of traditional privilège, but that may have been an internalized response to public mourning ritual. It would be naïve, of course, to suppose that even such apparently free and heartfelt collective grieving was independent of state interests. What is most historically interesting, for my purposes, is the social and aesthetic nature of this control. Public grieving involved at least a degree of voluntary emotional dis­ play, and official and semi-­official funeral media elaborated an aristocratic discourse and decorum of politesse in public mourning, meant to shape the literate public’s subjective sense of how to respond to prominent deaths.27 (The behavior of the nonliterate majority was more directly controlled by policing.) These media contributed in two ways: by circulating exemplary models of conduct and feeling—­the old moral discipline of imitatio—­and through aesthetic practices meant to elicit appropriate feeling in individuals. The press played an important role, by publishing death notices, eulo­ gies, commemorative poetry, and reports and images of funeral ceremonies, as well as descriptions and images of grieving royalty and nobility.28 For example, the Mercure galant printed a detailed account of Louis XIV’s pro­ cess of grieving Marie-­Thérèse’s death in 1783. According to the report, the king’s “violent” sorrow eventually gave way to a more restrained emotion (a “douleur sage”), prompting the following observation: Men take everything to excess, and unlimited sorrow reveals too much weakness. It is nonetheless necessary to feel the blows [of grief], other­ wise this would show a soul lacking any feeling of humanity; but sorrow should not possess us so wholly as to put us in a state of forgetting our­ selves and making us descend into baseness, [which is] not only unwor­ thy of persons of high rank, but of all those who call themselves men.29

This ethical reflection on masculine grief and grieving is characteristic of the Mercure, which regularly published contributions debating socially ad­ ept feeling and conduct. However, public mourning ritual itself and its theatrical representation—­ including in opera—­arguably played a greater role in shaping polite mourn­ ing decorum, since the performed nature of funeral ceremonies encouraged certain kinds of mourning behavior and sentiment more directly. Artistic fu­ neral media were particularly important in this regard, especially music, ar­ chitecture, and décor. Polyphonic music for funerals, for example, was meant to inspire or reflect grief and other appropriate passions. The Italianate style of many funerary motets in particular encouraged a highly theatrical form of

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expression and a strong emotional charge, ranging from sublimated sorrow or horror to joy in the Christian afterlife. Contemporary reports suggest that the performance of such works could be very effective. Madame de Sévigné recalled, for example, that Lully’s music for the 1672 funeral of the chancellor of France, Pierre Séguier, was “indescribable”: “Baptiste had done the utmost with all the King’s musicians. His Miserere was extended, and there was a Libera which brought tears to all eyes. I don’t believe there can be any other music in heaven.”30 The Mercure galant likewise emphasized the sorrowful character of music performed at memorial services for Marie-­Thérèse in pro­ vincial towns.31 The elaborate architecture and décor at state funerals were also meant to arouse strong feeling and moral reflection in spectators, much as in the theater or at the Opéra. Ménestrier wrote that in choosing a subject for funeral mausoleums, “It is necessary that this design have something lugu­ brious about it, which arouses sorrow.”32 The boundary between the theater (or the Opéra) and funerary spectacle became even less distinct with the as­ cendance of the more demonstrative Italian style of mausoleums, machines, and décor in the 1670s and ’80s, especially in designs by Jean Bérain, who was the dessinateur du cabinet du Roi and chief designer at the Opéra from 1680 until at least 1707.33 This aesthetic crossover between state funerals and opera or theater drew criticism from many, including royal officials. The maître des cérémonies, Sainctot, singled out Bérain as a particular offender, complaining that the designer had developed a taste for mausoleums and decorations that seemed bet­ ter suited to a theater of opera than to a ceremony as serious as this, in addition to which the mausoleum that he built in the middle of the church occupied nearly the entire width of the choir, preventing the cor­ porate bodies summoned to these ceremonies from seeing either the altar or the princes who carry out the mourning rites.34

In essence, Sainctot was concerned that designers had gone too far in their efforts to provoke an affective response in funeral spectators, distracting them from what, in his view, remained the primary function of the public: witnessing the Funeral Mass and the representative mourning of princes.35 Sainctot’s complaint that Bérain’s mausoleums were better suited to the Opéra than to a cathedral expressed a tension between two ideals of the pub­ lic’s role in state ceremonial. The first saw assembled spectators (aside from the grands) as relatively passive participants whose privileged presence itself satisfied the formal requirements of the ceremony. The second saw the public

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less as objects of ceremonial organization than as subjects participating by dis­ playing appropriate feeling, prompted by funeral media as much as by a par­ ticular death itself. These two ideals were not opposed; in fact, Sainctot him­ self was deeply concerned with the affective charge of funeral regalia, décor, and music.36 Rather, they correlated with two levels of governmental power. The first operated spatially and through ritual and organized the mourning community corporately in ways that mirrored the French hierarchical social order. The second operated through aesthetic media and targeted individuals’ embodied feeling and behavior in the manner analyzed by Foucault. Both models of participation are apparant in ancien régime state funerals, as well as in opera’s stylized pompes funèbres. In fact, opera’s mourning cho­ ruses and dance troupes usually acted very much as Sainctot envisioned: as a subordinate element whose hierarchically organized, witnessing presence itself legitimizes the funerary proceedings in divertissements. More notewor­ thy perhaps is the extent and intensity with which choruses explored the subjective side of public mourning, where the composer’s and musician’s art truly shone.

Opera’s Mourning Publics: Lully through Rameau Lamenting choruses often, though not always, appeared as part of the diver­ tissement section. Their performing forces, textures, and styles varied, but the majority featured the four-­part grand choeur singing in the solemn, chordal style developed by Lully, usually in the minor mode and with a relatively liberal use of dissonance. Aside from providing stylistically apt preludes, the orchestra mainly doubled the vocal parts, although in Rameau’s choruses the accompaniment was characteristically more independent. Choral mourning was sometimes echoed or enhanced by the dance corps, a pairing that had some precedent in classical tragedy—­where mourning choruses danced as well as sang—­but was more immediately inspired by the ballet de cour and its legacy.37 Normally, librettists, composers, and designers organized this onstage community of mourners in a simplified version of the complex social orga­ nization at funerals.38 This hierarchical organization extended beyond the obvious preeminence of protagonists to the kinds of mourning that choruses performed relative to protagonists or, where relevant, other choral or sub-­ choral groups. As we might expect, mourning tableaus assigned the chorus a supporting role vis-­à-­vis protagonists, echoing the public’s subordinate,

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mainly formal participation relative to mourning princes in state funerals. The chorus often simply affirmed or anticipated protagonists’ sentiments (in an “emotive voice”) or, as in Castor et Pollux, self-­referentially invoked the act of mourning itself (a “performative voice”).39 Choral amplification of protagonists’ grief was the most common func­ tion, and the opening of the pompe funèbre in act 3 of Lully’s Alceste (1674) offers a particularly interesting example. The first entrance of the cele­ brated choral refrain, “Alceste est morte” (example 2.4) marks the moment when, in a classic reversal, king Admète and the Thessalians realize that the queen, Alceste, is dead, because she has sacrificed herself in place of her husband. The Thessalians’ chorus, with its staggered fugato entrances, echoes Admète’s stunned recognition of Alceste’s death, and their repeti­ tion of his verse deepens and aggrandizes the king’s grief. The latter effect is partly due to the ritual overtones of the phrase, “Alceste est morte,” which recalled the formulaic proclamation of death at state funerals following the rite of inhumation. Lully’s musical setting was also responsible for the cho­ rus’s effect, especially his use of suspended seventh-­chords and a descend­ ing G-­minor tetrachord bass, which referred to the Italian lament tradition. The distant evocation of state ritual and Lully’s borrowing of a quintessen­ tial Italianate technique for communicating pathos signaled that this was mourning in the grand manner, and it invested Alceste’s death—­and the Thessalians’ loss—­with a tragic significance. Choruses sometimes took a more active role relative to protagonists by interpreting or commenting on the action (a “hermeneutic voice”).40 This could involve reflecting on a catastrophe, a protagonist’s actions, or occasion­ ally voicing moral judgment. Bouvard and Bertin de La Doué’s Cassandre pro­ vides an example of a chorus’s reflection on catastrophe. The prologue is set against the backdrop of the ruins of Troy, and—­unusually for a prologue—­the opening number features a chorus of enslaved Trojans grieving the loss of their city and their compatriots, in a grim G-­minor lament (example 2.5): Lieux désolés par la fureur des armes, Que sont devenus tous vos charmes? Lieux où règnent par tout les horreurs du trépas, Que sont devenus vos appas?41 [Places desolated by the fury of war, / What has become of your charms? / Places where the horrors of death reign everywhere, / What has become of your allurements?]

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example 2.4 Jean-­Baptiste Lully, Alceste, act 3, scene 4 (from F-­Pn Rés. VMA MS-­1440)

Particularly in operas set in times of war or tyranny, lament choruses some­ times competed with interpretations of the same events by other groups, or even by protagonists. In Cassandre, for instance, the Trojans’ lament in the prologue is juxtaposed with their enemies’ pompe funèbre for Agamemnon (act 1, scenes 4–­5), whom the Greeks believe was killed in the Trojan War.

example 2.5 François Bouvard and Toussaint Bertin de La Doué, Cassandre, prologue (from the first printed edition [Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1706])

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example 2.5 (continued)

Moral judgment—­especially perception of injustice—­was perhaps the most politically volatile type of hermeneutic voice. Although choruses of­ ten directed their harangues at abstract forces like fate or death, their cri­ tique was sometimes more pointed. The chorus of Corinthians in Charpen­ tier’s Medée, for instance, rails against contingency (“fortune”) and the gods

choral lament and the mourning public

71

following the death of their king, Creon, in a lament sequence that extends across two scenes in act 5. They take a more strident turn in the second iteration of their lament (5.3), as they determine to withhold their religious observance in retribution for divine injustice: Ah, funeste revers! fortune impitoyable! Corinthe, hélas! que vas-­tu devenir? Dieux cruels, est-­ce ainsi que vôtre haine accable Ceux que vous devez soutenir? Refusons nôtre encens, nôtre hommage, À ces dieux inhumains; Tous nos respects sont vains, Nos malheurs sont leur injuste ouvrage?42 [Oh, deadly reversal! Unpitying fortune! / Corinth, alas! What will become of you? / Cruel gods, does your hatred thus oppress / Those whom you should help? / Let us withdraw our incense, our hom­ age, / To these inhumane gods; / Are all our observances useless, / Are our misfortunes their unjust work?]

As we saw in chapter 1, glorification was a primary office of choruses in lyric tragedies and the usual basis for voicing their collective “we.” In Me­ dée, however, their virtue falters in the face of extreme loss, and they dis­ cover another basis for publicity: revolt. Charpentier’s expressive setting of the Corinthians’ chorus is unquestion­ ably the highlight of this pair of scenes, and his music for the second ver­ sion of their lament, in particular, illustrates their progressively less decorous mourning sentiment. Divided into two sections, the chorus transitions from the exalted, pathetic C-­minor setting of the first quatrain (example 2.6a)—­ embellished with diminished seventh and ninth chords and suspensions—­ to the rhythmically agitated, contrapuntal, G-­major passage accompanying their verses proposing rebellion (example 2.6b). Their recourse to a furious musical style in the second section underlines the extremity of their feeling state and, due to the stigma attached to the furious style, the inappropriate­ ness of its public expression. This negative judgment is made explicit immediately following their la­ ment. The princess Creuse first hears the Corinthians’ lament offstage (5.2), where it warns her of impending disaster. In the next scene, she learns that her father, the king, is dead, and responds with an exquisitely under­ stated, “Hélas!” The Corinthians’ own mourning contrasts with her decorous

example 2.6a Marc-­Antoine Charpentier, Medée, act 5, scene 3 (from the first printed edition [Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1694])

choral lament and the mourning public

73

example 2.6a (continued)

restraint, and when they finish their second lament, Creuse issues a mild rebuke: C’est assez, laissez-­moi, vos pleurs ne font qu’aigrir, Les maux que je me dois préparer à souffrir.43 [That is enough, leave me, your tears only aggravate / The evils that I must prepare to suffer.]

Creuse’s rebuke and dismissal reestablishes the norms of public mourning decorum that the Corinthians violated. As we have seen, choruses mostly affirmed or amplified a protagonist’s mourning, but occasionally they struck out in unanticipated directions, even to the point of challenging the fictional hierarchy. An unusual example is the chorus’s response to Phaedra’s lament and confession following the death of Hippolytus, in act 4 of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie. Phaedra’s accompa­ nied solo and chorus scene (“Quelle plainte en ces lieux m’appelle”) is one of the great moments in the repertory, not least for Rameau’s skillful use of the chorus as a dramatic interlocutor. The scene opens as Phaedra overhears the chorus’s lamentation of Hippolytus’s apparent death, after he has been carried off by a sea monster:

74

Choir

Violins

Basses, B.C.

chapter two

j 6 œœ œ œ &8 œ œ J J Re - fu - sons ? 68 œœJ Jœœ œœ J

œ œ j œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œJ Jœ œ œJ Jœ œJ Rœ œR œJ Jœ nô - tre‿en - cens, nôt - re‿hom - ma - ge À ces dieux œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ œ œ œœ œœ J J J J J œJ Rœ œR J J

œœ .. J in œœ .. J

œ œ. œ œ. R hu - mains; œœ œ . R œ.

Œ. Œ.

6 œ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ &8 œ œ

œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ .. œœ œœ œ œœ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

? 68 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ.

6 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ V8 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

&

∑

?

∑

29

œœ œœ œœ œ œœ œœ .. œœ œœ .. œ œ œ œ.

∑

œ œ.

∑

∑

∑

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . œ œ œ œ . œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œœ œ œœ œ œœ œ & œœ . œ . œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . œ œ œœ œ œœ œ œ œ j œ . œ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ . œ œ œœ œœ . œœ. œ# œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ V ? œœœœœœœ œ œ

œ œ œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ

œ œ œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ œ

œ œ œ

Œ. Œ.

j j ‰ œœ œœ œœ œœ ‰ J J

Re - fu -

œ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ œœ . œ.

example 2.6b Marc-­Antoine Charpentier, Medée, act 5, scene 3 (from the first printed edition [Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1694])

phèdre:

phaedra:

Quelle plainte en ces lieux

What lament draws me here?

m’appelle? choeur:

chorus:

Hippolyte n’est plus.

Hippolytus is no more.

œ

œ œ

75

choral lament and the mourning public

phèdre:

phaedra:

Il n’est plus! Ô douleur mortelle!

He is no more! Oh deadly sorrow!

choeur:

chorus:

Ô regrets superflus!

Oh pointless grief!

& œœJ sons œ ? œJ

œœ œœ œœ J J J nô - tre‿en - cens, œœ œœ œœ J J J

œœ œœ J J nôt - re‿hom œœ œœ J J

& œœ

œœ

33

œœ

œœ

œœ

œœ

b œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ .. œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ b œœ œœ

œ

œ

œ

œ.

œ V œ

œ

œœ

? œ

œ

œ

œ & œ J vains, ? b œœJ

œ œ J Nos œœ J

œ # œ œœ œ J œJ J mal - heurs, nos œœ œ # œœ J J J

36

-

Tous nos ‰ j j œ œ œ œ œ J J J ma - ge À ces dieux in - hu - mains; Tous nos re - spects sont œœ œœ œœ œœ b œœ œ . œ œ œ œ b œœ œœ œœ J R R J J J œ Jœ œJ œJ J J J R

r j r r b œœ œœ œœ œœj œjœ œjœ.. œœ œœ ..

œ

œ

re - spects sont vains, Nos

œ

œœ œ . œ. J J mal - heurs œœ œœ .. J J

mal - heurs

œ œ œ & b œ œ œ # œœ

œœ œœ

? œ œ œ œ

œ œ

œ œ œ # œœ V bœ œ

œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ . œœ œœ œœ œ œœ œœ œœ .

œœ œœ

œ œ bœ œ. œ œ œ œ bœ œ œ

œœ # œœ R J sont leur œ œ œ œ R J

œ œ. œ œ. J J in - jus œœ œ . J J

œœ œ R #œ

sont leur in - jus - te‿ou - vra

œ œ R

œœ

te‿ou - vra

-

-

œ Œ. œ J ge? œœ Œ . J ge?

œœ .. œœ # œ œœ œœ .. œœ œ

œœ # œ œœ œ # œœ œ œœ œœ œœ n œœ œœ œ

œ. œ œ œ œ. œ

œ

œ .. œ œ œœ œ . . œœ # œœ œ œœ œ œœ œ œœ œœ œ

example 2.6b (continued)

œ

œœ

œ œœœ œœœ

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chapter two

phèdre:

phaedra:

Quel sort l’a fait tomber dans la

What fate made him fall into

nuit éternelle?

the eternal night?

choeur:

chorus:

Un monstre furieux, sorti du

An enraged monster, rising

sein des flots, Vient de nous ravir ce héros.44

from the waves, Came to take this hero from us.

The chorus replies to Phaedra’s question with their refrain, “Hippolyte n’est plus,” reprised from the previous scene. In its brevity and stark acknowl­ edgment of tragedy, the refrain recalls choruses at parallel moments in Lully’s Alceste (“Alceste est morte”) and Atys (“Atys lui-­même”), although Rameau’s use of expressive dissonance goes far beyond Lully’s harmonic language. Strikingly, in this context the chorus (“Ô regrets superflus!”) rebuffs Phaedra’s mourning, and their traumatized, chromatic narration of Hippoly­ tus’s death draws a confession from her (measures 505–­513), which I discuss in chapter 3. Despite its dramatic and musical force, Phaedra’s recitative fails as effective mourning, as it is twice rejected by the chorus (measures 495–­497, 559–­564). Representing a protagonist’s mourning as ineffectual in the face of death was not that unusual in tragédies en musique, but rebuke of a royal or divine protagonist, particularly by a chorus of nonnobles, was extremely rare.45 The terms of the chorus’s rebuke are also worth noting. Casting Phae­ dra’s expression of remorse as useless placed it outside the economy of pub­ lic mourning in the tragédie en musique, where protagonists’ appropriate lamentation ideally leads the onstage community toward repair and a right perspective on the loss. The question is why Pellegrin had the chorus re­ peatedly refuse to legitimize Phaedra’s mourning. It is true that “superflus-­ plus” was a conventional rhyming pair in French poetry. But the chorus’s varied repetition of their couplet was not dictated by convention, and, fur­ thermore, it is hard to say whether they reject Phaedra’s mourning because it is somehow inadequate, because of her character’s fatal shortcomings, or because of a refusal to turn away from the reality of Hippolytus’s death. What­ ever the reason, the chorus refuses to cooperate as choruses normally do in mourning scenes, and nothing that Phaedra sings keeps them from returning to the fact of their loss. When Pellegrin ended the act with one last iteration of their couplet, he allowed the bereaved onstage community to lapse into melancholy and a state of disrepair.

choral lament and the mourning public

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Thus far I have focused on librettists’ hierarchical organization of onstage mourning, particularly the precedence of noble or divine personas’ mourning relative to that of choral groups. As we have seen, mostly choruses supported personas’ mourning by seconding their decorous sentiments and vocal set­ tings. However, in certain mourning scenes the chorus itself modelled con­ trasting styles of lamenting, including some that were markedly ignoble. For example, in the divertissement that concludes Atys, the goddess Cybele calls on her followers and minor divinities to join her in mourning Attis’s death. Quinault subdivided the chorus and dance corps into groups of water nymphs (nymphes des eaux) and wood gods (dieux des bois), on the one hand, and “Corybantes,” on the other.46 The latter were adepts of the Phrygian goddess Cybèle who, in the traditional myth complex, castrate themselves in com­ memoration of Attis’s own frenzied self-­castration and death.47 Quinault and Lully assigned these choral subgroups different affective and musical manners in their choral lament in the final scene. Cybele leads the choruses in a call-­and-­response exchange throughout the scene, but mid­ way through each of the choruses begins responding to her in alternation, as is clear from the 1676 livret: cybèle, et le choeur des divinités des bois et des eaux: Quelle douleur! [What sorrow!] cybèle, et le choeur des corybantes: Ah! quelle rage! [Ah! what fury!] cybèle, et les choeurs: Ah! quel malheur! [Ah! what misfortune!] 48

The poet distributed mournful affect differentially between the subgroups of performers: it is the ethnically, religiously, and sexually differentiated Corybantes, not the pastoral wood and water gods, who perform the inde­ corous passion of “rage,” although they join together in the end to deplore Attis’s and Sangaride’s deaths.49 Lully’s setting of the chorus is expressively restrained throughout, yet the subgroups’ rhetorical contrast between “dou­ leur” and “rage” finds subtle musical corroboration. The antiphonal alter­ nation between choirs itself underscores the chorus’s affective division, as does the harmonic instability that Lully introduces with the antiphony’s circle-­of-­fifths modulation.50 The Corybantes in Atys made strange mourners in the context of the tragédie en musique, where they presented a portrait of contextually exces­ sive grieving that corresponded to their exotic foreignness and implicitly lower status.51 (It may also be that the excessiveness of the scene’s mourn­ ing spectacle all told was a sign of the exorbitance Cybele’s sovereignty and of the sacrifice of her priest, Attis.)52 A similar distinction between manners

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of mourning appeared in Lully’s Alceste, although here there was no cor­ relation with particular subgroups of mourners. In Alceste, Lully and his collaborators drew a contrast between the stylized frenzy of the mourning chorus and pantomime ballet, “Rompons, brisons les tristes restes,” and the other, more solemn choruses in the pompe funèbre. The airs, choruses, and dances for this pompe funèbre are performed by groups of “distressed” women (femmes affligées) and “desolate” men (hommes désolés), in front of a “great monument” erected in her memory.53 The choral group’s open­ ing statement, “Formons les plus lugubres chants” (example 2.7), is a ho­ mophonic number with flute obbligato in Lully’s stately dotted-­rhythm style. It incorporates expressive dissonance and chromaticism to a greater extent than many of Lully’s opera choruses, yet it remains a decorous and restrained expression of sorrow. In contrast, after the chorus’s repetition of its refrain, “Alceste, la charmante Alceste,” the dance troupes perform a frenzied panto­mime ballet, and an “afflicted” soloist and the chorus voice the sentiments that the dancers’ choreography suggests (example 2.8): Rompons, brisons le triste reste De ces ornements superflus.54 [Let us break, let us smash the sad remnants / Of this useless regalia.]

Lully and Quinault were unlikely to have ended this divertissement on such a despairing note. Instead, Lully supplanted the fast rhythms, harmonic in­ stability, and lightly contrapuntal texture of “Rompons, brisons” with the ardent yet dignified lamentation of the concluding choral passacaille, “Que nos pleurs, que nos cris.” The contrast between the relatively disorderly style of “Rompons, bri­ sons” and the stately choral laments that surround it lent social and psy­ chological depth to this operatic portrait of public mourning. In particular, the artists’ decision to conclude with the choral passacaille suggests that an elegant, contemplative manner of lament was preferred in early tragédies en musique. Nevertheless, the stylized evocation of extreme grief in the pantomime ballet and chorus (“Rompons, brisons”) also had an important place in the tableau. Giving expression to excessively distraught mourning let the onstage groups bear witness to the crisis of a sovereign’s death and let audiences savor their surplus of ungoverned feeling. At the same time, ending with the passacaille “Que nos pleurs” definitively restored public de­ corum and affirmed the hierarchical order once more.

example 2.7 Jean-­Baptiste Lully, Alceste, act 3, scene 5 (from F-­Pn Rés. VMA MS-­1440)

j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ ú œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ ú Œ

œ &C J

De ces or - ne -

Rom - pons, bri - sons, rom - pons, bri - sons le tris - te res - te

De ces or - ne -

Œ

œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ . œ ú ?C ‰ œ œ œ. œ J Ó Œ

Rom - pons, rom - pons, bri - sons, rom - pons, bri - sons le tris - te res - te

Choir

B. C.

?C ‰ œ œ œ œ ú

ú

ú

œœ œœ œ œœ œœ œœ œ

& úú ?

j œ. œ

ú

b

œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ. œ œ œ œ. œ J

6

6

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

ments su - per - ßus. Rom - pons, rom - pons, bri - sons, rom - pons, rom - pons, bri - sons, rom - pons, bri -

œ œ œ œ œœ œ b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

ú ú

œ

œ # œœ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ

su - per - ßus. Rom - pons, rom - pons, bri - sons, rom - pons, rom - pons, bri - sons, rom - pons, bri -

ments

?

ú

w

ú

6

6

œ œ œ . œj œ œ. œ œ

ú ú

œ œ œ bú

œ œ

ú. 4

œ & œœ œœ œœ œ 11

ú ú

sons le

tris - te

res

ú

-

te

sons le

tris - te

res

-

te

? œœ œœ œœ œœ ?œ œ œ œ b

b

6 b

6

ú ú

ú b

ú ú

œ œ

j œ œ œ. œ ú œ œ œ. œ ú

ú #

De ces

or - ne - ments

De ces

or - ne - ments

# œœ œœ œ . œœ úú J #ú

6 5b

œ . œj ú

#œ œ ú

œ œ

6

j œ œ œ œ

œœ . .

6

œ œ

œ œ

œ œ

su - per - ßus. Rom - pons,

bri

su - per - ßus. Rom - pons,

bri

œœ œ J œ

# œœ .. œ 4

œ #

œ

œœ œ

œœ

ú

œœ

7

example 2.8 Jean-­Baptiste Lully, Alceste, act 3, scene 5 (from F-­Pn Rés. VMA MS-­1440)

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Opera’s Mourning Publics: Dauvergne through Lemoyne By the second half of the eighteenth century, the tragédie en musique was a prestigious but markedly old-­fashioned genre, and the mourning choruses of its pompes funèbres epitomized the somber, weighty tone that, to many, seemed so out of touch with modern tastes. Even so, in the 1760s and ’70s composers like Antoine Dauvergne and François-­Joseph Gossec continued composing the mourning choruses that were by then conventional in libret­ tos of a more tragic character. Rameau’s influence is especially audible in the mourning choruses that Dauvergne composed for the last act of Hercule mourant, which debuted at the Opéra in 1761. His librettist, Marmontel, called for choral laments in the opening scene of act 5, as the companions of the dying Hercules prepare his funeral pyre, and Dauvergne provided an ex­ tended setting for low voices, whose expressive chromaticism and pervasive dactylic rhythms evoke Rameau’s “Que tout gémisse” in Castor et Pollux.55 The 1773 Versailles version of Gossec’s Sabinus also featured a brief pompe funèbre for Sabinus, in which Epponine and a chorus of mourning women sing in procession to the tombs of the Gallic kings.56 However, Gluck’s Orphée et Euridice, which debuted in Paris the following year, over­shadowed Sabinus, which was also in production at the Opéra in 1774. Gluck’s opening solo and choral mourning tableau for Euridice was on an­ other order of musical drama, and it reinvigorated the tragédie’s conven­ tion of the lamenting chorus. The press naturally drew comparisons with the mourning chorus of Castor et Pollux, which was clearly a model. Yet Gluck’s integration of Orphée’s plangent interjections, his chromaticism and sustained harmonic tension, and his coloristic use of trombones oc­ cupied a different sound world from Rameau’s chorus, summoning a deep and seemingly timeless grieving unlike anything Parisians had heard in a choral lament. The chorus in Orphée inhabited the pastoral realm, but two of Gluck’s subsequent operas for Paris deployed Orphée’s heightened expression in ex­ plicitly political lamenting choruses. In both Alceste and Iphigénie en Tau­ ride, choruses lamented in the name of the “patrie,” a term that had serious political resonance in the late ancien régime. As historian Peter Campbell notes, in the 1770s the idea of “la patrie” signaled “an emotional and moral commitment to the good of the community.”57 For the Parisian Alceste, Gluck’s French librettist, Roullet, simply translated Calzabigi’s “patria” in his version of the Thessalian’s choral lament for their queen:

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Pleure, ô patrie! O Thessalie! Alceste va mourir.58 [Weep, oh compatriots! / Oh Thessaly! Alceste will die.]

Gluck used the tragic key of C minor for the Thessalians’ richly orches­ trated, recitational-­style chorus, which featured an echo effect in the lower voices for added poignancy. The chorus of priestesses in Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) likewise invoked the “patrie” in the funeral tableau for Orestes at the end of act 2. Iphigénie involved a more massive, dramatically active choral force, with extensive lamentation in the first half of the opera. However, the priestesses’ most extended mourning sequence was in the pompe funèbre. Having just learned, with Iphigenia, that her brother and their king, Orestes, is apparently dead, the priestesses reflect on what Orestes’s loss means for their homeland: Patrie infortunée, Où par des nœuds si doux Notre âme est encore enchaînée, Vous avez disparu pour nous!59 [Unfortunate homeland, / To which, by such sweet ties, / Our soul is still bound, / You have vanished for us!]

Gluck scored this chorus for two high-­voice (C1) parts in a somber, ethe­ real style that contrasts with the subsequent air and chorus, “O malheureuse Iphigénie.” The funeral concludes with the minuet air and chorus, “Contem­ plez ces tristes apprêts,” whose elegant, detached character suggests that the community has achieved a state of reflective equanimity in their grief. Politically speaking, the most striking innovation of late eighteenth-­ century mourning choruses was their reimagination of the chorus as a pa­ triotic public, where patriotism was understood as a “social morality” with no necessary connection to republican ideology.60 This was largely due to Gluck’s librettists, who may have introduced a more modern rhetoric of patriotism in Alceste and Tauride partly to justify the choruses’ active in­ tervention in public affairs.61 This patriotic rhetoric appeared in many other sorts of choral verses in this period, but in mourning scenes it had the salu­ tary effect of distinguishing the chorus as a more active, passionate entity

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whose grieving sometimes diverged from that of protagonists, as it did in Tauride. (There, Guillard created a striking divergence between the chorus’s preoccupation with the bien public and Iphigenia’s obsession with her own tragic fate and that of her family.) In the 1780s, even tragic librettists and composers began to stage cho­ ruses that expressed independent affect, made judgments, and articulated claims in the name of a relatively autonomous public “we.” This more ac­ tive, politically reflexive type of chorus was often simply labeled le peuple in period librettos, and it sometimes issued judgments that reflected poorly on the great tragic protagonists whose actions it witnessed. In Hoffman’s li­ bretto for Lemoyne’s Phèdre (1786), for example, the “Chœur Général” has the last word on Phaedra’s suicide, singing, Fiers enfants du soleil, race illustre et coupable, Ton sort est-­il inévitable? O terrible destin! Tout fléchit sous tes lois; Tes aveugles décrets n’épargnent pas les rois.62 [Proud children of the sun, illustrious and guilty race, / Is your fate inevitable? / O terrible destiny! Everything bows before your laws; / Your blind decrees spare not even kings.]

The first performance was at Fontainebleau, and one wonders how the cho­ rus’s last line—­sung in a bleak, pianissimo F minor—­was received at court. While later lyric tragedies did invest greater agency in onstage choral “publics,” their patriotic citizenship was tenuous and slid easily into mel­ ancholy. This was more obviously true in mourning scenes, like that in Gluck’s Alceste, where the chorus seems disconsolate in their grief for the lost individual or the patrie. But political melancholy more subtly pervaded passages like those in Phèdre and Lemoyne’s earlier setting of Electre (1782), where, as we might expect, both Electra and the chorus sing elegiacally for much of the opera. There the chorus is fixated on death and the end of the house of Atreus to such an extent that even Electra tires of their mourning (3.1). Yet they refuse to look away from the loss of the dynasty that had oriented their existence, even when Electra tells them that Orestes lives: Rien ne saurait tarir nos larmes. O mort! Nous implorons tes coups, Frappe, il n’est plus d’espoir pour nous.63

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[Nothing will dry our tears. / O death! We ask for your blows, / Strike, there is no more hope for us.]

When Orestes miraculously returns, these citizens of Mycenae pledge ec­ statically to die for him rather than risk his loss again.64 Not for them the hymns to la liberté heard in operas across Europe in the years before the Revolution: they remain attuned to the past and to dynastic presence as a source of their own political intelligibility, much like the tragédie itself.

chapter three

True Confessions: Opera’s Theater of Guilt and Remorse

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onfessions were among librettists’ favorite devices for making even very flawed characters seem sympathetic and recognizably humane. Pellegrin, who produced many such scenes across his long career, said as much in his preface to the 1715 livret for Théonoé, whose titular princess conspires in the death of her own brother. “Some injustice and cruelty will perhaps be found in Theonoe when she wants to kill Alcidamas,” he conceded, “but the remorse that I give her immediately after she has conceived of the crime begins to clear her: the care that she takes to spare him torment should inspire our concern for her, and the recognition that follows works to restore her innocence.1 Likewise, in his livret for Sémiramis, Pierre-­ Charles Roy defended his decision to have Queen Semiramide express remorse for her incestuous love: “The remorse with which she combats her passion, which she attests in recognizing her son and in dying, is the means by which the theater elicits pity for the most guilty characters.”2 Confessional scenes in which characters disclose their illicit feelings or intentions were very common across the French repertory, but I focus in this chapter on confessions of wrongdoing like Semiramide’s, which were most common in librettos written or revised after the death of Lully.3 Naturally, characters in Lullian works of the 1670s and ’80s engaged in moral reflection and expressed remorse from time to time, but they mostly externalized responsibility for tragic events, attributing them to destiny, the gods, or error. Something changed around the turn of the eighteenth century, when librettists began having characters explore their personal responsibility and guilt in longer, more prominently placed introspective passages. Composers, for their part, supplied these passages with vocal music that communicated the experience of culpability with greater emotional power and precision.

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To cite just one example, in Pellegrin and Desmarets’s Renaud, ou La suite d’Armide, the Damascan sorceress Armida spends much of the last act confessing guilt and remorse for having betrayed her own people for love of the Crusader Rinaldo. Her F-­minor monologue in the third scene is the most elaborate of these confessions, as she reacts to the death of her kinsman, Ardaste, at the hand of the Crusaders: Qu’ai-­je appris? qu’ai-­je fait? ô! trop coupable Armide! Barbare! à quel excès j’ai porté ma fureur? Je ne sauve un amant perfide, Que pour rendre mon crime égal à mon malheur: Je deviens en un jour parjure et parricide.4 [What did I hear? What have I done? O, too-­guilty Armida! / Barbarian! to what excessive lengths have I taken my rage? / I save a treacherous lover / Only to make my crime equal my misfortune: / In a single day I have become an oath-­breaker and a kin-­slayer.]

This sequel to Quinault and Lully’s celebrated Armide (1686) picked up where the earlier opera left off, yet the contrast between the two protagonists could not have been more pronounced. While the earlier Armida cursed Rinaldo in the final scenes before flying off to seek revenge, Desmarets and Pellegrin’s sorceress devoted her most lyrically sensual moments to castigating herself and attempting suicide before finally reconciling with her beloved. Sung confessions like Armida’s had a clear dramatic value for opera, as they explored problems of responsibility and justice raised by tragic situations. In this, they resembled laments, although characters’ confessions of wrongdoing usually addressed questions of justice from the side of guilt, rather than loss or victimization. The content and dramatic function of confessions was thus mainly ethical, as personas reflected on tragic questions of motivation, responsibility, and justice. But such confessions often had a political dimension as well. This is hardly surprising in dramatic situations that involved a violation of some moral or legal code, which for much of the ancien régime reg­ istered as an offense against sovereignty (whether patriarchal, monarchical, or divine). However, the political dynamic that interests me most in this context is governmental, and it is established with the act of confession itself. The most important function of guilty confessions was arguably their ability to shape audiences’ sense of a persona as a socially and morally recog­ nizable character. In the case of Pellegrin’s Armida, her confessions estab­

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lished her gender and sexual conformity, filial piety, and acceptance of Chris­ tian dominion, which justified her sympathetic treatment in the opera’s con­ clusion.5 Avowing guilt and remorse also gave her character a reflective moral interiority that, thanks to her introspective singing, was exposed to evaluation by other personas, a chorus, or audience members. Given the theatrical nature of operatic confessions, this dynamic of self-­disclosure and judgment could operate on at least two levels: as a relation dramatized within the stage world or as one that unfolded between spectators and impersonating stage actors. Yet regardless of the level at which we approach opera’s guilty confessions, they usually involved a bid for recognition as a moral “self.” And struggles for recognition—­as theorists from Rousseau and Hegel to Beauvoir, Fanon, and Foucault have shown—­involve power.6 Moral recognition and its normative social power are most relevant here, in a chapter on theatrical confessions of guilt. The deep roots of opera’s staged confessions lay in Catholic auricular confession and its French legal counterpart, both of which would have been familiar to Opéra audiences.7 These old penitential practices left their mark on the rhetorical form of confessions in opera, as well as on the relations of power and authority that they staged. However, opera’s confessions were also influenced by contemporaneous developments in moral philosophy and culture. It is no coincidence that confessional song emerged more prominently in European opera of the eighteenth century, a period that prioritized sensitive introspection and self-­disclosure as a faculty of the morally responsible individual. Like the other arts, opera’s creators wholeheartedly embraced what Michael Frazer calls the Enlightenment’s secular “reflective regimes,” especially its sentimentalist strand, and confessional vocal numbers were among their most effective means of representing characters’ self-­reflection and moral interiority.8 Moreover, opera’s musical and gestural arts had an acknowledged ability to solicit pity or, in terms preferred by Enlightenment commentators, sympathy for flawed characters in ways that arguably distinguished its staged confessions from similar passages in spoken drama, novels, or memoirs.9 While confession in any art form was at basis verbal, its delivery in skillfully crafted theatrical song could enhance its effectiveness by heightening listeners’ sense of its subjective truthfulness, especially when performed by the era’s most accomplished singing actors.10 What constituted truthfulness in introspective singing differed in the golden age of the tragédie en musique versus in the second half of the eighteenth century.11 Much could be said on this question, but, generally speaking, confessions of wrongdoing in the Lullian and Ramellian tradition traded

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in an ethics of sincerity whose consummate aim was “to know oneself . . . and make public what one knows.”12 This early modern French emphasis on knowing and reporting a self gave way, toward the end of the eighteenth century, to an emphasis on becoming a centered self and acting in ways consistent with it.13 In fact, in the works of Gluck, Le Moyne, Sacchini, and so forth we see the influence of this Rousseauean recognition paradigm and its ethics of authenticity as a framework for evaluating confessing characters’ make-­believe “selves.” In both moments, though, the truthfulness of confessions depended partly on characters’ manner of confessing in song as much or more than on what they revealed about themselves. Confessions that are convincing as such generally delineate a sincere or, in later repertories, authentic “self,” largely through a poetic and musical manner that artfully fulfills the conventions for that type of character experiencing passions in extremis. When it succeeded as confession, remorseful introspection presented characters in ways that humanized and potentially redeemed them while attracting audience interest.14 Thomas’s cultural history of sympathy and iden­ tification in opéra-­comique suggests that successful, moving confessional performance may even have let audience members recognize something shared in a character’s emotional or moral experience, although the heroic register of Opéra productions made identification, per se, less straightforward.15 Despite these dramatic and social benefits, confessing wrongdoing in a passionate, self-­castigating way also had drawbacks for guilty characters, as well as for the kinds of stories opera could tell. This is because confessions of this sort engaged characters in acts of moral and social self-­definition that could amount to a kind of symbolic violence when confessing constrained or marginalized them as a “member of a despised or abject” group.16 In extreme cases, guilty confessions could lead to a character’s social death, and this often prompted female characters in particular to take their own lives off­stage. More often, though, characters found the experience itself of moral reflection, guilt, and remorse destructive, so that even when they recovered in the end, they played out a painful experience of ethical self-­formation onstage. In approaching opera’s guilty confessions thus, I am drawing on a distinctly Foucauldian sense of their politics. Foucault’s analyses of confession across his career have been very influential in early modern cultural history in particular, because the ancien régime figured large in his genealogy of confessional practice and its political stakes. I will give a brief background on this work, then, and its relevance for studies of early opera, before turning to my discussion of the French repertory.

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Foucault on Confession in the Ancien Régime In a series of writings and lectures in the mid-­1970s, Foucault undertook a genealogical survey of confession as a broad field of truth-­telling practices that were first formalized in medieval religious and legal institutional contexts. His early study, Surveiller et punir (1975), analyzed legal confession in the context of the ancien régime as a judicial technique in which the authority and power of the sovereign compelled an individual to reveal the truth about a crime, first in the torture chamber and courtroom and then publicly in the course of punishment.17 One of the most striking forms of legal confession that he considered was the amende honorable, an obligatory statement that was typically part of the sentence that French magistrates handed down for more serious crimes.18 Figure 3.1 shows the amende honorable of Jacques Le Normand in progress before the pillory at Les Halles in 1716, and it illustrates the usual procedure. The text of the confession was first read by the court clerk to the condemned, who was on his or her knees, barefoot and in a chemise, holding a wax torch, with hands tied. The prisoner then repeated the confession, ideally verbatim and “in a loud and intelligible voice” (à haute et intelligible voix), as arrêts criminels (criminal judgments) formulaically prescribed.19 In the amende honorable, the condemned’s acknowledgment of guilt was mainly a matter of performing a prescribed role satisfactorily, although even this state-­controlled form of confession could and did veer away from script.20 Foucault was ultimately more interested in spontaneous or quasi-­ spontaneous forms of confession in civil society and the modalities of power that they entailed. By the end of the eighteenth century, he argued, confessional discourse had come far from its penitential origins and developed into a wide field of informal dialogical procedures for eliciting the hidden truth of individuals’ selves: The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes it and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile.21

What unites the many varied practices of confession in the modern era, he argued, is their basically coercive nature, as forms of introspective speech

figure 3.1 Punition remarquable de Jacques Le Normand faussaire, voleur et concussionnaire public, c. 1716 (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

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that pressure individuals to say who they truly are, what they do, and why, often with shame or difficulty. Foucault’s approach to confession changed across his career, and in his later lectures and interviews he developed a more nuanced model of confession as a mode of government by which individuals control their own and others’ behavior by referring it to norms.22 He returned to the topic of confession in the 1981 Louvain lectures, where he focused more broadly on “the obligation of truth-­telling about oneself” in many forms of interpersonal communication. There he conceived confession, in the broader sense of “l’aveu” (avowal), as “a verbal act through which the subject affirms who he is, binds himself to this truth, places himself in a relationship of dependence with regard to another, and modifies at the same time his relationship to himself.”23 In this later work he reframed confessional truth telling as one form of “veridiction,” which, in retrospect, he saw as having been a central focus of his critical thought.24 Honing the critique of recognition that he had developed for some time, Foucault concluded that confessional veridiction constrains people by limiting the ways in which they can describe themselves and still be recognized as viable subjects, with the bene­ fits and protections that recognition confers. His account of the politics of voice in these analyses differs strikingly from that encountered in most critical commentary on opera, particularly in the distinctive role that he assigned to freedom. Modern opera commentary has often praised characters’ reflective self-­expression, including in confession scenes, as morally or politically emancipatory in ways that rely on an equation of skilled, expressive vocality with agency and freedom. In one notable example, Ivan Nagel’s study of Mozart’s operas celebrates Pamina’s confession in the act 1 finale of Die Zauberflöte (1791), “Herr, ich bin zwar Verbrecherin,” as an anthem of self-­realization, and he finds Mozart’s musical setting to be an active component of this process. “From the very cry of contrition that the words force her to give voice to, breath and melody shape a song of new self-­confidence, soaring with that ardent protest of reason and feeling by which, as Hegel claimed, ‘the subject proves to be the sub­ject.’” Pamina, he argues, makes a bid for a historically novel state of moral autonomy “by the sheer decision to affirm . . . her own truth,” which is real­ized with Sarastro’s merciful response.25 But Foucault viewed freedom as an ongoing practice of loosening constraints on how it is possible to persist and thrive as a subject, rather than as a faculty possessed by a sovereign self or—­in a conception closer to the ancient régime—­an ability to act without undue limitation. It is my sense that his theorizing of freedom in the later work does not so much displace

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these other conceptions as highlight governmental orders of constraint and possibilities for resisting them, including in the historical conditions of seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century France. If Foucault was justified in drawing our attention to the government of selves, as I think he was, his critique of voicing subjective truth should prompt us to reevaluate the politics of many familiar forms of confessional song, including operatic avowals of love, jealousy, or hatred; admissions of wrongdoing or bad intentions; and, of course, lament. While confessional passages in opera have often been heard as moments of characters’ liberatory self-­realization, I want to linger in this chapter with their potential for symbolic violence, returning now to the French repertory.

The Form of Operatic Confession Confession depends on the active participation of the confessing individual, whether we are speaking of a person or, as here, a singer’s dramatic impersonation. It is also effectively dialogical, even where, as was often the case in early opera, librettists scripted a character’s confession as a soliloquy.26 Such confessions are dialogical in effect because they nearly always respond to an accusation, which calls characters to account for themselves and their actions. Sometimes librettists had another persona or even a chorus voice these accusations. For example, in Renaud, ou la suite d’Armide (4.5) Hidraot asks Armida, “Qu’avez-­vous fait?” (What have you done?), and accuses her of freeing Rinaldo and betraying the Saracen cause. Armida responds by explaining, “Je vous ai tous perdus pour sauver ce que j’aime” (I lost all of you to save the one I love).27 However, more often they had characters voice self-­accusatory statements or questions, especially in monologue airs. A typical example is Deidamia’s monologue in Stuck’s Polydore (5.6), where she berates herself for having betrayed her people for love of her enemy, Polydorus. “Qu’ai-­je fait?” (What have I done?), she asks, and then responds to her own question: “ô devoir, ô vengeance, ô patrie! / Je vous trahis tous en un jour” (O duty, o vengeance, o country!/ I betray you all in a single day).28 Regardless, when characters respond to such accusations by confessing, they enact a painful, agonistic process of moral formation in rela­ tion to their accuser: an enunciatory position that, following Chloë Taylor, I will term the “confessional other.”29 Whether this confessional other is realized onstage as another character or a chorus, addressed as an off­stage entity, or “conjured” by the confessing persona (or “confessional subject”), its accusatory stance asserts an authority that the persona herself affirms in confessing.30 The act of confessing also

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makes the persona vulnerable to this other’s response, which creates a disparity of power. Confession scenes of this sort thus limn a political as well as a moral exchange, one that involves a persona “giving in” to an authoritative demand for accountability, with some degree of risk.31 This dynamic was unusually overt in the concluding scene of Biblis, where queen Biblis admits her incestuous love for her brother, Caunus. In her final moments before committing suicide, she addresses the gods resentfully, singing, Après ce que j’ai fait pour échapper au crime, En voulant l’éviter, je tombe dans l’abîme, Et malgré-­moi, je fais un aveu si honteux. Signalez-­vous ainsi vôtre pouvoir suprême Pour punir de faibles humains?32 [After what I did to avoid crime, / Looking to escape it, I fall now into the abyss, / And in spite of myself, I make such a shameful confession. / Is this your way of demonstrating your supreme power / To punish human weaknesses?]

