The Comedians of the King: "Opéra Comique" and the Bourbon Monarchy on the Eve of Revolution 9780226743394

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THE COMEDIANS OF THE KING

THE COMEDIANS OF THE KING Opéra Comique and the Bourbon Monarchy on the Eve of Revolution

JULIA DOE The University of C hicago Press C hicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 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 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74325-7 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74339-4 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226743394.001.0001 This book has been supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment and 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: Doe, Julia, author. Title: The comedians of the king : opéra comique and the Bourbon monarchy on the eve of revolution / Julia Doe. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020032134 | ISBN 9780226743257 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226743394 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Opéra comique—France—18th century. | Bourbon, House of— Music patronage—History—18th century. | Music patronage—France—History— 18th century. Classification: LCC ML1950.D64 2020 | DDC 782.1094409/033—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032134 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Editorial Principles • vii Int rodu cti on

1

Institutional History Dialogue Opera and the Cosmopolitan “Revolution” The Politics of Genre

5 10 15

1.

23

o p é r a c o m i qu e

an d t h e L e gac y o f C o l b e rt

Comic Theater and the Querelle des Bouffons Theater and the Nation La Nouvelle Troupe New Rivalries

2. C ha r acter , C lass, an d St y l e i n t h e Ly r ic Bienséance in Ancien Régime Opera Opéra Comique and the Drame Romance and Refinement Recitative for the Peuple Lyric Drame at the Opéra

26 29 34 39 drame

43 48 55 60 68 74

3. The M u s i c a l R e vo lut i on s o f Ma r ie An to in et t e

83

The Musical Patronage of a Habsburg Queen Tragédie Lyrique and Its Parodies Italian Opera at the French Court Despotism and Privilège

87 97 107 117

4. The Deca d e n c e o f t h e Pasto r a l

123

Pastoral Living at the Petit Trianon “Private” Pastorals: The Troupe des Seigneurs Ceremonial Pastorals for Court and Capital The Pastoral as Adaptation: C. S. Favart’s Ninette à la cour

126 130 138 147

5. “Heroi c” C o me dy on t h e E v e o f 1 7 8 9

159

Opera and Revolution at the Salle Favart The Development of “Heroic” Comedy The “Heroic” Sargines Continuity and Rupture

163 172 179 192

6 . Epi logu e: T h e F o u n dat i on o f a “ Pe o p l e ’ s ” A rt

197

Richard Coeur de Lion: The First Fifty Years Richard Coeur de Lion: The First One Hundred Years Conclusions: Richard Coeur de Lion and the Revolutionary Centennial

202 208 213

Acknowledgments • 217 Notes • 221 Bibliography • 283 Index • 305

EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES

The Comedians of the King reproduces a trove of archival documents from the eighteenth century, the grammatical conventions and spelling of which may differ from those in modern usage. In transcribing these materials, I have generally maintained the original orthography, while adding punctuation and capitalization to improve clarity for the modern reader. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. The scores of opéra comique from this period are only rarely available in modern editions. Most of this book’s musical examples are generated from eighteenth-century prints. (I have defaulted to the first edition, where extant, of the published score, which was frequently prepared with the involvement of the composer.) Because these publications were commercial items and tended to be produced quickly after an opera’s premiere, they do occasionally contain irregularities. I have edited discrepancies in text setting with reference to printed librettos; I have also silently corrected obvious errors in pitch.

INTRODUCTION

Few repertories of Western art music have been more persistently identified with absolutist politics than the tragic operas of prerevolutionary France. Tragédie lyrique was invented under the auspices of monarchy and functioned from its start as an embodiment of national cultural hegemony and governmental prestige. The most famous examples of the genre, by Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau, have been described by one scholar as veritable “symbol[s] of musical Bourbonism,”1 and by another, more colloquially, as the “courtiest court operas that ever were.”