Guilty personas like Biblis are typically driven to confess against their self-­ interest—­malgré-­moi is the formulaic expression—­and at the risk of their dignity, their freedom, and sometimes much more. Not all introspective or autobiographical singing in the tragédie en musique was political in this sense, and we should distinguish ubiquitous professions of regret, love, hope, despair, and so forth from sung confessions that are drawn from personas with difficulty and at some cost to themselves. Consider the following two professions of illicit love, in Lully’s Alceste and Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie (1733 version). In act 3 of Alceste, Alcides (Hercules) admits to king Admetus that he is in love with the doomed queen, Alcestis, and proposes to retrieve her from Hades if Admetus will yield her to him: J’aime Alceste, il est temps de ne m’en plus défendre; Elle meurt, ton amour n’a plus rien à prétendre33 [I love Alcestis, it is time for me to admit this; / She is dying, your love has no more claim]

Alcides makes his admission in a negotiation where he enjoys a distinct advantage, and he risks nothing in telling the truth. In contrast, Phaedra’s

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admission that she is in love with her stepson, in Hippolyte et Aricie (3.3), is drawn from her by Hippolytus himself, who reproaches her hatred of his beloved Aricia, singing, “Mais pour l’objet de mon amour / Qui peut vous inspirer cette haine fatale?” (But what could inspire in you this fatal hatred / For the one I love?) She replies : Elle a trop su te plaire; Elle en perdra le jour; Puis-­je avec trop d’ardeur immoler ma rivale?34 [She knew too well how to please you, / For this she will die; / Can I too fervently seek my rival’s destruction?]

Although she outranks her stepson, Phaedra confesses unwillingly and from a vulnerable position, because her disclosure exposes her to rejection by some­ one she loves, as well as to the social death of public incest. It also reveals a moral character that she herself finds repulsive and seeks to destroy: “Frappe,” she urges Hippolytus, “ce monstre est dans mon cœur” (Strike, this monster is in my heart).35 Phaedra’s passionate self-­identification as a monster highlights a final aspect of the politics of confessional song: its normativity. The monster was the quintessential seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century icon of the unnatural and inhumane, and in Hippolyte it serves as a racialized metaphor (borrowed from Racine) for Phaedra’s illicit passion.36 When Pellegrin’s Phaedra disparages herself in these terms, she defines her character and behavior in accordance with a value-­laden social structure as recognizably “other.” She not only accepts Hippolytus’s horrified response but actively identifies herself as monstrous, claiming this description as who she truly is and, in a sense, committing to her own otherness. In her dialogue scene with Hippolytus, she represents herself as the embodiment of deviance and expresses a self-­revulsion so acute that she seeks her own death. “Etouffe dans mon sang un amour que j’abhorre” (Extinguish from my blood a love that I abhore), she implores Hippolytus, before taking his sword.37 Operatic confessions of guilt like Phaedra’s generally conform to a four-­ part model that Foucault set out in his 1981 Louvain lectures. There, he de­ fined avowal as “a verbal act through which the subject affirms who he is, binds himself to this truth, places himself in a relationship of dependence with regard to another, and modifies at the same time his relationship to himself.”38 Adapting the rhetorical components of Foucault’s definition to this repertory, we could say that the confessional mode of introspective song in­

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volves a character’s declaration or acknowledgment of a truth about herself, often in response to a description (“yes, that’s me,” or “I am not that”); a com­ mitment to be who she says she is; an exposure that puts a character at risk as vulnerable to or dependent on another; and, finally, a modification of her relationship to herself, initiating some significant change. While this rhetor­ ical form appeared in other kinds of confessional song as well, in the following sections we will see how it works in the tragédie en musique’s guilty confessions.

Confession Scenes in Lyric Tragedy: 1672–­1764 An early example of a confession that exhibits most of these features occurs in the last act of Joseph-­François Duché de Vancy and Desmarets’s Théagène et Cariclée (5.3), where the Persian sorceress Arsace confesses to having unknowingly killed her own follower, Thisbe. She did so, she declares, in an attempt to take revenge on her romantic rival, Chariclea. Her confession comes in the second half of an extended divertissement-­like scene in which the Ethiopian king, Hidaspes, recognizes Chariclea as his long-­lost daughter, saving her from being sacrificed to Osiris. When the king thanks Arsace for helping to bring about this recognition and reversal, she unexpectedly hurls a curse at the assembly, wishing them “un jour d’horreur, de tristesse et d’effroi” (a day of horror, sadness, and terror). The astonished king demands to know, “Qui peut d’un tel souhait rendre Arsace capable?” (What could make Arsace capable of desiring such a thing?), and she responds in a sober G-­minor recitative: Apprenez quels sont mes forfaits? De la mort de Tisbé je suis seule coupable; Je voulais qu’à mes yeux une mort effroyable Fit périr ma rivale, et vengeât mes attraits.39 [You want to know my crimes? / I alone am guilty of causing Thisbe’s death; / I wanted to see my rival die / A dreadful death, and avenge my charms.]

Announcing what she did and why, Arsace declares herself guilty and commits to this description by taking responsibility for Thisbe’s death. When the king reacts with astonishment (“Qu’entends-­je?”[What do I hear?]), she turns to address the Olympian gods, who often serve as confessional others

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in such scenes. Addressing the gods as unseen authorities, she exposes herself to their judgment and punishment: Ciel injuste, assouvis ta colère, Tu demandes mon sang, je te vais satisfaire, C’est servir trop longtemps d’objet à ton courroux, Ma mort va couronner toutes tes barbaries; Dieux cruels, triomphez, j’expire sous vos coups, Ou plutôt de mon sort soyez encore jaloux; Je vais au séjour des Furies Trouver des déités moins barbare que vous.40 [Unjust heaven, give free rein to your anger, / You demand my blood, I will satisfy you, / Too long have I been the object of your wrath, / My death will be the crowning achievement of your barbarity; / Cruel gods, triumph, I perish beneath your blows, / Or perhaps be jealous still of my fate; / In the realm of the Furies I will / Find gods less barbarous than you.]

Finally, Arsace modifies her relationship to herself, in the most drastic way possible, by committing suicide. Interestingly, Arsace’s confession is witnessed not just by other personas (and, we imagine, the gods), but by an onstage assembly. The stage presence of le peuple in such scenes heightens the dramatic effect of the most common “modifications”—­the fourth component of confession—­that personas’ characters and relationships undergo: their abjection, expulsion, and sublimation. When guilty personas acknowledge their guilt and expose their “true” character, they usually experience abjection, which Butler characterizes as both a socially “degraded or cast out status” and a psychic zone “of uninhabitability” that produces an intense revulsion, as in, “I would rather die than do or be that!”41 Faced with their own abjection, personas usually expel themselves from the onstage community by announcing their exile or death by suicide. This transitions them to a state of liminality that prepares their eventual departure or “second” death, in psychoanalytic terms.42 Librettists (or censors) ensured that all guilty personas would experience some degree of abjection, but not all were consigned to exile or death. Some confessions lead instead to madness, in an extreme modification of a character’s relationship to herself. Remaining for the moment with préramiste works, Pellegrin and Joseph-­François Salomon’s Théonoé (5.1) included a monologue in which the captive princess Theonoe (alias Axiamire) goes mad

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after confessing her part in condemning her beloved Alcidamas—­really her disguised brother Leucippe—­to death. Her confession culminates in a couplet in which she defines herself as “sacrilège et barbare” (sacrilegious and barbaric) and then slides into madness, hallucinating the crime she has set in motion and determining to die (example 3.1): C’en est fait . . . le fer tombe . . . ils vont cesser de vivre. Quelle horreur . . . attendez . . . je suis prête à vous suivre. . . . Ciel! Quel nuage épais les dérobe à mes yeux!43

example 3.1 Joseph-­François Salomon, Théonoé, act 5, scene 1 (from the first printed edition [Paris: J.-­B.-­Christophe Ballard, 1715])

example 3.1 (continued)

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example 3.1 (continued)

[It is done . . . the knife falls . . . they will live no longer. / What horror . . . wait . . . I am ready to follow you. . . . / Heavens! What heavy cloud hides them from my eyes!]

Pellegrin gave Theonoe suitably disjointed rhetoric, and, following his cue, Salomon supplied a setting with very disoriented harmony. Throughout this section the continuo line is also embellished with rapid sixteenth-­and thirty-­second-­note tirades, a préramiste convention for representing altered states such as madness or prophetic delirium. In this case, Theonoe’s madness is temporary. Near the end of the scene she recovers her sanity but experiences a terrible remorse, which she expresses in a slow, poignant vocal descent and ascent outlining the dominant of C minor over a series of diminished chords in the continuo: Mais ma raison revient, tout fuit, il ne me reste, Que les cruels remords qui déchirent mon cœur.44

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[But my reason returns, it all dissipates; I am left / With nothing but the cruel remorse that tears at my heart.]

Theonoe was one of a number of incestuous criminal protagonists in the early-­eighteenth-­century repertory, and Pellegrin had to work hard to absolve her character, who otherwise would probably have met a fate like that of Tereus, Semiramide, or Byblis, all of whom die after confessing to incest-­ driven crimes.45 Pellegrin’s most dramatically compelling criminal persona was another incestuous royal, Phaedra, whom he and Rameau gave one of the finest con­ fession scenes in the repertory, in Hippolyte et Aricie (4.4). Recall that at the beginning of the scene Phaedra learns that her stepson Hippolytus has been killed by a sea monster. The chorus (measures 498–­505) simply narrates the tragic events—­although in a pathos-­laden chromatic idiom—­not suspecting Phaedra’s involvement.46 However, she experiences their narrative as an accusation, and it draws an anguished confession from her in which she blames herself for Hippolytus’s death (example 3.2a): Non, sa mort est mon seul ouvrage; Dans les enfers, c’est par moi qu’il descend; Neptune de Thésée a crû venger l’outrage; J’ai versé le sang innocent.47 [No, his death is my work alone; / It is because of me that he descends into Hades; / Neptune thought to avenge the offense against Theseus; / I have spilled innocent blood.]

Turning to Rameau’s remarkable setting of this exchange with the chorus, at Phaedra’s interjected “non” (measure 505), the texture is reduced in a way that underlines her character’s exposure in confession. Up to this point, Rameau had elided the solo and choral statements, and the orchestra had bolstered the chorus with a homophonic, quasi-­declamatory underlay. However, with Phaedra’s “non,” the chorus and orchestra fall silent, and she narrates her guilt accompanied by the basse continue. Only when she begins to feel the pangs of remorse—­“Qu’ai-­je fait? Quels remords!” (What have I done? What remorse!)—­does the exposed texture of her confession give way to tempestuous rumblings in the orchestra (from measure 513). As I dis­ cuss in the next chapter, the orchestra’s accompaniment seems to dramatize the gods’ punitive response to her confession.

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Phèdre

Choir

Flute I Violin I

Flute II Violin II

Bassoons Basses B.C.

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example 3.2a Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733 version), act 4, scene 4 (OOR, ser. 4, vol. 1, ed. Sylvie Bouissou [Paris: Gérard Billaudot, 2002])

Like earlier confessing personas, Phaedra rails against the cruelty of the gods, whose unseen, terrifying audition is now represented by Rameau’s sole­n­ nel accompaniment (example 3.2b): Dieux cruels, vengeurs implacables, Suspendez un courroux qui me glace d’effroi;

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Phèdre

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example 3.2­b Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733 version), act 4, scene 4 (OOR, ser. 4, vol. 1, ed. Sylvie Bouissou [Paris: Gérard Billaudot, 2002])

Ah! si vous êtes équitables, Ne tonnez pas encore sur moi; La gloire d’un héros que l’injustice opprime Vous demande un juste secours. Laissez-­moi révéler à l’auteur de ses jours, Et son innocence et mon crime.48 [Cruel gods, implacable avengers, / Suspend a wrath that freezes me with terror; / Ah! if you are fair, / Thunder no more upon me; / The glory of a hero whom injustice oppresses / Demands just relief

Ah!

-

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from you. / Let me reveal to his father / Both his innocence and my crime.]

With her final lines, Phaedra proposes to make amends through a further confession to Hippolytus’s father, Theseus. Rameau’s expressive vocal writing makes her contrition seem sincere, and her concluding vocal phrase (measures 555–­59) in particular suggests that she recognizes the seriousness of what she has done. Its pitch outline is simple enough, descending from a D to an F-­sharp before gradually ascending again to D; but, with characteristic acuity, Rameau changes the harmonic underpinning of her last melodic

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546

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example 3.2b (continued)

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b + & b 2 ú.

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example 3.2b (continued)

D, inviting recursive reflection on the first.49 At the beginning of the phrase her poetry envisions the remedy of a second confession, and her melodic D forms the third of a bright B-­flat-­major triad played in a high register in the strings. However, by the end of the phrase her second D forms the root of the dominant of G minor, a tragic tonality that suggests the insufficiency of her proposed remedy in the face of catastrophe. Rameau’s manipulation of tonal space at this moment (measures 558–­59) also underlines the enormity of her “crime.” The contrary movement outward to the final D in the voice and low strings articulates a three-­octave expanse, whose vastness registers the truth of her criminality and ushers her into a dark sublimity.

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As noted, Phaedra’s final vers breaks off on the dominant of G minor, emphasizing the word “crime.” Her dominant is only resolved when the chorus of hunters breaks its silence with the vocative, “Ô,” on a G-­minor triad (measure 559): Ô remords superflus! Hippolyte n’est plus. [Oh pointless remorse! / Hippolytus is no more.]

The chorus thus rejects her expression of remorse, and the orchestra seems to as well, as its homorhythmic doubling of the choral parts “speaks” in unity with them. This choral (and orchestral) repudiation is fascinating as a theatrical imitation of the kinds of public judgment that we know occurred in real-­life penal rituals. There is no executioner or gibbet here, but Phaedra is expelled from the onstage community just as surely as if there were. Indeed, in the first scene of the next act (measures 15–­17, 1733 version) we learn that after making her promised second confession she has committed suicide. Phaedra’s interaction with Rameau’s solennel orchestra stages a relationship with a transcendent authority that may be theatrically represented but remains beyond her interior reality. In contrast, from the 1760s onward, a new type of confessing persona appeared in serious opera across Europe, one whose interiority was expansive enough to begin to incorporate the confessional other as an internalized moral sensibility. While morally sensible characters would become a staple of sentimental comic operas, including in France, Gluck’s productions for Paris were among the earliest operas in the French tragic tradition to include highborn personas who justify their actions with reference to their own conscience, beyond any external moral authority.50 This represents an important dramaturgical change, one with political implications. The heroic protagonists of tragédies en musique had conventionally adhered to hierarchical social norms, aristocratic virtues (such as la gloire, la générosité, or la sincérité), or fealty to a sovereign as their highest good. Yet, under the influence of cultural currents of sensibilité and changing paradigms of moral subjectivity, poets and composers endowed the noble protagonists of the late eighteenth century with an inner sense of the good and the right that these characters increasingly take as an authority for their actions. This also altered the confessional relationship I have been tracing in this chapter, including its musical component. Particularly in Gluck’s operas, the

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vocal and orchestral music of confession scenes acquired a greater respon­ sibility for communicating characters’ interior experience and their truth. Musical sound thus emerged as the theatrical medium par excellence for a new kind of moral authority, grounded in human nature and lodged especially within the intimate domain of sensibility.

Confessions of Sensibility: 1764–­1789 Iphigénie en Aulide was the first opera that Gluck composed for Paris, to a libretto by a French diplomat, Marie François Louis Gand Leblanc du Roullet. Du Roullet followed his model, Racine’s Iphigénie (1674, 4.8–­9), in giving Agamemnon an extended confessional monologue in act 2 as he is about to hand his daughter Iphigenia over to be sacrificed to the gods.51 Reflecting in an expressive arioso style on the terrible act he means to commit, Agamemnon wavers and is overtaken by guilt: À moi, soldats . . . O dieux! que vais-­je faire? C’est ta fille, cruel, que tu leur vas livrer; Ta fille, si longtemps à ton amour si chère; Tout mon cœur se sent déchirer: Non, qu’elle vive . . . Ah! quelle est ma faiblesse? Pour conserver ses jours, que les dieux ont proscrits, Faut-­il sacrifier l’intérêt de la Grèce? Faut-­il d’Achille endurer les mépris? Non, que plutôt cent fois à l’autel entraînée, Ma fille par sa mort . . . ma fille! je frémis! Iphigénie, o ciel! de festons couronnée, À l’homicide acier présentera son sein! Je verrai tout son sang couler? . . . Père inhumain!52 [To me, soldiers . . . Oh gods! What will I do? / Cruel man, it is your daughter whom you will hand over to them; / Your daughter, so dear for so long, / My whole heart feels torn: / No, let her live . . . Ah! what is this weakness? / To save her life, whom the gods have proscribed, / Is it necessary to sacrifice the interests of Greece? / Must I endure Achilles’s scorn? / No, rather may [she] a hundred times to the altar be taken, / My daughter by her death . . . my daughter! I tremble! / Iphigenia, oh heaven! Crowned with garlands, / Her breast will present itself to the murderous steel! / I will see her bleed to death? . . . Inhuman father!]

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As with earlier confessing personas, Agamemnon’s attempt to justify his daughter’s sacrifice is provoked by an accusation, which he voices himself: “C’est ta fille, cruel, que tu leur vas livrer.” Torn between filial love and princely duty, he decides in favor of the former and, recognizing his failure to live up to this standard, derides himself as cruel and a père inhumain. Roullet departed from Racine at this point by introducing a rhetorical confrontation with the Eumenides, who traditionally punished kin-­slayers. “N’entends-­tu pas déjà les cris des Euménides?” (Do you not already hear the cries of the Eumenides?), Agamemnon sings, as the orchestra sounds the Eumenides’ stark quarter-­note motive in the first violins against a rapid de­ scending figure in the strings and flutes.53 Personifying the Eumenides (or Furies) was conventional in the tragédie en musique, but Gluck’s decision to imitate their reproachful “cris” and “sifflements” in the orchestra (beginning in measure 40) lent this supernatural confessional other an acousmatic presence, one that is heard but not seen. However, Agamemnon’s final couplet returns the focus to his own moral sentiment, which he comes to recognize as a more compelling authority even than the Eumenides: Quoi, rien ne peut fléchir votre courroux, Cruelles? . . . mais en vain votre fureur s’irrite, Le remords dévorant, qui me presse et m’agite, Pour déchirer mon cœur est plus puissant que vous.54 [What, can nothing turn aside your anger, / Cruel ones? . . . But your fury is roused in vain, / The devouring remorse that presses and disturbs me, / Tears my heart more powerfully than you.]

As we have seen, librettists often had confessing personas experience remorse, but Roullet’s vivid imagery of physical torment and Gluck’s expressive musical setting endowed Agamemnon’s profession of remorse with an unprecedented emotional depth. Agamemnon’s apprehension of his own guilt and remorse unfolds gradually in the course of the monologue, and Gluck used the orchestra to particularly powerful effect in depicting this process. The strings echo the king’s initial expression of regret (“Ta fille, si longtemps à ton amour si chère,” measures 12–­14) with a presto sixteenth-­ note motive outlining a diminished seventh chord (measures 14–­15), a figure that the strings reiterate following Agamemnon’s next line, “Tout mon cœur se sent déchirer” (measures 15–­17) (example 3.3a). As he reconsiders whether to sacrifice Iphigenia, a similar motive traces a diminished descent once more in measures 31–­33 (“Ma fille . . .”). Near the end of the monologue,

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Violin I-II

Agamemnon

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example 3.3a Christoph Willibald Gluck, Iphigénie en Aulide, act 2, scene 7 (GSW, Ab. 1, Bd. 5b, ed. Marius Flothuis [Kassel: Bärenreiter Kassel, 1987–­1989])

the orchestra recommences its evocation of remorseful affect, beginning with “mais en vain votre fureur s’irrite” (example 3.3b). In a striking contrast with the Eumenides’ music in the section prior (measures 40–­63), the oboes and violins now have a string of chromatic “sigh” motives in parallel sixths (e.g., measures 66–­68) that, alternating with the strings’ written-­out tremolo, aptly conveys the “remords dévorant” that Agamemnon describes. His vocal setting itself attests to his moral experience, essentially confessing for him.

example 3.3­b Christoph Willibald Gluck, Iphigénie en Aulide, act 2, scene 7 (GSW, Ab. 1, Bd. 5b, ed. Marius Flothuis [Kassel: Bärenreiter Kassel, 1987–­1989])

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example 3.3b (continued)

We find a similar tendency in the tragédies of Gluck’s contemporaries in Paris in the 1770s and ’80s, although none used the orchestra quite as adeptly to theatricalize characters’ moral sensibility and interiority. The last act of Johann Christian Bach’s Amadis de Gaule (3.4) includes a monologue scene for Oriana, in which she confesses her feelings of guilt over having accused Amadis of betrayal before his apparent death. Bach’s collaborator, Vismes, extended Quinault’s original scene for Oriana (in his 1684 libretto, Amadis) to include a new air expressing her remorse, given here as it was set by the composer: Cruel remords qui me tourmente, Viens déchirer mon triste cœur. Hélas! c’est ton injuste amante, Hélas! c’est moi qui fait tout ton malheur!

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Ah! si ton âme était constante, Ah! si plus sensible à mon ardeur, Cruel remords qui me tourmente, Viens déchirer mon triste cœur. Tous les maux que la haine invente N’ont rien d’égal à ta rigueur. Ah! si ton âme était constante, Ah! si plus sensible à mon ardeur, Cruel remords, viens déchirer mon triste cœur. Ah! tous les maux que la haine invente N’ont rien d’égal à ta rigueur.55 [Cruel remorse that torments me, / Come tear apart my sad heart. / Alas! It is your unjust lover, / Alas! It is I who have caused all your misfortune! / Ah! if your soul had been constant, / Ah! if more sensitive to my passion, / Cruel remorse that torments me, / Come tear apart my sad heart. / None of the evils that hatred invents/ Can match your severity. / Ah! if your soul had been constant, / Ah! if more sensitive to my passion, / Cruel remorse, come tear apart my sad heart. / Ah! none of the evils that hatred invents / Can match your severity.]

Seeing Amadis’s body lying prone at her feet, Oriana first sings an anguished accompanied recitative, but in the air that follows her character seems to come undone, addressing her confessions erratically to her own remorse (in the refrain and C section) as well as to the memory of Amadis (in the B section).56 Bach communicated the afflictive power of Oriana’s remorse above all through the air’s use of the terrifying topic, especially its F-­minor tonality, brass, pervasive alla zoppa syncopation, tremolo, and fast runs. With each variation of her refrain the violins’ rapid descending third motive (measures 29–­30, 61–­64, 96–­98) becomes increasingly elaborate and agitated, symbolizing the painful experience of remorse that her poetry evokes. He also used the horns expressively starting in measure 47 (following the word malheur), where the rest of the orchestra drops out and the horns sound an exposed fortissimo octave on the tonic of B-­flat (example 3.4). Oriana has just assumed responsibility for Amadis’s death (“Hélas! c’est moi qui fait tout ton malheur!”), and the emphatic horns sound the voice of judgment. Their similar interjection at measure 72 (following the word cœur) is buttressed by the winds, and it now seems to herald the punishing remorse that section C will evoke. With their darker timbre and ombra associations, the horns endow

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example 3.4 Johann Christian Bach, Amadis de Gaule, act 3, scene 4 (The Collected Works of Johann Christian Bach, 1735–­1782, vol. 10, ed. Ernest Warburton [New York: Garland, 1988])

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example 3.4 (continued)

Oriana’s implied interlocutor at this moment with an almost supernatural gravity, yet we know that her confession is internally directed. In Bach’s hands, Oriana’s conscience is interpreted musically as a quasi-­ noumenal moral force. Librettists and composers of the 1780s generally persisted in internalizing moral authority and dramatizing the afflictive power of moral sentiment, to the point that representing remorse as self-­torment became something of a cliché. For example, in the last act of Antonio Sacchini’s masterpiece, Œdipe à Colonne (3.3), Polynices sings to his father Oedipus: Que pour mieux punir Polynice, Le ciel et les enfers inventent des tourments! Ils n’approcheront pas de ceux que je ressens. Le remords dans mon cœur, est mon plus grand supplice; Il est insupportable, affreux, Il me suit, il me presse, il m’obsède en tous lieux.57 [In order to better punish Polynices, / May heaven and hell invent new torments! / They will not approach those that I feel. / The remorse in my heart is my greatest punishment; / It is unbearable, frightful, / It follows me, it presses me, it hounds me everywhere.]

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Remorse affects Phaedra similarly, in Jean-­Baptiste Lemoyne’s eponymous opera of the same year (3.7). In her second monologue of the last act, the tragic queen takes responsibility for Hippolytus’s death and expresses such revulsion toward her own desires and actions that she comes to see her very existence as a “crime”: Je souille l’air que je respire, Mon aspect inspire l’horreur, Un affreux remords me déchire, L’enfer est déjà dans mon cœur.58 [I sully the air that I breathe, / My face inspires horror, / A frightful remorse tears at me, / Hell is already in my heart.]

No external coercion is needed for Phaedra to recognize her criminality and submit to punishment. Her own remorseful affect presses her to confess and exposes her to the self-­reproach of conscience: as she sings, brokenly, “L’enfer est déja dans mon cœur.” Agamemnon, Polynices, Phaedra, and other confessing personas in late-­ eighteenth-­century tragédies presented a theatrical rendition of Diderot’s portrait of the criminal tormented by conscience, in his Encylopédie entry on “remords”: REMORSE, m. s. (Gram.) secret reproach of the conscience; it is impossible to extinguish when it is merited, because we cannot prevail on ourselves to the point of taking the false for the true, the ugly for the beautiful, the bad for the good. . . . He who is tormented by remorse cannot live with himself; it is necessary that he flees from himself. This is perhaps the reason why those who do wrong are rarely sedentary; they only remain in place while conceiving of evil, they wander after having committed it.59

Such characters represented a newly moralized criminal subject whose confession was provoked most immediately by the sting of conscience, beyond any external demand or threat. Pressed by tragic circumstances, culpable personas in late-­century operas commonly discover something like moral autonomy, as noble or royal individuals who possess both the freedom and responsibility of practical discernment.60 These personas most commonly experience authority not as an external accusatory demand, but as personal feelings of guilt and remorse that com-

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pel them to confess. Guilty confessions of this period, then, accommodated the confessional other as a transcendent moral authority that seemed to issue from a persona’s sensitive noble “heart.” Interestingly, as artists made this experience of guilt more central to confessions, they began to divide confessing personas internally, depicting them as both objects and subjects of moral judgment (although not yet as the fully transcendental subjects of nineteenth-­century opera). Conscience thus emerged in classical opera as a sublime faculty within the late century’s noble subjects, endowing their moral sensibility with an almost magical ability to bridge the gap that remained, in the twilight of the ancien régime, between transcendent and im­ manent realities.61

Failed Confessions Thus far I have emphasized scenes involving “good” confessions, in which personas more or less succeed in giving an account of themselves and their actions in song. The epitome of the good confession was undoubtedly Theseus’s exchange with Neptune in the original version of Hippolyte et Aricie (5.1–­2). Theseus’s opening monologue, “Grands dieux! de quels remords je me sens déchirer!,” limns a powerful sense of guilt and remorse over his part in Hippolytus’s apparent death. Like Phaedra, he identifies himself passionately as a “monstre” who has committed “le plus noir des forfaits” (the darkest of crimes), and the moral revulsion he feels toward himself and his actions leads him to seek his own death.62 Neptune intervenes, announcing that Hippolytus lives but that Theseus will be forever separated from him as punishment for his misguided vengeance. In a crowning moment of confessional lyricism, Theseus sings a C-­minor air to Hippolytus that begins with his ardent expression of admiration for the justice of this decision: “Je ne te verrai plus! O juste châtiment!” (I will never see you again! O just punishment!) (example 3.5). His vocal melody registers the shock of wonder with an upward leap of a sixth on the exclamation “O,” and the entire ensemble pauses for two beats at the end of this phrase, suggesting a stance of chastened reflection. The strings furnish an appropriately somber accompaniment to Theseus’s vocal part, but, in a stroke of brilliance on Rameau’s part, the flutes have a series of stately arpeggiated descents that bathe the entire setting in luminosity. Theseus appears in these two scenes as an icon of heroic virtue, confessing admirably and responding to Neptune’s mercy with an appropriate mixture of wonder and joy.63 However, the protagonists of eighteenth-­century tragédies did not always confess and reform as they should. In fact, some

example 3.5 Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie, 1733 version, act 5, scene 2 (OOR, ser. 4, vol. 1, ed. Sylvie Bouissou [Paris: Gérard Billaudot, 2002])

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of the most enjoyable confessional scenes succeeded brilliantly as musical theater but failed in some way as confession. Especially in early tragédies en musique, confessing personas often do not accept responsibility for tragic events, seeing them as the result of supernatural intervention in human affairs. Others initially accept responsibility but then change their minds, accusing the gods or destiny. Some assume responsibility for tragedy but commit themselves positively to error or evil. A few exceptional classical-­ era personas refuse to confess altogether, maintaining the justice of their actions to the end. Such refusal was exceedingly rare in Francophone trag­ édies, for generic and political reasons, although it was more common in comic and semi-­serious opera. There was no French counterpart of Traetta’s and Coltellini’s Antigone (in Antigona), for instance, whose noble refusal to repent and acceptance of death, in the face of sovereign censure, presented a threat to the opera’s absolutist order. Among the most interesting examples are scenes in which personas confess in ways that show them to be recognizably moral, yet without reforming themselves. For instance, the 1756 version of Rameau’s Zoroastre (5.2–­3) includes a dialogue in act V, in which Erinice admits her complicity in a plot against Zoroastro and tries to save him, before reversing herself and rejoining Abramane’s planned attack. Zoroastro’s pointed notice of her remorse is what provokes this change of heart, and she sings, Mes remords! . . . Ce reproche étouffe leur murmure . . . Notre sort est de nous haïr. Il manquait à mon cœur cette nouvelle injure Pour le forcer à m’obéir.64 [My remorse! . . . This reproach stifles its murmuring . . . / Our fate is to hate each other. / My heart was lacking only this new injury / To force it to obey me.]

Erinice’s confession in this scene acknowledges who she is and exposes her to Zoroastro’s reproach, but she then fails to change her behavior or her rela­ tionship to the guilty self she has declared herself to be. In contrast, other personas confess in ways that seem to fail as truth telling, and such moments reveal generically and historically contingent limits of opera’s imagination of sung confession as “veridiction.” Perhaps even more so than in other media, confession in opera underlines Foucault’s insistence on the primacy of the “act of truth-­telling” over the “assertion” itself, as the truthfulness of an operatic confession inheres not just in what

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characters declare but in the act itself of confessing in song.65 Audiences’ ability to perceive characters’ confessions as truthful depended on poets’ dramaturgy of self-­divulgence and -­evaluation, as well as on composers’ and singers’ handling of a character’s musical manner of expression. Specifically, good confessions in the tragédie en musique tended to be earnest; appropriate to the character’s rank, gender, and kind (e.g., supernatural or human, pastoral or heroic); and expressively coherent and efficient. Confessional vocal writing that did not fulfill these criteria typically undermined the im­ pression of veracity and may even be said to fail as a confession. One of the most common such “failures” involved a lapse in the expressive coherence or efficiency of confessional song. This could happen when confessing characters supplied too much, too little, incoherent, or irrelevant information, or when they confessed in musically elaborate airs or monologues that promised to draw listeners away from denotative meaning into a predominantly sensual experience of lyricism, rhythmic propulsion, or harmonic tension and release.66 One example is Oriana’s air, “Cruel remords,” in Amadis de Gaule (see example 3.4), which is rhetorically unstable, shifting addressees and alternating between self-­castigation and accusation of the apparently dead Amadis. Its rondò form contributes to this instability by instigating Oriana’s rapid shifts of topic and addressee, and its structural repetition—­which is discursively unnecessary—­subordinates the air’s confessional function to a formal musical logic and a sensual experience of inoperative song. Oriana’s air does seem to earnestly convey her remorse and despair (especially as performed by Katia Velletaz with Solamente Naturali and Musica Florea),67 and its elevated expressionistic style is appropriate to her rank and gender. Yet it does little to define her character musically as an injuste amante (unjust lover) who, as she sings, is responsible for Amadis’s suffering. In fact, characterization seems at best a secondary concern. Oriana’s fragmented, redundant poetic “speech,” her tendency to lapse into repeated affective exclamations (such as “ah!” and “hélas”), and the sheer musical pleasure of the setting itself undermine verisimilar characterization in favor of expressing an unstable affective state that, however apropos to her circumstances, hardly delineates a coherent character. As musical theater the air is terrific, but as a plausible confession of a self it falls short.68 Recall that one of the main political objections to confessional song is its potential for normative violence. Oriana’s air does not really involve such violence, as it does not convincingly moralize or criminalize her (and neither does the orchestral recitative, “Que vois-­je?” that precedes her air). Her vacillations and expressive exorbitance do give her character a touch of

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the madwoman, and it would be easy to hear her air as enacting a gender-­ specific form of government by relegating her to opera’s veritable colony of demented women. However, I do not find this reading very convincing, partly because Oriana’s character does not seem particularly abject, as she would be if her air presented her as mad. It may also be that this is simply ineffective vocal writing on Bach’s part (and it is worth remembering that the opera received only seven performances in Paris, although that may have been due to resentment over Marmontel’s revision of Quinault). Or perhaps Oriana’s relative unintelligibility as either truly criminal or truly mad can be heard as providing a refuge of sorts from the demand for recognizable fem­ inine characterization. If Oriana discloses her grief and remorse in a less normative manner than many such characters, her chief antagonists, Arcabonne and Arcalaus, also respond to her predicament in unorthodox ways. Breathless with pleasure as they enter with a coterie of démons, they repeat a single line: “Ah! quel plaisir de voir leur cruel désespoir” (Ah! what pleasure to see their cruel despair).69 In contrast with Lully’s earlier setting of their line (which Vismes adapted from Quinault), Bach’s minor-­mode duo suggests the magicians’ frank enjoyment of their cruelty toward Oriana and Amadis, an enjoyment that is audible in the strings’ shivering sixteenth-­note flourishes, their driving eighth-­note rhythms, and their sensual parallel thirds, which echo those in the voices. Contrast this vicious enjoyment with Zoroastro’s moralizing response (5.3) to Erinice’s confession, discussed above. Alone onstage following her exit, Zoroastro sings a maxim quatrain that concludes, essentially, “she got what she deserved”: Tel est le juste sort du crime, Le trouble l’environne, et l’opprobre le suit.70 [Such is the just outcome of crime, / Disturbance surrounds it, and infamy follows it.]

His is an overtly normative listening that takes Erinice’s confession as evidence of her genuine criminality and judges her accordingly. He listens, in other words, for the truthfulness of what she sings, whereas Arcabonne and Arcalaus listen for the sheer malicious pleasure of it. The magicians’ enjoyment is overtly antinormative—­morally monstrous, in eighteenth-­century terms—­and, as such, is an extension of the opera’s villainization of them. However, audiences too presumably enjoyed listening to

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singers perform confessions, given the prevalence of confessional numbers in French opera across the eighteenth century. While some audience members may have indeed responded to sung confessions with the sober, moralistic listening of a Zoroastro, I suspect that many did not. What were the ethics and, indeed, the politics of such enjoyment in the theater? This is a venerable question taken up by generations of tragic theorists, and I will not try to settle it here. Nevertheless, there is value in considering the role of gratification in this repertory’s confessional theater, by way of conclusion.

The Pleasures and Perils of Confessional Song Gratification can enter into confessional performance from several directions—­as experienced by onstage characters, singers, or audiences—­and it can take many forms, of which Arcabonne’s and Arcalaus’s sadism is just one. Nevertheless, while such pleasures can certainly be nonnormative, grat­ ification in confessing or hearing confessions does not necessarily escape the governmental economy that Foucault theorized. In some cases it may actu­ ally reinforce that economy by furnishing another impetus to participate in confessional discourse and experience what he called its “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure.”71 In a critical development of Foucault’s work on confession, Taylor surmises that “modern ‘man’ be­ing a ‘confessional animal,’ we do not only want to confess, we also want to hear confessions.” She suspects that this amounts to an auditory voyeurism that does not necessarily proceed “out of a genuinely ethical interest in” the confessant but can amount to a kind of narcissistic desire for self-substantiation. As she puts it, “We listen to the other’s confession for an opportunity to say ‘me too’ or ‘not I,’ and then to elaborate on this identifi­cation or disidentification, to confess again.”72 Taylor’s study of confessional culture finds that Foucault’s emphasis on the regulatory potential of truthfulness is, in the last analysis, misleading, as it underestimates the role of attachment and gratification in how confession forms selves into subjects. She warns, “Confessional discourse, far from being true by definition, may tend towards untruth by its very nature as pleasurable, as shameful, as excusatory, and as coercive.”73 Whether confession involves subjects in Foucault’s “spirals of pleasure and power” or, Taylor adds, “spirals of displeasure and despair,” the entanglement of confessional disclosure with nonrational states calls into question the modern ideal of confession as the “expression of a free and rational decision on the subject’s part.”74

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This nonrational dimension is especially important for understanding the governmental economy of confessional song in the tragédie en musique, whose musical component was thought to primarily communicate affect. Such song acquires a moral and political utility when guilty personas attach themselves passionately to derogatory self-­descriptions (such as criminel, monstre, or barbare) and, by extension, to the typecast operatic identities they name. Indeed, the musical settings of such passages often heighten the pathetic effects of these descriptions, and in many cases they seem designed to attract a pitying or sympathetic listener response to the experiences and, by extension, identities that singer-­personas claim. Well-­composed and well-­ performed confessional song can also foment a desire on the part of listeners to participate further in confession—­both within and beyond the opera house—­by associating it with intense sensory gratification. Eighteenth-­century confessional song is good to think with in this respect, because it participated in the emergence of Rousseauean ideals of the voice as a means of authentic self-­expression. It thus has contributed to the generalization of confessional recognition since the eighteenth century as a rite of Western personhood. Indeed, the proliferation of several kinds of confessional scenes in opera from the late eighteenth century onward suggests a distinctly modern fascination with self-­exposure and self-­regulation, especially in the absence of threatened violence or overt coercion. It is in scenes like these that confessional song exercises the most effective normativity, because it can more readily seem a spontaneous, autonomous expression of a character’s authentic self. However, in the second half of the eighteenth century, guilty characters’ confessions were still sometimes elicited under the threat of physical violence. This threat could be objectified onstage as a menacing authority figure, although librettists typically reserved this tactic for antiquarian or exoticist plots involving despots. Increasingly, though, it was the orchestra that brought threats of force to bear on characters, as an impersonal confessional other that solicited and judged confessions from beyond the stage reality. Mozart’s Idomeneo, for example, was directly influenced by the tragédie en musique (his librettist, Varesco, adapated Danchet’s Idoménée), and it offers a well-­known example of such a confession in act 2, where king Ido­ meneo cries out, “Il reo! / Io solo errai” (I am the guilty one! / I alone have erred) only when pressed to do so by the supernatural orchestral “storm” and the terrified chorus.75 Idomeneo acts like the king he is and responds to the chorus’s repeated demand for a culprit (“Il reo, qual’è?” [Who is the guilty one?]) by intervening in the ensemble’s descending enharmonic and chromatic progression

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with his solid D-­major cadence on “reo.” Having wrested control of the harmony, he defiantly names himself the guilty one in a heroic rhetorical and musical register appropriate to his office.76 His ability to musically overcome Neptune’s raging orchestra (and the reeling chorus) casts his confession as an act of an autonomous will and ethos, along the lines of what Nagel discerned in Die Zauberflöte. Yet confession is costly, even for a king, and Idomeneo’s admission buys his apparent autonomy at the expense of his “passionate cooperation” with a transcendent authority that his confession itself enshrines as tragic necessity. His cry, “Il reo!,” makes him intelligible within that order of authority and meaning, heralding the guilty subjectivity of a modern tragic morality.77 In the following chapter I trace a history of the forceful orchestral writing that composers like Gluck, Salieri, and Mozart used to represent the depersonalized, transcendent authority that guilty characters evoke in late-­ eighteenth-­century scenes of confession and punishment. Guilt was typically externalized in the tragédie en musique through characters’ confessions, and these confessions were sometimes met by violent punishment. In the course of the eighteenth century the task of depicting this punitive violence, and the authority behind it, fell increasingly to the orchestra.

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ozart’s orchestra in the 1780s represented penal violence and terror more vividly than had been attempted before in music for the lyric stage. The storm that besets King Idomeneo and the Cretans in act 2 of Ido­ meneo unleashes Neptune’s punitive wrath within the diegetic stage world, together with the monster that rises from the sea. However, in the space of the Residenztheater, where Idomeneo debuted in 1781, the violence of divine punishment registered through tempestuous orchestral music of unprecedented force. A stark F-­minor storm symphony (supplemented, Daniel Heartz reminds us, by a “wave machine, thunder drum, and reflector lamps to make lightning”) gives way to a more dynamic, harmonically unstable pas­ sage accompanying the Cretans’ chorus, “Qual nuovo terrore.”1 Following Idomeneo’s confession, the Cretans panic and flee the monster in a terrified pantomime chorus (“Corriamo, fuggiamo”), accompanied once more by the raging orchestra. Idomeneo and, even more so, Don Giovanni, are touchstones for orchestrally driven scenes of supernatural punishment in early modern opera, but by the 1780s such scenes had proliferated on the French lyric stage for half a century. This chapter looks at this French tradition, which emerged most notably in Rameau’s tragedies of the 1730s and ’40s and reached a zenith with the operas of Gluck, Sacchini, and their contemporaries. In particular, it focuses on the changing role of the opera orchestra in communicating sovereign judicial authority and violence toward culpable characters, especially in terrestrial settings (action set in Hades will be discussed in chapters 5 and 6).2 While vocal music plays an important role in such scenes, it is instrumental music that increasingly bears the weight of representing acts of condemnation and punitive violence, in an aestheticized form appropriate for the theater. In some of the most interesting cases, the orchestra seems to issue 123

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judgment or dole out punishment independently in the absence of onstage judicial figures like rulers or deities. Passages like these were possible because of the gradual enhancement of the opera orchestra’s dramatic and expressive capacity across the eighteenth century, a process that David Charlton terms “envoicing” the orchestra.3 In France, this process involved a shift in the poetics and even the ontology of instrumental music, which traditionally had been denied a representational capacity comparable to language or texted vocal music.4 Its communicative power also depended on the emergence of conventional instrumental topics whose elements could ideally convey meaning with minimal or no linguistic support. The orchestral music for judicial scenes from the 1770s and ’80s typically employed the expressive dissonance and chromaticism, sudden tonal shifts, tremolando, rapid scale and arpeggio figures, unison textures, disjunct melodic leaps, and alla zoppa syncopation that were hallmarks of the topic that Leonard Ratner and others labeled the Sturm und Drang (a term that is now best avoided).5 Because in serious opera this musical vocabulary was most saliently associated with terror and the sublime, I will refer to it here, in its French iteration, as the terrible or terrifying topic.6 Most research on this topic focuses on its application in the minor-­mode symphonic writing of Haydn, Mozart, and other central European composers in the 1770s and ’80s, but this symphonic usage was inherited from the Baroque and early classical tradition of descriptive instrumental writing for musical theater, stretching from Monteverdi through the reform operas of the mid-­eighteenth century.7 One main source is the descriptive music that appeared in tragédies en musique from the late seventeenth century onward, especially in storm and earthquake symphonies and in oracle and ghost (ombre) scenes.8 Most relevant for this chapter is the convention known in France as the tempête, a pictorial innovation of the préramistes that prepared the midcentury development of the orchestra into a dramatic medium of supernatural violence.9 Although the tempête originated as a free­standing instrumental number depicting a storm, instrumental music of a tempestuous or cataclysmic character (the tempête topic) was used in multiple dramatic contexts involving destructive force, including scenes of vio­lent elemental punishment set in motion by supernatural agents. Neither this storm-­like music nor the related slow and somber ombre style was inherently linked to the judicial action considered here; but their affective connotations of wonder, awe, terror, and horror suited them well to situations involving beyond-­ human judgment and punishment.10 The rise of orchestral penal scenes in tragédies en musique of the préra­ miste generation represents a marked shift from the treatment of judgment

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and punishment in earlier works, which mostly avoid showing punishment or any form of onstage violence.11 In early-­eighteenth-­century tragédies, in contrast, violent action has a greater role: librettists thematized violent torment and punishment more frequently, and composers commonly supplied descriptive orchestral music to supplement characters’ narration of violent action. With Rameau’s tragédies of the 1730s, the orchestra’s descriptive mu­ sic in penal scenes emerged as a truly dramatic force, capable of doubling or even replacing onstage judicial figures. It characteristically did so through troubled orchestral writing meant to indicate a supernatural judicial presence and violence. By the 1770s and ’80s, orchestral writing for penal scenes developed sufficient communicative power and sonic force that it became the preeminent vehicle of judicial authority and violence, regardless of whether a sovereign persona is also present. In fact, late-­eighteenth-­century tragédies tended to overdetermine the representation of judicial authority in the theater. They typically featured one or more sovereign figures whose onstage presence and authority was backed by the terrifying orchestra. In the last decades of the century, then, we see a complex movement with regard to judicial action in opera. The 1770s and ’80s gave rise to a heightened display of torment and punishment, both in the greater number of scenes produced and in their more powerful and ambitious musical expressivity. As the burden of depicting judicial authority and violence shifted definitively onto the “envoiced” orchestra, justice came to seem more abstract and depersonalized. At the same time, penal scenes focused more intensely on criminal subjectivity, through an ever more sensitive vocal and orchestral exploration of characters’ guilt, remorse, and other moral feeling. Just when orchestras achieved an ability to depict judicial terror with unprecedented musical force, composers and librettists turned the medium’s expressive powers as well on the interiority of justice’s objects. Even where opera librettos called for interventions by dei ex machina and so forth, as many still did, criminal interiority and the proper moral response to criminality took center stage, with sovereign justice experienced as a distant, terrifying force. Before the last decades of the century, guilty characters’ punishments typically involved physical suffering or death, as well as madness or negative affects like remorse. However, in the 1770s and after, librettists tended to emphasize characters’ moral self-­punishment, alongside any corporal punishment by external forces. The opera orchestra, which had long symbolized the terrorizing force of sovereign violence in penal scenes, also began to represent the normative violence of tragic guilt and self-­recrimination. Not yet the transcendentalist subjects of nineteenth-­century opera, guilty characters in these late works were poised between an external judicial authority that

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remained on the order of myth and an internal echo of its sublimity, experienced as the reproach of conscience or the voice of nature. The orchestra remained the main theatrical medium of violence, but it now possessed a fearsome capacity to pressure criminal personas on two fronts, body and soul.

The Lullian roi justicier Seventeenth-­century tragédies en musique did not use the orchestra to depict judgment or punishment, as later operas would do. Instead, they normally personalized judicial authority in the figure of a deus ex machina or a mortal ruler who embodied the merciful roi justicier, a French variant on the clement prince. Like their Italian counterparts, Quinault and other early tragédie librettists overwhelmingly stressed clemency over punishment: opera’s deities and kings mainly intervened with just solutions and pardons for the guilty. When violent punishment was part of the plot—­such as, for example, in Thésée, Atys, Isis, and Amadis—­it occurred offstage, was self-­inflicted, or was cast as the action of an unjust, intemperate ruler or sor­cerer. Moreover, violence remained largely verbal, dramatized through narration. The vocal music for such passages was mostly restrained and decorous, and the orchestra played only a modest supporting role. Librettists generally avoided associating good princely personas with severe corporal punishment, either delegating violence to other personas or displacing it onto divinities, especially infernal ones. When ruler personas did punish subjects directly for any but the most heinous deeds, they were generally presented in a negative light. This dramatic ethos was aesthetically justifiable as adhering to the principle of vraisemblance by presenting the most reasonable fiction of judicial sovereignty.12 But the rationality of the fiction stemmed from official and quasi-­official discourses of royal justice under the Bourbons. Both justice and clemency were among the virtues traditionally ascribed to the kings of France, and royal iconography sometimes pictured them as allegorical figures surrounding the king.13 Other artists emphasized the moment of decision, depicting the quasi-­miraculous act by which the monarch decided to implement or suspend the law. For example, an engraving commemorating the pacification of La Rochelle following an extended royal siege shows Louis XIII weighing the respective appeals of la Justice and la Clémence (figure 4.1). The banner celebrates the king’s military victory over the Huguenot Rochelois and their English allies, and it quotes a triumphal­ ist verse translation of Psalm 20, urging the king to punish their “audacity” with death.14 However, in the lower right-­hand corner of the engraving is

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figure 4.1 La Justice et la Clémence sont agenouillées devant Louis XIII assis sous une tente (n.p.: Joan le Clerc [c. 1628]; Bibliothèque nationale de France)

a quatrain annotating the depicted scene of appeal and deliberation, as la Justice and la Clémence advance their respective claims: La Justice conclut à punir les coupables. La Clémence pour eux demande au Roi pardon[.] Miséricordieux envers ses misérables D’une abolition entière il leur fait don.15 [Justice advises punishment for the guilty. / Clemency asks the King to pardon them. / Merciful toward his miserable ones / He gives them the gift of a complete annulment.]

The annotation provides a satisfying conclusion to the engraving’s dramatization of the king’s decision whether to spare the Rochelois. It also stresses the gift character of Louis XIII’s clemency toward La Rochelle, which flatters the king as the embodiment of the Bourbon ideal of the just, but benevolent prince. As this image suggests, the monarch was the ultimate judicial authority within the early modern French kingdom.16 During the course of the six­ teenth century, the Valois kings and their sovereign courts centralized ju­ dicial authority in the monarchy, notably displacing the traditional judicial prerogatives of the church. They also appropriated for royal justice the sacral nature of divine judgment and punishment and promoted a theological ideal of the sovereign as supreme judge (the roi justicier) and earthly fount of di­ vine justice.17 By the seventeenth century, the right and duty to judge subjects

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was seen as a defining charge of sovereignty; as Jean Bodin wrote in his Six livres de la république (1577), “The true science of a prince is to judge his people.”18 This idea withstood the pragmatic delegation of most judicial functions to royal magistrates and court officers, and the king retained the right to intervene exceptionally in any judicial matter under his jurisdiction, characteristically by pardoning or remitting crimes.19 Nevertheless, by the reign of Louis XIII the person of the sovereign was distanced from the judicial torture and corporal punishment carried out in his name. As Paul Friedland remarks, in seventeenth-­century France, nearly everyone but the king and queen went to see public executions.20 Pascal Bas­ tien finds that this royal absence was justified by a Bourbon ideal of kingship that mandated detachment “from the terror-­based justice that confirmed his power, assigning to the executioner the charge of punishing crime, of shedding blood and of intimidating his subjects with the fear of punishments.” The king himself dealt essentially in wisdom, noble generosity, and grace, not in killing. “Reuniting the king with the executioner,” Bastien points out, “would have destroyed the sacrality of power and sullied with blood and vio­ lence the figure of the sovereign, from whom issued the law, to be sure, but not the lash, the brand, or the scaffold.”21 This idealization of the sovereign as the just judge and lawgiver heavily influenced tragédie librettos. One obvious place was in the prologues, where allegorical figures and choruses praised the wisdom and moderate laws of the prince.22 But in the tragédies themselves librettists also sometimes represented sovereign figures acting as judges in disputes among the gods or high-­ranking mortals. For example, in the conclusion of the 1678 version of Lully’s Psyché, Jupiter resolves the dispute between Venus and Psyche by making the latter immortal. The persona of Jupiter also issues a judgment in the final scene of Lully and Quinault’s Proserpine, weighing the goddess Ceres’s appeal for her daughter Proserpina’s return against Pluto’s claims on her. In general, the seventeenth-­century repertory deemphasized personal punishment by good sovereign personas. As I noted in the previous chapter, librettists usually had guilty characters commit suicide, go mad, or be killed in combat or through magic. In rare cases they were not punished at all, as when Corneille’s Medea flies off defiantly in a dragon cart in Medée. When sovereigns do deal out violent punishment in early tragédies, they are typically represented as unjust and even, in some cases, tyrannical or depraved, partly because such actions nearly always target characters who are innocent or otherwise sympathetic. For example, in Atys Quinault had the goddess Cybele punish Attis

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with a state of madness, in which he kills his beloved Sangaride. But she comes to regret her decision, finding his punishment “too cruel”: Je commence à trouver sa peine trop cruelle, Une tendre pitié rappelle L’amour que mon courroux croyait avoir banni, Ma rivale n’est plus, Atys n’est plus coupable.23 [I begin to find his punishment too cruel, / A tender pity recalls / The love that I thought my anger had banished, / My rival is no more, Attis is no longer guilty.]

It was very unusual for deities or rulers to admit fallibility in Quinault’s librettos, but Cybele goes so far as to confess the barbarie (barbarity) and extreme rigueur (rigidity) of her own judgment, even acknowledging Attis’s criticism of her punishment as unjust.24 Lully and Quinault’s Isis offers another example of nonideal punishment by a sovereign persona, as Juno has Io tormented throughout act 4 because Io is loved by Jupiter.25 This sequence is exceptional in the Lullian corpus as an extended, spectacular action focused on the violent punishment of an innocent. Io’s punishments are vividly portrayed through horrific stage designs and the massed stage presence of the corps, representing her tormenters and other victims. The nymph’s chief tormenter, a Fury, has a solo singing role, and her violent interactions with Io occupy much of the act. Characteristically for Lully’s works, the tormenting action is mainly narrated in a series of poignant recitatives for Io, or enacted by the dancers in a pantomime. The orchestra establishes the general mood and supports the singers and dancers—­most notably in the mimetic prelude to the chorus, “L’Hiver qui nous tourmente”—­ but it has no significant role in representing the violence that Io undergoes. Quinault cast Io’s torment by Juno as unjust, because it is driven by the goddess’s immoderate jealousy and desire for vengeance. Like Cybele in Atys the year before, Juno comes to recognize her error in act 5 and relents after having extracted a promise of future fidelity from her spouse. Io, for her part, is transformed into the goddess Isis. The female gender of the punishing deities and royal sorcerers in Atys, Isis, and Quinault’s earlier Thésée seems to serve a key function in these librettos, as it allows punishment by princely characters to occur onstage while still preserving the plausibility and appropriateness of their actions. Displacing violent punishment onto female royalty or divinity arguably deflected this unflattering portrait of nonideal justice from the male sovereigns and heroes who reflected most

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directly on the king.26 Perhaps the femininity of characters like Cybele, Juno, and Medea created enough distance from the masculine icon of the roi justicier that their personal association with unjust punishment could seem a reasonable fiction.

The Préramistes Penal violence had a more prominent place in works from Louis XIV’s late reign and the Regency. Violence, whether enacted or narrated, was generally more common in librettos from this period, especially in tragic works by poets like Pierre-­Charles Roy, who sided with the Anciens in the literary dispute between the “Ancients” and the “Moderns.”27 The 1700s and 1710s also saw the first French lyric settings of several classical legends and tragedies that featured supernatural punishment of heinous crimes; and composers treated these penal scenes as occasions for experimenting with mimetic musical processes that could communicate the terror and menace of sovereign force. The orchestra commonly had at least some musical figuration illustrating the punishment of culpable individuals, especially in descriptive symphonies, preludes, and accompanied recitatives or airs. However, for the first few decades of the century this descriptive orchestral writing remained supplementary to the drama, which continued to unfold essentially via sung poetry. The earliest of these works is Desmarets and Campra’s 1704 setting of Duché de Vancy and Danchet’s livret Iphigénie en Tauride.28 Desmarets com­ posed act 2, scene 2, in which Orestes is tormented by the Eumenides, and he supplied orchestral music that modestly illustrates their violent treatment. For Orestes’s air in this scene, “Une juste fureur,” Desmarets drew on Lullian conventions for representing fury or madness, especially the fast run­ ning bass, when Orestes narrates his experience of the gods’ punishing fire, lightning, thunder, and earthquakes: Ces dieux, ces dieux cruels sont armez contre moi! Que de feux, que d’éclairs! Quels éclats de tonnerre! Sous mes pas chancelants je sens trembler la terre, Ses gouffres sont ouverts.29 [These gods, these cruel gods are armed against me! / What fire, what flashes of lightning! What thunder-­claps! / Beneath my faltering steps I feel the earth tremble, / Its abysses open.]

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Desmarets’s musical imitation of the storm itself was limited to a vocal flour­ ish on the word éclats, perhaps reflecting the nature of the storm as a delusion born of divine madness.30 The central section of the air, beginning at “Ciel! Qu’est-­ce que je vois!” transitions into a disjointed, harmonically un­ stable ombre-­like style as Orestes sees the ghost of his mother Clytemnestra, whom he killed to avenge his father’s death. His torment by the Eumenides resumes in the final section, at “Mille feux dévorent mon âme,” and the music returns to the furious style of the opening before concluding in a slower, chromatic idiom as Orestes envisions his death and descent into Hades. The year after the revival of Iphigénie, Campra composed his own Eumenides scene for the tragic denouement of Idoménée, where Idomeneo is punished for violating his oath to Neptune. In an elaborately accompanied récitatif obligé, the king goes mad and is led by the Furies to kill his own son, whom he mistakes for the sacrificial victim promised to Neptune. Addressing Neptune and the Furies, he sings: Dieu cruel, règnes-­tu jusques dans les enfers? Tu fais sortir les Euménides! . . .  Je vois leurs troupes parricides! Quels serpents! Quels flambeaux! Quels sifflements! Quels feux! Filles du Styx, soyez mes guides, Je vous suis, je ressens tous vos transports affreux.31 [Cruel god, do you hold sway even in Hades? / You bid the Eumenides come forth! . . . / I see their murderous hordes! / What serpents! What torches! What hissing! What flames! / Daughters of the Styx, be my guides, / I follow you, I feel your terrible transports come over me.]

The violons that accompany Idomeneo punctuate his vocal line with more varied mimetic figuration than earlier composers had used in scenes of frenzied terror (example 4.1).32 Beyond the usual rapid scales and flourishes, Cam­ pra gave the dessus de violons a disjointed melodic line with abrupt shifts of direction and an erratic rhythmic profile, unified only by the repeated use of a thirty-­second-­note upbeat figure.33 The orchestra here supports our awareness of Idomeneo’s divinely altered state, but it also begins to imitate the Eumenides’ terrifying presence and punishment, which only he can sense, in the aural space of the theater.

Violins

Idomenée

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example 4.1 André Campra, Idomenée, act 5, scene 5 (from F-­TLm Cons. 132)

25

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beaux!

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133

the tormenting orchestra

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example 4.1 (continued)

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Rameau’s Animated Orchestra Campra’s Idoménée was revived in 1731, two years before Rameau’s Hip­ polyte et Aricie debuted at the Opéra. Rameau and Pellegrin may have been influenced by penal scenes in this and other earlier works, but Hippolyte and later tragédies went far beyond them in the dramatic use of the orchestra.34 In fact, Rameau’s innovations in orchestral dramaturgy inaugurated a long-­term shift in the lyrical staging of judicial authority and violence. Hippolyte et Aricie has three judicial episodes: the underworld trial and judgment in act 2, Phaedra’s confession and punishment in act 4, and Theseus’s confession and punishment by Neptune in the 1733 version of act 5. The episodes in acts 2 and 5 both vest judicial authority in supernatural ruler personas (Pluto and Neptune, respectively), and, perhaps for this reason, in neither episode does the orchestra have a significant part in dramatizing Theseus’s torment or punishment. (Even the extraordinary orchestral writing in the second Trio des Parques in act 2 is not enlisted to torment or punish Theseus but to convey the horror of his impending fate.)35 The ritournelle that opens act 2 is the only real exception, as Rameau provided a very fast, largely contrapuntal string passage that seems to imitate the Fury Tisiphone’s pursuit of Theseus at the entrance to Hades.36 In contrast, Phae­ dra’s confession and punishment scene in act 4 lacks an onstage judicial persona, and Rameau accorded the orchestra a primary role in dramatizing the gods’ punitive violence and her terrified response. Chapters 2 and 3 discussed other aspects of this remarkable scene, so here I will focus on the accompanied portion of her recitative, beginning at “Qu’ai-­je fait?” (example 4.2). Recall that Phaedra has just confessed her

Phèdre

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b &b c Violins

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example 4.2j Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733 version), act 4, scene 4 œ (OOR, ser. 4, vol. 1, ed. Sylvie Bouissou [Paris: Gérard Billaudot, 2002])

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example 4.2 (continued)

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œœ œœ œœ doux

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chapter four

b + &b w

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rés,

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example 4.2 (continued)

guilt over Hippolytus’s apparent killing by the sea monster. The string orchestra, reinforced by bassoons and double basses, reacts instantly to her ex­ pression of remorse with G-­minor tremolando figuration, rapid scales, and rocketing arpeggios: Qu’ai-­je fait! Quels remords! Ciel! J’entends le tonnerre. Quel bruit! Quels terribles éclats! Fuyons; où me cacher?37 [What have I done? What remorse! Heaven! I hear the thunder. / What noise! What terrible lightning bolts! / Let me flee; where can I hide?]

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As she determines to hide from the cataclysm around her, the orchestra shifts to a repetitive, monotone eighth-­note pattern in C minor, loosely imitating the earth shaking beneath her feet: Je sens trembler la terre; Les enfers s’ouvrent sous mes pas.38 [I feel the earth tremble; / Hades opens beneath my feet.]

Phaedra decides that this violent tumult is an expression of divine retribution for her crimes, and as she does the orchestral figuration returns to the vigorous arpeggios, scalar runs, and rapid upbeat figures of the opening (mm. 513–­523): Tous les dieux conjurés, pour me livrer la guerre, Arment leur redoutables bras.39 [All the gods, conspiring to wage war on me, / Prepare their fearsome arms.]

With her final verses, Phaedra addresses the gods directly in a recitative supported now by a numinous solennel accompaniment, begging for a reprieve and promising to confess again to Theseus, as discussed in chapter 3.40 The orchestra’s tempestuous and solemn accompaniment styles recall descriptive writing in works from the previous two decades, but Rameau transformed these conventions into something new and more dramatically powerful. He had Phaedra interact with the orchestra in this scene as if it were the unseen gods themselves, or else the violence they unleash. There is even a moment in the récitatif obligé when Phaedra’s character seems to hear the orchestra’s stormy figuration, singing, “j’entends le tonnerre. / Quel bruit!” (meaures 516–­17).41 The orchestral accompaniment remains mostly nondiegetic, creating a parallel musical realization of the catastrophe Phae­ dra experiences onstage as personal, violent punishment. Yet it intrudes on the diegetic reality at least once, and this intrusion combines with the sheer musical force of the passage to create an unaccustomed sense of the orchestra as the organ of the unseen gods. In Hippolyte, Rameau pushed the French opera orchestra to become an almost animate physical and moral force, capable of interacting with stage personas through obbligato accompaniments that were not only audible and

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meaningful to audience members but even affected the stage reality. After all, only in the wake of this orchestral violence does Phaedra agree to confess her crime to Theseus, which clears Hippolytus of false charges. Her second, offstage confession responds to a coercive appeal issuing from the orchestra itself. Whether acting directly or indirectly on guilty characters, this newly animated orchestra challenged the longstanding French preferral of the voice as the primary means of dramatic communication in opera.42 As a result, many listeners in the 1730s found Rameau’s orchestra deeply unsettling. Some even used the metaphor of torture to describe the effects of listening to his operas, especially their unusually abundant and active orchestral writing.43 In a sense, enlisting the orchestra as an instrument of torment in opera’s penal scenes theatricalized an afflictive experience of overwhelming musical power that critics had remarked since the late seventeenth century, with the introduction of Italianate musical procedures into the Lullian conventions of the tragédie. Dominant mimetic theories held that instrumental music could depict the passions or natural phenomena like storms or earthquakes, but in Rameau’s hands tempestuous orchestral writing assumed a more weighty presence and greater narrative and actional capacities. These new capacities were partly the result of the orchestra’s larger size, its greater timbral and pitch range, and technical advances in instrument construction, but they also re­ flected a changing ontology of sound and new models of musical communication.44 Although Rameau’s orchestral writing in the 1730s still owed much to the Lullian tradition, in hindsight it represents an important step in the development of instrumental music—­and the orchestra, in particular—­into a medium invested with extraordinary capacities of expression and action. Later works by Rameau also enlisted the orchestra for scenes of torment and punishment. Zoroastre includes a pair of scenes in acts 1 and 2 (in the 1756 version) depicting the supernatural torment of Amélite. In both scenes an onstage infernal chorus terrorizes Amélite on behalf of the usurpers Erinice and Abramane, but the orchestra supplements their taunts with music representing “des tourments plus cruels que la mort” (torments crueler than death, 1.5) threatened by Erinice. The chorus first menaces Amélite in act 1, scene 6 (“Tremble, tremble, suis nos pas”) as they carry her off to Erinice’s stronghold, and they sing in an updated furious style with fast sixteenth-­ note rhythms, tremolando, and lightly contrapuntal scalar figuration in the strings. The 1756 version also includes a scene of torment (2.4) set in Erinice’s dungeon: a furious prelude featuring fast arpeggio and scalar figures conveys

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139

the terror of the scene, and the chorus reprises their earlier verses from act 1, together with some of the same music. The last act of Les Boréades shows the tyrannical god of the North Wind, Boreas, tormenting the Bactrian queen Alphise as punishment for her refusal to marry one of his descendents. Rameau’s music for Boreas and the Vents is some of the most challenging in the opera, and Boreas’s rage is consistently associated with running sixteenth-­note string and wind figuration in compound meter, often in a contrapuntal texture. As in Zoroastre, the punishment scene in act 5 has a chorus of Vents souterrains (Subterranean Winds) who torment Alphise at Boreas’s command, but their music has a frenetic and boisterous rather than a terrifying character, in keeping with the wind imagery. Rameau’s vocal writing in the E-­flat-­major chorus (“Qu’elle languisse”) is in an updated furious style, with compound eighth-­note rhythms throughout, and the chorus’s buoyant counterpoint pairs with the running sixteenth-­note figuration in the strings and winds to produce an effect of ir­ repressible malevolence. In scene 4, the Vents threaten Abaris as well, in a chorus whose more menacing character arises from its chromaticism and its exploration of the relative minor (example 4.3). The orchestral accompaniment reprises its running sixteenth-­note figuration from the previous scene, but it incorporates wider-­ranging arpeggio figures, conveying the greater force of the chorus’s threats. Rameau’s last tragédies en musique treated the orchestra as a dramatic force complementary to that of the voices, almost as a matter of course. From Hippolyte onward, the orchestra was typically a full participant in scenes of torment and punishment, and often it was the preferred sonic medium for dramatizing violence. Rameau sometimes had characters themselves experience tempestuous orchestral music diegetically, as a terrible physical and moral force. He also used orchestral sound to supplement the penal authority and power of onstage personas, such as Erinice, Boreas, or Pluto. However, his librettists occasionally took the more progressive step of excluding princely judicial figures altogether from penal scenes or else giving them largely symbolic roles. In scenes like these, Rameau had the orchestra assume the task of communicating the terror and force behind sovereign judgment. This augmentation of the orchestra’s dramatic capacity is perceptible in many other kinds of scene that Rameau composed, but it is particularly striking in scenes of punishment. Rameau’s technique of enlisting instrumental sound to symbolize judicial authority, clemency, or penal violence gave it an expressive power that was potentially independent of the voice. A number of Rameau specialists have documented the parallelism that resulted from the

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composer’s experiments with communicative instrumental music, which introduced the possibility of divergent (though not yet autonomous) musical signification.45 In penal scenes, the orchestra’s novel ability to communicate judicial presence, pardon, punishment, and their respective affects began to loosen these dramatic functions from judicial personas and their singing. This supported the broader trend toward abstracting and depersonalizing justice on the French lyric stage, a process that was fully on display in penal scenes of the last quarter of the century.

example 4.3 Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Les Boréades, act 5, scene 4 (ed. Antoine Geoffrey Dechaume [Paris: Éditions Stil, 2002])

the tormenting orchestra

141

example 4.3 (continued)

The Orchestra as Sublime Menace By the time Gluck arrived in Paris, his and other central European compos­ ers’ experimentation in opera and ballet composition had developed the or­ chestral depiction of judgment, punishment, and terror to new levels of dra­ matic effectiveness. Together with midcentury works by Jomelli and Traetta, Gluck’s pantomime ballets for Vienna, Don Juan (1761) and Semiramis (1765), and the Furies scene in Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) inspired imitations

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across Europe and inaugurated a fashion for dramatic orchestral music featuring the new, highly expressionistic, mostly minor-­mode terrifying topic. This topic shared many elements with earlier instrumental conventions for connoting terror, such as the French tempête and other descriptive writing for the theater, especially in Rameau’s tragédies.46 However, Gluck and his contemporaries reworked these existing conventions into an idiom that was markedly more forceful, building and sustaining a high degree of tension and employing starker dynamic and harmonic contrasts for dramatic effect. Gluck’s more extensive use of chromaticism and even enharmonicism is particularly noteworthy in the penal scenes he composed, as is his dramatic use of flat-­II or flat-­VI as alternate key areas. The more forceful sound of Gluck’s terrible style was also possible thanks to the larger and more timbrally diverse classical orchestra, especially the one housed at the Opéra, which Gluck exploited to unprecedented effect. In particular, his use of trombones in solemn or supernatural scenes would have a lasting effect on terrifying orchestration in the theater, as in the symphonic repertory. In the 1770s and ’80s, composers creating works for the Opéra commonly drew on the terrifying topic in depicting penal violence, and the dynamic, expressionistic nature of its elements lent many of these scenes great dramatic power. Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride has several well-­known examples of this kind of writing in acts 2 and 3, where Orestes is tormented by the Eumenides for having murdered his mother.47 The brief reprieve felt in his famous act 2 arioso, “Le calme rentre dans mon cœur,” gives way to a terrible pantomime ballet and chorus in which the Eumenides torment a sleeping Orestes. Gluck’s orchestration calls for three trombones in addition to a full complement of winds and strings, and the ballet features tremolando, chromatic harmony, and a relentless sixteenth-­note rhythmic pattern, alternating with a stark three-­pulse motive representing the Eumenides. In act 3, Orestes again falls into a frenzy as he begs his friend Pylades to let him die in order to escape the Eumenides. But as he begins his recitative, the obbligato accompaniment reprises the Eumenides’ motive in the trombones and winds, indicating that his tormenters have returned (example 4.4a): Ne sais-­tu pas que pour Oreste La vie est un supplice affreux? Ne sais-­tu pas que ces mains parricides Fument encore du sang que j’ai versé? Ne sais-­tu pas que l’enfer courroucé Rassemble autour de moi ses noires Euménides, Qu’elles m’obsèdent en tous lieux.48

example 4.4a Christoph Willibald Gluck, Iphigénie en Tauride, act 3, scene 4 (GSW Ab. I, Bd. 9, ed. Gerhard Croll [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1973])

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[Do you not know that for Orestes / Life is a terrible punishment?/ Do you not know that these parricidal hands / Still smoke with the blood that I shed? / Do you not know that Hell[,] angered, / Surrounds me once more with its dark Furies, / That they haunt me everywhere.]

While the act 2 pantomime ballet and chorus calls for the Eumenides to ap­ pear onstage, the act 3 orchestral recitative does not; and so the orchestra assumes their tormenting function, accompanying Orestes’s expressive vo­ cal line with music whose violence far exceeds the earlier Eumenides scenes. The three-­pulse Eumenides motive, reprised from the act 2 ballet, is repeated compulsively by the orchestra, reinforced by the stentorian trombones and arpeggiated flourishes in the strings. Its repetitions outline an extreme tonal instability, as the orchestra moves rapidly through multiple flat tonalities, mostly in the minor mode. Near the end of the recitative the orchestral assault intensifies. The Eu­ menides motive now sounds twice in close succession and ushers in a passage of more conventionally tempestuous music, with a faster tempo and pervasive tremolando in the strings. As if responding to this musical transition, Orestes shifts from describing his unseen tormenters to addressing them directly, imploring them for mercy: Les voici! De serpents leurs mains s’arment encore! Où fuir? . . . Eh! Quoi? Pylade et me fuit et m’abhorre! Il me livre à leurs coups! . . . Arrêtez . . . Ah! Grands Dieux!49 [Here they are! Their hands are armed again with serpents! / Where can I flee? . . . Eh! What? Pylade flies from me and shuns me! / He leaves me to their blows! . . . Stop . . . Ah! Gods almighty!]

Gluck took Guillard’s verse, “Il me livre à leurs coups!,” as a cue to commence a brutal fortissimo syncopation pattern in the violins, outlining a F-­ sharp diminished-­seventh chord (measures 127–­30) (example 4.4b). Orestes cries out vainly against the orchestra’s “coups,” which conclude with one last articulation of the Eumenides’ motive on the same F-­sharp harmony. As Julian Rushton has pointed out, in this scene Gluck’s orchestra essentially “attacks the singer.”50 In the following decade, terrifying orchestral writing routinely appeared in tragic works involving penal scenes, including Grétry’s Andromaque (1780),

example 4.4­b Christoph Willibald Gluck, Iphigénie en Tauride, act 3, scene 4 (GSW Ab. I, Bd. 9, ed. Gerhard Croll [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1973])

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Piccinni’s Iphigénie en Tauride (1781), Lemoyne’s Electre (1782) and Phèdre (1786), Sacchini’s Renaud (1783) and Œdipe à Colonne (1786), and Salieri’s Les Danaïdes (1784). Œdipe à Colonne will illustrate this moment, which saw the emergence of a modernized form of French grand opera and a real florescence of judicial themes in its librettos. Terrifying orchestral writing occurs in all three acts of this most successful of Sacchini’s French works, but it is most saliently involved in punishment in act 2, where the Eumeni­ des torment Oedipus. Led by Antigone, the blinded Oedipus approaches the temple where he killed his father, but as he nears the altar he experiences an attack by the Eumenides. The orchestra, which had been lightly accompanying their dialogue, commences a soft tremolando as Oedipus realizes where he is, and it continues with the unstable, chromatic harmony, fast scales and arpeggios, and extreme dynamic contrasts that we would expect in a Furies scene. Sacchini’s modest use of the orchestra here was no match for Gluck’s dramatic intensity in the Iphigenia operas, but he did deploy the terrible style effectively and efficiently, as a sonic sign of the violent supernatural punishment meted out to Oedipus. Indeed, his fluent and flexible deployment of the terrible topic throughout the opera, especially in contexts involving menace, is an index of its thorough incorporation as a resource for grand opera’s penal dramas.

Tragic Guilt and the Suicidal Air Midway through Oedipus’s frenzy, his character’s sense of self begins to de­ teriorate, and as it does he sings an air (“Filles du Styx,” 2.2), begging the Eu­menides to punish him.51 The F-­minor tonality, octave voicing, and Oedipus’s monotone vocal delivery at the opening signal that this is an invo­ cation, and in the middle section, where Oedipus describes the Eumenides’s torment, Sacchini added solemn blasts from the winds and the usual fast scales and arpeggios associated with supernatural violence. In the final act, Oedipus’s prodigal son, Polynices, expresses similar sentiments in his rondò air, “Délivrez-­vous d’un monstre furieux” (3.3). Having tried and failed to reconcile with his father, after colluding in Oedipus’s banishment from Thebes, Polynices likewise begs for punishment, in an impassioned D-­ minor Allegro agitato (example 4.5): Délivrez-­vous d’un monstre furieux. Mes crimes, je le sais, sont indignes de grâce. Frappez, vengez et la terre et les cieux:

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example 4.5 Antonio Sacchini, Œdipe à Colone, act 3, scene 3 (from the first printed edition [Paris: Soldato, 1787])

Ecrasez votre fils sous vos pieds qu’il embrasse: Je désire la mort, je la veux, je l’attends.52 [Free yourselves from a raging monster. / My crimes, I know, do not deserve pardon. / Strike, avenge the earth and the heavens: / Crush your son beneath your feet, which he embraces: / I yearn for death, I want it, I await it.]

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example 4.5 (continued)

In the final couplet, Polynices makes a last request, that his father recognize him before he dies: “Mais qu’elle suffise à ma peine. / Que je retrouve un père à mes derniers moments!” (But may that be my sole punishment. / May I regain a father in my last moments!)53 Sachinni sets this sentimental turn in a galant F-­major Largo, whose melodic periodicity and minuet rhythms create a strong contrast with the troubled music of the opening Allegro. Suicidal airs in a heroic register were common in tragic operas in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Guillard himself penned what seems to have become the model for such airs in act 2 of his libretto, Iphigénie en Tauride. Gluck set Orestes’s “Dieux! qui me poursuivez” as a heroic D-­major air with added horns, trombones, and timpani for supernatural color:

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Dieux! qui me poursuivez, Dieux! auteurs de mes crimes, De l’enfer sous mes pas entrouvrez les abîmes; Ses supplices pour moi seront encore trop doux! J’ai trahi l’amitié, j’ai trahi la nature, Des plus noirs attentats j’ai comblé la mesure: Dieux! frappez le coupable, et justifiez-­vous.54 [Gods! you who pursue me, gods! authors of my crimes, / Open hell’s abyss beneath my steps; / Even its punishments would be too gentle for me! / I betrayed friendship, I betrayed nature, / I committed unpardonable atrocities: / Gods! strike the guilty one and show your good faith.]

Orestes voices similar sentiments at the parallel moment of Piccinni’s Iphi­ génie en Tauride (“Fait éclater la foudre”). Piccinni’s version of Orestes’s air was more nakedly heroic even than Gluck’s, with a key of E-­flat-­major and added horns and trumpets. Nor were such airs restricted to operas setting classical tragedies. In the final act of Sacchini’s Renaud (1783, 3.5) Armida also begs the heavens for punishment: Ciel injuste, ciel implacable, Armide brave ton courroux, Sans pitié pour un cœur coupable, Épuise sur moi tous tes coups: Qu’attends-­tu? Frappe, éclate, tonne: À ta fureur je m’abandonne.55 [Unjust heaven, implacable heaven, / Armida braves your wrath, / Without pity for a guilty heart, / Let all your blows fall on me: / What are you waiting for? Strike, explode, thunder: / I give myself over to your fury.]

Leboeuf had adapted this air from Pellegrin’s 1722 libretto, Renaud, ou la suite d’Armide, extending it and modernizing it by adding a final sentimental quatrain.56 As in Piccinni’s air for Orestes, Armida sings in a heroic E-­flat-­ major idiom with the rapid scalar figuration and tremolando that were by that point conventions of the terrible topic. What might explain the proliferation of these airs, with their passionate appeal for punishment and death? And what was the dramatic role of the terrifying orchestral accompaniments that composers routinely supplied?

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In the earlier tragédies en musique, guilty personas mostly punished themselves by actually committing suicide or going into exile, or else they were involuntarily punished. Occasionally, librettists had them ask the gods to strike them down, as in Pellegrin’s Renaud. However, late-­eighteenth-­ century composers invested far more musical resources into theatricalizing this self-­annihilating desire, by setting such verses as heroic airs in a vigorous, elevated style. The stormy orchestral writing that routinely accompanied these airs animated and sublimated the addressee of what amounts to a guilty, suicidal form of confessional singing. The orchestra’s sublimation of the confessional other in such airs represents a major development in the dramaturgy of tragic guilt and recompense in penal scenes. While the Lullian and post-­Lully generations typically personified sovereign judges and their agents as onstage singing roles (or else presented them virtually as a rhetorical interlocutor), composers in the 1770s and ’80s envisioned a depersonalized, transcendent authority whose theatrical realization rested essentially with the orchestra. Even where librettists supplied judicial personas in these late works, they mostly functioned as iconic doubles of this extra-­diegetic judicial authority. Characters’ misdeeds were likewise no longer staged as personal offenses against the prince so much as offenses against the abstract authority of law by characters who see themselves as accountable to its norms. Again, this was typically the case even when princes or deities interacted with guilty characters. Their awe-­ inspiring quality in these interactions stemmed mainly from their sublime representation of the law. The “envoiced” opera orchestra of Gluck and his successors furnished the sound of this sublime authority in the theater, and as such it contributed to the emergence of a recognizably modern “tragic-­heroic paradigm” of guilt and punishment in opera.57 The troubled and troubling orchestral writing that these composers supplied for opera’s penal scenes monumentalized the gods and their earthly representatives, kings and fathers, as the fount of justice and order. Call this terrifying, mysterious source tragic necessity, the law, or even (in a psychoanalytic vein) “das Ding”: the classical opera orchestra’s thundering grandeur took its measure, tracing “the outline of something sublime.”58 The ardor with which guilty characters attach themselves to their own suffering and death responds directly to this sublimed object of judicial authority. In her insightful chapter, “The Allure of Tragic Guilt,” literary theorist Gabriela Basterra points out that “one of the most perplexing aspects of tragedy is the passion with which tragic subjects cooperate with the fate that brings on their doom.” She concludes that tragedy’s protagonists

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collude in their own social or actual death in exchange for becoming intelligible after the fact as authentic subjects; indeed, to preserve the intelligibility of the tragic universe itself, in the face of an “emptiness of authority” that is “worse than tragic.”59 On the eve of revolution and regicide, is it any wonder that the guilty noble characters of this late absolutist form should meet their own punishment and death with a grandiose, heroic passion?

Sublime Criminality The terrifying orchestra of the late eighteenth century did more than represent the sublime authority that threatens opera’s guilty personas: by engaging them as objects of its sonic violence, it defined them as criminals. Wrongdoing and wrongdoers of various kinds were of course a staple of the tragédie en musique and other serious forms of early opera, and French librettists commonly represented guilty characters as “perfides,” “criminel/les,” or es­ pecially “monstres.” But for the most part these qualities were attributed to characters contingently on the basis of their actions. Only in extreme cases, such as Rameau and Pellegrin’s Phaedra, did guilt and criminality seem something deeper, a truth of the self that, in Phaedra’s case, runs in the blood. However, in later-­eighteenth-­century opera criminality began to seem an essential condition of the repertory’s great tragic characters: a moral and legal failing that stemmed at least partly from some internal necessity. The passionate affirmation with which these characters respond to the violence represented by the orchestra—­as in the suicidal airs discussed above—­was proportionate to its sonic exorbitance; yet their passion also bespoke a heroic tragic subjectivity that bore a far greater responsibility for its own innocence or guilt. The criminal as an essential subjective type acquired a greater dramatic and political import in late-­eighteenth-­century opera in ways that suggest the influence of several contemporary historical developments. Chief among these were criminal justice reform efforts in France in the 1760s through the 1780s, led by the philosophes and the legal profession, as well as broad cultural changes in how crime, criminals, and their punishment were documented and imagined.60 In the latter category we might cite the arrêts crimi­ nels published by the Parlement de Paris, small judicial prints for private use whose numbers peaked in the 1770s; ephemeral iconographic engravings, which in the second half of the century favored portraits of criminals and tableaus of crime in action; or the vast literature publicizing the great causes célèbres (sensationalized court cases) of the 1770s and ’80s.61 A full consideration of the relationship of these cultural developments to opera’s judicial

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dramaturgy is outside the scope of this study, but there are several points of commonality that will contextualize the operatic history I am tracing. First, the general proliferation of orchestral penal scenes in the late eighteenth century is consistent with the expansion of public interest in notorious criminals and in the causes célèbres in the same period. While grand opera occupied a more elite cultural register than the ephemeral judicial engravings and courtroom briefs, the aristocracy and literati were also caught up in the criminal cases that they publicized. We know, for example, that the aristocratic audience of the Comédie Française welcomed a recently acquitted housemaid, Victoire Salmon, and her lawyer into a box at a performance of 1786, where they were applauded by the audience.62 The Opéra’s audience would not have been immune to this vogue for real-­life judicial drama, and we can expect that even the aristocratic, conservative form of the tragédie would have responded to it. Further, one of the most interesting elements of this public fascination with criminal justice, from the perspective of opera history, was the heightened interest in the character of the criminal in the second half of the century. Artists, authors, and printers fed this interest with visual and verbal portraiture of accused individuals in popular prints. Figure 4.2 shows one such portrait of the con artist and poisoner Antoine-­François Desrues, who was broken on the wheel and burned at the Place de Grèves in 1777.63 The portrait medallion appears in the center of the engraving, framed by a description of Desrues’s punishment. In the backdrop we see the window of a prison cell, and in the lower foreground are visual symbols of his crime (the chalice) and its penalty (the placard worn by convicts to shame them, the curved bar used to break them on the wheel, and firewood for the pyre). The engraver captioned the image with a quatrain noting the appropriateness of the punishment and underscoring the particularly offensive nature of Desrues’s premeditation and dissimulation: Sous le masque de la vertu, Il fit plus d’un crime effroyable. Cet hypocrite abominable, As fini comme il a vécu. [Wearing a mask of virtue, / He committed an even more heinous crime. / This abominable hypocrite / Ended as he lived.]

I mention this engraving here because its visual tactic of pairing criminal portraiture with abstract yet menacing imagery of punishment resem-

figure 4.2 Desrues, en buste de profil à droite, c. 1777 (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

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bles opera’s manner of representing criminals and criminality in the last decades of the ancien régime. One of the more striking features of penal scenes in the 1780s is their pairing of a heightened dramatic interest in criminal character and interiority with the symbolic orchestral representation of corporal punishment that I have discussed in this chapter. Focusing on the first of these features, penal scenes tended to scrutinize and divulge the internal life of their guilty characters more intensively than in earlier works, especially in confessional obbligato recitative and airs. I argued in chapter 3 that this confessional manner of song dramatized culpable characters’ moral formation and, ideally, presented them as selves who possess an internal experience structured by shared norms. Key to this formation were the affects of guilt and remorse, which librettists gave to characters when they wanted to humanize them and attract audience sympathy. However, characters usually describe the experience of guilt and remorse as even more devastating than physical violence, and composers sometimes called on orchestral sound to communicate this afflictive experience of moral feeling. We saw in the last chapter that the formulaic comparison between physical and emotional torment was especially prominent in late-­century librettos, and that composers supplied particularly expressive music for such moments. Recall Gluck’s obbligato setting of Agamemnon’s expression of remorse in Iphigénie en Aulide (see example 3.3b), where he sings (addressing the Eumenides): Le remords dévorant, qui me presse et m’agite, Pour déchirer mon cœur est plus puissant que vous.64 [The devouring remorse that presses and disturbs me, / Tears my heart more powerfully than you.]

Agamemnon’s vocal part does most of the work of communicating his remorse, but Gluck’s orchestra also contributes chains of chromatic sigh motives in alternation with fast repeated diminished triads in the strings. In confessional passages like this one, the orchestra’s expressivity could enhance the impression of subjective depth and even weigh in on characters’ self-­description. There is a striking fluidity to the orchestra’s dramatic functions in these penal scenes. On the one hand, the orchestra could symbolize a transcendent authority and its violent punishment of criminal personas, yet it also sometimes represented the subjective violence of negative moral feeling itself, especially guilt and remorse. Representing guilt and remorse involved the

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orchestra in a complex dramatic operation in which characters turn agonis­ tically against themselves and become their own tormentors. Moral philos­ opher Simon Critchley describes guilt in particular as the “affect or emotion that accompanies” a “divided experience of self as self-­failure,” which occurs when “the ethical subject that I have chosen to be enters into conflict with the self that I am.”65 Likewise, tragic-­heroic criminals in opera seem to expe­ rience guilt and its aftermath, remorse, when their commitment to a norm they cannot fulfill pressures them to repudiate their own actions and even their “selves.” Most of the tragic characters I have discussed inherit ancestral crimes or are driven by fate or the gods, and they assume fault for actions that go beyond what any individual could choose. When they confess, then, they in­ter­nalize the sublime origin of their fault as a terrible otherness that recrim­inates their fictional “selves,” producing guilt and often remorse. The terrifying orchestral accompaniment that composers assigned to many late-­century confessions theatricalized the violence of this internal recriminating force. It colluded with the confessing voice in dramatizing the agon of what Nietzsche called “that other ‘somber thing,’ the consciousness of guilt, the ‘bad conscience.’”66 If, in the course of the eighteenth century, the French opera orchestra came to symbolize punishment as quintessentially a work of self-­government, the creators of earlier works found a different solution to the problem of rep­ resenting judicial violence. It is true that violent punishment was not normally enacted onstage in tragédies en musique and was distanced from benign rulers and divinities. It did find a home, though, in the setting of the underworld. In the next chapter, I consider opera’s Christianized version of the pagan underworld as an alternate setting for its judicial dramas. Unlike in ter­ restrial and celestial settings, underworld scenes let artists imagine the horror of eternal government, unrelieved by sovereign glory or grace. In these dys­ topian regimes, penal violence is the rule, and its suspension requires an exceptional intervention by the underworld king.

chapter five

Spectral Kingdoms: Poetics and Politics of Les Enfers

T

he underworld is a destination for many of opera’s most venturesome personas and the setting for some of its most affecting and experimen­ tal music. Mythological heroes such as Orpheus, Theseus, and Hercules de­­ scend to the underworld in search of lost beloveds, while Queen Alcestis and the divine twin Pollux willingly take the place of doomed loved ones in acts of heroic self-­sacrifice. Less celebrated are those criminal, rebellious, or suicidal personas, such as Phoebe in Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, whose moral deficits consign them to hell. Many virtuous personas find themselves unwillingly in the underworld as well, especially victims of divine malice like Psyche and, most memorably, the liminal deity and reluctant queen Proserpina. The Greeks had a characteristically precise lexicon for the stages of this journey, designating the descent into Hades as a katabasis and the ascent or return to the mortal world an anabasis.1 Both stages are dramatized in Fran­ cophone opera: Gluck’s and Calzabigi’s essay on this theme in the Parisian version of their Orfeo ed Euridice is but the most memorable. Yet it is the passage through the underworld itself, especially the heroic encounter with death and the dead, that occupies the majority of enfers, as underworld acts and scenes were known in the French theatrical tradition. Theatrical enfers significantly predate the tragédie en musique, but during the genre’s golden age, from Lully through Rameau, a series of works devoted entire acts to a protagonist’s journey through the underworld and confrontation with its rul­­ ers, especially the god Pluto.2 The chronology of operatic enfers suggests a decline in taste for new seri­ ous underworld acts in the first three decades of the eighteenth century, fol­ lowed by their brief revival in the 1730s with the tragédies of Rameau. When the underworld reappeared as a stage setting in new works in the 1770s, its

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dramaturgy changed in ways that reflected not only major shifts in operatic poetics, composition, and stagecraft in the interim but also extra-­theatrical developments that changed the conditions in which enfers were justifiable and meaningful for French audiences.3 This and the following chapter are concerned with the political repre­ sentation in underworld acts during their heyday in tragédies en musique from the 1670s through the 1730s and their brief resurgence in the 1770s with Gluck’s tragédies for Paris. Both chapters consider the political significance of the epic katabasis narrative in its adaptation for the French lyrical stage, but they focus on different aspects. In this chapter I will analyze opera’s pre­­ sentation of les enfers as a quasi-­absolutist theatrical space. I argue, in short, that underworld acts were a key component of the tragédie’s “imaginative geography,” a phrase that Edward Said coined to describe “a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary” but that neverthe­ less performs the important cultural work of designating “a familiar space which is ‘ours’ and an unfamiliar space beyond ours which is ‘theirs.’ ”4 Said’s classic concept could readily be applied to early modern opera’s imagined terrestrial locations, helping us understand the political significance of its Ethi­opian, Greek, Gallic, Ottoman, or romance island settings. However, here I draw on Said in order to address another dimension of opera’s spatial imaginary: what might be called its imaginative cosmography, designating relationships among its celestial, terrestrial, and infernal realms. Analyzing these settings as imaginative geographies adapts Said’s politi­ cization of space and spatial relations to the distinctively metaphysical ter­ rain of the tragédie en musique, which routinely depicted marvelous places that lay beyond rational experience. The cosmos that artists created on the lyric stage was an enchanted one, and the political fantasies that it accom­ modated likewise encompassed nonrational spaces and states of existence. If we pursue Said’s analytic in this context, we need to account for the fact that the tragédie en musique, like other courtly forms of opera, did not limit its political imaginary to humanity or even the living, but ranged widely across human, nonhuman, and posthumous collectivities and the spaces they occupied. Indeed, the key distinguishing feature of opera’s infernal realm is its as­­ sociation with death and the dead. This ontological distinction orients un­ derworld settings toward a distinctively necrological mode of political fan­ tasy, which was centrally concerned with the thanatic aspect of sovereign government. We saw in chapter 2 how opera reimagined one of the ancien régime’s most important political rituals of death, the state funeral, in its

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staged pompes funèbres. Collective mourning in opera did more than repro­ duce features of public funerary rituals for entertainment purposes. It dra­ matized the ideal governmental function of public death ritual as a means of repairing the political community and, in the case of a monarch’s death, ensuring the continuity of the dynastic state. With its underworld acts, the tragédie explored another political dimension of death: not now as a threat to the body politic but as a sovereign prerogative over the bodies and lives of subjects. In so doing, it addressed the most individually menacing aspect of sovereignty, the right of death and ultimate judgment. In absolutist theory, this prerogative involved the right to render judg­ ment in appeals of last resort, and especially the right to take the lives of subjects, whether in criminal justice or in waging war. These regalian rights were addressed in other operatic settings besides the underworld, such as in judicial scenes and in the many plots involving war. However, the under­ world was the classic setting for the recurring fantasy of an ambivalent en­ counter between an individual and the monarchical state that represented its potential annihilation. This ambivalence appeared in underworld actions where characters express an unresolvable desire and aversion toward their own death, which they objectify in the authority figures they encounter (such as Pluto, Charon, or the Fates). The katabasis that characters like Orpheus, Theseus, and Psyche make in underworld acts thus also aestheticized an ethi­ cal experience of death as the limit of human possibility, in a classic instance of tragic sublimation in opera.5 We see this encounter with death staged repeatedly across the European genres of serious opera in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a con­ frontation between a heroic persona and the underworld’s quasi-­absolutist deities. Chapter 6 takes up this encounter as it was staged in the tragédie en musique, where the sublime object that heroes confront at the heart of the underworld is absolutist government in its most terrible, monstrous form. From the 1670s through the 1730s, French librettists embodied the under­ world’s governing power in singing roles for Pluto, and in some cases his consort, Proserpina. However, infernal acts and scenes from the second half of the eighteenth century tended to eschew these princely roles in favor of lesser ministerial figures and related deities, such as the Furies or the Fates, who act as antagonists. This shift away from representing annihilation in a princely persona did not change the fundamental dramatic dynamic of tragic sublimation. It just transferred the terror and “dignity of the Thing,” in La­­ canian terms, to the administered late-­absolutist state.6 The discussion in this chapter lays the groundwork for the following one,

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with an overview of key artistic, aesthetic, and political contexts for artists’ imaginative creation of the underworld on the French lyrical stage. Gener­ ally speaking, I find three symbolic political functions of underworld settings and their plots. Actions set in les enfers politicized human finitude by cast­ ing life or death as conditions of belonging to terrestrial or infernal sovereign realms, respectively. They also essentialized and universalized absolutist government as an immutable political order that obtains even beyond the grave. And, finally, they displaced its monstrous, death-­dealing aspect from the Apollonian terrestrial and celestial settings of most acts to, in Said’s words, “an unfamiliar [infernal] space beyond ours which is ‘theirs.’ ”7 First, how­ ever, it will help to have a sense of the intertextual sources of French oper­ atic underworlds and of the kinds of actions they typically hosted.

Artistic Sources and Developments Librettists’ dramatizations of the Hadean journey hearkened back to ancient epic literature, especially the Homeric Odyssey (book 2) and Vergil’s Aeneid, as well as Hesiod’s Theogony and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.8 In its broad out­ lines, the tragédie en musique’s geographical imagination of the underworld was inherited especially from book 6 of Vergil’s Aeneid, where the Sybil leads the Trojan hero Aeneas to the land of the dead. However, underworld acts were influenced more immediately by the earlier ombra tradition in Ita­­lian court theater and opera and by the French ballet de cour, théâtre à machines (machine play), and tragédie-­ballet.9 Each of these forms of musical the­ ater sometimes featured Hadean set pieces with elaborate décors, machines, and costumes. In France, machine plays like Jean Gilbert Durval’s Les Tra­ vaux d’Ulysse (1631) and François Chapoton’s very successful La Déscente d’Or­­phée aux enfers (1639) included enfer scenes, as did Luigi Rossi’s Italian-­ language opera Orfeo (Francesco Buti, 1647).10 Following the upheaval of the Fronde, the 1656 Ballet de Psyché included an underworld entrée danced by a young Louis XIV in the role of Pluto, and by Jean-­Baptiste Lully imperson­ ating a démon. Lully also composed a “Concert Italien” for this entrée, scored for chorus, instruments, and four soloists (including the soprano Anna Bergerotti), but his music has unfortunately not survived.11 Italian scenography was especially influential on underworld entrées and acts in French courtly spectacle. The famed machinist Giacomo Torelli de­ signed the set and machines for the Hadean entrée in the Ballet de Psyché, which was staged at the Tuileries (figure 5.1). The pencil drawing in figure 5.1 seems to depict the second part of the entrée, in which Pluto and the démons

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figure 5.1 Giacomo Torelli, design for the Ballet de Psyché, 1656 (Archives nationales de France)

perform a “wholly exceptional dance,” presumably to an air played by the large infernal consort of cornetts, organ, and other instruments arrayed around them.12 Torelli also designed the stage décor and machines for the under­ world scenes in act 3 of Rossi’s Orfeo.13 In 1662, Francesco Cavalli’s Ercole amante was performed at the Tuileries with an enfers set designed by Carlo Vigarani, who had replaced Torelli as Louis XIV’s machiniste. The influence of earlier Italian infernal décors persisted through the first tragédies en musique. La Gorce notes that Vigarani’s design for the palace of Pluto in act 4 of Lully’s Alceste was modeled on Alfonso Parigi’s design for the 1637 per­ formance of Le Nozze degli Dei at the Pitti Palace in Florence.14 The tradition of French-­language underworld dialogues and airs de cour is worth mentioning as another, more distant precedent for the tragédie en musique’s underworld scenes. For example, Gabriel Bataille’s multivolume collection of airs de cour included two dialogues addressing Charon, arranged for voices and lute: Antoine Boësset’s “Hola Caron viens tôt ici” (bk. 5, 1614), and “Hola, Hola Charon” (bk. 6, 1615).15 Many more airs treated aspects of the Orpheus myth, including récits from ballets de cour.16 The texts of French

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cantatas also regularly treated underworld themes, as in Charpentier’s Orphée descendant aux enfers (1683). Evocations of the classical katabasis were not limited to serious vocal music. Instrumental tombeaux from the late seventeenth and early eigh­ teenth centuries sometimes outlined a quasi-­narrative descent to the under­ world, through a sequence of sections bearing programmatic labels.17 Jean de Sainte-­Colombe’s Les regrets, from his Concerts à deux violes égales,  es­­ corts performers and listeners through several parts of the classical under­ world, with sections entitled, “Appel de Charon,” “Les pleurs,” “Joie des Elysées,” and “Les Elysées.”18 The composer’s son, Sainte-­Colombe le fils, left a remarkable F-­minor tombeau for his father (c. 1701) that also out­ lined a partial katabasis. In the section labeled “Passage du Styx,” a running eighth-­note figuration in an unmarked corrente style descriptively evokes the coursing of the fabled river (example 5.1). François Couperin’s Apothé­ ose in memory of Lully (1725) continues in this tradition of commemorating the dead by imagining them in the pagan underworld, although in this case Couperin’s sonata traces a kind of anabasis narrative, as Lully is marvel­ ously translated from the Elysian Fields to Parnassus.19 When librettists, composers, and designers of lyrical tragedies created an action set in les enfers, they borrowed many elements from this rich classical and neoclassical tradition. However, as is usually the case with neoclassical courtly theater, opera artists’ borrowing from these sources was an appro­ priation that adapted the antique underworld to French tragic poetics, aris­ tocratic ethics, and state politics.

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The Poetics of Absolutist Underworlds When opera’s heroic personas cross the threshold into Hades, what they find is terrifying and strange, but also in some ways very like the world opera au­­ diences knew. Opera’s underworlds had many of the features of early modern states: rulers, courts, and courtiers; ministers and judges; armies, borders, pris­ ons, and countless miserable denizens. It is worth asking why librettists chose to imagine the underworld thus, as a politically organized setting. After all, the ancient mytheme of the descent to subterranean realms has proven remarkably flexible across its long literary history, accommodating a host of meanings, only some of which are political. Yet librettists in the French ope­ratic tradition consistently imagined the underworld not just as a repository of knowledge, riches, or lost loves but as a kingdom or empire of the dead.20 Personas who make the descent into Hades find a realm with jurisdictional limits (the infer­ nal rivers, especially the Styx and the Acheron), a seat of rule and justice (Plu­ to’s palace), a prison (Tartarus), and a distant aris­­tocratic par­adise (the Elysian Fields). And at the center of this realm, both spatially and politically, sits the chthonic god Pluto, a sovereign with supreme authority and governing power. The underworld of French opera, in short, resembles nothing so much as an absolutist monarchical state. This formal resemblance certainly enhanced the political legibility of the kinds of dramatic action, expression, and spec­ tacle that recurred in underworld acts. However, it also had a structuring and regulating effect on the poetic drama prior to its hermeneutic function. In adapting the katabasis narrative for the French lyrical stage, librettists and their collaborators were expected to imagine the classical underworld in such a way as to present a theatrical realm that was fantastic yet plausible to con­ temporary audiences. The demand for theatrical plausibility (vraisemblance) issued from the neo-­Aristotelian poetics that exercised such a hold on the period’s opera criticism. Of the three conventional proprieties, plausibility was the most important and generically relevant for the tragédie en musique, where it addressed the nature of the relationship between operatic representa­ tion and the world of experience. In the case of lyrical tragic enfers—­a setting never found in spoken tragedy—­the criterion of plausibility raised special difficulties. How could a monarchically organized underworld seem plau­ sible when the underworld itself was rationally impossible? Further, even if operagoers were to suspend disbelief in a subterranean afterlife of the dead, what necessity dictated organizing the staged underworld as a monarchical state? If we see the tragédie en musique as something other than mere pro­ paganda or theatricalized ideology, we need an explanation for its creators’ imagination of diegetic, supernatural states.

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Unlike opera’s staged terrestrial realms—­Greece, Ethiopia, Colchis, and so forth—­its infernal realm had no phenomenal analogue outside the the­ ater, and as such it fell under the heading of the supernatural merveilleux.21 The impossibility of the merveilleux did not prevent such personas, places, objects, or actions from being governed by the principle of plausibility, in the special form that Catherine Kintzler terms vraisemblance merveilleuse (marvelous plausibility). Kintzler, following Cahusac, defines this form of vraisemblance as the requirement that “a marvelous action, from the mo­ ment it comes onstage, presents effects and properties conforming to those that it would really have if it were possible.”22 She argues that in the case of a marvelous place like the underworld—­which is, “properly speaking, no­­ where”—­the theatrical analogy with real experience, which constitutes vrai­­ semblance naturelle (natural plausibility), cedes to an analogy with experi­ ence of a possible and representable world: a world “of the visible unseen” and “the audible unheard.” “Possible experience,” she continues, “thus es­­ tablishes itself according to laws that are capable of regulating an imaginary: wholly fictive, to be sure, but forming a world, with its physics, its legisla­ tion, its logic, its proceedings and its propriety.”23 A world, I would add, with its imagined political order. Not all marvelous places in lyrical tragedy were presented as organized polities, although all served as backdrops for dramatized social power relations. However, those that were politically organized, whether explicitly or by implication, were al­­most always monarchies. This is probably because sovereign monarchical government was naturalized for French subjects of all estates, even for those who debated its constitutional versus divine origins. (Not until the second half of the eighteenth century would reform-­oriented political thought broach the possibility of sovereign government without monarchy.) During the hey­­ day of the tragédie en musique, the monarchical state was simply the most rationally thinkable and representable kind of polity, even when transposed to a supernatural realm. In a sense, then, librettists organized the underworld as a quasi-­absolutist kingdom of the dead for the same reason that, in Kintzler’s example, the god Mercury flies into the theater on wings: not because anyone had ever experi­ enced such a thing, but because that is the more “reasonable fiction.”24 What was “reasonable” in both cases arose from a commonsense understanding—­ common, that is, to opera’s creators and especially the upper echelons of its audiences—­of the basic nature of the world. This knowledge of nature—­here, of the natural political order—­did not need to be sophisticated or even true; as Kintzler writes, it only needed to draw “on what is known or is believed to be known” about how the world works.25 The organization of the underworld

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was effectively limited by what was plausible or even just thinkable for the socially dominant group of users in order to present a “reasonable fiction” of this “visible unseen” world. The underworld and the dramatic action of the katabasis were thus legitimized poetically through a kind of common­ sense political epistemology (what Foucault would call an epi­steme) that established the limits of the operatic imaginary. Thus far, much the same could be said of opera’s celestial realm (les cieux), the highest of the three hierarchically ordered spheres of the operatic cosmos. Like the underworld, opera’s celestial realm had no phenomenal correlate and as such was defined by the supernatural merveilleux and gov­ erned by its poetics of “marvelous plausibility.” And librettists also con­ ventionally imagined it as a quasi-­absolutist state, ruled by a deity (Jupiter) with supreme authority and power. Nevertheless, beyond their similarity as monarchically organized supernatural realms, les cieux and les enfers were starkly distinguished by their respective relationships to the poetic themes of life and death. The underworld was uniquely the domain of mortality and posthumous judgment: deaths occurred in terrestrial settings too, of course, but the dead and their fate belonged properly to the underworld. Because tragédie librettists conventionally imagined the underworld as a monarchy or empire, they politicized the condition of belonging to the un­ derworld, death, as a condition of belonging to a sovereign jurisdiction. For example, when the shade of Alceste appears in act 4 of Quinault’s Alceste, she is a subject and feted royal guest of Pluto and Proserpina. The genre’s politicization of death was ubiquitous yet also key to the significance of its underworld acts. Librettists routinely represented death as a ruled and gov­ erned condition, analogous to the experience of being ruled and governed in life. They did so, again, because that was the most reasonable fiction for ancien régime audiences: if the magic of the lyrical theater could make the dead sing and even interact with the living, surely they would do so as sub­ jects of a king. Here too, the principle of marvelous plausibility regulated the poetic imaginary of the underworld through analogy with possible expe­ rience. In order to grasp what is distinctive about opera’s enfers as a setting for political theater, then, we need to understand how death was a political, as well as natural, phenomenon in the ancien régime.

Politicizing Death Death and killing are arguably an inherent “dark side of politics,” classically through two kinds of state action: capital punishment and war.26 In the king­ dom of France, judicial killing and the demand that male subjects lay down

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their lives in battle were theorized as prerogatives of sovereignty, as embodied in the king. Bodin counted among the “marks” of sovereignty the “making of war and peace” and “the power to order the death penalty,” or suspend it with a pardon; and post-­Westphalian political theorists broadly agreed that the “essence of political sovereignty” lay in “the sovereign’s right to claim the death of the citizen.”27 This perspective was not limited to proponents of divine right, such as Bodin or Bossuet. Hobbes, for example, saw the “sover­ eign power of life and death” in an absolutist monarchy as fully compatible with the freedom of subjects.28 A century later, Rousseau argued likewise in The Social Contract that “when the prince has said” to the citizen, “it is expedient for the State that you die, he ought to die; since it is only on this condition that he has lived in security until then, and his life is no longer only a bounty of nature, but a conditional gift of the State.”29 More recently, a number of Continental theorists have revisited classi­ cal theories of the sovereign right of death, mainly in developing accounts of modern biopolitics (the politicization of life processes).30 Foucault’s anal­­ ysis is most relevant here, partly because it incorporates a compelling the­ ory of the history of sovereignty as it developed in France. In the 1975–­1976 lectures at the Collège de France and part 1 of the History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault distinguished analytically between “juridical sovereignty” and “bio­ power” as different modes of politicizing death. Early modern sovereignty, he argued, consisted above all in the right to take the lives of subjects or let them live, whereas since the nineteenth century biopower had organized populations in such a way as to preserve or extend normatively recognizable lives while allowing others to die.31 In practice, he noted, the sovereign right over life involved a “startling dissymmetry,” in that it was mainly exercised in state killing (male sovereigns could not give life to their subjects as they could death).32 This did not discount the act of pardoning, for example, as an exercise of sovereignty, but rather recognized it as an exceptional suspension of what was essentially a thanato-­political economy. Foucault rightly highlighted the strangeness of the sovereign-­subject re­ lationship within this economy. As he put it in the eleventh lecture in 1976, “The right of life and death is a strange right”: first, because the classical juridical discourse of rights suggests that “life and death are not natural or immediate phenomena which are primal or radical, and which fall outside of the field of power.” Politicizing death denaturalized it by bringing it within the scope of temporal authority while enhancing the godlike aura of the sovereign. More paradoxically, subsuming mortality within sovereign right theoretically suspended the absolutist political subject between life and death up until the moment her life expired:

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In terms of his relationship with the sovereign, the subject is, by rights, neither dead nor alive. From the point of view of life and death, the subject is neutral, and it is thanks to the sovereign that the subject has the right to be alive or, possibly, the right to be dead. In any case, the lives and deaths of subjects become rights only as a result of the will of the sovereign.33

Seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century people were obviously alive, but, in politi­ cal terms, their lives were not entirely their own, nor did they escape sov­ ereignty in death. Absolutist theory, with its Christian theological orientation, saw a profound homology between mundane and otherworldly sovereignty; sovereignty was unthinkable without divinity, and divinity without sovereignty was heretical. This homology cast the end of life as a passage from a temporal, human jurisdiction to a divine one. As Foucault put it, “Death was the moment when we made the transition from one power—­that of the sovereign of this world—­to another—­that of the sovereign of the next world. We went from one court of law to another, from a civil or public right over life and death, to a right to either eternal life or eternal damnation.” He speculated further that the spec­ tacular ritualization of death in the ancien régime responded to its politiciza­ tion as a right of sovereignty: “Death was the moment of the most obvious and most spectacular manifestation of the absolute power of the sovereign.”34 This power was idealized as supreme and indivisible, yet it encompassed axes that Rousseau would designate “sovereignty” and “economy.” As he wrote in his Discourse on Political Economy: I invite my readers . . . clearly to distinguish public economy, which is my topic, and which I call government, from the supreme authority, which I call sovereignty; a distinction which consists in this, that the one has the legislative right and in some cases obligates the very body of the nation, whereas the other has only the executive power, and can only obligate individuals.35

Rousseau’s distinction is important for understanding how death was politi­ cized in the ancien régime, where decisional power over life and death rested with the sovereign, but executing these decisions was a matter of govern­ ment. War and justice—­the state functions that exercised the most direct power over subjects’ lives—­were two administrative areas of royal govern­ ment, and historians Thierry Sarmant and Mathieu Stoll point to the emer­ gence between 1661 and 1715 of a properly administrative power in these and other areas that was “very visible and familiar to everyone.”36 None­

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theless, the king retained the power to intervene personally in domestic or foreign affairs, without appeal to human law. In judicial matters specifically he could condemn individuals to death or spare their lives according to a decision that, at basis, was beyond rational accountability. Even if French kings rarely exercised these powers personally, their right to do so helps us understand how life and death were not just states of being, but states of being ruled and governed. As such, they were not entirely dis­ tinct. The tragédie en musique articulated the relationship between these states of being by imagining the stage worlds of the living and the dead as comparably governed states. Yet the relationship among its three conven­ tional realms—­“l’enfer, la terre, et les cieux,” as Mercury sings in act 2 of Lully’s Persée—­was not simply one of resemblance. Librettists, composers, and designers also distinguished the quality of these realms’ characteristic regimes, creating a hierarchy descending from the ideal lawgiving of the Olympian realm to the unending penal government of the underworld.

The Ruled and Governed Cosmos In the final scene of Lully’s Proserpine, the gods of the three realms assem­ ble to witness the marriage of Proserpina and Pluto. Lully represented these realms musically by a triple chorus comprised of “celestial deities who sing in the machines” and two “troupes of singing terrestrial and infernal dei­ ties,” as well as a group of instrumentalists costumed as celestial deities.37 A design by Jean Bérain’s atelier, which La Gorce assigns to this scene, shows an arrangement of the corps much like that described in the livret, with a hierarchical placement of celestial divinities in the gloire overlooking the earthly divinities seated in the higher of the two galleries and the infernal divinities seated along the lower level (figure 5.2).38 Following a prelude with obbligato trumpets and percussion, Jupiter and the artfully placed choruses celebrate the pacification of the three realms beneath Jupiter’s celestial government: Que l’on enchaîne pour jamais La Discorde et la Guerre, Dans les enfers, dans les cieux, sur la terre, Tout doit jouir d’une éternelle paix.39 [Let Discord and War / Be forever bound; / In Hades, in the heavens, and on earth, / May everything enjoy eternal peace.]

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figure 5.2 Atelier of Jean Bérain, design attributed to Lully, Proserpine, act 5 (Archives nationales de France)

The ceremonial style and lavish instrumentation of this culminating solo and chorus support the text’s vision of an ordered cosmos, and Lully’s deployment of a largely homophonic four-­part chorus provided a simple but effective mu­ sical symbolization of corporate assembly and concord. However, Lully’s setting of the third vers also imposed a hierarchy onto the chorus, which he subdivided into antiphonal high-­voice, mixed-­voice, and low-­voice groups (example 5.2).40 The low-­voice group (C3, C3, C4, F4) opens the phrase on “Dans les enfers,” followed by the high-­voice group (G2, C1, C3) on “dans les cieux,” with “sur la terre” sung by the group of mixed voices (G2, C3, C4, F4). Lully’s association of the three realms with progres­ sively rising vocal tessituras suggested a spatial order, to be sure, but it also implied a moral progression from infernal baseness to the virtuous elevation of the celestial realm. (Hervé Niquet’s 2008 recording of Proserpine with Le Concert Spirituel exploits this moral differentiation quite effectively by as­ signing a harsher timbre to the infernal group.)41 Proserpine’s final divertissement encapsulates the partial differentiation of the infernal realm in the tragédie en musique. On the one hand, the underworld

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and its personas resembled opera’s other realms in many respects. Politi­ cally, they were all imagined as kingdoms with supreme rulers, and the di­ vertissement convention ensured that these rulers were routinely attended by singing and dancing retinues comprised of their subjects. Librettists and designers also organized these realms in accordance with an absolutist po­ litical geography that defined centers and peripheries based on proximity to the sovereign: the earthly realm has its déserts and solitudes, just as the in­ fernal realm has its Tartarus. Musical and costuming styles were likewise broadly similar for comparably ranked characters across the three realms, with discrete iconic features used to designate differences of location. In all settings, Lully and his successors normally gave high-­ranking personas an elegant, restrained, and diatonic arioso-­like vocal idiom, varying it subtly according to their character, affective state, and dramatic circumstances.42 On the other hand, the underworld’s association with death and final judgment distinguished it in ways that mattered for its operatic representa­ tion. As noted above, the otherness of opera’s underworld was essentially on­ tological, as a theatrical space belonging to deceased personas and retinues. Set designs conveyed this difference through iconic markers such as flames, a dark color palette, or, in the case of the Elysian Fields, a more somber ver­ sion of pastoral imagery. Costuming also distinguished underworld perso­ nas and retinues iconically from their counterparts in other settings. In the case of heroic personas, whose costumes tended to resemble one another, the addition of grotesque decorative elements distinguished a Pluto from a Jupiter or Neptune.43 Due to this association with death and violent punishment, Hades and its ruler, Pluto, bore a certain stigma in seventeenth-­century French courtly theater. This stigma carried a negative moral charge that extended to the quality of rule and governance that librettists imagined there: both Pluto and Hades were consistently aligned with tyranny and despotism, as well as barbarity. The degree to which court poets, designers, and musicians (in­ cluding Lully) emphasized these conventional qualities depended on the dramatic and political contexts of a particular performance. Yet even the least menacing underworld settings, such as those of the 1670s and early ’80s, had a somber, terrible air that contrasted starkly with the Apollonian poetics of light, perfection, and vitality that dominated royal iconography of the Sun King, whose rule saw the majority of enfers in lyrical tragedies.44 In contrast, in operas from Louis XIV’s late reign and after, infernal rule was consistently tyrannical or despotic, and this negative political morality es­ tablished one of the most salient distinctions between the underworld and opera’s other diegetic realms.

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This distinction created a chiaroscuro with the genre’s idealized repre­ sentations of terrestrial and especially celestial rule, whether in its prologues or in the celebratory divertissements and denouements of the five-­act trag­ édies themselves. Indeed, the underworld typically served as a repository of nonideal, even anti-­utopian, political fantasy. Librettists could displace such fantasies onto the underworld without violating the principle of mar­ velous verisimilitude, because this setting was already debased by virtue of its defining association with death and violence. It is this association that let opera’s underworlds accommodate thanatic aspects of power and politi­ cal experience that were much less at home in the tragédie’s other conven­ tional settings. Specifically, they imagined posthumous justice as an eternal penal government of the dead, a vision that forms a precise counterpart to the genre’s vision of an unending kingdom in its celebratory denouements. Strange as it is for us to imagine the dead as political subjects, absolutist theory and lyrical theater routinely did, and in ways that gave expression to the violent, thanatic aspect of ancien régime government that royal imag­ ery deemphasized. This is not to suggest that the state’s ability to exercise violence and even kill was suppressed knowledge. On the contrary, it was on full display in military reviews and conscription, public criminal confes­ sions and executions, lettres de cachet, and in printed criminal arrêts and sentences. And theorists of the coup d’état acknowledged the prince’s ability to act violently in accordance with political necessity. Nevertheless, as we have seen, violence and death were ordinarily dis­ tanced, both ideally and pragmatically, from the person of the monarch. Naudé’s caution against abusing the coup d’état speaks to this concern. In his treatise on the coup, his fourth “rule” is that princes should guard against immoderate punishment, and particularly pleasure in bloodshed. “It is only proper for a tyrant to say that he savors death, and for devils to take plea­ sure in the torment of men.” He goes on to describe the better stance for princes: “It is necessary to act . . . as a restrained man, prudent, wise, and discreet, and not angry, vindicative and given over to extraordinary and violent passions: this beautiful virtue of clemency, which teaches [him] to consider wallowing in torments and human blood as sullied and cruel, is always more esteemed than rigor and severity.”45 Librettists certainly emphasized the virtue of clemency in the tragédie en musique, where it is one of the signature virtues of good princes; but they could not easily avoid sovereign violence in plots with significant tragic con­ tent, even if the genre’s conclusions, like those of early Italian opera, do tend toward the “celebratory and comic.”46 Moreover, the tragédie en musique was defined by what Kintzler calls an “aesthetic of exhibition, an aesthetic of

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spectacle,” in which “all that can be shown is shown”; and this inclined the form toward an aestheticized presentation of violence, including sovereign violence.47 One dramaturgical solution to this problem was to displace death, torment, and penal killing onto infernal settings. These imagined spaces and their rulers could then become a repository for the destructive obverse of celestial justice, “a monstrous reserve of undifferentiated power and violence that law negatively affirms.”48 This dramatic function of operatic underworlds and their personnel had a more than passing resemblance to the ancien régime office of the execu­ tioner, a sacral figure who bore the taint and ignominy of sovereign violence but also played an indispensable role in carrying out justice.49 By far the most scandalous element of actions set in les enfers was the quasi-­royal character of Pluto, whose legal rigorism and avidity for violent retribution struck an ar­ chaic note, recalling the penal bloodlust of the “barbarous” rulers of antiquity or, closer to home, the Valois kings (whose taste for torture and executions is well documented).50 Pluto appeared in many guises in French musical theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but in tragédies he typically ap­ peared as a shadowy double of the genre’s clement princes, wearing the than­ atic face that they could not. The troupes of démons whom librettists imagined carrying out Pluto’s commands are particularly interesting in this regard. In Christian theology, they are fallen angels who serve the divine will by violently punishing the damned in hell for eternity (the subject of many vividly imagined scenes in early modern art). A question arose in late-­medieval angelology about whether they would persist in their office of punishment after Judgment Day, despite the Pauline principle that government would end in the king­ dom of heaven. Agamben cites Aquinas’s answer to this problem, in support of his claim that the Christian hell has long represented a state of endless government: Just as, among the saved, order with be observed . . . (because all the or­ ders of the heavenly hierarchies will continue forever), so too will order be observed in punishments, men being punished by demons, lest the Divine order . . . be entirely set aside. Wherefore just as the Divine il­ luminations are conveyed to men by the good angels, so too the demons execute the Divine justice on the wicked.

In Aquinas’s opinion, fallen angels have a comparable ministerial role as the good angels who serve as “executors and promulgators” of “supreme jus­ tice.”51 Hell, then, is a place of divine government in perpetuity, where de­

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mons “will be the indefectible ministers and eternal executioners of divine justice.”52 Likewise, the difference that les enfers represented within the tra­ gé­die’s cosmos consisted in its imagined existence as a place of sovereign justice executed violently, eternally, and without restraint or any possibility of redemption. Opera’s underworld settings presented an unsettling mixture of the prox­ imate and the strange. Ontologically, the underworld was drastically differ­ entiated as the realm of the dead, yet it also represented a future posthumous condition of all mortal personas, retinues, and, by extension, audience mem­ bers. Politically, too, the underworld bore a striking similarity to the tragédie’s other sovereign realms and, by analogy, to France under the Bourbons. Yet the form of rule that librettists imagined there involved an unbri­dled passion for martial and penal force that was regarded as unseemly in princes. It was a short step from this formal ambivalence toward absolutist lawgiving—­an ambivalence that is, in a sense, built into the tragédie en musique—­to a criti­ cal perspective on absolutism itself as despotism, which Cowart discerns in several operas from Louis XIV’s late reign.53 Lyrical tragedy was not metaphysical or sacred theater, despite its reliance on the merveilleux. When it addressed itself to such ponderous matters as death and the afterlife, it was not inviting philosophical or religious con­ templation but offering an entertainment loosely based on the world its au­ diences knew and, with its moral thematics, inviting them to imagine how they might best inhabit it. This world was, among other things, ruled and gov­ erned. Whatever other attractions it held, the tragédie’s fantastic, multimedia cosmic drama offered audiences a sublimated experience of the limits of the political order they knew. They could, if they wished, accompany Orpheus, Psyche, or Theseus through the realm of the dead, exposing themselves vicariously to that most precarious aspect of their political existence, yet living to tell the tale.

chapter six

Pluto, the Underworld King

T

he ancient Greeks and Romans imagined the lord of the underworld as a terrible figure, sacred but feared and despised by the living. “For Hades gives not way, and is pitiless,” states the Iliad’s Agamemnon, “and therefore he among all the gods is most hateful to mortals.”1 Theseus describes Dis (Pluto) similarly in Seneca’s tragedy Hercules furens. “Much of the horror” of the underworld, he says, “lies in its master, whose face is feared even by the fearsome.”2 Many centuries later, the encyclopédiste Louis de Jaucourt summed up what his literate contemporaries knew of the god, writing that Pluto “was generally hated . . . because he was believed to be inflexible, and because he never allowed himself to be moved by the prayers of men.”3 Neoclassical librettists regularly arranged confrontations with this au­ gust but unloved deity in underworld acts. Indeed, the encounter with Ha­ des’s ruler was the central dramatic event in most underworld acts before the 1740s, which nearly always included a singing role for Pluto (Pluton). In a sense, the persona of Pluto is another instance of the archetype that Thomas terms the “opera king.”4 In an elegant deconstructive reading of librettos from Louis XIV’s reign, Thomas notes a meaningful divergence of the tragédie’s compromised heroic male protagonists from the idealized princely “héros” of the prologues, which by convention allegorized the king.5 However, Plu­ to’s profile as a ruler of the underworld represents a more drastic departure from the form’s ideal. While Pluto’s characterization varied from work to work, librettists con­ sistently presented his persona as a menacing, chthonic other of the clement prince. In the tragédie en musique, as in other contemporary heroic genres, good princes and princely deities were rarely associated with harsh punish­ ment or death. Their characters displayed restraint in love and war, and they showed mercy in judgment. Pluto’s actions, on the other hand, were consis­ 174

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tently marked by an unseemly rigorism, inclemency, and bellicosity, and libret­­ tists portrayed his character as incapable of pity or love, with the exception of his desire for Proserpina. In the political ethics elaborated by the tragédie, these qualities represented a real failure that distinguished Hadean govern­ ment from that of opera’s other fictional realms. Why would opera’s creators repeatedly stage encounters with this fear­ some underworld king? We know that the selection of subject matter for new tragédies and courtly entertainments was not necessarily at artists’ discre­ tion but was often mandated by the crown and limited by its censors. So the decision to feature an enfer, with its flawed king, was never unencumbered by political considerations. And, indeed, it is not hard to reconcile the con­ vention of the underworld encounter with ideological pressures on French courtly opera. The confrontation with Pluto can be interpreted as an allegory of nonideal rule that constituted a courageous yet decorous truth telling of­ fered to the prince, in the mirror-­of-­princes tradition.6 This interpretation of confrontation scenes as cautionary tales is most plausible with regard to enfers in operas created during the height of Louis XIV’s reign, from the 1660s through the 1680s. These operas presented a more sympathetic and attractive persona whose terrifying nature was modulated by galanterie, that art of refined amiability and pleasure that had transformed the French court in the wake of the Fronde.7 In contrast, from the last decade of the seventeenth century depictions of infernal government in opera and other musical theater began to depart no­­ ticeably from the mirror of princes. The older aesthetic of galanterie also dis­­ appeared from confrontation scenes, leaving a harsher, more nakedly des­ potic portrait of sovereign government. Georgia Cowart has concluded from these and other features that the manner of portraying Pluto’s realm in the 1690s aligns its problematic features with the French state—­and Louis XIV’s reign in particular—­rather than as its negative image.8 The open appeal to the judgment of an opera-­going public in fin-­de-­siècle underworld scenes was novel, inviting audiences’ aesthetic engagement with matters of sovereignty and government that had long been regarded as arcana imperii, or mysteries of state.9 Rameau and Pellegrin’s Hippolyte et Aricie was the last tragédie to in­ clude a singing role for Pluto in an act set in the underworld. By the second half of the eighteenth century, fewer new French-­texted operas featured infernal action, while those that did omitted roles for Pluto. Instead, librettists staged confrontations with other chthonic deities, ministers, or retinues. This was a notable development in the political imagination of Hades, one that paralleled poets’ tendency in the later eighteenth century to dramatize

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sovereignty without an onstage sovereign, or to disperse sovereign-­like pow­ ers and authority to other entities.10 In the context of infernal acts and scenes, we see librettists imagining Hadean realms that echoed the administrative orientation of the monarchy in the eighteenth century.11 As I argue near the end of the chapter, confrontation scenes in Gluck’s Orphée and Alceste, in particular, staged a fantasy of confronting the sovereign’s most terrifying at­ tributes and powers as exercised not by a personal ruler, but by agents acting in his or her name. Yet this represented a late development in an operatic tradition that, for the most part, preferred to arrange the Hadean confrontation as a face-­to-­face interaction with a supreme deity. Furthermore, the dramatic sequence of this interaction remained largely constant across the repertory before the Revolu­ tion. At basis, it involves a hero’s transgression of the underworld’s law, his plea for mercy, and the moment of judgment and decision, in which his fate and, in some cases, that of a loved one is determined. Transgression, supplication, judgment: the Judeo-­Christian vocabulary sig­­ nals a theological dimension to these confrontations. And indeed, the core actions of this conventional type of scene were thoroughly sacralized. When characters like Orpheus or Theseus appeal for mercy, they address Pluto not just as the underworld’s ruler but as “a sacred presence that could demand a life,” as Paul Kahn describes the sacral sovereign of preliberal polities.12 They cite pity, love, or grief as justification for making an exception in their case, and they speak in terms of sacrifice and wonder, enchanted language that places the hero-­ruler relationship on an alternate footing than the rational ones we tend to assume, such as the rule of law or the social contract.13 Pluto, for his part, responds to these heroes not just as miscreants but as enemies whose actions threaten his rule and instigate a political crisis.14 Li­ brettists thus portrayed the god as sensitive to offense, eager to resort to arms, and ready to punish wrongdoers with exorbitant violence. These con­ ventional qualities did not just reflect Pluto’s shortcomings as an imagined ruler. They personalized an emergency politics of sovereign violence, setting up the core antagonism behind underworld confrontations: the threat of co­­ ercive force and the demand for sacrifice in the face of a threat to the fictional state. This dynamic of sovereign enmity and outsized retribution, in the con­­ text of Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception,” unmistakably signaled a nonra­ tional, sacral mode of political discourse in opera.15 Pluto’s incarnation of this other face of the sacral prince identified him with the early modern figure of the tyrant that Benjamin saw as a fixture of Baroque tragic theater. Benjamin maintained, in a leftist appropriation of

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Schmitt, that “the function of the tyrant is the restoration of order in the state of emergency.”16 He saw the “historical ideal of restoration” as “haunted” by its antithesis, “the idea of catastrophe,” and proposed that early modern the­­ories of emergency powers responded to this specter of political disinte­ gration and chaos, which the prince was charged with averting.17 As we will see, the staged underworlds of French musical theater accommodated this negative ideal of emergency intervention by a ruler who staves off catastrophe by exercising absolute power over life.18 In the discussion that follows I give an overview of the main conven­ tions for characterizing Pluto in seventeenth-­century French musical theater, which had the bulk of examples, before turning to Hadean confrontations themselves and their music through the 1770s. Pluto was rarely the protago­ nist of the underworld acts in which he appeared, although his authority was central to their political representation. Their action centered instead on a hero’s supplication of the god and the moment of decision, when the god de­­ termines the hero’s fate and often that of a loved one as well. French settings of the Orpheus myth presented an iconic version of this confrontation, which I analyze in terms of political theology. I then take a closer look at three iconic operas by Rameau and Gluck that mediated political theological problems of the extralegal decision, the friend/enemy distinction, and the sacrificial ori­ gins of the community.

Personifying Pluto Like many other conventions of early French opera, the personification of Pluto in the tragédie en musique and other operatic genres had roots in the seventeenth-­century pastorale, machine play, and courtly entertainment tra­­ dition, especially the ballet de cour. It also undoubtedly borrowed from Ital­ ian operatic precedent, most immediately in Rossi’s Orfeo, which was per­ formed at the Palais Royal in 1647. Of these influences, the ballet de cour was probably the most significant, with a number of memorable danced roles for Pluto during the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. Pluto appeared with Pro­­ serpina—­who wore blackface (avec le visage noir)—­and Charon in the Grand Ballet du Roi (1619), where they danced an unusual ballet with lit scepters and headdresses.19 Danced roles for Pluto also occurred in the Ballet de la prosperité des armes de France (1641), sponsored by Cardinal Richelieu, and the Ballet du Jugement de la beauté, among others.20 A teenage Louis XIV performed what was perhaps the most politically sig­­ nificant danced role for Pluto in the Ballet de Psyché (1656; see figure 5.1). As

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with many seventeenth-­century French personifications of the god, Bense­ rade’s verses portrayed him as terrifying, yet reassuringly galant. Cowart points out that the poet used the role of Pluto to present an unusually frank allegory of a reign that was still troubled in the wake of the Fronde.21 Pluto’s court was “fertile en démons” (full of devils), and although the god had conquered the “chaos” that threatened his throne, he nonetheless felt “de nouveaux embarras, / Une guerre intestine, et de secrets combats” (new difficulties, / An internal war, and secret struggles).22 While Benserade deftly steered the verse away from an overly close political allegory—­implying that the young king’s “embarras” were of an erotic nature—­the “guerre intestine” that dis­ turbed his peace also clearly alluded to the recent civil war.23 The king’s im­­ personation of Pluto, rather than another Olympian deity, stressed the crown’s potential for defensive force and harsh punishment of its enemies, emergency powers that were seen as essential to restoring state stability following an extended period of crisis. Six years later, Louis XIV once again took the role of Pluto in L’Hercule amoureux, the ballet that Benserade and Lully created for the entr’actes of Cavalli’s Ercole amante (1662). The king retired from dancing in 1670, and when Pluto next appeared on the musical stage, it was in roles sung by pro­­ fessional actors in early tragédies en musique. Lully and Quinault’s Alceste and Proserpine both had substantial singing roles for Pluto, and both rep­ resented the underworld’s ruler as flawed but relatively hospitable and be­ nign.24 Alceste had the most gracious and galant depiction of the god in any tragédie. It was the first example of this genre to include an underworld act, and Quinault presented Pluto in a relatively flattering light, as a somewhat bellicose version of the good prince. Pluto also exhibited a certain galanterie in Proserpine, but of a more predatory, patriarchal sort. Quinault based the libretto on an episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses recounting the god’s violent abduction of Proserpina and Ceres’s retribution. Pluto naturally received a much fuller portrayal in this opera. While Quinault showed him as a ruling monarch (5.1), the opera’s subject called for imagining a personal dimension of Pluto’s character, as he struggled to win the love of Proserpina. Imagining Pluto as a lover presented a challenge, because the god’s ac­­ tions of kidnapping and implied rape were inconsistent with the available ethical models for amorous princes in seventeenth-­century opera.25 Qui­­nault, Lully, and the designer for the court production, Jean Bérain, solved this prob­­ lem by giving Pluto a galant rhetorical and visual style while retaining con­ ventional terrifying and violent aspects of the god. In his duet scene with Proserpina in act 4, Pluto’s verses were sprinkled with Quinault’s formulaic vocabulary for lovers, including references to Proserpina’s “beaux yeux” and

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“charmes” and his own “soupirs” and “amour fidèle.” As La Gorce points out, Pluto also cut a dashing figure in Bérain’s costume design for the singer Jean Gaye, who created the role for the 1680 performance at St-­Germain-­en-­ Laye. “To satisfy public taste of the period,” he argues, Pluto’s violent action “needed to seem galant, and the abductor had to wear a seductive face.” Ac­­cordingly, Bérain gave a stylish makeover to this unsavory character, posi­tioning Pluto in a dance posture with castanets in his hand and dressing him in the latest theatrical fashion.26 He nevertheless preserved the god’s iconic bident, and Pluto’s costume was decorated with demonic masks that recalled his underworld provenance. Moreover, Lully wrote the vocal part for a baritone, at odds with Bérain’s im­ age of the young heroic lover but consistent with the low-­voice tradition of the role. Pluto’s actions across the opera were also marked by violence, bel­ licosity, and an immoderate desire for power that belie his pleasing appear­ ance. While these qualities would be inappropriate in a good terrestrial or celestial ruler, they were of a piece with the god’s conventional nature and serve to preserve bienséance. Singing and dance roles for Pluto appeared in musical theater at the Opéra and beyond in the 1680s and ’90s. In the most notable example, Char­ pentier’s chamber opera for Mademoiselle de Guise, La Déscente d’Orphée aux enfers (H. 488; c. 1687), included a bass-­voice role for Pluto in the sec­ ond of its two extant acts.27 Two new works at the Opéra in the 1690s also had significant vocal roles for Pluto: Louis Lully’s tragédie en musique, Orphée (1690), and the one-­act Italian opera, Orfeo nell’inferni, interpel­ lated in act 3 of André Campra’s comédie-­lyrique, Le Carnaval de Venise (1699). The personification of Pluto in these latter two works turned defin­ itively away from galanterie, allowing the negative qualities of the god ful­ler expression.28 In fact, both operas portrayed Pluto rather baldly as a despot. Cowart has demonstrated that the two Orpheus settings were connected, based on their internal resemblance, and she goes on to propose that Campra/Regnard’s one-­ act opera paid homage to Orphée “as a subversive moment in the history of public entertainment.” Specifically, she discerns a similar anti-­absolutist sub­­text in both operas, which coalesces in their respective characterizations of Pluto. In Orphée, she writes, “Pluto is cast as a militaristic, cruel tyrant  op­­posing the musician-­hero Orpheus,” in ways that suggest an unflattering  parallel with Louis XIV as a lapsed patron of the arts bent on military pur­ suits. Nine years later, Orfeo nell’inferni too presented Pluto as a warmon­ gering ruler, but its comic treatment deflated the character’s usual grandiosity, leaving only a “ridiculous buffoon.”29

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Cowart’s analysis discerns an important development in the character­ ization of Pluto—­and thanatic sovereignty, more broadly—­at the Opéra itself in the 1690s. Parodies of Lullian tragédies delighted in profaning the form’s mystified gods and princes, but in serious productions at the Opéra they re­­mained sacrosanct.30 Nevertheless, Le Carnaval de Venise and Orphée are noteworthy for their efforts to demythologize the staged encounter with Pluto, especially through the use of dramatic distancing techniques. The most striking of these is Regnard’s opera-­within-­an-­opera device, as well as Bérain’s stage-­ within-­a-­stage décor. Both works also went out of their way to depict other characters avoiding Pluto’s stage presence. In act 2 of Orphée, Eurydice point­ edly flees Pluto’s approach, and Cowart notes that Regnard had the characters Isabelle and Léandre make their escape as Bérain’s stage set descended for the performance of Orfeo nell’inferni. They flee the onstage theater—­which Cowart astutely reads as representing the Opéra—­for the more pleasurable fête galante that concludes the act.31 Seventeenth-­century personifications of Pluto brought to the fore a for­ mal ambivalence toward the roi justicier that was part of the fabric of seri­ ous musical theater in France. Thomas’s “opera king” was a sacralized type, and all such sacral figures are marked by an ambiguity—­what Georges Ba­ taille called the right and left sacred—­that invites ambivalent responses of attraction and repulsion.32 Baroque musical theater, especially the tragédie en musique, built an imagined cosmos around this ambivalence, assigning its Apollonian ideal of kingship (the “right sacred”) to the celestial realm and relegating its dangerous, negative aspect (the “left sacred”) to the realm of the dead. As we might expect, this distinction was not absolute, and just as artists sometimes endowed Pluto’s persona with charisma, the form’s be­­ nevolent princes and gods were often shadowed by a monstrous capacity for violence, as with the sun god’s slaying of the Python in the prologue of Cadmus et Hermione (discussed in chapter 1). In this sense, serious impersonations of Pluto disclosed a terrifying, des­ potic potential of the opera king, but this was mainly a structural effect of the tragédie and related heroic lyrical genres. Their alignment of left and right as­ pects of the sacral sovereign with separate cosmic realms made the action of crossing between these realms—­the underworld sojourn—­available for a range of contemporary political uses, including the fin-­de-­siècle court libertinism that research by Cowart, Fader, and others has brought to light.33 At basis, though, passages to and from the underworld had the character of a mediated fantasy: they brought opera’s heroes into contact with the phantasmic other of the benevolent prince and, through him, with the “secrets of political domination and its mechanisms.”34

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Orpheus and the Underworld King The most celebrated classical source of the underworld sojourn was the Or­­ pheus myth, which recurred as a subject of French court ballets, machine plays, intermèdes, chamber operas, and cantatas, but was surprisingly less common at the Opéra.35 Baroque librettists and composers setting the story of Orpheus’s descent to the underworld found different ways of handling its key actions—­the hero’s petition to enter Hades and to retrieve Eurydice, and the gods’ assent—­but they nearly always devoted more stage time and more elaborate music to Orpheus’s petitioning of Charon or Pluto and Pro­­ serpina. Creating an effective Orpheus role was the ultimate challenge, be­ cause it asked composers, singers, and instrumentalists to approximate the semi-­divine musician’s singing and playing in the theater. Composers often followed the model established with Monteverdi’s “Possente spirto” in his and Striggio’s L’Orfeo, adapting a favorite musical genre or style and adding unusual virtuosity, expressive harmony, or special instrumental and timbral effects.36 They also nearly always tailored Orpheus roles to particular singers, even more so than usual in early opera, because a successful performance relied so heavily on singerly competence and charisma. The Orpheus story thus lent itself to extraordinary lyrical display, which had an inherent appeal. But the showpieces that Baroque composers wrote for the role were also part of a dramatic action, and this meant that librettists needed to construct a plausible relationship between Orpheus’s singing and the gods’ exceptional decisions. The difficulty lay not just in the un­­likeliness of replicating supernaturally effective song in the theater (every­­ one was aware, after all, that the action was a dramatic fiction). Staging Or­­pheus’s en­ counters with personified Hadean powers also meant rationalizing the plot, especially the gods’ decision to suspend the law that the living cannot enter the underworld and the dead cannot leave.37 This brought special challenges, because it invoked a key paradox of sovereignty, as it was theorized in the ancien régime: the sovereign’s ability to act justly and legitimately outside the law. Pluto’s suspension of the law of death is the essential political moment of the Orpheus story, at least as it was retold in early opera. In the most ba­ sic sense, this is because the god’s decision brings a new reality into being—­ Eurydice’s return—­without any rule or norm that could justify his decision. Yet librettists always represented this decision as just, and it was celebrated as such in exuberant ensembles, choruses, or dance numbers. The musical and choreographic exuberance of onstage groups only enhanced the aura sur­­ rounding Pluto’s exceptional decision, which the French repertory habitually

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presented as a little miracle. In fact, librettists repeatedly devised crisis situ­ ations (both in the underworld and elsewhere) in which a ruler persona in­ tervened with a solution that other characters acknowledged as legitimate and just, yet that could not be rationalized legally or instrumentally. What justified the exception in nearly every case was charity or love. However, Pluto’s character conventionally lacked this quality, and so re­ quired some coaxing by other characters in order to deliver a just outcome. In Baroque Orpheus settings this normally took the form of skillful musical rhetoric, aided in some cases by Proserpina’s intercession or physical beauty. Pluto ultimately grants Orpheus’s suit in these setting not as an expression of benevolence but on the basis of an aesthetic experience of moral feeling (love, grief, pity) that acts as a kind of virtue supplement, improving his character just enough that he finds the grace to act like a proper prince.38 When he does, the onstage community hails his decision as the revelation that it is. Charpentier’s chamber opera for the Guise household, La Déscente d’Or­­ phée aux enfers, illustrates how French artists handled these dynamics of en­ treaty and decision. Like many before him, Charpentier’s Orpheus (a role cre­ ated for an haute-­contre named François Anthoine) makes his case to Pluto and Proserpina in song that is supposed to possess superlative rhetorical and ethical force. The centerpiece of the second act is Orpheus’s expressive la­ ment, an arioso-­style vocal number with atmospheric scoring for muted viols and keyboard. Charpentier extended the lament across the scene in several discrete sections, each of which culminates in a D-­minor refrain that be­ gins, “Ah! ah! laisse-­toi toucher à ma douleur extrême” (Ah! ah! let yourself be moved by my extreme sorrow). Between these sections, we hear Pluto, Proserpina, and the chorus responding to Orpheus’s plaint. The rhetoric of Orpheus’s address adheres very closely to Ovid.39 Reas­ suring Pluto that he has no sinister intent, Orpheus first sings ardently and despairingly of his lost Eurydice and asks Pluto to release her. Proserpina is moved by his sorrow, and, following Orpheus’s first refrain and Pluto’s initial refusal, she urges the god to let Eurydice return. Orpheus resumes his efforts, and after his second refrain Pluto at last begins to yield, singing, Quel charme impérieux m’incite à la tendresse? Et me fait plaindre son tourment? Pluton, aurais-­tu la faiblesse De te laisser toucher aux regrets d’un amant? [What imperious spell bids me show tenderness? / And makes me pity

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his torment? / Pluto, would you be so weak / As to be moved by a lover’s sorows?]40

The final section of the lament culminates in a more formal passage sung over a descending bass line, in which Orpheus recalls Pluto’s own vulnerability to Proserpina’s beauty: C’est par ce coup heureux dont ton cœur fut blessé, C’est par ces yeux charmants d’où ce trait fut lancé Que le fidèle Orphée à tes pieds te conjure De soulager l’excès des peines qu’il endure. [By this happy blow, by which your heart was wounded, / By these charm­ ing eyes, from which this dart was fired / Faithful Orpheus begs you at your feet / To lighten the burden of the torments he suffers.]41

Charpentier backed Orpheus’s appeal with a rapid modulation by fifths (from G major to E major) in the first three lines before cadencing on A major in preparation for the final refrain. This tonal battery was calculated to move the intransigent god, and so it does. Pluto at last gives in, swayed by Orpheus’s pointed reminder of his own susceptibility to erotic love. As was often the case in settings of this story, Or­ pheus’s lyricism is not entirely responsible for Pluto’s change of heart, which the god himself attributes to Proserpina’s love and beauty: Je cède, je me rends, aimable Proserpine. Conjuré par vos yeux, je n’ai plus de rigueur. Voyez ce que peut sur mon cœur Votre beauté divine. [I yield, I give in, O lovely Proserpina. / Entreated by your eyes, I no longer feel any harshness. / You see the effect on my heart / Of your celestial beauty.]42

Beginning with the second couplet, Pluto serenades Proserpina in a buoyant triple-­time air in D major (a “joyous and very warlike” key, by Charpentier’s own reckoning).43 Despite this galant rhetoric, the goddess’s role in Pluto’s change of heart is somewhat limited; it is her beauty, more than her interces­ sion, that sparks Pluto’s sympathy and inspires an unaccustomed mildness.

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Nevertheless, through her and Orpheus’s efforts Pluto comes to feel the lov­­ er’s sorrow and ecstasy, which leads him to grant the hero’s suit and even laud him as triomphant (triumphant) over the underworld.44 Pluto’s character undergoes a similar transformation at the parallel mo­ ment in the Orpheus entrée of Grenet and Lefranc’s opéra-­ballet, Le Triomphe de l’harmonie. As in La Déscente d’Orphee, the god’s decision to release Eurydice is driven by a musically induced sympathy with the lovers’ suffer­ ing. In this case, however, Pluto simply announces his change of heart in a brief recitative (“A tes désirs tout est propice,”) and it is left to Eurydice to explain, in a tender air de dessus and chorus with flute obbligato: Tendre Amour, le sort, les dieux, les rois, Tout cède à tes lois; L’Enfer s’ouvre à ta voix. Ta présence suspend l’horreur des sombres bords: ta puissance, tes doux transports désarment la vengeance du tyran des morts.45 [Tender Love, fate, the gods, kings, / All yield to your laws; / Hell opens at your voice. / Your presence / suspends the horror of the dark shores: / Your power, / Your sweet transports / Disarm the ven­ geance / Of the tyrant of the dead.]

This was conventional rhetoric for a divertissement air, but it encapsulates the quasi-­sovereign force that French Orpheus settings attribute to love. As Eurydice’s verses proclaim, love constitutes a higher good than law, trump­ ing even the sovereign’s prerogative over life. These and other early operatic settings of the Orpheus myth thus ar­ ticulated a vernacular ethics of political action as based on love. This links them to a long Western tradition of weighing rule ordered by law against rule ordered by charity and revelation.46 In the Christian-­derived terms of this ethics, love enters public life as a virtuous passion that defines one vi­­­ sion of the relationship between ruler and ruled, and it contends with law as the primary value guiding justice.47 Orpheus’s ability to muster love, sorrow, and pity in his underworld interlocutors is the object of wonder in nearly

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every early operatic setting of the myth, because it announces a political order in which the force of sovereign law is tempered by grace. In underworld settings for opera, as we have seen, this grace was supposed to emanate not from the virtue of the sovereign but from another source: Orpheus’s magical song. Early opera scholarship has shown that enchanted epistemologies of various sorts informed Baroque artists’ attempts to bring Orpheus’s music to life onstage.48 I would add that these Orphic settings also involved a political theology of music, centering on their singer protagonist.49 They normally dramatized the quasi-­sovereign power of music to transform and renew the political community while also affirming the revelatory ca­ pacity of beauty, pathetic feeling, and love. Each of these forces possesses an attractive vitality that, in opera, can mimic the charisma of majesty (what Bossuet called “this secret charm of the prince”).50 It is this “glowing-­center” quality—­a sense of “being near the heart of things,” as Clifford Geertz put it—­that sways Hades’s ruler to suspend the law of death.51 Sovereign-­like powers thus proliferate in the underworld well beyond its prince, as the chorus and corps recognize when they hail Orpheus, Hercules, or other heroes. In Grenet’s Orphée, for example, the “ghosts of happy lov­­ ers” praise Orpheus’s triumph in an ebullient, contrapuntal romp of a cho­ rus, worthy of Rameau or even Handel (example 6.1): Que tout applaudisse à ta gloire, Triomphe, règne dans ces lieux; L’Avenir plein de ta mémoire, Sans cesse publiera ton nom victorieux: Un mortel a plus fait que n’ont osé les dieux.52 [Let all applaud his glory, / Triumph, reign in these parts; / The future, filled with his memory, / Will unceasingly proclaim his victorious name: / A mortal did more than the gods ever dared.]

In Orpheus settings, choruses like these elaborated a political theology of the musical artist, representing the power of exceptional human creativity and virtuosity in terms normally reserved for the godlike powers of opera’s kings. The narrative outline of Orpheus librettos was inherited, of course, but seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century librettists reworked the myth into a more timely political fantasy of artistic charisma powerful enough that it could inspire even a despotic ruler like Pluto to give up his prerogative of death, and grant life.

example 6.1 François Lupien Grenet, Orphée, scene 4, first entrée of Triomphe de l’harmonie (from the first printed edition [Paris: De Gland, (1737)])

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Theseus on Trial: Hippolyte et Aricie Orpheus was far from the only character to venture into the underworld be­ cause of love, although his artistic means of averting catastrophe set him apart from other male heroes. The figure of Hercules was the main alterna­ tive, as an epic warrior who conventionally saves the day through physical might, rather than love, magic, beauty, or art. Perhaps closest to Orpheus in the French repertory was the character of Theseus in Pellegrin and Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie. Although in the classical corpus Theseus was a mar­ tial figure much like Hercules, here he more closely resembled Orpheus or the silver-­tongued Ulysses in his reliance on rhetorical prowess.53 In act 2 of Hippolyte, Theseus petitions Pluto to release his beloved friend and cocon­ spirator, Pirithous, appealing to love as the highest good. However, Pellegrin imagined a strikingly legalistic Pluto who remains unmoved by Theseus’s appeals (a characterization that may have been influenced by the librettist’s family background in the legal profession). In the end, Pluto allows Theseus to leave only because of divine intervention and, even then, under the stigma of banishment. If settings of the Orpheus myth stressed the political redemption of love and art, Hippolyte’s underworld act presented a searing vision of politics ordered by enmity and the ban. The core action of act 2 unfolds in Pluto’s throne room, where the god sits in state with the three Fates at his feet. The­­ seus addresses Pluto in stentorian tones with his recitative, “Inexorable roi,” where he appeals to a heroic ethos of male friendship as justification for hav­ ing accompanied Pirithous on his quest. For the 1742 production, Rameau added a sustained upper-­register bassoon accompaniment to this recitative, which lent his speech an appealing poignancy and gravity.54 Theseus presses his case in a brief air (“Pour prix d’un projet téméraire”) whose original ver­ sion included an obbligato part for bassoon, singing, Ah! si son amour est un crime, L’amitié qui pour lui m’anime, N’est-­elle pas une vertu?55 [Ah! if his love is a crime, / The friendship that I feel for him, / Is it not a virtue?]

But Pluto dismisses this argument without comment and turns Theseus over to the Fates (les trois Parques), whom he describes as the underworld’s high­ est judicial authority:

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Eh bien; je remets ma victime Aux juges souverains de l’empire des morts; Va, sors, en attendant un arrêt légitime, Je t’abandonne à tes remords.56 [Well then, I hand my victim over / To the supreme judges of the em­ pire of the dead; / Go, get out, await a lawful sentence, / I abandon you to your remorse.]

Pellegrin and Rameau personified the Fates as an ensemble of three low-­ voiced, cross-­gendered roles who pass sentence on Theseus in their second trio. However, before he faces them, Theseus undergoes a banishment that Pluto sets in motion with the words, “Je t’abandonne à tes remords.” With it, Pluto gives Theseus over to the internal hell of remorse and, eventually, the numinous terror of the Fates. Following the divertissement of divinités infernales in scene 3, Theseus tries to sacrifice himself in order to share his friend’s torments, but he is prevented by the Fates, whose first trio decrees that he must live. He turns in desperation to Neptune, petitioning him in a splendid accompanied air (“Puisque Pluton est inflexible”) to intervene so that he can at least leave the underworld as his friend’s avenger. This appeal works, as the god Mercury persuades Pluto to release Theseus, in a kind of diplomatic accord among the cosmic powers. Having granted Theseus this reprieve, Pluto abandons him once and for all to the Fates. Jean-­Luc Nancy’s writing on abandonment helps makes sense of Pel­ legrin’s rather convoluted judicial drama as ordered by the logic of the ban. Abandonment, Nancy writes, is a compulsion to appear absolutely under the law, under the law as such and in its totality. In the same way . . . to be banished does not amount to coming under a provision of the law, but rather to coming under the entirety of the law. Turned over to the absolute of the law, the banished one is thereby abandoned completely outside its jurisdiction.57

By subjecting Theseus to the Fates’ verdict, Pellegrin fleshed out his char­ acter and prepared audiences for the extreme misfortune that awaits him in Troezen.58 If Theseus had paid for his misdeeds in Hades, the underworld ep­ isode would have had little bearing on the action to follow, but instead Pel­ legrin used it to cast him as a marked man under a kind of curse. As Nancy puts it, Pluto compels Theseus “to appear absolutely under . . . the law as

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such and in its totality,” exposing him directly to the monstrous reserve of violence behind the law. “Abandoned being,” Nancy continues, “finds itself remitted, entrusted, or thrown to this law that constitutes the law, . . . to this other side of all law that borders and upholds a legal universe: an abso­ lute, solemn order, which prescribes nothing but abandonment.”59 This nicely describes Theseus’s confrontation with the Fates, which is also a confrontation with the shadowy allegorical figure of Le Destin (Des­ tiny).60 A peculiarity of Pellegrin’s libretto is its surplus of figures of neces­ sity and what Burgess calls its “continual deferment” of authority.61 In the underworld act, this involves the transfer of decisional power from Pluto to the Fates, who speak on behalf of the law in its most transcendent form, as Destiny.62 The logic of the ban helps explain this deferment of judicial sov­ ereignty in the underworld and elsewhere. Theseus has committed a crime but is not subject to ordinary penalties because he is of supernatural parent­ age and cannot be killed before his time. (This is an obscure point in Pel­­ legrin’s plot, but it might have been legible to his contemporaries as an act of divine demarcation recalling the biblical history of Cain.)63 Pluto likewise does not pardon Theseus but relinquishes him to an even higher power, ad­ dressing the Fates in a solemn accompagné texture: Vous, qui de l’avenir percez la nuit profonde, Qui tenez en vos mains et la vie et la mort; Vous, qui réglez le sort du monde, Parques, annoncez-­lui son sort.64 [You, who pierce the profound darkness of the future, / Who hold life and death in your hands; / You, who order the destiny of the world, / Fates, reveal his destiny to him.]

As is well known, Rameau reserved his most extraordinary musical in­ vention for the moment when the Fates deliver their verdict, in his original version of their second trio.65 Tellingly, the Fates address Theseus not by name but by his exceptional status as one shadowed by divine malheur. The Fates sing as they move through a series of enharmonic modulations,“Où cours-­tu, malheureux? / Tremble! Frémis d’effroi!” (Where are you running, ill-­fated man? / Tremble! Shudder with dread!). This extreme tonal instabil­ ity (achieved through what Rameau labeled the diatonic-­enharmonic genre) is an index of the Fates’ strangeness, to be sure,66 but it also inducts The­ seus’s character into an abject condition of exposure to “the other side of all law,” in Nancy’s terms. Rameau’s choice of the enharmonic genus for his

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second trio was consistent with his conviction, articulated across a num­ ber of his theoretical writings, that it created an experience of disorienta­ tion, fearful aversion, and horror in listeners. Classical French theorists of tragedy described the effects of theatrical horror as inducing extreme stress responses like trembling, paralysis, or the hair standing on end, and Thomas argues that “it is precisely this physical reaction” that the Fates demand from Theseus himself, with their command, “Tremble! Frémis d’effroi!”67 This vers urges Theseus’s character to assume a horrified aversion toward his own future and self, while its musical setting, which Theseus presumably can­ not hear, seems designed to replicate this affective posture in listeners.68 And it works, at least onstage: Theseus sings, in his concluding recitative of act 2, “Ah! je cède à l’horreur dont je me sens glacer!” (Ah! I give in to this horror that seizes me!).69 Why subject Theseus to such measures? In opera the underworld was conventionally a place of extreme punishment, but Theseus’s treatment sug­ gests that he has not just broken a law but—­like Orestes, Oedipus, and other figures of abandonment in neoclassical opera—­has transgressed a taboo. As with the incest taboo that forms the silent center of the other acts, Theseus’s crime is never explicitly mentioned, but everything in act 2 revolves around it. Audiences would have known from the classical corpus and, more im­ mediately, from hints in Racine’s Phèdre that Pirithous and Theseus tried to kidnap and presumably rape Proserpina.70 However, early opera did not treat the abduction and rape of women as taboo in itself, and this was no excep­ tion. (Quinault penned an entire opera on Pluto’s own rape of Proserpina, after all, and there the outrage is to Ceres’s authority, not Proserpina’s self-­ determination.)71 It seems likely that the unspeakable act here was Piri­thous and Theseus’s attempt to usurp Pluto’s patriarchal dominance over Pro­ serpina, as the relationship was construed in the repertory. Or perhaps the ta­ boo did not really involve a woman at all. The bond between Theseus and Pirithous had long been seen as skirting—­or crossing—­the boundary between homosocial and homoerotic love, and there is no reason to think that a seasoned dramatist like Pellegrin would have been unaware of that literary tradition.72 The fate reserved for Theseus is pure horror, more menacing than any dis­ crete penalty because its violence is unlimited, elsewhere, and yet to come: Tu quittes l’infernal empire, Pour trouver les enfers chez toi.73 [You leave the infernal empire, / Only to find hell at home.]

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The Fates’ final vers allude to the situation of incest and accused rape that Theseus will find in Troezen, but, more literally, they predict an obscuring of the boundary between the infernal and terrestrial realms with Theseus’s return. This casts the action that follows as involving a contamination of the world of Troezen by the monstrosity of les enfers. Audiences know that the terrible situation awaiting Theseus at home is not really his fault, but the Fates’ rhetoric implies a kind of sublime causal­ ity whereby he brings the taint of the ban back to the ruling house of Athens. This helps explain the extreme abjection of Theseus’s suicidal confession in his récitatif obligé at the beginning of act 5 (1733 version), “Grands dieux!” where he assumes responsibility for what has happened and undergoes an experience of tragic guilt. “D’un monstre tel que moi délivrons la nature” (Deliver nature from a monster like me), he sings, adopting an affect of re­ pulsion toward himself that drives him to attempt suicide.74 Neptune’s ap­ pearance prevents this, but then he announces that Destiny has prescribed banishment once more. This time, Theseus is forbidden from ever seeing his son Hippolytus, whom Diana has removed to the consecrated space prepared for the lovers. Burgess points out that Theseus is himself “banished from the stage and from the public rejouissance in the final divertissement” of act 5.75 The pas­ toral festivities that conclude this act celebrate a new Golden Age of love, pleasure, and princely virtue. But Diana herself implies that this political renewal depends on Theseus’s exclusion, as the corrupt father and king. She informs Hippolytus, in her concluding recitative and air, J’ai pris soin d’établir ta nouvelle puissance Dans ces lieux fortunés, dont Saturne fit choix Pour ramener le monde à son aimable enfance. C’est aux dieux à donner des rois Par qui de la vertu le siècle recommence.76 [I have ensured that your new authority would be established / In these fortunate climes, which Saturn chose / To return the world to its lovely childhood. / It is for the gods to give kings / Whose virtue renews the age.]

Hippolytus’s virtue is a near-­obsession of the opera, and Diana’s air holds him up as the ideal, sacral prince capable of renewing the polis by breaking defin­ i­tively with the past. The underworld act that Pellegrin furnished for Hippolyte et Aricie is of

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interest here not just for its exceptional artistry and its exploration of the ban, but as a turning point in the tragédie en musique’s political imagina­ tion of the underworld sojourn. From the 1740s onward, heroic protagonists in French-­texted serious opera do not personally confront the underworld’s rulers. Instead, the few heroes and heroines who have infernal action in later works face off with Hadean ministers and other deities. While this change accords with broader currents of opera reform at midcentury, it also suggests a historical shift of the experienced center of political power away from the increasingly distant personal monarch and toward the administered monar­ chical state.77 With the return to katabatic themes in two of Gluck’s reworked operas for Paris, Orphée et Eurydice and Alceste, agents of the imagined underworld “state” became the most proximate face of thanatic government.

Facing the Thanatic State: Gluck’s Orphée and Alceste Underworld settings in seventeenth-­century French musical theater nearly always included demonic retinues, furies, monsters, and a bevy of minor dei­ ties. In early tragédies en musique, these figures contributed to the overall spectacle of underworld acts and underlined the splendor and horror of Pluto and Proserpina’s realm, but they were mostly ancillary. (This status is sym­ bolized in Jean Bérain’s partial drawing of an infernal palace in fig­­ure 6.1, which shows a pair of ministers in a side loge and a grouping of demons ar­ ranged along a supporting column.) After Rameau’s lifetime, the convention of the underworld setting was nearly defunct in new serious works, as we have seen; and when librettists did script infernal settings or personnel they no longer organized their action around the personal authority of Hadean rul­ ers. The power over life associated with the underworld still exercised a hold over librettists’ imaginations in these decades, but it found a more compel­ ling outlet in roles for lesser supernatural figures, as well as in acousmatic music. The infernal acts in Gluck’s Orphée et Euridice and Alceste altered the ka­­tabasis narrative in this way. Their representation of the underworld largely derived from Calzabigi and thus had roots in the aesthetic and political mi­ lieu of 1760s Vienna. Aesthetically, Calzabigi’s handling of the operas’ in­ fernal action responded to his own reform principles and to influences from opera seria, the tragédie en musique, and opéra-­comique.78 Nevertheless, it would have resonated with major structural changes in French politics, es­ pecially the depersonalization of sovereign authority that Quentin Skinner and others have discerned in the last third of the century.79

figure 6.1 Jean Bérain, design for a palace of Pluto with ministers in the side loges (Archives nationales de France)

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In Orphée, unlike in earlier French versions of the story, Orpheus does not petition Pluto or Proserpina but only their troupe of ministres redoutés (formidable ministers, 1.2), whom he first encounters in the celebrated act 2 underworld tableau.80 Gluck’s librettist Moline, following Calzabigi, set the first scene of this act in a smoking grotto at the entrance to Hades, guarded by a troupe of demons and furies.81 When Orpheus addresses them they resist his entreaties in their famous chorus, “Quel est l’audacieux,” accompanied by a coloristic ensemble of strings, bassoons, and brass (Or­ chestra I). Orpheus, for his part, sings to a second, offstage orchestra of harp and pizzicato strings, representing his fabled lyre. Composers often created a stylistic or timbral contrast between the two sides of Orphic confronta­ tions, but Gluck took this to another level with the extreme tonal incom­ mensurability that he built into their music.82 Orpheus appeals to them in B-­flat major at “Laissez-­vous toucher,” and at first the chorus denies him diatonically. But after the shift to the dominant, the chorus shrieks “Non!” on an F-­sharp doubled by the trombones against the flattened-­II (G-­flat) of F in the basses of Orchestra II and Orpheus’s melody: orphée:

orpheus:

Laissez-­vous toucher par mes

Let yourselves be moved by my

pleurs, Spectres, larves, ombres terribles.

tears, Specters, wraiths, terrifying shades.

le chœur:

chorus:

Non, non!

No! No!

83

Rousseau expressed astonishment over Gluck’s deft harmonic maneuver­ ings at this moment and reported hearsay that “at the performance of this Opera no one could stop shaking each time this terrifying nò was repeated.”84 If Rousseau’s report is accurate, the enharmonic reinterpretation of F-­sharp/ G-­flat seems to have viscerally conveyed the horror of the situation to listen­ ers. Heartz points out that it also epitomizes “the struggle going on between Orpheus and the furies,” in a musical dramatization of the confrontation with the powers of death.85 Ultimately, of course, Orpheus’s music succeeds in pacifying these fearsome foes, forcing their tonal acquiescence, and they let him pass to the Elysian Fields after singing a triumphal verse in his honor. In many respects, this scene was in keeping with the French tradition of heroic underworld confrontations, despite its foreign genesis. The basic dynamic of heroic entreaty and sovereign grace remained the same, except

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that Gluck’s Orpheus (originally sung by Joseph Legros) directs his fabled musical charisma at lesser powers. The demons and furies his character con­ fronts do retain the aura attached to Hades’s divinities in earlier works. In the exchange with Orpheus, for example, their reiterated “non!” summons the full force and menace of the law, and Gluck cloaked their cries in a tonal and timbral strangeness that suggests the numinous authority that they rep­ resent. However, Hades’s gatekeepers lack the stature of Pluto and Proser­ pina, or even the judicial supremacy that Pellegrin attributed to the Fates in Hippolyte. Gluck called on musical sound to stand in this gap, manipulating tonality, texture, and timbre to supply a theatrical sense of left-­sacred majesty even in the absence of an onstage ruler.86 A similar absence and musical compensation is perceptible in the infernal scenes of Alceste, in Gluck and Du Roullet’s revised version for Paris. Alces­ tis’s interaction with underworld powers differs from Orpheus’s in important ways, notably the fact that her heroism is characterized by self-­sacrifice rather than struggle. Representing the underworld powers, Du Roullet, following Calzabigi, called for a partially offstage chorus of dieux infernaux and a solo dieu infernal, which Gluck scored as a bass role. Both soloist and chorus ad­­ dress Alcestis in act 3, the former on his own authority, in his air “Caron t’appelle,” and the latter in the name of “l’enfer”: “L’enfer parle, obéis à sa loi souveraine!” (Hell speaks, obey its sovereign law!). Calzabigi based the solo role of the infernal deity loosely on the figure of Thanatos in Euripides’s Alcestis, and, as in the source play, it is a shadowy allegorical figure personi­ fying death itself, rather than a ruler of the dead. It is the chorus whose verses bring an explicitly political dimension into the exchange, with their appeal to “l’enfer” as a sovereign entity that “speaks” with the force of law. The set­ ting of their command itself (beginning at “obéis”) underscores the numinous nature of this authority. From a triadic, incantatory texture on “L’enfer parle” (measures 271–­77, 290–­96), their choral lines resolve into octaves doubled by the trombones and winds (example 6.2). They drive home the obligation of obedience with detours to the flat-­II and raised-­VII of the dominant (on “obéis” and “loi”; measures 278–­79, 297–­98). No prince issues this command, only agents of “l’enfer” imagined as a quasi-­state, whose power over life and death stems from elsewhere than the personal charisma of its ruler.87 There are true sovereigns among the dramatis personae—­Admetus, Al­ cestis, and the deux ex machina Apollo—­but this is also an opera haunted from the beginning by the threatened loss of a king.88 Thessaly is thrown into crisis by the oracle’s mandate that the king must die, which plunges the royal family and the Thessalians into a state of exception. The rest of the opera re­ volves around the necessary, but reviled, sacrifice that has to occur in order

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example 6.2 Christoph Willibald Gluck, Alceste (1776 version), act 3, scene 4 (ed. Rudolf Gerber [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1957])

to prevent a divine regicide. When the infernal deity commands Alcestis to decide who will make the sacrifice, she gives herself ecstatically to death, in one of the most intensive syncopal moments in Gluck’s output: “Qu’il vive! Et des enfers ouvrez-­moi le passage!” (Let him live! And open the way to Hades!) In the revised ending of act 3, following the opera’s dismal open­

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example 6.2 (continued)

ing in Paris, Hercules interrupts this drama of exception and feminine sa­c­ rifice by returning Hades’s victim to the mundane world through sheer force of arms.89 But this Alceste was a tragédie, and the political theological im­ pulse of the genre was too strong to end with such a profane restoration. Apollo descends in a gloire to bestow immortality on Hercules and restore Admetus and Alcestis to their people before returning to the heavens. So the king is not sacrificed in the end and neither is his queen, yet the threat of regicide hangs over the opera. The mythical rejuvenating capacity of kings is also called into question right up until the end, when Apollo inter­ venes to restore order. This is partly due to the political weakness of Adme­ tus’s character. When he learns that Alcestis will take his place in death, he gives in to private despair, failing in a real sense to act as the public person—­ the king—­that he is. Alcestis even reproaches him on that count in act 3 when he admits that he tried to kill himself: Que dis-­tu? Ciel! . . . Admète! Ô désespoir affreux! Tes sujets! Nos enfants! N’es-­tu donc plus leur père!90 [What are you saying? Heaven! . . . Admetus! O horrible despair! / Your subjects! Our children! Are you no longer their father?]

This precipitates Admetus’s most moving passage in the act: his personal appeal to Alceste in his air, “Alceste, au nom des dieux!” The impassioned

198

chapter six

reprise of his first quatrain (measures 90–­105) is one of the great glories of the repertory, and its vocal surge up to an exposed A-­flat—­repeated twice, for effect—­seems to reveal something truthful about his character. But Al­ cestis’s sense of duty is stronger than her husband’s, and she is held to a different, distinctly feminized standard of honor, which demands her self-­ sacrifice as a patriot and wife. As Admetus’s character retreats further into private suffering, the absence of a functioning king sets off a chain of com­ pensatory actions, especially in the second version for Paris. Alcestis her­ self assumes the burden of political renewal and descends into Hades, but Admetus cannot save her (and by convention she cannot save herself). Enter the archaic hero Hercules and, finally, the divine Apollo, who imposes order and achieves the renewal of the state.

The Gift of Clemency Legal historian Grant Gilmore once quipped, “In Heaven there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. . . . In Hell, there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.”91 He at­ tributes this passage to the jurist and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, but its view of law as a limited remedy for an imperfect society would have been recognizable to Rousseau as well. In his Social Contract, Rousseau wrote, “All justice comes from God, he alone is its source; but if we were capable of receiving it from so high, we would need neither govern­ ment nor laws. . . . Conventions and laws are therefore necessary to com­ bine rights with duties and to bring justice back to its object.”92 If perfect justice is possible only in the kingdom of heaven, law is its mundane substitute. Yet because law’s regulatory economy could never ad­ dress all particulars, especially in a fundamentally unequal society, ancien régime thinkers stressed clemency as a supplementary virtue for princes and magistrates. The Jesuit political theorist Le Moyne, in his L’Art de regner, cited the Christian icon of the paschal Lamb “who came to abolish the law of rigor, and found the law of grace.” He warned against judicial severity as being un-­Christlike and especially unworthy of France’s most Christian kings: Kings who wish to be seen as fearsome and terrible; who prefer their people’s flight and silence over their cooperation and acclamations; who sign only death sentences and command only confiscations and tor­ ments; what semblance, what quality do they share with this King who distributes grace?93

pluto, the underworld king

199

Grace introduced a gift event into law’s worldly economy, which drew it closer to the Christian ideal of divine justice. Courtly opera across Europe mythologized princely acts of pardon and grace as a revelation of sacral kingship and the transcendent nature of sov­ ereign power.94 Librettists like Striggio, Quinault, and Metastasio also up­ held such acts as the sine qua non of good rule, echoing a commonplace of contemporary political thought. Despite the idealist bent of the period’s tragicomedy, poets did not disregard the other, violent aspect of sacral sov­ ereignty, but reserved it for fictional states of emergency and for despotic or barbarous regimes. Theirs was not our nightmare of emergency powers exercised by a machine-­like state bureaucracy or by nihilistic nonstate actors. When the creators of serious opera in France conjured a political hell, one of their most terrifying visions was of a supreme, godlike ruler lacking the clemency of the ideal prince. (Another was the prospect of an insurrectionary populace or of magically empowered, lawless women, both of which recurred as im­ ages of the public enemy.) As we have seen, librettists generalized this anti-­ ideal as the defining mode of rule in their infernal realms, where gods doled out vengeful justice without love or the possibility of mercy.95 What recourse did opera’s heroic characters have against such power? The underworld narratives that librettists put onstage addressed this question re­ peatedly and passionately, and they furnished several possibilities. These ranged from the brute counterforce of a Hercules to the arts of music, po­ etry, and beauty, which could wield grief or love as means of persuasion. For all their differences, these activities emphasized an essentially human ca­ pacity and advance claims for its sovereign-­like powers of “making.”96 They contested—­if tentatively and, often, unsuccessfully—­the transcendence of sovereign power by redirecting our admiration and sympathy toward musi­ cians, poets, and orators, warriors, intercessors, lovers, and friends. For the most part, their alternate world-­making potential was eclipsed in the end by courtly opera’s festive sacralization of sovereignty, but it made a brief, com­ pelling appearance in opera’s confrontations with the underworld king.

Conclusion: A Theater of Precarity

I

t is my sense that heroic confrontations with Pluto, Proserpina, or other infernal figures in French opera were not, in the first instance, veiled cri­ tiques of absolutism or particular monarchs, although they could serve such purposes. Rather, I suspect that they had a homelier function of aestheticizing the precarity of political existence in the ancien régime in ways that were en­­ joyable for audiences and acceptable to censors. Historian David Bell sums up this general state of precarity: Men and women competed, as always, for power, position, status, and ju­ risdiction, and argued incessantly over these things, but they generally did so under the pretense of wishing only to restore or maintain a state of af­ fairs that dated from time immemorial, in a complex and delicate hierarchy presided over by God’s anointed king. They also did so in the knowledge that at any time, in the name of that same king, they might find themselves summarily stripped of power, position, status, jurisdiction, and in­­deed all freedom.1

Bell alludes to a historical phenomenology of divine-­right absolute monarchy, as its ideals and structures manifested in everyday political life. For the social elite who made up the most prominent segment of the audience at Opéra pro­ ductions, security did indeed depend to a great extent on the king’s pleasure (or that of his agents), as well as on an older system of familial and patron-­ client networks. In extreme cases, even the most powerful subjects could find their fortunes reversed without warning, not unlike the hapless Phaeton. The tragédie en musique was dedicated to upholding the ideological myth of an unchanging, sublimely legitimate political order that Bell describes. But it also entertained audiences with fantastic plots that imagined the suspen­ 200

a theater of precarity

201

sion of this order in crisis situations. These dramas of the exception opened a space for artists’ fantasies of heroic protagonists encountering princely power in its most exorbitant, left-­sacred form. Near the end of the eighteenth cen­­tury, librettists and composers adapted this fantasy to accommodate the rising political class of ministers, magistrates, and civil servants, but its dramatic and political structure remained unchanged. The combination of a deeply entrenched social and political order, ori­ ented toward ensuring continuity, and the ever-­present potential for indi­ vidual, familial, or corporate disgrace and ruin characterized life in ancien régime France. Whatever else they did for audiences at the time, opera’s un­­ derworld confrontations enacted a generically and historically specific work­­ ing through of what it meant to be a subject of an absolutist monarchical state, particularly the threat of deprivation and violence in response to crisis (symbolized most notoriously by the Bastille). Articulating political precar­ ity in this way, as involving a kind of structural trauma, puts it in drastic, psychoanalytic terms, appropriate to the larger-­than-­life heroic dramas and characters that occupied the lyric stage.2 Yet political precarity was expe­ rienced in more ordinary ways as well, especially by members of the Third Estate. That creature of the prince, Lully, and his collaborator Quinault cer­ tainly felt the vicissitudes of royal favor throughout their careers. Likewise, Charlton points out that uncertainty dogged the institution of the Opéra: “Although the Opéra operated via systems . . . these could at any moment be countermanded by royal authority, whether personal or assigned.”3 The fortunes of the Théâtre Italien and its players, of course, rose and fell even more dramatically. If precarity was a structural feature of life under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, enlightened reformers in the eighteenth century sought to ease this condition through classic liberal appeals to human dignity and rights, ideals of equal­ ity and tolerance, and the rule of law. These efforts sought to place greater limits on the sovereign power of death or reassign it to other entities, aspi­ rations that would eventually find expression in the liberal security state. Struggles for the emancipation of peasants, women, and slaves were also in part efforts to distribute security more widely by limiting nonpolitical forms of despotism.4 We know in hindsight, thanks to postcolonial and decolonial research on the eighteenth century, that the triumph of liberalism in Europe and its settler colonies did not banish precarity, although it did win an un­ precedented freedom and security for mostly white, mostly male European property owners. What eighteenth-­century French reformists came to mean by the term “despotism” arguably lived on (in adapted forms) in the colony, the plantation and mine, the patriarchal household, and the prison, all of which

202

conclusion

were or became spaces characterized by an extralegal domination of “pre­ carious life,” in Butler’s terms.5 However, the dominant French cultural imagination of despotism in the eighteenth century located it elsewhere, especially in Orientalist fantasies of Ottoman rule. Baroque underworlds and their death-­dealing gods represented an early harbinger in opera of the “despotic fantasy” that gained currency in the course of the eighteenth century, when despotism was imaginatively ter­ ritorialized as a political order proper to a geographic (rather than ontological or cosmic) elsewhere.6 If Benserade and Quinault tried to assuage the menace of left-­sacred kingship with their aesthetic of galanterie, eighteenth-­century librettists cast out this aspect of sovereignty from the imagined community of Europe with the figure of the Oriental despot. As the scene of opera’s dra­ mas of the exception shifted in the eighteenth century, from merveilleux un­ derworlds to other human worlds, the sacral figure of the violent prince did not disappear, but was reinvented as an exoticist stereotype who came to re­­present “a worst-­case instance of where absolutism was tending.”7 The underworld king and the Oriental despot were not the same, to be sure: one figure represented a terrifying universalization of the law without regard for particulars, while the other represented the arbitrary reign of hyper-­ embodied particularity without regard for law. But both spoke to a decadence of sovereign government conceived as transcendent power made immanent, a principle that had upheld early modern absolutist regimes across Europe. Paul Kahn is eloquent on the challenge that issued from early modernity’s habitual recourse to theology for characterizing mundane rule. Speaking of the Christian god, he writes: His justice is never separate from His love. If it were to become so, ven­ geance would be both terrible and endless. If the king’s end was to achieve God’s ends on earth, then political institutions had to achieve some kind of synthesis of the universal and the particular, of justice and love, of rule and exception.8

Opera played a small part in thinking through this problem, by staging the nightmare of godlike sovereign powers exercised upon the great, outside a framework of revelation and grace. Bossuet himself shuddered at the thought of divine vengeance unleashed upon the mighty. Quoting the book of He­ brews, he wrote, “‘It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’ He lives eternally; his anger is implacable and always living; his power is in­­ vincible; he never forgets; he never yields; nothing can escape him.”9 How

a theater of precarity

203

much more terrifying must it have been to contemplate such powers in the everyday world, without the palliative of divine goodness? These chapters have tried to show that the tragédie en musique’s ambiv­ alence toward power lent itself to staged fantasies of princely clemency and severity, and that these established a theatrical archive of a traumatic structure of life in the ancien régime. If the genre was replete with personi­ fications of the clement prince, whose decision miraculously suspends polit­ ical reason, it also approached the political miracle from the other, govern­ mental side, with its stories of emergency rule driven by political rationality. The classic tragédie en musique mainly personified the violence of emer­ gency rule as the terrifying ruler of the dead, while tragic opera of the later eighteenth century was more compelled by hell’s ministers and démons. Regardless, the hero’s interaction with these figures performed an aesthetic work of sublimating the most menacing aspect of life under the Bourbons. In such a hell, facing such a king, even heroes resorted to the weapons of the weak: beauty, rhetoric, and, of course, music.

appendix

Operas and Ballets Cited Title Acis et Galatée

Premiere 1686

Librettist(s)

Composer(s)

Form

Jean Galbert de Campistron

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 3 acts

Alceste

1776

Marie François Louis Gand Leblanc Bailli du Roullet, after Ranieri de’ Calzabigi

Christoph Willibald Gluck

3 acts

Alceste, ou Le triomphe d’Alcide

1674

Philippe Quinault

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts

Amadis

1684

Philippe Quinault

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts

Amadis de Gaule

1779

Alphonse-­Denis-­ Marie de Vismes du Valgay, after Philippe Quinault

Johann Christian Bach

3 acts

Andromaque

1780

Louis-­Guillaume Pitra

André-­Ernest-­ Modeste Grétry

3 acts

Antigona

1772

Marco Coltellini

Tommaso Traetta

3 acts

Ariane

1717

Pierre-­Charles Roy, François-­Joseph Lagrange-­Chancel

Jean-­Joseph Mouret

prologue, 5 acts

Armide

1686

Philippe Quinault

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts

Atys

1676

Philippe Quinault

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts (continued)

205

Operas and Ballets Cited (continued) Title Ballet de la prosperité des armes de France

Premiere 1641

Librettist(s)

Composer(s)

Form

Jean Desmarets de  Saint-­Sorlan

François de Chancy

36 entrées, in 5 acts

Ballet de Psyché, ou La Puissance de l’amour

1656

Isaac de Benserade

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

27 entrées

Ballet du Jugement de la beauté

1647?

Unknown

Unknown

11 entrées

Bellérophon

1679

Thomas Corneille, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts

Biblis

1732

Fleury

Louis Lacoste

prologue, 5 acts

Cadmus et Hermione

1673

Philippe Quinault

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts

Camille, reine des Volsques

1717

Antoine Danchet

André Campra

prologue, 5 acts

Canente

1760

Antoine Houdar de Lamotte

Antoine Dauvergne

prologue, 5 acts

Cassandre

1706

François-­Joseph de  Lagrange-­Chancel

François Bouvard, Toussaint Bertin de La Doué

prologue, 5 acts

Castor et Pollux

1737

Pierre-­Joseph Bernard

Jean-­Philippe Rameau

prologue, 5 acts

Chimène

1783

Nicolas-­François Guillard

Antonio Sacchini

3 acts

Didon

1783

Jean-­François Marmontel

Niccolò Piccinni

3 acts

Die Zauberflöte

1791

Emanuel Schikaneder

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

2 acts

Don Giovanni

1787

Lorenzo Da Ponte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

2 acts

Don Juan, ou Le Festin de Pierre

1761

Gasparo Angiolini, Ranieri de’ Calzabigi

Christoph Willibald Gluck

3 acts

Operas and Ballets Cited (continued) Title Electre

Premiere 1782

Librettist(s)

Composer(s)

Form

Nicolas-­François Guillard

Jean-­Baptiste Lemoyne

3 acts

Enée et Lavinie

1758

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

Antoine Dauvergne

5 acts

Ercole amante

1662

Francesco Buti

Francesco Cavalli

prologue, 5 acts

Grand ballet du roi sur l’aventure de Tancrède en la forêt enchantée

1619

Honorat Laugier, sieur de Porchères, René Bordier

Unknown

7 ballets

Hercule mourant

1761

Jean-­François Marmontel

Antoine Dauvergne

5 acts

Hippolyte et Aricie

1733

Simon-­Joseph Pellegrin

Jean-­Philippe Rameau

prologue, 5 acts

Idomenée

1712

Antoine Danchet, after Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon

André Campra

prologue, 5 acts

Idomeneo, re di Creta

1781

Giovanni Battista Varesco, after Antoine Danchet

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

3 acts

Iphigénie en Aulide

1774

Marie François Louis Gand Leblanc Bailli du Roullet

Christoph Willibald Gluck

3 acts

Iphigénie en Tauride

1704

Antoine Danchet, Joseph-­François Duché de Vancy

Henry Desmarets, André Campra

prologue, 5 acts

Iphigénie en Tauride

1779

Nicolas-­François Guillard

Christoph Willibald Gluck

4 acts

Iphigénie en Tauride

1781

Alphonse du Congé Dubreuil

Niccolò Piccinni

4 acts

Isis

1677

Philippe Quinault

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts

Jepthé

1732

Simon-­Joseph Pellegrin

Michel Pignolet de Montéclair

prologue, 5 acts

L’Hercule amoureux

1662

Isaac de Benserade

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

18 entrées for Ercole amante (continued)

Operas and Ballets Cited (continued) Title

Premiere 1791

Librettist(s)

Composer(s)

Form

Pietro Metastasio

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

2 acts

La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers

1686?

Unknown

Marc-­Antoine Charpentier

2 acts

Le Carnaval de Venise (includes interpolated opera, Orfeo nell’inferni)

1699

Jean-­François Regnard

André Campra

prologue, 3 acts

Le Nozze degli dei

1637

Giovanni Carlo Coppola

?Marco da Gaglioni and ?Jacopo Peri

prologue, 5 acts

Le Triomphe de l’harmonie

1737

Jean-­Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan

François Lupien Grenet

prologue, 3 entrées

Les Boréades

posthumous

?Louis de Cahusac

Jean-­Philippe Rameau

5 acts

Les Danaïdes

1784

Marie François Louis Gand Leblanc Bailli du Roullet, Ludwig Theodor von Tschudi, after Ranieri de’ Calzabigi

Antonio Salieri

5 acts

Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus

1672

Philippe Quinault, Isaac de Benserade, the Président de Périgny

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 3 acts

Les Fêtes de Paphos

1758

Jean-­Joseph Jean-­Baptiste Collet de Messine, Charles-­ Cassanéa de Antoine Le Clerc Mondonville de La Bruère, Claude-­Henri de Fusée de Voisenon

3 entrées

Les Horaces

1786

Nicolas-­François Guillard

Antonio Salieri

3 acts

Medée

1693

Thomas Corneille

Marc-­Antoine Charpentier

5 acts

Médus, roi des Mèdes

1702

François-­Joseph de  Lagrange-­Chancel

François Bouvard

prologue, 5 acts

Oedipe à Colone

1786

Nicolas-­François Guillard

Antonio Sacchini

3 acts

La Clemenza di Tito

Operas and Ballets Cited (continued) Title

Premiere 1647

Librettist(s)

Composer(s)

Form

Francesco Buti

Luigi Rossi

prologue, 3 acts

Orfeo ed Euridice

1762

Ranieri de’ Calzabigi

Christoph Willibald Gluck

3 acts Semiramis

Orphée

1690

Michel du Boullay

Louis Lully

prologue, 3 acts

Orphée

1690

Unknown

Unknown

ouverture and 5 intermèdes for Alexander Magnus

Orphée et Eurydice

1774

Pierre Louis Moline

Christoph Willibald Gluck

3 acts

Persée

1682

Philippe Quinault

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts

Phaéton

1683

Philippe Quinault

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts

Phèdre

1786

François-­Benoît Hoffman

Jean-­Baptiste Lemoyne

3 acts

Philomèle

1705

Pierre-­Charles Roy

Louis Lacoste

prologue, 5 acts

Polydore

1720

?Simon-­Joseph Pellegrin, as Jean-­ Louis-­Ignace de La Serre

Jean-­Baptiste Stuck

5 acts

Polyxène

1763

Nicolas-­René Joliveau

Antoine Dauvergne

5 acts

Proserpine

1680

Philippe Quinault

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts

Psyché

1671

Molière, Pierre Corneille, Philippe Quinault

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 intermèdes

Psyché

1678

Thomas Corneille, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts

Renaud

1783

Jean-­Joseph Leboeuf, Simon-­Joseph Pellegrin

Antonio Sacchini

3 acts

Renaud, ou La suite d’Armide

1722

Simon-­Joseph Pellegrin

Henri Desmarets

prologue, 5 acts

Orfeo

(continued)

Operas and Ballets Cited (continued) Title

Premiere 1773

Librettist(s)

Composer(s)

Form

Michel Paul Guy de Chabanon

François-­Joseph Gossec

5 acts

Scylla et Glaucus

1746

D’Albaret

Jean-­Marie Leclair

prologue, 5 acts

Semiramis

1765

Gasparo Angiolini, Ranieri de’ Calzabigi

Christoph Willibald Gluck

3 acts

Sémiramis

1718

Pierre-­Charles Roy

André Cardinal Destouches

prologue, 5 acts

Tarare

1787

Pierre-­Augustin Beaumarchais

Antonio Salieri

prologue, 5 acts

Théagène et Cariclée

1695

Joseph-­François Duché de Vancy

Henry Desmarets

prologue, 5 acts

Théonoé

1715

Simon-­Joseph Pellegrin, as Antoine de La Roque

Joseph-­François Salomon

prologue, 5 acts

Thésée

1676

Philippe Quinault

Jean-­Baptiste Lully

prologue, 5 acts

Toute la Grèce, ou Ce que peut la liberté

1794

Beffroy de Reigny

Jean-­Baptiste Lemoyne

1 act

Ulysse

1703

Henry, Sieur d’Hérapine Guichard

Jean-­Féry Rebel

prologue, 5 acts

Zoroastre

1749

Louis de Cahusac

Jean-­Philippe Rameau

5 acts

Sabinus

ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

T

his project has unfolded across nearly a decade, and its debts are too many to count. Perhaps the most longstanding debt is owed to Gary Tomlinson, whose knack for thinking with opera first showed me that such a thing was possible. This book is, in many ways, the product of a long and eminently rewarding dialogue with his work. My heartfelt thanks go especially to those friends and colleagues who commented on the book at various stages, especially Georgia Cowart, Charles Dill, Martha Feldman, Hedy Law, Melanie Lowe, and William Weber. Their feedback, critiques, and encouragement have been invaluable, surpassed only by the example they set in their own work. Jean-­Claude Carron graciously checked my translations from the French, and James Cassaro gave expert advice on the music editing. I am, of course, solely responsible for the results. Melinda LaTour, Patrick Bonzyck, and Codee Spinner provided very competent research assistance at crucial points. Finally, my ed­itor at the University of Chicago Press, Marta Tonegutti, has shepherded the project with characteristic grace and verve, to my eternal gratitude. Colleagues in the Department of Musicology at UCLA furnished a model of thoughtful, venturesome scholarship that has both formed and provoked my thinking over the years. Thanks are owed as well to students in my graduate seminars on opera at UCLA, particularly members of the course “Opera and Politics in Old Regime France” in the fall of 2016. As the book went to press, I prepared to join the music faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and was warmly welcomed by my new colleagues and students there. I’m especially grateful to Deane Root and Paula Riemer for making my transition such a smooth one. Research librarians and curators have provided indispensable assistance at every stage. Most of the primary research was conducted in Paris, and I owe a debt of gratitude to the staff at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 211

212

acknowledgments

especially the Département de la Musique and the Département des Estampes et de la photographie. The Département des Arts graphiques at the Louvre gave access to the superb volumes of costume and scene designs in the Collection Edmond de Rothschild, while the curators of the Archives nationales de France aided in consulting materials on public funerals. The digitization projects at each of these institutions have also been helpful for finishing this project at a distance from my sources. In particular, I am grate­ ful to Jérôme de La Gorce and the Archives nationales for their online exposition and catalogue of the Menus Plaisirs du roi. In Stockholm, Wolfgang Nittnaus granted access to theatrical dessins in the Tessin collection at the Nationalmuseum of Sweden. Closer to home, staff at the Huntington Library and at the Arts Special Collections and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA provided assistance at many points. The staff at the Center for 17th-­ and 18th-­Century Studies at UCLA ably facilitated a conference that I organized at the Clark Library in 2009, “Opera and Politics in the Ancien Régime.” Bridget Risemberg facilitated all things at the UCLA Music Library, and this project would not have been possible without her and her staff. Friends and family have supported me in innumerable ways through this project, and they have my warmest thanks for all they have done. You know who you are and what a difference you have made. As I’ve learned, if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes another kind of one for a parent to write a book. So here’s to my village, sine qua non. Finally, this book is dedicated to Andrea, with my love and gratitude. Support for the book came from an American Council of Learned Societies Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, the Division of the Humanities at UCLA, and travel and research grants from the UCLA Faculty Senate. The James R. Anthony Fund of the American Musicological Society also awarded a generous subvention for production expenses. Oxford University Press kindly granted permission to reprint material from an article, “Choral Lament and the Politics of Public Mourning in the Trag­édie en musique,” Opera Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2011):341–­78, which I have incorporated into chapter 2.

a b b r e v i at i o n s

F-­Pan F-­Pn F-­Po F-­TLm F-­V GSW

OOR

ROC

Archives nationales de France, Paris Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris Bibliothèque municipale de Toulouse, Toulouse Bibliothèque municipale de Versailles, Versailles Christoph Willibald Gluck, Sämtliche Werke, founding editor Rudolf Gerber, general editor Gerhard Croll (Basel: Bärenreiter Kassel, 1951–). Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Opera Omnia, general editor Sylvia Bouissou, series 1–­6 (Paris: G. Billaudot, 1996–­2003; Bonneuil-­Matours: Société Jean-­Philippe Rameau, 2004–­). Jean-­Philippe Rameau (1683–­1764), Œuvres complètes, publiées sous la direction de C. Saint-­Saëns, 18 volumes, rev. ed. (Paris: A. Durand & fils, 1895–­1924; New York: Broude Brothers, [1968])

213

notes

preface 1. Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 24. 2. Georges Bataille, “Attraction and Repulsion I: Tropisms, Sexuality, Laughter and Tears,” and “Attraction and Repulsion II: Social Structure,” in The College of Sociology (1937–­39), ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 1988), 103–­12, 113–­24.

introduction 1. Serious Francophone opera went by a number of genre labels, especially “tragédie en musique” or just “tragédie” and, later in the eighteenth century, “tragédie-­opéra,” “opéra tragédie,” and “tragédie lyrique.” For rhetorical ease, I refer to this tragicomic tradition as the tragédie en musique or lyric tragedy. 2. Victoria Johnson emphasizes the Opéra’s long association with luxury in Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 3. Here and elsewhere, “Opéra” refers to the organization of the Académie Royale de Musique and its theatrical venues. 4. See Martha Feldman’s discussion of festivity and sovereign excess in Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-­Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 141–­85, 280–­83. 5. This follows Bataille’s mediation on sovereignty in The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 3, Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988–­91). 6. Notable studies of sovereignty and kingship in French opera before the Revolution include Robert M. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973); Manuel Couvreur, Jean-­Baptiste Lully: Musique et dramaturgie au service du Prince (M. Vokar, 1992); Geoffrey Burgess,

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“Ritual in the Tragédie en musique: From Jean-­Baptiste Lully’s ‘Cadmus et Hermione’ (1673) to Rameau’s ‘Zoroastre’ (1749),” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1998; Downing A. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–­1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Donald Baird Chae, “Music, Festival and Power in Louis XIV’s France: Court Divertissements and the Musical Construction of Sovereign Authority and Noble Identity,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2003; and Georgia Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). On sovereignty in other forms of European opera before 1800, see Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty; and Thomas McGeary, The Politics of Opera in Handel’s Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Reinhard Strohm discusses themes of sovereign government in opera seria in Dramma per musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1997), 273–­93. 7. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–­1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 121. 8. Ibid., 122. 9. See Wendy Brown, “Power after Foucault,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, ed. John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Philips, 65–­84 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 10. See Raia Prokhovnik, Sovereignty: History and Theory (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2008), 195–­201. 11. The reference is to Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 12. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 64. I am also mindful of Catherine Kintzler’s Foucauldian definition of an imaginary as “the conditions by which an aesthetic production is thinkable” (what she calls an “éstheme”) (Catherine Kintzler, Le Poétique de l’opéra français, de Corneille à Rousseau [Paris: Minerve, 1991], 524). 13. See, e.g., Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto: Toronto University Press in association with the Renaissance Society of America, 1997); Paul Kahn, Law and Love: The Trials of King Lear (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Debora Kuller Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001); Paul Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 14. Mitchell Dean, The Signature of Power: Sovereignty, Governmentality, and Biopolitics (London: Sage, 2013), 73. 15. See Ellen M. McClure, Sunspots and the Sun King: Sovereignty and Mediation in Seventeenth-­Century France (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 16. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably opined:

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qu’un opéra ne peut souffrir tout cet échafaudage de faits et de suppositions qui précèdent ordinairement les tragédies, et . . . son exposition se devant faire sans récit, et son dénouement sans discussion, l’action n’en saurait être trop simple, ni trop débarrassée de tout ce qu’on appelle intérêt d’État. . . . Sur quel ton, je vous prie, faire chanter un politique ou un ambitieux, gens froids en apparence et sentencieux, dont les sentiments sont souvent enfermés dans le fond de leur cœur? Agrippine aurait fort embarrassé Lully. (Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Lettres à Madame la marquise de P . . . sur l’opéra [Paris: Didot, 1741], 48). 17. All of these elements factor in my analyses except for movement, but see Rebecca Harris-­Warrick and Carol G. Marsh, Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: “Le Ma­ riage de la Grosse Cathos” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jacqueline Waeber, ed., Musique et geste en France de Lully à la Révolution: Études sur la musique, le théâtre et la danse (Berne: Peter Lang, 2009); and Françoise Dartois-­Lapeyre, “A Multi-­ Layered Analysis of Dancing in Eighteenth-­Century French Opera,” trans. Margaret M. McGowan, Dance Research 33, no. 2 (2015): 124–­42. Harris-­Warrick, Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) appeared too late for consideration. 18. For example, Jean-­Pierre Néraudau, “Du Christ à Apollon: Les Chemins d’une mythologie de la cour,” in La Tragédie lyrique (Paris: Cicero, 1991); Buford Norman, Touched by the Graces: The Libretti of Philippe Quinault in the Context of French Classicism (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 2001); and Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 55–­65. 19. Kintzler, Poétique de l’opéra français, 520–­23. 20. When I speak of the “public” (in a political, rather than artistic, sense) and imaginary and historic modes of “publicity,” “publicness,” or “public life,” I am referring to a historically specific understanding of these difficult concepts, as summarized in Thomas E. Kaiser, “The Public Sphere,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime, ed. Wil­ liam Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 409–­29. As Kaiser points out, before the later eighteenth century the “‘public’ had no clearly defined shape, no single institutional setting, and no single set of recognized legal rights. Many might speak in its name, yet no one, the King included, monopolized its authority” (412). In the seventeenth century the royal court was “the closest approximation to a paradigmatic public” (414), but the crown also proliferated institutional publics to further its interests. And, of course, in the eighteenth century new forms of sociability outside the court displaced its centrality as a site of the public and as a source of “public opinion.” Jürgen Habermas has the best-­ known analysis of this development, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). See also Kaiser’s commentary summarizing historians’ revision of Habermas, in “The Public Sphere,” 416–­23. 21. William Weber, “La Musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien Régime,” Journal of Modern History 56, no. 1 (1984): 63–­64 (original emphasis). 22. On the audiences for lyric and spoken theater, see Pierre Mélèse, Le Théâtre et le public à Paris sous Louis XIV, 1659–­1715 (Paris: E. Droz, 1934); Henri Legrave, Le Théâtre

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et le public à Paris de 1715 à 1750 (Paris: Librairie C. Kincksieck, 1972); and Solveig Serre, L’Opéra de Paris, 1749–­1790: Politique culturelle au temps des lumières (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2011). 23. Jérôme de La Gorce, Opéra à Paris au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Desjonquères, 1992); and Johnson, Backstage at the Revolution. 24. Burgess and Serre have both described tragédie en musique performances as rituals of ruler sovereignty, in Burgess, “Ritual in the tragédie en musique”; and Solveig Serre, “L’Opéra entre incarnation et représentation: Quelques éléments d’un système politique,” Nouvelle revue d’esthétique 12, no. 2 (2013): 11–­21. 25. Barbara Coeyman, “Walking through Lully’s Opera Theatre in the Palais Royal,” in Lully Studies, ed. John Hajdu Heyer, 216–­42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 26. Lagrave, Le Théâtre et le public à Paris de 1715 à 1750, 207–­58; James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Weber, “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?” Early Music 25, no. 4 (1997): 178–­91; Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–­1791 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 13–­66; and Joseph Harris, Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 27. With regard to Opéra programming, David Charlton recommends considering “all works, given across any year, in two senses: first, as creations belonging to the cycle when they were first made and witnessed; second (if revivals) as works newly brought to life within an updated context and a new cycle” (David Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 56–­57). 28. Josèphe Jacquiot, “Philippe Quinault, membre de la Petite Académie,” in Mélanges d’histoire littéraire (XVI-­XVII siècles) offerts à Raymond Lebègue (Paris: Nizet, 1969), 305–­20; Couvreur, Jean-­Baptiste Lully, 43–­63; and Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 65–­70. 29. See Nicole Ferrier-­Caverivière, L’Image de Louis XIV dans la littérature française de 1660 à 1715 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de France, 1981); and Jean-­Pierre Néraudau, L’Olympe du roi-­soleil: Mythologie et ideologie royale au Grand Siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986). 30. See Anne-­Madeleine Goulet, Poésie, musique et sociabilité au XVIIe siècle: Les Livres d’airs de différents auteurs publiés chez Ballard de 1658 à 1694 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004); Monique Vincent, Le Mercure galant: Présentation de la première revue féminine d’information et de culture, 1672–­1710 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005); and Antoine Lilti, The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-­ Century Paris, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 135–­62. 31. Norman, Touched by the Graces, 185–­89. 32. This alludes to Edward W. Said’s concept of “imaginative geography,” in Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 54. 33. Burgess, “Ritual in the Tragédie en musique”; Geoffrey Burgess, “The Chaconne and the Representation of Sovereign Power in Lully’s Amadis (1684) and Charpentier’s Medée (1693),” in Dance and Music in French Baroque Theatre: Sources and Interpretations, ed. Sarah McCleave, 80–­104 (London: Institute of Advanced Musical Studies, King’s

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College London, 1998); Rose Pruiksma, “‘Dansé par le roi’: Constructions of French Iden­ tity in the Court Ballets of Louis XIV,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2004; Olivia Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2008), 142–­76; and Susan McClary, “Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in Seventeenth-­Century French Music,” in Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-­Century Music, 241–­57 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 34. For example, Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton, 1941), 372–­83; and Manfred F. Bukofzer, “French Music under the Absolutism,” in Music in the Baroque Era: From Monteverdi to Bach (New York: W. W. Norton, 1947). In contrast, James R. Anthony’s landmark study, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), mentions absolutism as a context of the tragédie en musique but does not discuss the relationship of French baroque music to contemporary politics. 35. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King; Neal Zaslaw, “Leclair’s ‘Scylla et Glaucus,’ ” Musical Times 120 (1979): 900; Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 70, 84–­85, 239–­41; Neal Zaslaw, “The First Opera in Paris: A Study in the Politics of Art,” in Jean-­ Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony, ed. John Hadju Heyer, 7–­24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 1–­14; Couvreur, Jean-­Baptiste Lully; and Neal Zaslaw, “Scylla et Glaucus: A Case Study,” Cambridge Opera Journal 4, no. 3 (1992): 199–­228. 36. See Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 47–­49; and Jean-­Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-­machine. Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981). 37. Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, 1981). 38. Burgess, “Ritual in the Tragédie en musique”; and Richard Taruskin, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005/2010), 85–­138. See also Feldman’s historical anthropological approach, in Opera and Sovereignty. Jean-­Marie Apostolidès attributes a ritual dimension to French spoken tragedy, but argues that the tragédie en musique breaks definitively with this function, in Le Prince sacrifié: Théâtre et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985), 1–­10, 180–­81. 39. For example, Kintzler, Le Poétique de l’opéra français; Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera; and Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 40. On connections to French colonization and slaving, see Bloechl, Native American Song; David M. Powers, From Plantation to Paradise: Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764–­1789 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014); and Bloechl, “Race, Empire, and Early Music,” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg, 77–­107 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Rebekah Ahrendt pursues the problem of religious difference in her study of tragédies en musique produced in the Netherlands, “A Second Refuge: French Opera and Huguenot Migration, c. 1680–­c. 1710,” Ph.D. diss., University

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of California, Berkeley, 2011; and Rebekah Ahrendt, “Armide, the Huguenots, and the Hague,” Opera Quarterly 28, nos. 3–­4 (2012): 131–­58. Finally, on diplomacy see David R. M. Irving, “Lully in Siam: Music and Diplomacy in French-­Siam Musical Exchanges, 1680–­1690,” Early Music 40, no. 3 (2012); 393–­420; and Rebekah Ahrendt, Mark Ferraguto, and Damien Mahiet, eds., Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 41. Couvreur, Jean-­Baptiste Lully; and Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera. 42. Georgia Cowart, “Carnival in Venice or Protest in Paris? Louis XIV and the Politics of Subversion at the Paris Opéra,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54 (2001): 265–­302; Don Fader, “The ‘Cabale du Dauphin,’ Campra, and Italian Comedy: The Courtly Politics of French Musical Patronage around 1700,” Music and Letters 86, no. 3 (2005): 380–­413; and Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 145. 43. Mark Goldie, “Absolutism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, ed. George Klosko (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 282–­95; and Johann P. Sommerville, “Early Modern Absolutism in Practice and Theory,” in Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Cesare Cuttica and Glenn Burgess, 117–­30 (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2012). 44. Fanny Cosandey and Robert Descimon, L’Absolutisme en France: Histoire et historiographie (Paris: Seuil, 2002); and Sommerville, “Early Modern Absolutism,” 117–­30. 45. Peter R. Campbell, “Absolute Monarchy,” in the Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime, ed. William Doyle, 11–­38 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 46. See also Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, xx–­xxi. 47. Johann P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–­1640, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 228. 48. Cuttica and Burgess, introduction to Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe, 5. 49. This relies on Jean Bodin’s “marks of sovereignty,” in On Sovereignty: Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. M. J. Tooley (1955; repr., n.p., Seven Treasures, 2009), 82–­ 87; and Dean, The Signature of Power, 224. 50. Philippe Quinault, Thésée tragédie en musique. Ornée d’entrées de ballet, de machines, et de changements de theatre. Représentée devant sa majesté à Saint-­Germain-­en-­ Laye, le dixième jour de Janvier 1675 (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1675), 68–­70. 51. Henry Desmarets, Théagène et Cariclée, tragédie mise en musique par Monsieur Desmarets, pensionnaire ordinaire du roi (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1695), 181–­211. 52. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Encore Editions, 2006), 47–­49, quote on 48. Norbert Elias’s classic history of civility should also be mentioned here, as it has had such an influence on cultural historians of the ancien régime. See Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (New York: Urizen, 1978); and, more recently, Jorge Arditi, A Geneaology of Manners: Transformation of So­­ cial Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 53. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–­78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 198. 54. Mably made a similar point, paraphrasing René Rapin’s Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote (Paris: F. Muguet, 1674): “Qu’on enlève . . . à Achille sa maîtresse; dans le fond

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ce n’est qu’une bagatelle, mais cela devient très-­sérieux dès que Thétis va se jeter aux pieds de Jupiter, que les dieux s’assemblent en conseil, qu’on y fait de grandes délibérations, que les esprits s’échauffent, et que tout le ciel se partage sur cette querelle” (Mably, Lettres . . . sur l’opéra, 54n). 55. For example, Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–­1650 (Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 1984); Kate Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Nina Treadwell, Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for La Pellegrina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Suzanne Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and J. R. Mulryne, Aria Ines Aliverti, and Anna Maria Testaverde, eds., Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Iconography of Power (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2015). 56. Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 131. 57. Quinault, Atys, tragédie en musique. Ornée d’entrées de ballet, de machines, et de changements de théâtre. Représentée devant sa majesté à Saint-­Germain-­en-­Laye, le dixième jour de janvier 1676 (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1676), 63–­64. 58. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet defined the public enemy as someone “who does not love the civil society of which he forms a part,” who is thus “an enemy to himself and to all mankind.” Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, ed. and trans. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 37. 59. Thomas Corneille, Medée, tragédie en musique, représentée par l’Académie Royale de Musique (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1693), 62. 60. Ibid., 78–­79. See McClary, “The Dragon Cart: The Femme Fatale in Seventeenth-­ Century French Opera,” in Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-­Century Music, 258–­74. 61. Thomas Corneille and Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Bellérophon, tragédie. Rep­ résentée par l’Académie Royale de Musique (Paris: Mille de Beaujeu, 1679), 1, 48. 62. Corneille and Fontenelle, “Acteurs de la tragédie,” in Bellérophon. 63. Corneille and Fontenelle, Bellérophon, 49. 64. On the witches’ sabbath, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 80–­93; and, in English musical theater, Amanda Eubanks Winkler, O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-­Century En­ glish Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 18–­62. 65. Corneille and Fontenelle, Bellérophon, 23. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 24. 68. See V. Johnson, Backstage at the Revolution, 15–­36, 103–­18. 69. Quinault, Isaac de Benserade, and the Président de Périgny, Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus. Pastorale. Représentée par l’Académie Royale de Musique (Paris: S.n., 1672), Avant-­propos. 70. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 227. On raison d’état and its valuation of princely prudence, see Yves-­Charles Zarka, ed., Raison et déraison d’État (Paris: PUF, 1992); Henry Méchoulan and Joël Cornette, eds., L’État classique, 1652–­1715: Regards sur la pensée politique de la France dans le second XVIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Philo­ sophique J. Vrin, 1996); Étienne Thuau, Raison d’Etat et pensée politique à l’époque de

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Richelieu (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000); Jacob Soll, Publishing the Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 22–­ 40; and, for a generalist overview, Jean-­Yves Grenier, Histoire de la pensée économique et politique dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Hachette Supérieur, 2007). 71. Raison d’état was also thematized in spoken French tragedy. See Marin, “Théâtralité et pouvoir, magi, machination, machine: Médée de Corneille,” in Le Pouvoir de la raison d’état, ed. Christian Lazzeri and Dominique Reynié, 231–­59 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992); Hélène Merlin-­Kajman, L’Absolutisme dans les lettres (Paris: H. Champion, 2000); Katherine Ibbett, The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630–­1660: Neoclassicism and Government (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009); and Lise Michel, “Machiavélisme et genres rhétoriques: L’Invention des raisons d’État dans la tragédie de Corneille, de Médée à Pertharite,” in Pratiques du Corneille, ed. Myriam Dufour-­Maître, 575–­90 (Rouens: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2012). 72. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 312–­28. 73. Ibid., 88. 74. Philippe Quinault, Phaéton, tragédie en musique représentée par l’Académie Royale de Musique, devant sa majesté à Versailles, le sixième jour de janvier mille six cents quatre-­vingt-­trois (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1683), 52. Manuel Couvreur perceives in Jupiter’s intervention a warning to overly ambitious ministers, perhaps recalling the king’s recent humiliation of Fouquet and his dismissal of Pomponne (Couvreur, Jean-­ Baptiste Lully, 380–­83). 75. Gabriel Naudé, Considérations politiques sur les coups d’État, ed. Frédérique Marin and Marie-­Odilie Perulli (Paris: Éditions de Paris, 1989), 101 (original emphasis). See also Ibbett, The Style of the State, 128–­30; and Roberto Nigro, “From Reason of State to Liberalism: The Coup d’état as Form of Government,” in The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, ed. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter, 127–­40 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 76. Marin, “Pour une théorie baroque de l’action politique,” in Naudé, Considérations politiques sur les coups d’État, 7–­65. See also Merlin-­Kajman, L’Absolutisme dans les lettres, 8–­12, 71–­76; and Ibbett, The Style of the State, 128. 77. Robert C. Ketterer, Ancient Rome in Early Opera (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). On clemency in opera, see also Ivan Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy: Re­flec­ tions on Mozart’s Operas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 261–­63; and McGeary, The Politics of Opera in Handel’s Britain, 241–­45. Feldman also argues, in an anthropological vein, that opera’s mythologies of kingship were formed out of a totality of good and bad aspects, in Opera and Sovereignty, 248–­73. 78. Quinault, Phaéton, prologue. 79. On timelessness as an effect of French courtly musical idioms, see McClary, “Tem­ porality and Ideology.” 80. Bossuet, Politics, 169–­70. 81. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13.

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82. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); and Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). 83. Corneille and Fontenelle, Bellérophon, 38. 84. Ibid., 41. 85. Ibid., 46. 86. An erotic parody of Bellérophon underlined the gendering of the disaster in the original libretto. See Catherine Gordon-­Seifert, “Heroism Undone: The Erotic Manuscript Parodies of Jean-­Baptiste Lully’s Tragédies en musique,” in Music, Sensation, and Sensuality, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern, 138–­42 (New York: Routledge, 2002). 87. Corneille and Fontenelle, Bellérophon, 51. 88. Weber, “La Musique ancienne,” 62–­88; and Serre, “L’Opera entre incarnation et représentation.” 89. Giorgio Agamben puts this in terms of a separation of “kingdom from government,” in The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 73.

chapter one 1. The custom of the parterre singing along with choruses at the Palais Royal is documented by foreign visitors like Charles Burney, Joseph Addison, and John Gay, who found the practice strange. Shaftesbury wrote, “the Mock-­Chorus’s of the French are the most ridiculouse things in the World, and a gross sort of Musick fit only for the Parterre, and in my time constantly sung by the Parterre in company with the Actors, so that I us’d to think my self rather at Church than at an Opera, where all Throats at once were lett loose to joyn in this Psalm-­Musick of a confus’d Multitude” (Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, letter to Pierre Coste, 19 February 1709, transcribed in Thomas McGeary, “Shaftesbury on Opera, Spectacle, and Liberty,” Music and Letters 74, no. 4 [1993]: 540). See also Ravel, The Contested Parterre; and Jérôme de La Gorce, Jean-­Baptiste Lully (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 592. 2. Philippe Quinault, Armide, tragédie en musique. Représentée par l’Académie Royale de Musique (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1686), prologue. 3. Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV: Absolute Monarchy and Public Opinion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); and Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV. 4. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, xii. 5. Ibid., 195. 6. Ibid. 7. Bossuet, Politics, 345, 347. 8. This refers to Feldman’s discussion of the mythologizing capacities of opera seria, in Opera and Sovereignty, 226–­83. 9. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 229–­30. 10. This relation is discussed in the large literature on sacral kingship, building especially on Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton Classics Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). See Alain Boureau, Le Simple corps du roi: L’Impossible sacralité des souverains français

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XVe-­XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions de Paris, 1988); Neithard Bulst, Robert Descimon, and Alain Guerreau, eds., L’État ou le roi: Les Fondations de la modernité monarchique en France (XIVe-­XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1996); Paul Monod, The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589–­1715 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); and McClure, Sunspots and the Sun King. 11. Bossuet, Politics, 242. Bossuet is paraphrasing Le Cérémonial français, recueilli par Théodore Godefroy . . . et mis en lumière par Denys Godefroy (Paris: Sébastian Cramoisy, 1649), 35. 12. McClure, Sunspots and the Sun King, 36. McClure argues that this problem was so vexing for political thought under Louis XIV that it calls the “two-­body model” proposed by Kantorowicz into question (14–­15). For similar challenges to Kantorowicz in the French context, see Boureau, Le Simple corps du roi; and Monod, The Power of Kings. 13. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 53–­67, 144–­66. 14. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ Prima Pars, 50–­119, ed. John Mortensen and Enrique Alarcón, trans. Fr. Laurence Shapcote, O.P. (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute, 2012), question 112, article 3, p. 581 (original emphasis). 15. Ibid. See also the discussion of contemplative spectatorship in Harris, Inventing the Spectator, 139–­63. 16. Eric L. Santner has argued for the persistance of a doxological mode of publicity well beyond the demise of theological ruler sovereignty, in The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-­Matter of Political Economy, with commentaries by Bonnie Honig, Peter E. Gordon, and Hent de Vries, ed. Kevis Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). See also Agamben’s speculation about the afterlife of political doxology, in The Kingdom and the Glory, 253–­59. 17. Quinault described the action of the stage machinery during the overture in a preface to the livret: “Le Théâtre s’ouvre et représente une campagne où l’on découvre des hameaux des deux côtés et un marais dans le fonds: le ciel fait voir une aurore éclatante, qui est suivie du lever du soleil, dont le globe brillant s’élève sur l’horizon, dans le temps que les instruments achèvent de jouer l’ouverture.” This preface also provides a clef for the prologue’s allegory, which, he notes, “est si clair qu’il est inutile de l’expliquer” (cited from Thomas Leconte’s edition of Quinault’s livret in Cadmus et Hermione de Jean-­ Baptiste Lully et Philippe Quinault, ed. Jean Duron [Wavre, Belgium: Éditions Mardaga, 2008], 107). 18. Duron, Cadmus et Hermione, 107. 19. Duron, Cadmus et Hermione, 110. 20. See Gérard Sabatier’s survey of official Apollonian imagery in the decades be­ fore Cadmus, in Sabatier, “Point n’avez occis le dragon?” in Duron, Cadmus et Hermione, 11. 21. Kintzler, Le Poétique de l’opéra français, 228–­43; and Sylvie Bouissou, Crimes, cataclysmes et maléfices dans l’opéra baroque en France (Paris: Minerve, 2011). 22. Jérôme de La Gorce, “Les Mises en scène de Cadmus et Hermione sous le règne de Louis XIV,” in Duron, Cadmus et Hermione, 204–­5. 23. Leconte remarks the brevity of this symphonie in his “Lecture-­Commentaire” on the edition of the livret in Duron, Cadmus et Hermione, 111.

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24. Naudé, Considérations politiques sur les coups d’État, 101 (original emphasis). See also Ibbett, The Style of the State, 128–­30. 25. He specifies in the livret that the Python “devint un Monstre si terrible que Apollon lui-­même fut obligé de la détruire” (Duron, Cadmus et Hermione, 104). 26. Duron, Cadmus et Hermione, 113. 27. Ibid., 113. 28. “Il suffit de dire que LE ROI s’est mis au-­dessus des louanges ordinaires, et que pour former quelque idée de la grandeur et de l’éclat de sa gloire, il a fallu s’élever jusques à la divinité même de la lumière qui est le corps de sa devise” (ibid., 104). 29. See McClary, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-­Century Music, 129–­90. 30. Les Vérités de l’Evangile, ou l’idée parfaite de l’amour divin. Exprimée dans l’intelligence cachée du Cantique des Cantiques. . . . Par R. P. Léandre de Dijon (Paris: La Veuve et Denis Thierry, 1661), book 2, 326–­27. 31. Pierre-­Charles-­Fabiot Aunillon, Oraison funèbre de très-­haut, très-­puissant, et très-­ excellent prince, Louis XIV. Roi de France et de Navarre, prononcée en l’Eglise Cathédrale d’Evreux le 7. Novembre 1715. Par Mr. l’Abbé Aunillon, Chanoine et grand Vicaire d’Evreux, Abbé du Guay de Launay (Paris: Etienne Papillon, 1715), 24–­25. See also Francis B. Assaf, La Mort du roi: Une Thanatographie de Louis XIV (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999), 95. 32. Duron, Cadmus et Hermione, 113–­14. 33. Quinault, Armide, prologue. 34. Bossuet, Politics, 169–­70. 35. Aunillon, Oraison funèbre, 25. 36. Berthold Vallentin, “Der Engelstaat,” in Grundrisse und Bausteine zur Staats-­ und Geschichtslehre zusammengetragen zu Ehren Gustav Schmollers (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1908), 41–­120. 37. The following summary is indebted to David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Isabel Iribarren and Martin Lenz, eds., Angels in Medieval Philosophical Inquiry: Their Function and Significance (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008); and Meredith J. Gill, Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 38. See Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Giles Constable, “The Orders of Society,” in Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 249–­360. 39. David Keck, “Bonaventure’s Angelology,” in A Companion to Bonaventure, ed. Jay M. Hammond, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and Jared Goff, 289–­32 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 315. 40. Keck, “Bonaventure’s Angelology,” 299. 41. Yves de Paris, La Théologie naturelle. Tome second. De l’immortalité de l’âme, des Anges et des Démons. Par le P. Yves de Paris, Capucin, 3rd ed. (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1642), 542. 42. Ibid., 522–­23. 43. Docte et dévot traité de la sublime nature, et de la digne occupation des SS. Anges dans le ciel, et dans la hiérarchie de l’Eglise . . . par Jean de Sainte Geneviève (Paris: Veuve Jean Henault and François Henault, 1675).

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44. Benoist Pierre, Le Bure et le sceptre: La Congrégation de Feuillants dans l’affir­ mation des états et des pouvoirs princiers (vers 1560–­vers 1660) (Paris: Publications de la So­r­bonne, 2006). 45. Docte et devot traité, 54. 46. Ibid., 69. 47. Ibid., 61. 48. McClure, Sunspots and the Sun King, 67. 49. Jean-­François Senault, Le Monarque, ou les devoirs du souverain. Par le R. P. Jean-­François Senault . . . (Paris: P. Le Petit, 1661), 416–­17. On this treatise, see McClure, Sunspots and the Sun King, 47–­56. 50. Pierre Le Moyne, L’Art de régner (Paris: S. Craimoisy, 1665), 554–­57. 51. See Gérard Sabatier, “La Gloire du roi. Iconographie de Louis XIV de 1661 à 1772,” Histoire, Économie et Société 19, no. 4 (2000): 527–­60. 52. F-­Pn, Rés. QB-­201 (48)-­fol., p. 36, Hennin, 4435. 53. See Alexandre Y. Haran, Le Lys et le globe: Messianisme dynastique et rêve impérial en France aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2000); and Bloechl, Native American Song, 142–­215. 54. Patricia M. Ranum speculates that the inscription “M.D.M.” stood for “Monsieur de Mollier,” in “Un Portrait présumé de Marc-­Antoine Charpentier,” in Marc-­Antoine Charpentier: Un Musicien retrouvé, ed. Catherine Cessac (Wavre, Belgium: Éditions Mardaga, 2005), 20n20. 55. These have been extensively documented under Louis XIII and XIV. See especially Michèle Fogel, Les Cérémonies de l’information dans la France du XVIe au milieu du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1989); Jean Duron, ed., Regards sur la musique au temps de Louis XIV (Wavre, Belgium: Éditions Mardaga, 2007); and Alexandre Maral, La Chapelle royalle de Versailles sous Louis XIV: Cérémonial, liturgie et musique, 2nd. ed. (Wavre, Belgium: Éditions Mardaga, 2010). 56. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiæ: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship. With a Study of the Music of the Laudes and Musical Transcriptions by Manfred F. Bukofzer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958). 57. See Jean Mongrédien and Yves Ferraton, eds., Actes du colloque international de musicologie sur le grand motet français (1663–­1792) (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-­Sorbonne, 1986); Jean-­Paul C. Montagnier, “Le Te Deum en France à l’époque baroque: un emblème royal,” Revue de musicologie 84 (1998): 199–­233; and Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 131–­86. 58. Latin text and translation adapted from Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 139. Montagnier highlights a royalist parody of the hymn, probably dating from the Dutch Wars, that substitutes the word subditi (subjects) for the acclaiming angeli of the original, in “Recueil de Tralage,” F-­Pa Ms 6543, f. 20r-­v. Transcribed and translated (into French) in Montagnier, “Le Te Deum en France,” 209. 59. On political theological aspects of music for the royal chapel under Louis XIII, see P. Donat Lamothe, “La Réinterprétation royaliste des textes bibliques, et surtout des psaumes, dans le répertoire religieux de la cour de France (1560–­1610),” in La Musique et le rite sacré et profane. Actes du XIIIe congrès de la Société Internationale de Musicolo-

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gie, Strasbourg 29 août-­3 septembre 1982, ed. Marc Honegger and Paul Prévost, 409–­20 (Strasbourg: Association des Publications près les Universités de Strasbourg, 1986); and Frédéric Gabriel, “Chanter Dieu à la Cour: Théologie Politique et liturgie,” in Duron, Regards sur la musique au temps de Louis XIII, 27–­44. The political use of the grand motet under Louis XIV and his successors is discussed in Herbert Schneider, “Lullys Beitrag zur Entstehung des Grand Motet,” in Actes du colloque international sur le grand motet français (1663–­1792); Montagnier, “Chanter Dieu en la Chapelle Royale: Le Grand motet et ses supports littéraires,” Revue de musicologie 86, no. 2 (2000): 217–­63; and Montagnier, “French grands motets and their Use at the Chapelle Royale from Louis XIV to Louis XVI,” Musical Times 146, no. 1891 (2005), 47–­57. 60. On Du Mont’s Magnificat, see Laurence Decobert, Henry Du Mont (1610–­1684): Maistre et compositeur de la Musique de la Chapelle du Roy et de la Reyne (Wavre, Belgium: Éditions Mardaga, 2011), 365–­66. 61. Jean-­Paul Montagnier, “Plainchant and Its Use in French Grand Motets,” Journal of Musicology 16, no. 1 (1998): 131–­33; and Montagnier, “Le Te Deum en France à l’époque baroque,” 217–­26. 62. Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages, 105–­9. As Van Orden writes of the Te Deum, experiencing the doxology would have reaffirmed each participant’s “sense of belonging” to a reconsecrated and emphatically Catholic “body politic” (Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 166). 63. Powell, Music and Theatre in France, 261–­64; and Jean Vignes, “Le Dispositif choral de la tragédie: Entre dramatique, lyrique et gnomique,” Fabula/Les colloques, Jodelle, Didon se sacrifiant. http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document2267.php. 64. Powell acknowledges this affective function of the chorus in the mythological pastorale, in Music and Theatre in France, 262. 65. Claude Calame, “The Tragic Choral Group: Dramatic Roles and Social Functions,” trans. Dan Edelstein, in A Companion to Tragedy, ed. Rebecca Bushnell, 215–­33 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 66. Calame, “The Tragic Choral Group”; and Claude Calame, “Performative Aspects of the Choral Voice in Greek Tragedy: Civic Identity in Performance,” in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, ed. Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 125–­26. As Calame points out, the choral “we” can refer to the textual speaker (i.e., Thracians, Ethiopians), as well as the ideal or actual author, and the “implicit” or actual audience. Depending on the dramatic context, the chorus’s enunciative nous can also refer beyond the theater to the collectivities involved in contemporary public ritual, such as royal entries, coronations, funerals, Te Deums, and so forth. 67. Catherine Kintzler, “Representations of le Peuple in French Opera, 1673–­1764,” in Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu, ed. Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman, 72–­86 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 75. 68. Quinault, Thesée tragédie en musique. Ornée d’entrées de ballet, de machines, et de changements de théâtre. Representée devant sa majesté à Saint-Germain-en-Laye, le dixième jour de janvier 1675 (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1675), 74. Stage directions in the livret for the court production suggest that Minerva and a choir of nine divinities

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descended in a gloire and sang in alternation with the choir of Athenians, who were located in the ground-­level palace décor. 69. See the listing of performers at St. Germain, in Quinault, Thésée, 73–­74. 70. Quinault, Isis, tragédie en musique, ornée d’entrées de ballet, de machines, et de changements de théâtre. Représentée devant sa majesté à Saint-Germain-en-Laye, le cinquième jour de janvier 1677 (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1677), 5–­6. 71. Ibid., 6. 72. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure; and Cowart, “Sirènes et muses: De l’éloge à la satire dans la fête théâtrale, 1654–­1703,” Dix-­septième siècle, n. 258 (2013/1), 23–­33, http://www.cairn.info/revue-­dix-­septieme-­siecle-­2013-­1-­page-­23.htm. 73. Perhaps the most interesting examples are found in Voltaire’s librettos from the 1730s. See Cuthbert Girdlestone, La Tragédie en musique (1673–­1750) considérée comme genre littéraire (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1972), 272–­79. 74. [Simon-­Joseph Pellegrin], Polidore, tragédie représentée pour la première fois par l’Académie Royale de Musique, le jeudi quinzième février 1720 (Paris: Veuve de P. Ribou, 1720), 48. Cuthbert Girdlestone attributes the libretto to Pellegrin, in Girdlestone, La Tragédie en musique (1673–­1750), 252. 75. Simon-­Joseph Pellegrin, Jephté, tragédie tirée de l’Ecriture Sainte; représentée pour la première fois par l’Académie Royale de Musique; le mardi quatrième jour de mars 1732 (Paris: Jean-­Baptiste-­Christophe Ballard, 1732), 32. 76. Burgess, “The Chaconne”; and McClary, “Temporality and Ideology.” 77. These upheavals included the politicized Querelle des Bouffons, the change of management in 1757, the devastating fire at the Palais Royal in 1763, and, more generally, the Seven Years’ War (1756–­63), in which France suffered a humiliating defeat and accumulated a heavy debt load that affected public spending on the Opéra, among other state institutions. 78. [D’Albaret], Scylla et Glaucus, tragédie, représentée par l’Académie Royale de Musique; Pour la première fois, le mardi 4 octobre 1746 (n.p.: n.p., 1746), 12. 79. Benoît Dratwicki, Antoine Dauvergne (1713–­1797): Une Carrière tourmentée dans la France musicale des Lumières (Wavre: Éditions Mardaga, 2011), 234–­50; and Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 91–­92. 80. Mary Cyr, “The Paris Opéra Chorus during the Time of Rameau,” Music & Letters 76, no. 1 (1995), 32–­51. 81. Antonia Banducci, “Staging a tragédie en musique: a 1748 Promptbook of Campra’s Tancrède,” Early Music 21 (1993), 180–­90; Cyr, “The Paris Opéra Chorus”; Cyr, “The Dramatic Role of the Chorus in French Opera: Evidence for the Use of Gesture, 1670–­1770,” in Opera and the Enlightenment, ed. Thomas Bauman and Marita Petzoldt McClymonds, 105–­18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Thomas Betzwieser, “Musical Setting and Scenic Movement: Chorus and chœur dansé in Eighteenth-­ Century Parisian Opéra,” Cambridge Opera Journal 12, no. 1 (2000), 1–­28. For a pan-­ European perspective, see Roger Savage, “ ‘Something Like the Chorus of the Ancients’: The Coro Stabile and the Chorus in European Opera, 1598–­1782,” in Choruses, Ancient and Modern, ed. Joshua Billings, Felix Budelmann, and Fiona Macintosh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 117–­32. On the related developments of the pantomime and ballet d’action, see Hedy Law, “Gestural Rhetoric: In Search of Pantomime in the French En-

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lightenment, ca. 1750–­1785,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2007; Waeber, Musique et geste en France; and Edward Nye, Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-­Century Stage: The Ballet d’action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 82. [François-­Louis Gand Leblanc du Roullet], Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), GSW, Ab. 7, Bd. 1, ed. Klaus Hortschansky (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995). 83. Julian Rushton points out that this solo-­and-­chorus furnished an occasion for patriotic sentiment toward the royal family at the Opéra shortly after Louis XVI’s succession. According to Grimm, Joseph Legros, who created the role of Achilles, gestured toward the new queen, Marie Antoinette, as he sang this number at a performance on January 13, 1775. Julian Rushton, “ ‘Royal Agamemnon’: The Two Versions of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide,” in Music and the French Revolution, ed. Malcolm Boyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 27–­28. 84. Marmontel, Didon, tragédie-­lyrique, en trois actes; représentée à Fontainebleau devant leurs majestés, le 16 Octobre 1783, et pour la première fois, sur le théâtre de l’Académie Royale de Musique, le lundi 1er décembre 1783 (Paris: P. de Lormel, 1783), 26. 85. On the “oath chorus,” see M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “The New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary Rhetoric and Operatic Consequences,” in Boyd, Music and the French Revolution, 107–­56. 86. Pierre-­Augustin Beaumarchais, Tarare, opéra en cinq actes, avec un prologue; Représenté, pour la première fois, sur le Théâtre de l’Académie ­Royale de Musique, le vendredi 8 juin 1787 . . . (Paris: P. de Lormel, 1787), 78. The ending of Tarare was repeatedly revised over the next few decades to keep pace with the changing political climate. 87. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 77. 88. Affiches, annonces et avis divers, ou Journal général de France, 23 nivôse an II/ 12 January 1794, 5670, cited in Bartlet, “Revolutionary Rhetoric,” 108 (my translation). 89. She bases this on her sense of the chorus as fundamentally spectacular in nature and on its characteristic functions, which include “commentary, lamentations, and expressions of opinion and approval,” as well as “acclamation” (Kintzler, “Representations of le peuple in French Opera,” 80). See also Catherine Kintzler, “La Réduction du théâtre et le spectaculaire. La Subversion du spectaculaire et la réassomption du théâtre,” Théâtre et opéra à l’âge classique. Une Familière étrangeté (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 147–­64. 90. Kintzler, “Representations of le peuple in French Opera,” 80. 91. Paul-­Marie Masson argues for the dramatic nature of most of Rameau’s choruses in L’Opéra de Rameau (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1930), 289–­93; and Anthony makes the case for the dramatic function of many of Lully’s choruses, in French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau, 93–­120. 92. This builds as well on the work of classicist Nicole Loraux, who proposed that tragic mourning has an oratorical tendency. See Loraux, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 1–­13. 93. Giorgio Agamben has developed his sense of inoperativity [inoperosità] across a number of writings, but especially Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Agam­ ben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Agamben, Profanations, 73–­92; Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 197–­259; and Agamben, The Use of Bodies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 93–­94 passim. See also

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Sergei Prozorov, Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 94. Aristotle opposed contemplative and political life, in the Politics (1324a). Agamben counters, “The political is neither a bios nor a zōē, but the dimension that the inoperativity of contemplation, by deactivating linguistic and corporeal, material and immaterial praxes, ceaselessly opens and assigns to the living” (Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 251). 95. Agamben, Profanations, 87–­88. 96. Bodin, On Sovereignty, 47. 97. Bodin warns near the beginning of book 1, “We intend to confine ourselves as far as possible to those political forms that are practicable. We cannot therefore be blamed if we do not succeed in describing the state which is rightly ordered absolutely.” (Bodin, On Sovereignty, 44). 98. Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. W. H. White (Hertfordshire, UK: Words­ worth Editions, 2001), 152. 99. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 251 (original emphasis). 100. I am put in mind here of Charles Dill’s Lacanian discussion of Rameau’s “tendency to compose too much music,” a tendency that was much remarked during his lifetime and drew deeply ambivalent responses from Parisian audiences (Dill, “Rameau avec Lacan,” Acta musicologica 80, no. 1 2008, 54). 101. For example, see Feldman’s discussion of the da capo aria as ritual experience, which broaches something like what I am calling inoperativity (Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 84–­85). 102. He thus recommended “that our operas should have only expressive instrumental movements, that is those whose sense and spirit are always conveyed in detail by the scene, the plot or the visual spectacle” (Jean le Rond d’Alembert, De la liberté de la musique, 1759, in Œuvres de d’Alembert, 5 vols. [1821–­22; repr., Geneva: Slatkine, 1967], 1:543–­44. Translated in Caroline Wood and Graham Sadler, eds., French Baroque Opera: A Reader [Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000], 86). 103. The concept of the “songish” is borrowed from Gary Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History,” in The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, 31–­44 (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 42.

chapter two 1. Aristotle defines pathos in the Poetics (11.1452b11–­13) as “a destructive or painful action [praxis], for example, deaths in the open, great pain, and wounds, and all things of this kind” (English trans. cited from Elizabeth S. Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992], 134). 2. Kintzler, Le Poétique de l’opéra français, 106–­30; and John D. Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999). 3. Blair Hoxby, What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8–­9. For example, Rapin comments that the pleasure of

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tragedy “consiste dans l’agitation de l’âme émue par les passions” (Rapin, Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote, 173). 4. Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?, 9. See also Camille Guyons-­Lecoq, “Quand la ‘voix de la nature’ chante sur la scène lyrique,” Dix-­huitième siècle 45, no. 1 (2013): 347–­63. 5. Rameau described the chromatic descents in this prelude as representing “des pleurs et des gémissements causés par de vifs regrets” (Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique [1754], The Complete Theoretical Writings of Jean-­Philippe Rameau, ed. Erwin R. Jacobi, 6 vols. [n.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1967–­72]). 6. Jean-­Philippe Rameau, Castor et Pollux, ROC, vol. 8 (Paris: A Durand et fils, 1903/ New York: Broude Brothers, 1968), 8:63–­67. 7. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004); and Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2009). See also Olivia Bloechl, “On Not Being Alone: Rousseauean Thoughts on a Relational Ethics of Music,” Colloquy: Rousseau in 2013: Afterthoughts on a Tercentenary, Jacqueline Waeber, convenor, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 1 (2013): 261–­65. 8. Graham Sadler, “Towards the Grand siècle and Beyond: Sacred Music of the French Baroque,” Early Music 23, no. 4 (1995): 718. “Que tout gémisse” may also have derived from a slave chorus in Rameau’s Samson project with Voltaire, as discussed in Dill, “Creative Process in Rameau’s Castor et Pollux,” in The Creative Process, vol. 3 of Studies in the History of Music (New York: Broude, 1992), 93–­106. 9. A number of scholars have reflected on connections between operatic and state mourning in the context of establishing the music used at certain state funerals. See Philippe Beaussant, Lully, ou le musicien du soleil (Paris: Gallimard/Théâtre des Champs-­ Elysées, 2002), 513–­55; Catherine Cessac, Marc-­Antoine Charpentier, trans. E. Thomas Glasow (Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1995); Jean Duron, ed., Musique pour les funérailles de la reine Marie-­Thérèse (Paris: Heugel/Le Pupitre, 2000); and Elisabeth Lebeau, “La Musique des cérémonies célébrées à la mort de Marie-­Thérèse, reine de France, 1683,” in Le “Baroque” musical. Colloque international tenu à l’Université de Liège du 9 au 14 sep­ tembre 1957, Les Colloques de Wégimont 4–­1957 (Paris: Société d’Édition « Les Belles Lettres », Université de Liège, 1964), 200–­19. 10. The chorus from Castor et Pollux was probably adapted for the funeral by François Rebel and François Francoeur, who incorporated it as part of the Gilles Requiem Mass along with another excerpt from the opera (the air “Séjour de l’éternelle paix,” Act 4, scene 1, 1737 version). The music for Rameau’s Funeral Mass is preserved together with the altered Gilles Mass in several manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (F-­Pn D-­11135, F-­Pn H-­494 [A-­B], and F-­Pn L-­17986 [A-­B]). 11. Pierre Chaunu, La Mort à Paris. XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1978), 181–­90; and Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–­1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 176. 12. Juliusz A. Chrościcki, Mark Hengerer, and Gérard Sabatier, eds., Les Funérailles princières en Europe, XVIe-­XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols. (Versailles: Centre de recherche du château de Versailles; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2012–­15). 13. Père Claude-­François Ménestrier, Des décorations funèbres (Paris: R.-­J.-­B. de La Caille, 1683), 141–­42.

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14. This reflects the protocol for the royal family, but a similar protocol pertained on the death of any of the grands. It is based on documents pertaining to state funerals at the Archives nationales de France (F-­Pan), Paris, especially sér. O1 1043–­1044, O1 3262, O*821, and K 1716–­1718, as well as the Sainctot manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 15. Eustache Du Caurroy’s Missa Pro defunctis (pub. 1636) was long the preferred mass setting for funerals of French sovereigns, although settings by Charles d’Helfer (pub. 1656) and Jean Gilles (bef. 1705) were revived for Louis XV’s services in 1774. La Collection Sébastien de Brossard, 1655–­1730 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1994), 87. 16. Le Sueur’s music for Surrexit vir bellator is not extant, but Mersenne gives the text of the threnody in Des Décorations funèbres, 352–­54. On Charpentier’s motets for Marie-­Thésèse see Duron, Musique pour les funérailles de la reine Marie-­Thérèse; and Cessac, Marc-­Antoine Charpentier, 124–­29. 17. Nouveau Mercure galant, October 1715, 249. 18. Ménestrier, Des Décorations funèbres, 283–­84. 19. Chaunu, La Mort à Paris, 360–­61; Harding, The Dead and the Living, 221–­25. 20. AN, sér. O1 1043, No. 71. 21. Harding, The Dead and the Living, 235. 22. Abbé Raguenet, “Histoire de Henry de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne,” AN, sér. R2 59, fol. 168r–­169v; and Madame de Sévigné to Madame de Grignan, 19 August 1675, Marie de Rabutin-­Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, Correspondance, 3 vols., ed. Roger Duchêne (Paris: Gallimard, 1972–­78), 2:79. 23. “La cérémonie ne finit qu’à quatre heures du matin, cependant la campagne et les rues se trouvèrent aussi rempliées partout où le cour passa que si ou l’eut porté en plein jour” (AN, sér. O1 3262). 24. Mercure galant, August 1683, 147–­48. This number is certainly overstated, as the total estimated population of Paris in 1684 was between 450,000–­460,000. 25. Sévigné to Grignan, 19 August 1675, Sévigné, Correspondance, 2:61. 26. AN, sér. R2 59, fol. 168v-­r. 27. Philippe Raynaud, La Politesse des lumières: Les Lois, les mœurs, les manières (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). 28. Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-­Century Paris,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2000): 1–­35. 29. Mercure galant August, 1683, 37–­47 (quote on 46–­47). 30. Sévigné to Grignan, 6 May 1672, in Sévigné, Madame de Sévigné: Selected Letters, trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 139. 31. Mercure galant, October 1683, part 1, 17–­19, 24, 34–­46. 32. Ménestrier, Des Décorations funèbres, 51–­52. 33. A number of Bérain’s designs for state mausoleums are collected in the Recueils de décorations de théâtre (O1 3238–­3242 B2), Archives nationales de France. See Jérôme de La Gorce and Pierre Jugie, Dans l’atelier des Menus Plaisirs du roi. Spectacles, fêtes et cérémonies aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Archives nationales; Versailles: Artlys, 2010); and the online database and digitized collection, at http://www.culture.gouv.fr /documentation/archim/menus-­plaisirs.html. 34. “La manière introduit dans les dernier temps par Bérain dessinateur du cabinet

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du roi, qui depuis plusieurs années s’était mis dans le goût de faire des mausolées et les décorations qui paraissaient plus convenables a un théâtre d’opéra qu’a une cérémonie aussi sérieuse que celle-­là, joint que le mausolée qu’il faisait au milieu de l’église occupait presque toute la largeur du chœur empêchait que les compagnies qui sont commandées a ces cérémonies puissent voir l’autel ni les princes qui représentent le deuil” (AN, sér. O1 1043 No. 67, pp. 6–­7). 35. Harding, The Dead and the Living, 263; and Paulette Choné, “Pompes funèbres,” in Dictionnaire du grand siècle, ed. François Bluche, 2nd. ed. (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 1220–­21. 36. Music was a particular target in several passages from his papers. See, e.g., AN, sér. O1 1043 No. 41, where Sainctot critiques the music used for the convoy of Marie-­Thérèse and recommends that future convoys include instrumental consorts positioned around the hearse in order to lend a more “magnificent and lugubrious” air to the procession. 37. The intermèdes for the 1671 Psyché were particularly significant, influencing, among others, the pantomime ballet performed during the pompe funèbre in act 3 of Lully’s Alceste. Later examples include the pyrrhic dances for a troupe of warriors in the funeral scene (1:4–­5) of Bouvard and Bertin de La Doué’s Cassandre (1706); dances for mourning Cretians in act 2 of Mouret’s Ariane (1717); and the pantomime ballet performed beside the tomb of Metabus in act 2 of Campra’s Camille, reine des Volsques (1717). See also Bouissou, Crimes, cataclysmes et maléfices, 235–­42. 38. Royal maîtres des cérémonies were charged with ensuring that all groups privileged to participate in funeral ceremonies—­especially the cortèges and Funeral Masses—­ did so. This meant that a cross-­section of the kingdom was present at funeral ceremonies, always ordered by rank and privilège. 39. Calame, “The Tragic Choral Group,” 215–­33. 40. Calame, “The Tragic Choral Group.” 41. François-­Joseph de La Grange-­Chancel, Cassandre, tragédie représentée pour la première fois par l’Académie Royale de Musique, le mardi vingt-­deuxième jour de juin 1706 (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1706), viii. 42. Corneille, Medée, 73. 43. Corneille, Medée, 73. 44. Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie, (1733), OOR, ser. 4, vol. 1, ed. Sylvie Bouissou (Paris: Gérard Billaudot, 2002), lii–­lxxiii. 45. In this Pellegrin went beyond either Racine’s (which had no chorus) or Seneca’s tragedies. Seneca’s Phaedra gave Phaedra a long lament and confession before she commits suicide, but only Theseus comments on the justice of her actions: the chorus reminds him of his duty to bury his son and helps him reassemble the body (lines 1244–­61). 46. Quinault, Atys. 47. Quinault’s Corybantes combined aspects of the Curetes, the Corybantes, and the Galli, as they appeared in Ovid’s description of Cybele’s rites in the Fasti, but all of these groups were associated with wild music and ecstatic self-­castration in Greek and Roman versions of the myth. See Lynn E. Roller, In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 48. Quinault, Atys, 69. 49. Rebecca Harris-­Warrick points out this “emotional division” within the double chorus, in “Lully’s On-­stage Societies,” in Johnson et al, Opera and Society, 64.

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50. Moreover, the divided emotion expressed by the chorus in “Quelle douleur! / Ah! quelle rage!” is echoed and amplified in the ballet that follows. The Entrée des Nymphes is a slow triple-­meter dance in C minor with expressive chromaticism, whereas the first and second Entrée des Corybantes have smaller rhythmic values, faster tempos, and, in the second entrée, internal stylistic incongruity, which supports their attributed affect of “rage.” On the expressive interrelationship between choral and dance troupes in divertissements, see Thomas Betzwieser, “Musical Setting and Scenic Movement: Chorus and choeur dansé in Eighteenth-­Century Parisian Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 12, no. 1 (2000): 1–­28; Rebecca Harris-­Warrick, “Recovering the Lullian Divertissement,” in Dance & Music in French Baroque Theatre: Sources and Interpretations, ed. Sarah McCleave, 55–­80 (London: King’s College London, 1998); and Harris-­Warrick, “ ‘Tout danse doit exprimer, peindre . . .’: Finding the Drama in the Operatic Divertissement,” Basler Handbuch für historische Musikpraxis 23 (1999): 187–­210. 51. François Chauveau’s frontispiece for the 1676 livret, which shows the final ballet, distinguishes visually between the two groups. Three dancing Corybantes appear on the right-­facing side of the stage, with a fourth in the left background, while the wa­ ter nymphs and forest deities appear stage left. The Corybantes’ exotic costumes—­their “Phrygian” caps, as well as their effeminate knee-­length skirts and bifurcated overskirts—­ distinguish them from the pastoral deities and accentuate their contextual foreignness (F-­Pn Estampes Rés. Fol.-­QB 201 [55], p. 15, Hennin 4895). 52. See Bataille, The Accursed Share; and Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 141–­85, 280–­83. I owe this point to Martha Feldman (personal communication). 53. Quinault, Alceste, ou le triomphe d’Alcide. Tragédie. Représentée par l’Académie Royale de Musique (Paris: René Baudry, 1674), 47. 54. Quinault, Alceste, 48. 55. Dauvergne took this expressionist impulse further in the extraordinary choral lament, “Grands Dieux! Quelles douleurs soudaines,” in act 3 of his last tragédie, Poly­ xène. This chorus is discussed in Dratwicki, Antoine Dauvergne, 245–­46. 56. Michel Paul Guy de Chabanon, Sabinus, tragédie lyrique (n.p.: n.d.), 51–­53. 57. Peter R. Campbell, “The Politics of Patriotism in France (1770–­1778),” French History 24, no. 4 (2010): 550–­75. 58. [Marie François Louis Gand Leblanc Bailli du Roullet], Alceste (1776), GSW, Ab. 7, Bd. 1, ed. Hortschansky (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995). 59. Nicolas-­François Guillard, Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), GSW, Ab. 7, Bd. 1. 60. Campbell, “The Politics of Patriotism,” 566–­67. See also David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–­1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 22–­77. 61. Campbell, “The Politics of Patriotism,” 566. 62. François-­Benoît Hoffman, Phèdre, tragédie-­lyrique, en trois actes. Représentée devant leurs majestés, à Fontainebleau, le 26 octobre 1786 (Paris: P. R. C. Ballard, 1786), 64. 63. Nicolas-­François Guillard, Electre, Tragédie en trois actes, représentée pour la première fois par l’Académie Royale de Musique, le mardi 2 juillet 1782 (Paris: P. de Lormel, 1782), 35. 64. “Nous jurons de mourir pour lui” (3.4) (Guillard, Electre, 51).

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chapter three 1. [Simon-­Joseph Pellegrin], Théonoé, tragédie représentée pour la première fois par l’Académie Royale de Musique, le [] jour du mois de novembre, 1715 (Paris: Pierre Ribou, 1715), v. 2. Pierre-­Charles Roy, Sémiramis, tragédie représentée pour la première fois par l’Académie Royale de Musique le mardi 29 novembre 1718 (Paris: P. Ribou, 1718), v–­vi. 3. Cynthia Verba analyzes confessions of forbidden love in Dramatic Expression in Rameau’s Tragédie en musique: Between Tradition and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 181–­218. 4. Henry Desmarets, Renaud, ou la suite d’Armide; tragédie représentée devant le roi, par son Académie de Musique, le samedi quatorzième jour de mars 1722 . . . (Paris: Jean-­Baptiste-­Christophe Ballard, 1722), 319–­21. 5. As René Rapin remarked, “comme la fin de la tragédie est d’apprendre aux hommes à ne pas craindre trop faiblement des disgrâces communes, et à ménager leur crainte: elle fait état aussi de leur apprendre à ménager leur compassion, pour des sujets qui la méritent. Car il y a de l’injustice d’être touché des malheurs de ceux, qui méritent d’être misérables” (Rapin, Réflexions sur la poétique de l’Aristote, 171). 6. This alludes to processes of subjective recognition that have been theorized by a long lineage of Continental thinkers beginning with Rousseau and extending through the mid-­twentieth-­century existentialists to, more recently, philosophers like Foucault, Butler, and Axel Honneth. While accounts of recognition have varied widely, the Rousseauean-­Hegelian lineage shares a model of self-­formation as heteronomous and contested, with high moral, psychological, and social stakes attached to its achievement. On recognition generally, see Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-­Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Sybol S. C. Anderson, Hegel’s Theory of Recognition: From Oppression to Ethical Liberal Modernity (London: Continuum, 2009); and Hans-­Christoph Schmidt am Busch and Christopher F. Zurn, eds., The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). On recognition as a basis for music critique, see Bloechl, with Lowe, introduction to Rethinking Difference, 1–­52. 7. John Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 25 (1975): 21–­38; Jean Delumeau, L’Aveu et le pardon: Le Difficultés de la confession (XVe-­XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Fayard, 1990); Joseph Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 1580–­1730 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 211–­12, 252–­76; and Virginia Krause, Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Also relevant is Nora Martin Peterson, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France (Lanham, MD: University of Delaware Press, 2016), which appeared too late for consideration here. 8. See Michael L. Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5–­7. 9. On sympathetic spectatorship in the French context, see Johnson, Listening in Paris, 51–­95; and Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 179–­264. See also Ruth HaCohen, “The

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Music of Sympathy in the Arts of the Baroque: Or the Use of Difference to Overcome Indifference,” Poetics Today 22, no. 3 (2001): 607–­50. 10. See Sarah Nancy, “The Singing Body in the Tragédie Lyrique of Seventeenth-­and Eighteenth-­Century France: Voice, Theatre, Speech, Pleasure,” in The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance, ed. Dominic Symonds and Pamela Karantonis, 65–­78 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013). 11. See Thomas’s discussion of Diderot on theatrical “truth,” in Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 275–­76. 12. Calvin Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 58. See also John Martin, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997): 1309–­42. On sincerity in French vocal music after the Revolution, see Kath­ erine Bergeron, “Melody and Monotone: Performing Sincerity in Republican France,” in The Rhetoric of Sincerity, ed. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith, 44–­59 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 13. See Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (London: Verso, 1970/2009); and Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 14. Harris, Inventing the Spectator, 164–­97. 15. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 179–­264. 16. See Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Ann V. Murphy, “The Remainder: Between Symbolic and Material Violence,” in Philosophy and the Re­ turn of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre, ed. Nathan Eckstrand and Christopher Yates, 189–­201 (New York: Continuum, 2011), 195–­98. 17. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 47–­54. Foucault engaged confession and punishment as a theorist of history, not as a historian, per se. Better empirical accounts of both phenomena in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century France are readily found and are an essential supplement to his theorizing. Two such studies, which are critical of Foucault, are Richard Mowery Andrews, Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old Regime Paris, 1735–­ 1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Pascal Bastien, Exécution publique à Paris au XVIIIe siècle: Une Histoire des rituels juridiques (Seyssel: Champ Vallon; Presses universitaires de France, 2006), 10–­13. One of the best sympathetic reassessments by a historian is Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Criminal Punishment in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 11–­16. 18. For example, the death sentence passed against Jean Bourdil by the municipal judges of Toulouse in 1726 condemned him “to be delivered to the high executioner, who shall lead him, bareheaded and barefoot, in a penitent’s shirt, holding a burning candle, into the courtroom where on his knees he will beg pardon of God, the king, and justice for the said crime and will say that he repents it; this done, he will be put into a cart that will follow the accustomed route to the church of St. Etienne, where he will make the same apology” (Archives départementales de la Haute-­Garonne 101 B 159, dossier of Jean Bourdil, document LL [4 May 1726], “Sentence dont est l’appel de suite,” cited and trans. in Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 37).

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19. For example, an arrêt of the Parlement of Paris in 1727 sentenced Denis Riquet to make an amende honorable before the church of St. Paul, “et audit lieu, dire et déclarer à haute et intelligible voix, que témérairement, et comme mal avisé, il a commis les actions impudiques mentionnées au procès, dont il s’en repentait, en demandait pardon à Dieu, au Roi et à Justice” (Arrêt de la Cour de Parlement qui confirme une sentence du Chatelet portant condamnation contre Denis Riquet de faire amende honorable la corde au col et à genoux, ayant en ses mains une torche du poids de deux livres, flétri d’un fer chaud marqué des lettres G. A. L. et aux galères pour trois ans, pour avoir commis des actions impudiques dans l’église de S. Paul [Paris: P. Simon, 1717], 2). See also Friedland, Seeing Justice Done, 96–­97. 20. According to Friedland, condemned individuals nearly always played along, but eyewitness accounts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries report that they sometimes refused to pronounce the amende honorable or deviated from the prescribed text. In fact, if magistrates anticipated the latter, they might suspend this aspect of the sentence and order the prisoner gagged, or impose a more severe penalty (Friedland, Seeing Justice Done, 98; and Bastien, Exécution publique à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, 140–­42, 192–­96). 21. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 61–­62. 22. See especially Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–­1980, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2014); and Foucault, Wrong-­Doing, Truth-­Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 23. Foucault, Wrong-­Doing, Truth-­Telling, 14, 17. 24. Ibid., 20. 25. Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy, 24, 26. 26. On the French monologue, see Laura Naudeix, Dramaturgie de la tragédie en musique (1673–­1764) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 281–­89; and Blake Stevens, “Mono­ logue Conflicts: The Terms of Operatic Criticism in Pierre Estève and Jean-­Jacques Rous­ seau,” Journal of Musicology 29, no. 1 (2012): 1–­43. Mauro Calcagno’s discussion of “di­a­ logic subjectivity” in Monteverdi’s dramatic vocal music is also relevant here. See Calcagno, From Madrigal to Opera: Monteverdi’s Staging of the Self (Berkeley: University of Cal­i­for­ nia Press, 2012), 32–­69. 27. Desmarets, Renaud, ou la suite d’Armide, 273–­74. 28. [Pellegrin], Polidore, 53. 29. Chloë Taylor, The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’ (New York: Routledge, 2009), 167–­90. See also Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 35–­64. 30. Jacqueline Waeber’s discussion of the monologue as an “impossible dialogue” is very suggestive in this regard, especially for the second half of the eighteenth century (Waeber, En Musique dans le texte: Le Mélodrame de Rousseau à Schoenberg [Paris: Van Dieren, 2005], 48–­50).

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31. Foucault, Wrong-­Doing, Truth-­Telling, 17. 32. Fleury, Biblis, tragédie, représentée pour la première fois, par l’Académie Royale de Musique; le sixième jour de novembre 1732 (Paris: Jean-­Baptiste-­Christophe Ballard, 1732), 46 (emphasis added). 33. Quinault, Alceste, 50. 34. Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie, OOR, sér. 4, vol. 1, lxiv. 35. Ibid. 36. Charles Dill, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 12–­14; and Sara E. Melzer, “Incest and the Minotaur in Phèdre: The Monsters of France’s Assimilationist Politics,” in Classical Unities: Place, Time, Action: Actes du 32e congrès annuel de la North American Society for Seventeenth-­Century French Literature, Tulane University, 13–­15 avril 2000, ed. Erec R. Koch (Tübingen: Narr, 2002), 431–­46. 37. Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie, OOR, sér. 4, vol. 1, lxiv. 38. Foucault, Wrong-­Doing, Truth-­Telling, 14, 17. 39. Desmarets, Théagène et Cariclée, 202–­3. 40. Ibid., 203–­4. 41. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 243n2. 42. This draws on a psychoanalytic model of the “two deaths” that Jacques Lacan developed partly from the Marquis de Sade. Slavoj Žižek explicates this Lacanian model in The Sublime Object of Ideology ([London: Verso, 1989], 131–­49), and he applies it to opera in Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 43. [Pellegrin], Théonoé, 47–­48. 44. Ibid., 48. 45. These personas appeared in Louis Lacoste and Roy’s Philomèle (1705), Destouches and Roy’s Sémiramis (1718), and Lacoste and Fleury’s Biblis (1732), respectively. 46. Charles Dill discusses this chorus’s chromaticism as symbolizing the monstrosity they witnessed in Dill, “Rameau’s Imaginary Monsters: Knowledge, Theory, and Chr­o­ maticism in Hippolyte et Aricie,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55, no. 3 (2002): 456–­59. 47. Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie, OOR, sér. 4, vol. 1, lxix. 48. Ibid., lxix–­lxx. 49. Dill argues that Rameau’s text-­setting particularly invites such “recursive hearing,” in Monstrous Opera, 31–­56 passim. 50. See Daniel Heartz, From Garrick to Gluck: Essays on Opera in the Age of Enlight­ enment, ed. John A. Rice (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2004); and Stefano Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 51. On sources for the libretto, see Julie E. Cumming, “Gluck’s Iphigenia Operas: Sources and Strategies,” in Bauman and Petzoldt, Opera and the Enlightenment, 217–­40; and Joseph Müller-­Blattau, “Gluck und Racine,” in Christoph Willibald Gluck und die Opernreform, ed. Klaus Hortschansky, 83–­97 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989). 52. Roullet, Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), GSW, Ab. 7, Bd. 1.

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53. This discussion of the Eumenides’s music refers to the fuller version of Agamemnon’s monologue in Christoph Willibald Gluck, Iphigénie en Aulide, GSW, Ab. 1, Bd. 5b, ed. Marius Flothuis (Kassel: Bärenreiter Kassel, 1987–­1989), 511–­13. 54. [Roullet], Iphigénie en Aulide, GSW, Ab. 7, Bd. 1, 81 (emphasis added). 55. Johann Christian Bach, Amadis de Gaule, Tragédie lyrique in Three Acts, vol. 10 of The Collected Works of Johann Christian Bach, 1735–­1782, ed. Ernest Warburton (New York: Garland, 1988), 267–­73 (original pagination; emphasis added). See also Jean Duron, ed., Amadis de Gaule (1779) de Johann Christian Bach, Philippe Quinault et Saint-­ Alphonse: Livret, études, et commentaires (Wavre, Belgium: Mardaga, 2011), 306. 56. A notice of the first performance in the Journal de Paris singles out Rosalie Levasseur’s creation of the role of Oriane, particularly in this scene: “elle a rendu avec expression la plus vraie et l’accent le plus tendre le morceau vraiment pathétique où Amadis, étendu sur le gazon, paraît mort à ses yeux.” Later reviews were less positive, though, and the opera received only four performances (Bach, Amadis de Gaule, quote on p. ix). 57. Guillard, Œdipe à Colonne, opéra en trois actes, dédié à la reine, représenté de­ vant leurs majestés, à Versailles, le 4 janvier 1786 (Paris: P. R. C. Ballard, 1786), 44–­45. 58. Hoffman, Phèdre, 57. 59. Denis Diderot, “Remords,” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2013 Edition), ed. Robert Morrissey, 14:98, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. 60. For another perspective on freedom as a theme of French opera in this period, see Hedy Law’s in-­progress monograph, “Ordering Chaos: Music, Pantomime, and Freedom in Enlightenment France” (unpublished manuscript, MS Word, November 15, 2016). I am grateful to her for granting access to this work before publication. 61. Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton Univerity Press, 1999), 73–­103. 62. Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie, OOR, sér. 4, vol. 1, lxx. 63. Feldman’s discussion of affect in early modern opera has influenced my understanding of wonder and joy in these scenes. Feldman, “Music and the Order of the Passions,” in Representing the Passions: Histories, Bodies, Visions (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 37–­68. 64. [Louis de Cahusac], Zoroastre, opéra, représenté par l’Académie Royale de Mu­ sique, le 5. décembre 1749. Et remis au théâtre le mardi 20 janvier 1756 (Paris: Veuve Delormel et fils, 1756), 68. 65. Foucault, Wrong-­Doing, Truth-­Telling, 19–­20. 66. Feldman has found this to be a tendency of opera seria arias in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the same is true of some of the more musically elaborate airs and monologues in contemporary tragédies, although the French manner of vocal writing was always more restrained than the Italianate (Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty, 84–­85). 67. Bach, Amadis de Gaule, dir. Didier Talpain (Venice: Palazzetto Bruzane/Centre de musique romantique française, 2012), compact disc. 68. James Currie makes a comparable argument, without focusing on confession, per se, about Vitellia’s rondò, “Non più di fiori,” in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. See James R.

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Currie, Music and the Politics of Negation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 100–­38. 69. Bach, Amadis de Gaule, 274–­75. 70. [Cahusac], Zoroastre, 69. 71. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:45. 72. Taylor, The Culture of Confession, 173. 73. Ibid., 82. 74. Ibid., 104, 97. See also Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 74. 75. Mozart, Idomeneo, Neue Mozart Ausgabe, Ser. 2, Wkgr. 5, Bd. 11, ed. Daniel Heartz (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1972), 1:331–­32. 76. It is worth noting the contrast between Varesco’s rendition of this confession and that of his source libretto, Danchet’s Idoménée (1712): in the parallel scene of the latter (3.8) the chorus does not demand to know the culprit, and Idomeneo does not confess, but persists in defying Neptune (Antoine Danchet, Idoménée, tragédie représentée pour la première fois, par l’Académie Royale de Musique, le mardi douzième jour de janvier 1712 [Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1712]). 77. Gabriela Basterra, Seductions of Fate: Tragic Subjectivity, Ethics, Politics (Basingstoke,UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 97.

chapter four 1. Heartz, Mozart’s Operas, ed. Thomas Bauman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 24–­25. 2. I thus exclude discussion of collective punishment, but see Bouissou, Crimes, cataclysmes et maléfices, 109–­12. 3. David Charlton, “ ‘Envoicing’ the Orchestra: Enlightenment Metaphors in Theory and Practice,” in French Opera 1730–­1830: Meaning and Media (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000). 4. Downing A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 5. See especially Howard Chandler Robbins Landon, “Crisis Years: Sturm und Drang and the Austrian Musical Crisis,” in Haydn: Chronicle and Works, vol. 2 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 266–­393; Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1997); Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980); and Wye Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Clive McClelland addresses the problems with this label, in “Ombra and Tempesta,” in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka, 280–­81 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 6. David J. Buch, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-­Century Musical Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 173–­ 78 passim. 7. Elaine Sisman, “Haydn’s Theater Symphonies,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (1990): 292–­352; Bruce Allen Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Neal Zaslaw, Mozart’s Symphonies: Context,

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Performance Practice, Reception (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 263; and Buch, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests. 8. On the oracle scene, see Caroline Wood, “Orchestra and Spectacle in the ‘Tragédie en musique’ 1673–­1715: Oracle, ‘Sommeil’ and ‘Tempête,’ ” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 108 (1981–­1982): 25–­46; and Geoffrey Burgess, “Enlightening Harmonies: Rameau’s corps sonore and the Representation of the Divine in the tragédie en musique,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 2 (2012): 383–­462. Laura Naudeix discusses scenes featuring spirits or ghosts in “Les Ombres dans la tragédie en musique (1673–­1764),” in Dramaturgies de l’ombre: Actes du colloque organisé à Paris IV et Paris VII, 27 au 30 mars 2002, ed. Françoise Lavocat and François Lecercle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 247–­61 (the literature on tempête and earthquake symphonies is cited in note 9, below). 9. Highlights of this research include Caroline Wood, Music and Drama in the Trag­ édie en musique (New York: Garland, 1996); Jérôme de La Gorce, “Tempêtes et tremblements de terre dans l’opéra français sous le règne de Louis XIV,” in Le mouvement en musique à l’époque baroque, ed. Hervé Lacombe, 171–­88 (Metz: Éditions Serpenoise, 1996); and Bouissou, Crimes, cataclysmes et maléfices, 43–­46, 71–­94, 161–­92. See also the literature review in Michele Cabrini, “Breaking Form through Sound: Instrumental Aesthetics, Tempête, and Temporality in the French Baroque Cantata,” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 3 (2009): 327–­78. 10. On the ombra topic beyond France, see Reinhold Hammerstein, Die Stimme aus der anderen Welt: über die Darstellung des Numinosen in der Oper von Monteverdi bis Mozart (Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1998); and Buch, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests. Clive McClelland makes a tempo-­based distinction between what he calls ombra and tempesta topics, in Ombra: Supernatural Music in the Eighteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012); and McClelland, “Ombra and Tempesta,” 279–­300. 11. On violence in the tragédie en musique, see Kintzler, Le Poétique de l’opéra français, 228–­43. Burgess responds to Kintzler in “Ritual in the Tragédie en musique,” 481–­85. 12. Kintzler, Le Poétique de l’opéra français, 523. 13. For example, see the portrait of the young Louis XIV from the Almanach royal of 1645, which shows the king seated on a dais surrounded by la Clémence, la Pieté, la Justice, la Valeur, and la Génerosité (Almanach royal ou dans l’ordre de l’histoire de France et à la gloire du roi, sont représentés avec son portrait ceux des XIII autres Louis, prédécesseurs de sa majesté [n.p.: n.p., 1645], F-­Pn Collection Michel Hennin, Estampes relatives à l’Histoire de France, vol. 38, 3459). 14. Contemporary royalist commentators on the psalms interpreted Psalm 20 in this way. See, e.g., Antoine de Laval, Paraphrase des CL. psaumes de David, tant littérale que mystique. . . . 4th ed. (Paris: Mathieu Guillemot, 1626), 110–­15. 15. La Justice et la Clémence sont agenouillées devant Louis XIII assis sous une tente (n.p: Joan le Clerc, n.d.), F-­Pn Collection Michel Hennin, Estampes relatives à l’Histoire de France, vol. 25, 2177. 16. The following discussion is based on Arlette Lebigre, La Justice du roi: La Vie judicaire dans l’ancienne France (Paris: A. Michel, 1988); Jean-­Pierre Royer, Histoire de la justice en France, de la monarchie absolue à la République (Paris: Presses Universitaires

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de France, 1995), 27–­103; Guy Antonetti et al., Les Monarchies (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997), ch. 2; and Bernard Barbiche, Les Institutions de la monarchie française à l’époque moderne, XVI-­XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), 47–­58. 17. Pascal Bastien, L’Exécution publique à Paris au XVIIIe siècle: Une Histoire des rituels juridiques (Seyssel: Champ Vallon; Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 207. 18. Lebigre, La Justice du roi, 48. 19. Ibid., 37. 20. Friedland, Seeing Justice Done, 144. 21. Bastien, L’Exécution publique à Paris, 220, 224. 22. See Norman, Touched by the Graces, 45–­67; and Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 53–­91. 23. Quinault, Atys, 65. 24. Ibid., 67. 25. This punishment episode in Isis was interpreted by the court as allegorizing the Marquise de Montespan’s jealous mistreatment of Louis XIV’s latest mistress, Madame de Ludres (Norman, Touched By the Graces, 185–­90). 26. When male characters did carry out unjust punishment in Lully’s later works (e.g., Amadis, Acis et Galatée), they were not royal or sovereign, a nicety that may have shielded artists from perceptions of an impolitic reflection on the monarch in the harsher political climate of the 1680s. Nevertheless, Cowart points out that Louis XIV was not pleased with Acis, and she reads the character of Polyphemus as a satirical portrait of the king as tyrant. She also points out that works by Lully’s sons satirized the king more openly via tyrannical sovereign characters (Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 139–­50). 27. Elliot Hirsch Polinger, Pierre Charles Roy: Playwright and Satirist (1683–­1764) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 186–­87; and Girdlestone, La Tragédie en musique (1673–­1750), 218–­37. 28. Campra contributed a prologue, much of the fifth act, and several scenes to Desmarets’s unfinished score, and the completed version was first published in reduced format on the occasion of the work’s revival in 1711. See Michel Antoine, Henry Desmarest (1661–­1741) (Paris: A and J. Picard, 1965), 145–­48. 29. Joseph-­François Duché de Vancy and Danchet, Iphigénie en Tauride, tragédie, représentée pour la première fois par l’Académie Royale de Musique, le mardi sixième jour de mai 1704 (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1704), 15. 30. Desmarets composed a labeled tempête later in the opera (3.5), suggesting that the omission of tempestuous writing in this scene was deliberate. See Wood, “Orchestra and Spectacle,” 40–­42. 31. Danchet, Idoménée, 58. 32. The 1712 Ballard edition only has a reduced version of Idomeneo’s accompanied recitative, but the manuscript score at the Bibliothèque municipale de Toulouse, dating from sometime before the 1731 revival, transmits the recitative with four-­part string orchestration. Although the inner voices are inessential, their fuller voicing is probably closer to the 1712 production than the reduced scores can convey. 33. Wood points out that Campra’s main contribution to the tempestuous idiom was “his development of a wider range of string figuration” (“Orchestra and Spectacle,” 44).

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34. On orchestration, see Sadler, “Rameau and the Orchestra,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 108, no. 1 (1981): 47–­68. Leanne Eleanore Dodge has a helpful dis­ cussion of this dramatic investiture of the music in Rameau’s operas—­what she terms the movement from mimesis to diegesis to transformation—­in “The Sensible Listener on Stage: Hearing the Operas of Jean-­Philippe Rameau through Enlightenment Aesthetics” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2011), 14–­74. 35. See Thomas’s insightful reading of this scene, in Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 161–­69. 36. Kintzler regards this passage as representing torture, in Le Poétique de l’opéra français, 236. 37. Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie, OOR, sér. 4, vol. 1, lxix. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. See Burgess, “Enlightening Harmonies;” and, for a related argument about the Lullian and préramiste repertory, Geoffrey Burgess, “Envoicing the Divine: oracles in Lyric and Spoken Drama in Seventeenth-­Century France,” in (Dis)embodying Myths in Ancien Régime Opera: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Bruno Forment, 63–­96 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012). Bruno Forment traces the Italian origins of this special type of accompanied recitative in “Addressing the Divine: The ‘Numinous’ Accompagnato in Opera Seria,” in Forment, (Dis)embodying Myths in Ancien Régime Opera, 97–­116. 41. Dodge discusses such moments of diegetic hearing of the orchestra in “The Sensible Listener on Stage,” 33–­74. 42. Kintzler, Le Poétique de l’opéra français, 355–­400 passim; and Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 40–­47. 43. For example, a satirical poem from 1737, at the height of the lullyste-­ramiste controversy, imagined Rameau as a torturer in Hades, where “the harshness of his barbarous airs will add to the various torments of Ixion, Tantylus, and Sisyphus” (“Marsias allegorie,” F-­Pbvp, MS 617, ff. 265–­266v, cited in Graham Sadler, “Patrons and Pasquinades: Rameau in the 1730s,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 113, no. 2 [1988]: 334–­36 [my translation]). See also Bloechl, Native American Song, 180–­84. 44. Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 103–­68; Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language; and Charlton, “ ‘Envoicing the Orchestra.’ ” 45. See Kintzler, Jean-­Philippe Rameau: Splendeur et naufrage de l’esthétique du plaisir à l’âge classique (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1983); Kintzler, Le Poétique de l’opéra français; and Dill, Monstrous Opera, 46–­51. 46. Zaslaw, Mozart’s Symphonies, 261–­63; and Buch, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests. 47. Much of the music for the Eumenides in act 2 is borrowed and reworked from Gluck’s earlier Semiramis. See Cumming, “Gluck’s Iphigenia Operas,” 217–­40. 48. GSW, Ab. 7, Bd. 1, 120. 49. Ibid. 50. Rushton, “ ‘Iphigénie en Tauride’: The Operas of Gluck and Piccinni,” Music & Letters 53, no. 4 (1972): 426.

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51. Guillard, Œdipe à Colonne, Opéra en trois actes, dédié à la reine, représenté devant leurs majestés, à Versailles, le 4 janvier 1786 (Paris: P. R. C. Ballard, 1786), 21. 52. Guillard, Œdipe à Colonne, 45. 53. Ibid. 54. GSW, Ab. 7, Bd. 1. 55. Jean-­Joseph Leboeuf, Renaud, tragédie-­lyrique, en trois actes; représentée pour la première fois, par l’Académie ­Royale de Musique, le mardi 25 février 1783 (Paris: P. de Lormel, 1783), 46. 56. Ibid., 46–­47. 57. Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), 79. 58. Ibid., 73. This discussion is also influenced by Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 47–­61; and Basterra, Seductions of Fate. 59. Basterra, Seductions of Fate, 40, 101, 58. 60. On judicial reform efforts, see Royer, Histoire de la justice en France, 159–­206. Bastien documents the representation of punishment, in L’Exécution publique à Paris. 61. Bastien, L’Exécution publique à Paris, 29, 47–­56; and Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 62. Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs, 257–­60, citing the journal of Siméon-­ Prosper Hardy, F-­Pn Ms. Fr. 6685, 8 June 1786. 63. Annie Duprat counts over eighty different prints pertaining to Desrues in the Bibliothèque nationale’s Hennin and De Vinck collections alone, in “L’affaire Desrues ou le premier tombeau de l’Ancien Régime,” Sociétés & Représentations 18, no. 2 (2004): 123–­34. 64. GSW, Bd. 7, Ab. 1, 81. 65. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 22. 66. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1992), 498.

chapter five 1. “Katabasis,” Brill’s New Pauly, Antiquity volumes edited by Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider, Brill Online, 2014, accessed May 27, 2014, http://referenceworks .brillonline.com/entries/brill-­s-­new-­pauly/katabasis-­e610380. 2. See also Naudeix, Dramaturgie de la tragédie en musique, 172–­77; and Bouissou, Crimes, cataclysmes et maléfices, 96–­101. 3. Charlton emphasizes the historiographic importance of cyclical revivals of older repertory at the Opéra through the 1770s. While enfers did disappear from new works in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, they were not absent from the stage (see Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 56–­92). 4. Said, Orientalism, 54. 5. See Basterra, Seductions of Fate; and Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 69–­87. 6. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, book 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–­1960 (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1992), 112. Cited in Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 73.

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7. Said, Orientalism, 54–­55. 8. Stamatia Dova, Greek Heroes in and out of Hades (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012). 9. Henri Prunières, L’Opéra italien en France avant Lulli (Paris: E. Champion, 1913); Anthony, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau, 27–­61; and Buch, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests, 1–­42. 10. Powell, Music and Theatre in France, 18. Naudeix discerns an influence of the machine play’s “vertical unity” of place in tragédies en musique that “suppose or stage a tripartite cosmos” (Naudeix, Dramaturgie de la tragédie en musique, 170–­72). 11. The Italian lyrics, which Lully also probably wrote, are included in the ballet’s livret (Isaac de Benserade, Ballet de Psyché, ou de la puissance de l’amour. Dansé par Sa Majesté le 16. jour de janvier 1656 [Paris: Robert Ballard, 1656], 35–­38). Powell speculates that Lully wrote the verses for the Concert Italien, in Music and Theatre, 276. 12. Benserade, Ballet de Psyché, 38. 13. Luigi Rossi, Orfeo, ed. Clifford Bartlett (Redcroft, UK: King’s Music, 1997). 14. La Gorce, Jean-­Baptiste Lully (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 602. 15. Airs de différents auteurs, mis en tablature de luth par Gabriel Bataille. Cin­ quième livre (Paris: Pierre Ballard, 1614), 60v–­62r; and Airs de différents auteurs, mis en tablature de luth par Gabriel Bataille. Sixième livre (Paris: P. Ballard, 1615), 53v–­56v. 16. Georgie Durosoir, L’Air de cour en France (1571–­1655) (Liège: Mardaga, 1991), 321. 17. On the tombeau, see Clemens Goldberg, Stilisierung als kunstvermittelnder Prozess: die französischen Tombeau-­Stücke im 17. Jaarhundert (Laaber: Laaber-­Verlag, 1987); Philippe Vendrix, “Le Tombeau en musique en France à l’époque baroque,” Recherches sur la musique française classique 25 (1987): 105–­38; and Michael Tilmouth and David Ledbetter, “Tombeau (i),” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 23, 2015, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber /article/grove/music/28084. 18. Monsieur de Sainte-­Colombe, Concerts à deux violes égales du Sieur de Sainte-­ Colombe, ed. Paul Hooreman (Paris: Heugel, 1973). 19. See Carolyn Abbate’s thoughtful discussion of the tombeau in In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 189–­94. 20. Indeed, the most common décor is an interior court of Pluto’s palace, usually designed as a sumptuous colonnaded throne room with flames in the background. 21. The following discussion is indebted to Kintzler, Le Poétique de l’opéra français. See also Naudeix, Dramaturgie de la tragédie en musique, 172–­77. 22. Kintzler, Le Poétique de l’opéra français, 295 (emphasis added). 23. Ibid., 520. 24. Ibid., 523. 25. Ibid. 26. George Armstrong Kelly, Mortal Politics in Eighteenth-­Century France (Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo Press, 1986), 317, xix–­xx. 27. Prokhovnik, Sovereignty, 42; and Adam Thurschwell, “Ethical Exception: Capital Punishment in the Figure of Sovereignty,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 3 (2008): 579. 28. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 138.

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29. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, 64. 30. Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, ed., Biopolitics: A Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 31. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–­ 1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey, 239–­63 (New York: Picador, 2003); and Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:135–­45. 32. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 240–­41. 33. Ibid., 240. 34. Ibid., 247–­48. 35. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, 6 (original emphasis). 36. Thierry Sarmant and Mathieu Stoll, Régner et gouverner: Louis XIV et ses ministres (Paris: Perrin, 2010), 556. 37. Quinault, Proserpine, tragédie en musique. Ornée d’entrées de ballet, de machines, et de changements de théâtre. Représentée devant sa majesté à Saint-Germain-enLaye le troisième février 1680 (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1680), 74. The latter were presumably the oboists and continuo players who accompany Jupiter’s solo portions of the solo and chorus, “Que l’on enchaîne pour jamais,” as called for in the livret: “Divinités célestes qui jouent de divers instruments, et qui accompagnent Jupiter dans la Gloire.” 38. Jérôme de La Gorce, Lully, un âge d’or de l’opéra français, catalogue d’exposition (Paris: Fondation Drouot/Théâtre des Champs-­Elysées, 1991–­1992), 54–­55. 39. Quinault, Proserpine, 79. 40. Livrets printed for the February 3, 1680, court performance at Saint Germain en Laye list the singers who took these choral roles in that production. I consulted F-­Pn Rés. Yf 2372, 78–­80. 41. Lully, Proserpine, dir. Hervé Niquet with Le Concert Spirituel, Glossa, 2008. 42. Lully’s recitatives for male rulers addressing their subjects, for example, have a markedly similar triadic style, regardless of their location. Compare, for example, the first couplet of the recitative for Jupiter in the final divertissement of Proserpine (“Ceres, que de vos pleurs,” V.6) with that for the Athenian king Aegeus in Thésée (“Oublions le passé,” V.4) and for Pluto in Proserpine (“Vous qui reconnaissez ma suprême puissance,” V.1). 43. See Bérain’s costume designs for Theseus versus Pluto, in La Gorce, Jean Berain, dessinateur du Roi Soleil (Paris: Editions Herscher, 1986), 73, 78. 44. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King, 162–­69 passim. 45. Naudé, Considérations politiques sur les Coups d’État, 109 (original emphasis). 46. Ketterer, Ancient Rome in Early Opera, 13. 47. Kintzler, “Representations of le peuple,” 79–­80 (original emphasis). 48. Basterra, Seductions of Fate, 35. Bouissou surveys the deaths of criminal characters in Crimes, cataclysmes et maléfices, 146–­59. 49. See Pascal Bastien, Une Histoire de la peine de mort: Bourreaux et supplices: Paris, Londres, 1500–­1800 (Paris: Seuil, 2012); and Friedland, Seeing Justice Done, 71–­88. Apostolidès also notes the symbolic relationship of executioner and king, in Le Prince sacrifié, 48–­49. 50. On the Valois, see Bastien, L’Exécution publique, 214–­16.

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51. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Volume V–­Part III, Second Section & Supplement, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1912; New York: Cosimo, 2007), Supplement, Qu. 89, Art. 3–­4, pp. 2929–­30. 52. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 164. See also Agamben’s discussion of Aquinas, 163–­64. 53. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 146–­48, 203–­6.

chapter six 1. Homer, Iliad, 9.158–­59. 2. Seneca, Hercules furens, 160. 3. De Jaucourt, “Pluton,” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2013 Edition), ed. Robert Morrissey, 12:804, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. 4. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 53–­99. 5. He sees this divergence as a primary way in which “opera simultaneously elaborated, complicated, and problematized the representation of the king” (Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 98). Norman also stresses the divergence between prologue and tragédie, in Touched By the Graces, 34. 6. McGeary discusses the mirror-­of-­princes tradition in the context of Handel’s operas, in The Politics of Opera in Handel’s Britain, 213, 237–­39. 7. Goulet, “Louis XIV et l’esthétique galante: la formation d’un gout délicat,” in Le Prince et la musique: Les Passions musicales de Louis XIV, ed. Jean Duron, 89–­104 (Éditions Mardaga, 2009). See also the discussion of courtly music and civilité prior to the Fronde, in Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms. 8. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 146–­48. 9. On the emergence of French artistic publicity in the later seventeenth century, see Joan DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin-­de-­Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 31–­77. In the context of opera, see Jérôme de La Gorce, “L’Opéra et son public au temps de Louis XIV,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-­de-­France (1981): 27–­46; Weber, “La Musique Ancienne”; William Weber, “L’Institution et son public: L’Opéra à Paris et à Londres au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales ESC 48:1519–­39; Johnson, Listening in Paris; and Cowart, “Audiences,” in The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen Greenwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 667–­68, 676–­81. Victoria Johnson stresses the long-­term impact of the Opéra’s hybrid organization as a royal academy and a public theater, which oriented it partly toward the Parisian artistic public, in Backstage at the Revolution, 83–­118. 10. This argument is indebted especially to Weber, “La Musique ancienne,” 62–­88. Solveig Serre also follows Weber in linking the demise of “an aesthetic of incarnation” to the depersonalization of the French state, in “L’Opera entre incarnation et représentation: Quelques éléments d’un système politique,” Nouvelle revue d’esthétique 12, no. 2 (2013): 11–­21. 11. The loosely Tocquevillian view of the eighteenth-­century French state as an administrative monarchy stems especially from François Furet, Interpreting the French

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Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Michel Antoine, Le Dur métier de roi: Études sur la culture politique de la France d’Ancien Ré­ gime (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986); and Antoine, “La Monarchie absolue,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 1, The Po­ litical Culture of the Old Regime, ed. Keith M. Baker, 3–­24 (Oxford and New York: Pe­r­ gamon Press, 1987). 12. Paul Kahn, Political Theology, 22. 13. On sacrifice in opera before 1800, see Martha Feldman and Valerio Valeri, “Opera e sacrificio: passato e futuro mitologico nel teatro pre-­rivoluzionario,” in Valeri, Uno spazio tra sé e sé: l’antropologia come ricerca del soggetto, ed. Martha Feldman and Janet Hoskins, trans. Bianca Lazzari, 183–­228 (Rome: Donzelli, 1999). 14. Carl Schmitt argued that the public friend-­enemy distinction is the core criterion of politics in The Concept of the Political, expanded ed., trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 25–­27. 15. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, foreword by Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5–­15. My discussion of the exception in this chapter is also influenced by Walter Benjamin’s de facto dialogue with Schmitt, as well as Agamben, Homo Sacer; Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Paul Kahn, Political Theology. 16. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 2003), 74. 17. Ibid., 65–­66. 18. “Walter Benjamin’s Hypothetical French ‘Trauerspiel,’ ” ed. Hall Bjornstad and Katherine Ibbett, special issue, Yale French Studies 124 (2013). 19. Scipion de Gramont, Relation du grand ballet du roi, dansé en la salle du Louvre le 12 février 1619, sur l’aventure de Tancrède en la Forêt enchantée (Paris: Jean Sara, 1619); and Margaret M. McGowen, L’Art du ballet de cour en France, 1591–­1643 (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1963). On blackface in the ballet de cour, see Bloechl, “Race, Empire, and Early Music,” in Rethinking Difference, 85–­91. 20. On the political context of the Ballet de la prosperité des armes de France, see Olivia Bloechl, “War, Peace, and the Ballet in Le Soir,” Early Music 38, no. 1 (February 2010): 91–­100. 21. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 39–­40. 22. [Benserade], Ballet de Psyché, 38–­39. 23. Benserade’s erotic entendre is a poetic instance of the “marital maxim” (“The king is the husband and political spouse of the kingdom”) discussed by Sarah Hanley in “The Monarchic State: Marital Governance and Male Right,” in Politics, Ideology, and the Law in Early Modern Europe, ed. Adrianna E. Bakos, 107–­26 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1994), 110. 24. Jean-­Noël Laurenti makes a similar observation about Quinault’s characterizations of Pluto in Valeurs morales et réligieuses sur la scène de l’Académie Royale de Musique (1669–­1737) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2002), 236–­38, although he comes to different conclusions. 25. The most common are the Neoplatonic ideal of the ruler as a lover and the Stoic

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ideal of self-­government and moderation of the passions (Ketterer, Ancient Rome in Early Opera, 13). 26. La Gorce, Jean Bérain, 80; and La Gorce, Les Féeries d’opéra, 117. 27. A ballet entitled Orphée was also performed as a series of danced intermèdes with récits between the acts of the tragedy Alexander Magnus at the Jesuits’ Collège Louis-­le-­Grand. “M. Des Noyers cadet” performed the danced role of Pluto, and a “Gerard Michel, de Paris” is listed as performing the vocal récits. Orphée, ballet mêlé de récits pour servir d’intermèdes à la tragédie d’Alexandre qui sera représentée au Collège de Louis le Grand le deuxième jour d’août à une heure après-­midi (Paris: Gabriel Martin, 1690). 28. On Orphée, see also Laurenti, Valeurs morales et réligieuses, 236–­37. 29. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 146–­48, 202–­6. Anthony characterizes Pluto in this work as a “bon diable,” in his introduction to André Campra, Le Carnaval de Venise, French Opera in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 17, ed. Barry S. Brook (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1989). 30. Overviews of the vibrant Parisian culture of opera parody include Grout’s classic pair of articles, “Seventeenth-­Century Parodies of French Opera,” parts 1–­2, Musical Quarterly 27, no. 2, 4 (1941): 211–­19, 514–­26; and, more recently and ambitiously, Susan Harvey, “Opera Parody in 18th-­Century France: Genesis, Genre and Critical Function,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2002; Pauline Beaucé, Parodies d’opéra au siècle des Lumières. Évolution d’un genre comique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013); and Judith le Blanc, Avatars d’opéras. Parodies et circulation des airs chantés sur les scènes parisiennes (1672–­1745) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014). 31. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 204. 32. George Bataille, “Attraction and Repulsion I: Tropisms, Sexuality, Laughter and Tears,” in The College of Sociology (1937–­39), ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing, 103–­12 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 33. Fader, “The ‘Cabale du Dauphin’”; Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure; and Fader, “Le Régent en Bacchus? French Noble Self-­Construction, Operatic Allegory, and Philippe d’Orléan’s Penthée (1703),” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Milwaukee,WI, November 2014. 34. Mladen Dolar, “Introduction: The Subject Supposed to Enjoy,” in Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East (London: Verso, 1998), x. 35. For a summary of Orpheus settings in France, see Powell’s introduction to M.-­A. Charpentier, La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers, H. 488, ed. Fannie Vernaz (Marandeuil, France: Éditions des Abbesses, 2004), xxi–­xxvi. See also Xavier Bisaro, “Orfeo de Mantoue à Paris: Itinéraires de l’opéra de cour au XVIIe siècle,” Musurgia 11, no. 3: Musique et pouvoir (2004): 39–­57. 36. See Tim Carter, “ ‘Possente Spirto’: On Taming the Powers of Music,” Early Music 21 (1993): 517–­22; Eric T. Chafe, Monteverdi’s Tonal Language (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992); and Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 37. The Orpheus myth included two such moments of exceptional decision making in the underworld: first, at the gates of Hades and, second, in the palace of Pluto and

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Proserpina. French librettists preferred the latter episode, probably because its palatial setting and majestic personas offered the greatest scope for theatrical splendor. 38. Librettists typically followed Ovid on this point. Charles Martin’s translation of the relevant passage reads, “Then, for the first time ever, overcome / by the effects of song, the Furies wept, / nor could Persephone reject his prayer, / nor he who rules the underworld deny him; / Eurydice was called up from her place / among the newly dead, and awkwardly / came forward, limping from her recent wound” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, ll.60–­66). 39. Powell also notes this correspondence, in M.-­A. Charpentier, La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers. 40. The French and English texts are taken from M.-­A. Charpentier, La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers, H. 488, xxxvii (translation by Stewart Spencer). I have modernized the French spelling and punctuation from the original manuscript version transcribed in this edition. 41. M.-­A. Charpentier, La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers, H. 488, xxxvii. 42. Ibid., xxxviii. 43. Cessac, Marc-­Antoine Charpentier, 145. The air de basse texture, in which the bass voice doubles the lowest instrumental part, is in keeping with Lullian convention, which assigned it to particularly august or aged male deities and rulers. 44. M.-­A. Charpentier, La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers, H. 488, xxxvii–­xxxviii. 45. Lefranc de Pompignan, Le Triomphe de l’harmonie, 17–­18. 46. Paul Kahn, Law and Love, xi–­xix. 47. Stephan Leopold discusses a political theology of love in the French literary tradition, in Liebe im Ancien Regime: Eros und Polis von Corneille bis Sade (Paderborn: Fink, 2014). 48. See Ruth Katz, The Powers of Music: Aesthetic Theory and the Invention of Opera, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994); Tomlinson, “Pastoral and Musical Magic in the Birth of Opera,” in Bauman and Petzoldt, Opera and the Enlightenment, 7–­20; and Bonnie Gordon, “Orfeo’s Machines,” Opera Quarterly 24, no. 3–­4 (2008): 200–­22. On the power of music in Gluck’s and Calzabigi’s Orfeo ed Euridice, see Catherine Kintzler, “Orphée, un mythe moderne,” Cahiers de l’Atelier lyrique de Tourcoing 15 (1994): 25–­39. 49. Feldman discusses the power of singers in opera seria producions as quasi-­ sovereign in Opera and Sovereignty, 281–­82. 50. Bossuet, Politics, 78. 51. Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 122–­23. 52. Lefranc de Pompignan, Le Triomphe de l’harmonie, 17. 53. Ketterer discusses the classical sources for Baroque opera plots involving Theseus, in “Helpings from the Great Banquets of Epic: Handel’s Teseo and Arianna in Creta,” in (Dis)Embodying Myths in Ancien Régime Opera, 33–­62. 54. Masson, L’Opéra de Rameau, 522; Lois Rosow, “Structure and Expression in the Scènes of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie,” Cambridge Opera Journal 10, no. 3 (1998): 267; and Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 169.

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55. Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie, OOR sér. 4, vol. 1, lxi. 56. Ibid. 57. Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 44. 58. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 165. 59. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, 44. 60. On Le Destin in Pellegrin’s libretto, see Dill, “Rameau’s Imaginary Monsters,” 451–­52; Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 165; and Burgess, “Enlightening Harmonies, 394, 398. 61. Burgess, “Enlightening Harmonies,” 394. 62. In their first trio, the Fates sing, “Du Destin le vouloir suprême / A mis entre nos mains la trame de tes jours” (The sovereign will of Destiny / Put the thread of your life in our hands). 63. As Bossuet writes, commenting on Cain, “The wicked who have nothing to fear from men are all the more unfortunate, since like Cain they are saved for divine vengeance. ‘The Lord set a mark on Cain, that whosoever found him should not kill him.’ It was not that he pardoned this parricide; but it required a divine hand to punish him as he merited. He treated kings with the same strictness. . . . We have seen that the primacy of their condition draws on them a primacy of punishment. ‘For to him that is little, mercy is granted: but the mighty shall be mightily tormented. . . . But a greater punishment is ready for the mighty.’ ” He concludes, “These chastisements make one tremble” (Bossuet, Politics, 100–­1). 64. OOR sér. 4, vol. 1. 65. The enharmonic version of the trio was not performed at the Opéra during the first production of 1733 but was included with the first print edition of the score. See Sadler, “Rameau, Pellegrin, and the Opéra,” The Musical Times 124 (1983): 533–­37. 66. Alexander Rehding, “Rousseau, Rameau, and Enharmonic Furies in the French Enlightenment,” Journal of Music Theory 49, no. 1 (2005): 151–­52. On Rameau’s enharmonicism, see also Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment, 200–­7; Cynthia Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue, 1750–­1764 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 8–­30; and Dill, “Rameau’s Imaginary Monsters,” 464–­70. 67. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 166. 68. This suggests that Rameau’s enharmonic practice could work as a tonal technology of abjection, as theorized in Julie Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 69. OOR sér. 4, vol. 1. 70. See Racine, Phèdre, 2.1. On Pellegrin’s treatment, see Dill, “Pellegrin, Opera, and Tragedy,” 253–­54; and Burgess, “ ‘Le Théâtre ne change qu’à la troisième scène’: The Hand of the Author and Unity of Place in Act V of Hippolyte et Aricie,” Cambridge Opera Journal 10, no. 3 (1998): 285. 71. Naudeix, “Proserpine au croisement des mondes”; and Norman, “Le Rôle de la femme dans Proserpine,” 38–­50, 51–­62. 72. The Princess Palatine Elisabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans, alluded to this homoerotic characterization of Theseus in a gossipy letter of 1701, writing, “What they say about king William [III] is only too true, but all heroes were also that way, especially

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Hercules, Theseus, Alexander, Caesar. All of them were that way and had their favorites.” She adds wittily, “You’ll find me knowledgeable on this subject.” As indeed she was: everyone knew that her recently deceased husband, Philippe, duc d’Orléans, had overwhelmingly preferred men (Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchess d’Orléans, to Countess Amalie Elisabeth, 13 December 1701, in Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant Ragan, eds., Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 126). 73. OOR, sér. 4, vol. 1, 146–­47. 74. Dill remarks the surplus of monstrous figures in Hippolyte, and this is one of those moments. See Dill, “Rameau’s Imaginary Monsters,” 451–­59. 75. Burgess, “‘Le Théâtre ne change qu’à la troisième scène,’” 286. 76. OOR, sér. 4, vol. 1. 77. On reform aesthetics, see Aubrey S. Garlington, Jr., “Le Merveilleux and Operatic Reform in 18th-­Century French Opera,” Musical Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1963): 484–­97; Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna; Heartz, “From Garrick to Gluck,” 257–­70; and Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 209–­32. 78. For a discussion of these influences in Orfeo, see Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna, 358–­68. Charlton also argues that Calzabigi was influenced by midcentury revivals of Quinault and Lully’s Alceste, in Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 26, 26n109. 79. See Weber, “La Musique ancienne,” 62–­88; Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 578–­607; and Julien Swann and Joël Félix, eds., The Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy: From the Old Regime to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Quentin Skinner is one of the influential proponents of the depersonalization thesis, in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2:349–­58; and Skinner, “The State,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, 90–­131 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 80. A critical review of the opera in the Journal des Beaux-­Arts compared this confrontation unfavorably to Psyche’s confrontation with a troupe of demons in Mondonville and Voisenon’s L’Amour et Psyché, act 3 of the ballet-­héroïque Les Fêtes de Paphos (1758). Journal des beaux-­arts et des sciences, vol. 3 (September 1774), 530. Cited in GSW, Ab. 1, Bd. 6, xii–­xiv. 81. GSW Ab. 1, bd. 6, 38–­40. 82. For analyses of this famous passage, see La Laurencie, Orphée de Gluck, 267–­77; Jacques-­Gabriel Prod’homme, Christoph-­Willibald Gluck (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 110–­17; Heartz, Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 200–­2; and Rehding, “Rousseau, Rameau, and Enharmonic Furies.” 83. GSW Ab. 1, bd. 6, 85–­87. 84. Rousseau, Extract from a Response by the Underlaborer to His Frontman Concerning a Piece from Gluck’s “Orfeo,” in Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. and ed. John T. Scott (Hanover, NH: University Press of New En­ gland for Dartmouth College, 1998), 506. Rousseau referred to the Italian version of the opera, although he may have attended a performance of the French version in 1774. 85. Heartz, Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 201.

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86. Richard Will discusses supernaturally tinged “confrontation scenes” in instrumental music of the later eighteenth century, in “When God Met the Sinner, and Other Dramatic Confrontations in Eighteenth-­Century Instrumental Music,” Music & Letters 78, no. 2 (1997): 175–­209. 87. In his 1788 “Lettre sur le Chevalier Gluck,” the editor Olivier de Corancez reported a comment that he attributed to the composer, regarding the nature of the démons in Alceste: “Demons . . . have a well-­known and well-­defined conventional character; an excess of rage and fury should dominate their portrayal; but the infernal deities are not devils; we think of them as the ministers of fate [les ministres du destin]. . . . They are indifferent to Alcestis and Admetus; the only necessity is that their destiny is fulfilled” (Journal de Paris, 24 August 1788, 1021–­3, translation adapted from Patricia Howard, Gluck: An Eighteenth-­Century Portrait in Letters and Documents [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], 248). 88. According to Heartz, Calzabigi began writing the libretto for the Viennese Alceste not long after Emperor Francis died in 1765, which sent his widow Maria Theresa into deep mourning. The librettist dedicated Alceste to the empress and drew an explicit, flattering comparison between her and Alcestis, suggesting to Heartz that his adaptation of Euripides was influenced by these recent sad events. See Heartz, Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 217–­18. It seems likely that the libretto’s elegiac stance toward kingship has roots in the sorrow and upheaval following Francis’s death, although in France the theme of a king’s death (or threatened demise) would have resonated more immediately with the passing of Louis XV. 89. Du Roullet added the character of Hercules, following both Quinault and Euripides, in June after the near-­failure of the initial run of Alceste. On the series of changes to act 3, see Rudolf Gerber’s foreword to Gluck, Alceste (1776), GSW, Ab. 1, Bd. 7, ed. Rud­ olf Gerber (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1957), v–­xi; and Howard, Gluck: An Eighteenth-­Century Portrait, 144–­59. 90. GSW, Ab. 1, Bd. 7, 286. 91. Grant Gilmore, The Ages of American Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 110–­11, partially cited in Paul Kahn, Political Theology, 38. 92. Rousseau, The Social Contract, and Other Later Political Writings, 66. 93. Le Moyne, L’Art de régner, 405. 94. Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty. 95. On love as a political virtue, see Paul Kahn, Law and Love; and Paul Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 96. Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion, 3.

conclusion 1. Bell, The Cult of the Nation, 54. 2. “Structural trauma” refers to Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 43–­85. 3. Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 3. 4. On the latter, see Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 88–­105.

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5. See Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, eds., The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-­Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 6. The phrase is Dolar’s, in his introduction to Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court, xi. See also Thomas Kaiser, “The Evil Empire? The Debate on Turkish Despotism in Eighteenth-­Century French Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (2000): 6–­34; and Ivan Kalmar, Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power (New York: Routledge, 2012). 7. Kaiser, “The Evil Empire?” 8. 8. Paul Kahn, Political Theology, 36. 9. Bossuet, Politics, 101.

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index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. absolutism, 31, 173, 200, 202; and divine right, 17 (see also divine right theory); and opera, 2, 7–­9, 219n34 absolutist political thought (absolutist theory), 25, 158–­59, 166, 170–­71 Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles, 6 Académie Royale de Musique, ix, 6, 14. See also Opéra Agamben, Giorgio, xi, 23–­24, 50–­51, 172, 230n94; archaeology of glory, 23; on inoperativity, 50, 229n93 Ahrendt, Rebekah, 219n40 airs de cour, 160 almanachs, 36–­37, 38 Althusser, Louis, 8 ambivalence: formal, of the tragédie en musique, 171–­73, 180, 203; toward authority, in dramatized encounters, 158 amende honorable, 89, 237n19, 237n20 anabasis, 156, 161 angelology, and political thought, 24, 26, 34, 36, 172 angels, 24–­26, 34, 41, 49; attending vs. administering types, 25, 33–­36; contemplation, 25, 34, 36­–­37, 49; fallen, 26, 172; hierarchy as model for the French kingdom, 33–­36 Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, 223n1 Anthony, James R., 219n34, 249n29 Apollo, 12–­15; and the Python, 26–­27 Apostolidès, Jean-­Marie, 219n38

Aquinas, Thomas, 25, 34, 172 Aristotle, 50, 53–­54, 230n94, 230n1 Aunillon, Pierre-­Charles-­Fabiot (Abbé), 31, 33 authenticity, 88 authority, 2, 9–­10, 15, 20–­21, 89, 92, 114, 121–­ 22; charismatic, 25–­26, 185, 195; defama­ tion of, in opera, 11–­12; judicial, 126–­27, 133, 150; moral, 105–­6, 113, 115; sublime, 150–­51 Bach, Johann Christian, Amadis de Gaule, 110–­13, 112–­13, 118–­19 Ballard family, printer of librettos and scores, 6 ballet, 3, 41, 141, 159, 181, 234n50, 249n27. See also pantomime ballet ballet de cour, 11, 41, 66, 159–­60, 177–­78 Ballet de Psyché, 159, 160, 177 Banducci, Antonia, 46 Basterra, Gabriela, 150 Bastien, Pascal, 128 Bataille, Gabriel, 160 Bataille, Georges, xii, 180 Beaumarchais, Pierre-­Augustin, Tarare, 48, 229n86 beauty, 182–­83, 185, 203 Bell, David, 200 Benjamin, Walter, 176, 248n15 Benserade, Isaac de, 41, 178, 202, 248n23 Bérain, Jean, 65, 167, 168, 178–­80, 192, 193 Bernard, Pierre-­Joseph, Castor et Pollux, 55 Bertin de La Doué, Toussaint, Cassandre, 67–­ 68, 69–­70, 233n37

279

280

index

Betzwieser, Thomas, 46 bienséance (propriety), 27, 179 biopolitics, 15–­16, 165 blackface performance, 177 Bodin, Jean, 51, 128, 165, 230n97 Bonaventure, 25, 34 Bossuet, Jacques-­Bénigne, 17, 23–­24, 33, 165, 185, 202, 221n58, 224n11, 251n63 Bourbon dynasty, ix, 1, 8, 17, 22, 59–­60, 126, 173, 203 Bourdil, Jean, death sentence, 236n18 Bouvard, François, Cassandre, 67–­68, 69–­70, 233n37 Burgess, Geoffrey, 189, 191, 218n24 Butler, Judith, xi, 54, 96, 202 Cain, 189, 251n63 Calame, Claude, 41, 227n66 Calzabigi, Ranieri de’, 192, 194–­95, 253n88; Orfeo ed Euridice, 156 Cambert, Robert, 41 Campbell, Peter, 81 Campra, André: Camille, reine des Volsques, 233n37; Idoménée, 131, 132–­33, 133, 242n32, 242n33; Iphigénie en Tauride, 130, 242n28; Le Carnaval de Venise, 179–­80 catastrophes, in opera, 15–­16, 19, 67 Catholic theology and politics, 3, 23–­26, 31, 33–­41, 227n62 Cavalli, Francesco, Ercole amante, 160, 178 ceremonial, religious and political, 11, 24, 37–­41, 59–­66 chaconne, 45, 78 Chapoton, François, La Déscente d’Orphée aux enfers, 159, 179–­80, 182–­84 Charlton, David, 124, 201, 218n27, 244n3 Charpentier, Marc-­Antoine: La Déscente d’Orphée aux enfers, 179, 182–­85; Me­ dée, 11, 16, 70–­71, 72–­73, 74–­75; Orphée descendant aux enfers, 161; works for the funeral of Marie-­Thérèse, 60 Chauveau, François, 31–­32, 32, 234n51 choral agency, 25, 49–­52, 83 chorus: agency, 50; as dramatic interlocutor, 71–­77; as a fictive political community, 49–­51, 53–­56, 66, 76, 82, 182; hierarchical organization, 41–­42, 77–­78, 167–­68; lamenting, 53–­54, 66, 68, 71, 73, 77–­78, 81–­82; melancholy of, 76, 83–­84; as a patriotic public, 82, 229n83; performative

voice, 13, 27, 41, 42, 51–­52, 55, 67; their inactivity, 49–­50 (see also inoperativity) chromaticism, 56, 78, 81, 124, 139, 142, 234n50, 238n46 cieux (fictive celestial realm), 155, 164, 167. See also court, heavenly or celestial; gloire (cloud machine) citizenship: angelic model of, 23, 26, 33 (see also publicity: doxological); in Cadmus et Hermione, 26–­33; choral, in Belléro­ phon, 13–­14 clemency, 126–­27, 127, 171, 199, 203 Colbert, Jean-­Baptiste, 6, 14 Coltellini, Marco, Antigona, 117 confessing characters, 92, 101, 105, 107, 114–­ 15, 117 confession: Catholic auricular, 87; as dialogical, 89, 92–­95; as a mode of government, 18, 91–­92, 119, 120–­21, 154–­55; in opera, 18–­19, 85–­87, 96, 115, 155, 191 confessional monologue, 86, 92, 96–­100, 106–­ 8, 110–­15, 118, 237n30 conscience, 114–­15, 126, 155 contemplative choruses, 23–­26, 41–­49 contemplative life, 51 Corancez, Olivier de, 253n87 Corneille, Thomas, 3; Bellérophon, 12; Chimène, ou le Cid, 48; Medée, 11–­12, 16, 128 costuming, vii, xii, 1, 5, 37, 159, 170, 179 coup d’état, 16, 29, 171 Couperin, François, Apothéose, 161 court, heavenly or celestial, 24, 33, 36 Couvreur, Manuel, 8 Cowart, Georgia, 8, 43, 173, 175, 178–­80, 242n26 criminality, as a theme in opera, 114, 119, 125, 151–­54 Critchley, Simon, 155 Currie, James, 239n68 Cyr, Mary, 46 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 52 dance corps (troupes), 4, 11, 16, 41, 50, 53, 66, 77–­78 Danchet, Antoine: Idoménée, 121, 240n76; Iphigénie en Tauride, 130–­31 Dauvergne, Antoine: Canente, 46; Énee et La­ vinie, 46; Hercule mourant, 81, 234n55; Polyxène, 46 Dean, Mitchell, 4

index death: and the dead, 156–­58; politicized, 164–­ 67, 171; the two deaths (psychoanalytic model), 96, 238n42 décor, xii, 5, 18, 64–­66, 159–­60, 180, 245n20. See also stage settings decorum, xi, 10, 64, 73, 78 démons, 159, 172, 203, 253n87 Desmarets, Henry: Iphigénie en Tauride, 130, 242n28, 242n30; Renaud, ou La suite d’Armide, 86, 92; Théagène et Cariclée, 9, 95 despotism, 121, 170, 173, 175, 179–­80, 199, 201–­2 Desrues, Antoine-­François, 152, 153, 244n63 Destouches, André Cardinal, Sémiramis, 238n45 deus ex machina, 12, 20, 30, 125–­26, 195 d’Helfer, Charles, 232n15 Diderot, Denis, 114 Dill, Charles, 230n100, 238n46, 238n49, 252n74 divertissements, 1, 4, 10, 13, 15, 22, 30, 44–­ 49, 78, 168–­70, 184 divine justice (judgment) or injustice, 71, 127, 172–­73, 199 divine love, 31 divine punishment, 123, 127, 251n63 divine right theory, 24, 31, 165, 200 Dodge, Leanne Eleanore, 243n34 Doxology, Lesser, 39–­41, 227n62 dramaturgy, 8, 118, 150; orchestral, 133 (see also orchestra: dramatic and expressive capacity) Du Caurroy, Eustache, Missa Pro defunctis, 232n15 Duché de Vancy, Joseph-­François: Iphigénie en Tauride, 130; Théagène et Cariclée, 95 Du Mont, Henri, Magnificat, 39–­41, 39–­40 Duprat, Annie, 244n63 Du Roullet, Marie François Louis Gand La­ blanc Bailli, Alceste, 106, 195, 253n89 Durval, Jean Gilbert, Les Travaux d’Ulysse, 159 Elias, Norbert, 220n52 Elisabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orléans, 251n72 emergency rule, xi, 176–­78, 199, 203 enfers. See underworld enharmonicism, 121, 142, 189, 194, 251n68 enjoyment: of confession, 120–­21; as inoperativity, 26, 51–­52; as a meta-­theme of

281

tragédie en musique choruses, 25–­26, 31–­33, 43, 49, 51–­52, 120; in spectator experience, 1, 17, 200 Eumenides, 107–­8, 131, 239n53. See also Fates (the Furies) Euripides, Alcestis, 195, 253n88, 253n89 Fader, Don, 8, 180 fantasy, x, xii, 5, 17, 51, 52, 157–­58, 171, 176, 180, 185, 201–­3 Fates (the Furies), 158, 187–­91, 195, 251n62. See also Eumenides Feldman, Martha, 230n101, 239n63, 239n66 fêtes, 1, 17, 25, 46–­47, 49, 51–­52 Fleury, Biblis, 93, 238n45 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 12, 52 Foucault, Michel, xi, 2–­3, 10, 15, 18, 94, 117, 164–­66, 236n17; on confession, 88–­92, 120; conflicts of conduct, 10; on freedom, xi, 91–­92; governmentality, xi, 2, 15, 92, 120; Louvain lectures (1981), 94–­95; on power, 2; on sovereignty, 3, 165–­66; veridiction, xi, 91, 117–­18, 120 Francoeur, François, 231n10 Frazer, Michael, 87 freedom, x–­xi, xiii, 91, 93, 114, 165, 200, 201 Friedland, Paul, 128, 237n20 Fronde, 159, 175, 178 funeral ceremonial, 59. See also state funerals Gaye, Jean, 179 Geertz, Clifford, 185 Gilles, Jean, Messe des morts (Requiem Mass), 58, 231n10, 232n15 Gilmore, Grant, 198 gloire (cloud machine), 7, 12, 48, 105, 167, 197, 228n68 glorification choruses, 22–­23, 30, 41–­42, 45, 49, 52 glory: and divinity, 35–­41, 51; and political power, 23–­24, 33, 37, 43; as a theme of the tragédie en musique, 10–­15, 23–­27, 30–­31, 44–­49, 102, 155, 185 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 88, 105, 107, 110, 123, 142, 157; Alceste, 81–­83, 176, 192, 195–­98, 196–­97, 253n87; Don Juan, 141; Iphigénie en Aulide, 47–­48, 106–­8, 108, 109–­10, 154; Iphigénie en Tauride, 81–­ 83, 142–­44, 143, 145, 148; orchestral writ­ ing, 82, 107–­8, 141–­44, 148, 150, 154; Or­ feo ed Euridice, 141, 156; Orphée et

282

index

Gluck (cont.) Euridice, 81, 176, 192, 194–­95; Semira­ mis, 141, 243n47 Golden Age, legend of, 16–­17 Gossec, François-­Joseph, Sabinus, 81 government: absolutist, 8–­9, 159, 162, 165; as a function of the tragédie en musique, xi, 11, 23–­24, 50–­52, 78, 86–­88, 121; than­ atic, 157, 167, 171–­72, 180, 192; as a theme of the tragédie en musique, x–­xi, 2–­3, 14–­22, 51, 86–­88, 92–­95, 154–­55, 175, 203 governmentality, xi, 2, 51, 66, 121 grace, 185, 194, 198–­99 Gregory the Great, 34 Grenet, François Lupien: Le Triomphe de l’harmonie, 184; Orphée, 185, 186 Grétry, André-­Ernest-­Modeste, Andromaque, 144 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, Baron von, 229n83 Guillard, Nicolas-­François: Chimène, ou le Cid, 48; Iphigénie en Tauride, 148; Les Horaces, 48 guilt, as a theme in opera, 85–­87, 122, 151, 154–­55, 191 Habermas, Jürgen, 217n20 Hades: aligned with tyranny, despotism, and barbarity, 170; political imagination of, 175–­76 Harding, Vanessa, 61 harmonic instability, 77–­78, 123, 131. See also tonal instability Haydn, Joseph, 124 Heartz, Daniel, 123, 194, 253n88 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 91 Hesiod, Theogony, 159 historical phenomenology, x–­xi, 200 historiography, ix–­x, xii–­xiii, 7–­9, 49 Hobbes, Thomas, 165 Hoffman, François-­Benoît, Phèdre, 83 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 198 Homer: Iliad, 174; Odyssey, 159 horror, theatrical, 65, 174, 190, 192 Hoxby, Blair, 54 iconography, royal, 27, 36, 126, 170, 241n13 ideology, xii, 7–­8, 22, 26, 52, 82, 162, 175, 200 imaginary, definition of, 3, 216n12

imaginary, political, ix–­xii, 3–­4, 10, 20–­21, 36, 49, 157, 175, 192 imaginative geography, 157, 218n32 incest, as theme in the tragédie en musique, 85, 93–­94, 100, 190–­91 inoperativity, 17, 26, 50, 52, 118, 230n101 instrumental music: descriptive, 124, 137–­39; poetics and ontology, 52, 124 introspection, in opera, 87–­88, 93–­94 Isherwood, Robert, 7 Jaucourt, Louis de, 174 Jean de Sainte Geneviève, 35–­36 Johnson, Victoria, 215n2, 247n9 Jomelli, Niccolò, 141 justice, x, 126–­27, 127, 140, 166, 171–­72, 184, 198–­99 Kahn, Paul, xi, 176, 202 Kaiser, Thomas E., 217n20 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 37, 224n12 katabasis, 156–­58, 161–­62, 164, 192 Ketterer, Robert, 16 kingship, ix, xi–­xii, 1, 128, 253n88; Apollo­ nian ideal, 16, 27, 30–­31, 170, 180; charis­ matic, xii, 24–­25, 180–­81, 185, 195; left­sacred, xii, 180, 201–­2 Kintzler, Catherine, 5, 41, 50, 163, 171, 216n12, 229n89 Kojève, Alexandre, 50 Lacan, Jacques, 238n42 la Clémence. See clemency Lacoste, Louis: Biblis, 93, 238n45; Philomèle, 238n45 La Gorce, Jérôme de, 160, 167, 179 la Justice. See justice Lalande, Michel-­Richard de, De Profundis, 57, 58 La Rochelle, 126–­27 law, and rule of law, 176, 198–­99, 201 Léandre de Dijon, 31 Leboeuf, Jean-­Joseph, 149 Leclair, Jean-­Marie, Scylla et Glaucus, 45 Lefranc de Pompignan, Jean-­Jacques, Le Triomphe de l’harmonie, 184 Legros, Joseph, 195 Lemoyne, Jean-­Baptiste: Electre, 83, 146; Phè­ dre, 83, 114, 146; Toute la Grèce, ou Ce que peut la liberté, 49 Le Moyne, Pierre, 36, 88, 198

index Le Normand, Jacques, 89, 90 Le Sueur, 232n16 Levasseur, Rosalie, 239n56 liberalism, xii–­xiii, 2, 21, 26, 201 Louis XIII, 126–­28, 201 Louis XIV, ix–­x, 1–­2, 6–­8, 21, 64, 130, 170, 173, 175, 179, 201, 242n25, 242n26 Louis XV, 2, 21 love, 182–­85, 191; of country and king, 17; homoerotic, 190; as a political virtue, 17, 33, 184–­85; subplots, 33 Lully, Jean-­Baptiste, ix, 5–­7, 14, 41–­42, 159, 170, 201, 245n11; choral writing, 22, 167–­68; contemplative choruses, as model, 41–­43, 66; music for the funeral of Pierre Séguier, 65; orchestral writing, 7, 42–­43, 66, 126, 129; precarious position, in royal service, 201; as royal apologist, 31, 33 Lully, Jean-­Baptiste, works: Acis, 242n26; Alceste, 67, 68, 76, 78, 79, 80, 93, 160, 178–­79, 233n37; Amadis, 126; Armide, 22, 33, 51–­52, 86; Atys, 76–­77, 126; Bel­ lérophon, 3, 12–­14, 18–­19; Cadmus et Hermione, 26–­33, 28, 29, 180; Isis, 126, 129; Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, 15; L’Hercule amoureux, 178; Orphée, 179; Persée, 167; Phaéton, 15; Proserpine, 128, 167–­68, 168, 169, 178–­79, 246n42; Psyché, 128, 233n37; Thésée, 9, 42, 126, 246n42 lullyste-­ramiste controversy, 243n43 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 216n16, 220n54 machine plays, 41, 159, 177, 181, 245n10 madness, 96–­99, 119, 125, 128–­31 Marie-­Thérèse (queen consort of Louis XIV), memorial services, 60, 62, 63, 64–­65 Marin, Louis, 8 Marmontel, Jean-­François: Didon, 47–­48; Hercule mourant, 81 Martin, Charles, 250n38 marvelous. See merveilleux mass, at funerals, 60, 232n15 Mazarin, Jules, 41 McClure, Ellen M., 224n12 Ménestrier, Claude-­François, 59, 61, 65 Mersenne, Marin, 232n16 merveilleux (the marvelous), xii, 5, 10, 163–­ 64, 173, 202 Metastasio, Pietro, 199

283

Moline, Pierre Louis, 194 Montagnier, Jean-­Paul C., 40, 226n58 Montéclair, Michel Pignolet de, Jephté, 43–­45, 44–­46 Monteverdi, Claudio, 124; L’Orfeo, 181 morality, in opera, 85–­87, 107–­8, 117, 122. See also authority: moral; conscience Mouret, Jean-­Joseph, Ariane, 233n37 mourning: collective, in opera, 53, 56, 59, 77–­ 78, 81–­84 (see also chorus: lamenting); public, 59, 61–­64, 66 (see also state funerals) Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: Die Zauberflöte, 91, 122; Don Giovanni, 123; Idomeneo, 121, 123; La Clemenza di Tito, 239n68; orchestral writing, 123–­24 mysticism, Catholic, 31, 34 Nagel, Ivan, 91, 122 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 188–­89 Naudé, Gabriel, 29, 171 Naudeix, Laura, 245n10 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 155 Niquet, Hervé, 168 normativity, 94, 118–­19, 121, 125 ombre, 124, 131, 159 opera: as archive of political experience, xi–­ xii, 2–­6, 9, 171, 192, 203; Francophone, genre labels, 215n1. See also tragédie en musique Opéra, xii, 1, 5, 201, 215n3, 218n27. See also Académie Royale de Musique opera orchestra. See orchestra opéras-­ballet, 43, 184 orchestra: dramatic and expressive capacity, 124, 133, 139, 142; interacting with stage personas, 137–­38; representing guilt and self-­recrimination, 124; representing violence and terror, 123–­26, 138; terrifying (terrible) style, 142–­46, 149, 151, 155; as a theatrical medium for authority, 106, 110, 123, 125 Orfeo nell’inferni (in Campra’s Le Carnaval de Venise), 179–­80 Orphée (ballet), 249n27 Orpheus myth, 177, 181–­87, 249n37 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 27, 159, 178, 182, 250n38 Palais Royal, 6 pantomime ballet, 78, 141–­42, 144, 233n37

284

index

pantomime chorus, 123 Parigi, Alfonso, Le Nozze degli dei stage design, 160 parterre, 22, 223n1 pathos, 53–­54, 230n1 patrie, 20, 81–­83 patriotism, 82 patronage networks, 8. See also tragédie en musique: royal patronage of Peace of Nijmegen (1678–­79), 19 Pellegrin, Simon-­Joseph, 59, 76, 233n45; Hip­ polyte et Aricie, 94, 100, 133–­37, 134–­36, 151, 175, 187–­92, 195; Polydore, 43; Renaud, ou La suite d’Armide, 86, 92, 149–­50; Théonoé, 85, 96, 99–­100 penal scenes, the orchestra’s role in, 125, 139–­ 40, 142, 144, 150, 152, 154 penal violence, 123, 130, 139, 142, 154–­55 Perrin, Pierre, 41 Petite Académie, 6 Piccinni, Niccolò: Didon, 47–­48; Iphigénie en Tauride, 146, 149 pity, 85, 87, 121, 175–­76, 182, 184. See also sympathy plausibility. See vraisemblance Pluto, 172, 174; aligned with tyranny, despotism, and barbarity, 170; confrontation with, in opera, 175–­76; dancing roles, 177–­79; as a lover, 178; and Orpheus, 181– 86; persona (personification of), 174–­80, 249n29; singing roles, 174–­75, 178–­79 poetics: Aristotelian, xi, 5, 50; of underworld acts and scenes, 162–­64, 171–­72. See also vraisemblance police, as a theme in opera, 15 political economy, xii, 16, 166 political order, 163, 185, 187, 200–­202 political theology, x, xii, 3, 33, 43, 177, 185, 197; the ban, 187–­89, 191–­92; of confessional song, 88, 92, 94; the exception, as a theme of the tragédie en musique, 176, 181–­82, 195, 201–­2. See also sacrifice politics: liberalized, in the reigns of Louis XV and XVI, 21; of musical artistry, xii, 185, 199; of voice, 91 pompes funèbres, 66–­68, 78, 81–­82, 158, 233n37. See also state funerals Powell, John S., 245n11 power, xi, 4, 87, 203; economy-­government model, 2, 4, 14–­18, 21, 23, 50, 120–­21, 166 (see also government); psychic life of,

3; quasi-­sovereign, xi, 184–­85, 199, 203; sovereignty-­reign model, 4, 9–­12, 21, 23, 158, 164–­67, 199 (see also sovereignty); statist theories of, 2 precarity, 18, 54, 173, 200–­203. See also vulnerability press, role in state mourning, 64 prologues, 6, 10, 15, 42, 49, 128; encomiastic, 11, 22, 41, 45 pseudo-­Dionysius the Areopagite, 34–­35 public, historical understanding of, 217n20 public enemies, in opera, 11, 199, 221n58 public grieving, 59, 61–64, 66. See also state funerals publicity, 43, 47; absolutist, 4, 31, 41; artistic, in the ancien régime, 247n9; doxological, 23–­24, 26, 36, 49, 53, 224n16 (see also citizenship: angelic model of); vicious, 13–­14, 26, 71; virtuous, 26, 49, 53 punishment: corporal or violent, 122, 125–­30, 137, 152–­55, 170, 242n26; onstage, 125–­26 Quinault, Philippe, 41, 119, 126, 129, 199, 201–­2; Alceste, 78, 164, 178; Amadis, 126; Armide, 86; Atys, 11, 77, 126, 128–­ 29; Cadmus et Hermione, 26–­27, 29, 31, 33, 180, 224n17; Isis, 5, 7, 42–­43, 126, 129; Phaéton, 15; Proserpine, 128, 178–­ 79, 190; Thésée, 42, 126, 129, 227n68 Racine, Jean, 10, 19, 94, 233n45; Iphigénie, 106–­7; Phèdre, 190 Raguenet, François (Abbé), 61–­62 raison d’état, 15–­16 Rameau, Jean-­Philippe, ix, 52, 123, 125, 230n100, 231n5, 238n49, 243n43, 251n68; Castor et Pollux, 54–­59, 55–­56, 57, 81, 156, 231n8, 231n10; enharmonicism, 189–­ 90; Funeral Mass, 59, 231n10; Hippolyte et Aricie, 17, 19, 73, 76, 93–­94, 100–­105, 101, 102–­4, 115, 116, 133–­37, 134–­36, 151, 175, 187–­92; Les Boréades, 139, 140–­41; orchestral writing, 54, 56, 66, 100–­101, 104–­5, 125, 133–­40; Vents souterrains, 139; Zoroastre, 117, 138 Ranum, Patricia M., 226n54 rape, 178, 190–­91 Rapin, René, 220n54, 230n3, 235n5 Ratner, Leonard, 124 Rebel, François, 231n10 recognition, 87–­88, 91, 121, 235n6

index regicide, ix, 2, 151, 196–­97 Regnard, Jean-­François, Le Carnaval de Venise, 179–­80 remorse, as a theme in opera, 85–­87, 100, 105, 107, 110–­14, 125, 154–­55 Revolution, ix, xii, 49, 60, 84, 151 Riquet, Denis, amende honorable, 237n19 roi justicier, 126–­30, 180 Rossi, Luigi, Orfeo, 159–­60, 177 Roullet, Marie François Louis Gand Leblanc du: Alceste, 81; Iphigénie en Aulide, 106–­107 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 17, 121, 165–­66, 194, 198, 252n84 Roy, Pierre-­Charles, 130; Philomèle, 238n45; Sémiramis, 85, 238n45 Rushton, Julian, 144, 229n83 Sacchini, Antonio, 88, 123; Chimène, ou le Cid, 48; Œdipe à Colonne, 113, 146–­48, 147–­48; Renaud, 146, 149 sacred, right and left, xii, 180, 202 sacrifice, as theme of the tragédie en mu­ sique, xii, 67, 77, 106–­7, 156, 176–­77, 188, 195–­98 Sadler, Graham, 57 Said, Edward W., x, 157, 159, 218n32 Sainctot, Nicolas de, 62, 65–­66, 233n36 Sainte-­Colombe, Jean de, Les regrets, 161 Sainte-­Colombe le fils, 161, 161 Salieri, Antonio: Les Danaïdes, 146; Les Hora­ ces, 48; Tarare, 48–­49, 229n86 Salmon, Victoire, 152 Salomon, Joseph-­François, Théonoé, 96–­99, 97–­99 Santner, Eric L., 224n16 Sarmant, Thierry, 166 Schmitt, Carl, 176–­77 self-­formation, 88, 235n6 self-­government, 18, 155, 249n25 Senault, Jean-­François, 36 Seneca: Hercules furens, 174; Phaedra, 233n45 Serre, Solveig, 20, 218n24, 247n10 Sévigné, Madame de, 61–­62, 65 Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 223n1 Skinner, Quentin, 192 Sommerville, Johann, 9 sovereignty, ix–­x, 4, 9–­10, 128, 165, 181, 199, 201–­3; and divinity, 166 (see also divine right theory); French, depersonalized, 20;

285

judicial, 126, 189; and the right of death, 158, 165–­66, 201 (see also violence: sov­ ereign); as a theme of the tragédie en musique, x, 8–­14 Spinoza, Baruch, 51 stage settings (set design, stage design), 7, 129, 156, 160, 170, 180. See also décor state funerals, 57, 59–­66, 232n14; artistic media, 64–­66; public participation in, 61–­65, 233n38 Stoll, Mathieu, 166 Striggio, Alessandro, L’Orfeo, 181, 199 Stuck, Jean-­Baptiste, Polydore, 43 Sturm und Drang, 124 suicidal airs, 148–­50 suicide, in opera, 86, 93, 96, 105, 128, 150, 191, 197 sympathy, 87–­88, 154, 199. See also pity Taylor, Chloë, 92, 120 tempête, 124, 142, 242n30 théâtre à machines. See machine plays theology. See Catholic theology and politics; political theology Theseus, 9, 42, 115, 133, 187–­92; homoerotic characterization, 251n72 Thomas, Downing A., 8, 88, 174, 180, 190, 247n5 tombeaux, instrumental, 161 tonal instability, 123, 131, 144, 146, 189. See also harmonic instability tonality, 183; depicting horror, 189, 251n68; depicting remorse, 111; depicting shock and sorrow, 55 Torelli, Giacomo, 159–­60, 160 Traetta, Tommaso, 141; Antigona, 117 tragédie en musique, ix–­xii, 1, 9; and collective nature of mourning, 53, 55–­56; cosmos, mythological, 167–­70, 180; and glorification of the king, 11, 13, 22, 27 (see also glorification choruses); Lullian, ix, 42, 85, 87, 126, 129–­30, 138, 150, 250n43; parodies of, 180; as political theater, x–­xi, 3, 20, 50; ritual dimension, 8; royal patronage of, 6, 15; and sovereign government, 2–­3, 218n24. See also opera tragic-­heroic guilt, in opera, 150, 155. See also guilt, as a theme in opera Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 8 truthfulness (truth-­telling), 87–­88, 91–­92, 117– ­20. See also Foucault, Michel: veridiction

286

index

Turenne, Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de, 60–­62 underworld, 155–­56, 171–­73, 190, 244n3; in opera, settings, 157–­61, 170, 192; otherness of, 170; politically organized, 162–­64 underworld king, 155, 175, 199, 202. See also Pluto Vallentin, Berthold, 34 Valois dynasty, 25, 127, 172 Van Orden, Kate, 11, 227n62 Varesco, Giovanni Battista, Idomeneo, 121 vengeance, 19, 129, 202 Vergil, Aeneid, 159 Vigarani, Carlo, 12, 27, 29, 160 violence, 118, 121–­22, 154, 201; in art, 27–­29; onstage, 125–­26; sovereign, 171–­73, 176; supernatural, 146

Vismes du Valgay, Alphonse-­Denis-­Marie de, 110, 119 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, librettos, 228n73 vraisemblance (plausibility), 5, 59, 126, 162–­64 vulnerability, 18, 54–­55, 92–­95, 183. See also precarity Waeber, Jacqueline, 237n30 war (warfare), 9, 13, 15, 68, 158, 164–­66 Wars of Religion, 14, 24 Weber, William, 5, 20, 247n10 William of Auvergne, 34 Williams, Raymond, 10 Wood, Caroline, 242n33 Yves de Paris, 34 Žižek, Slavoj, 238n42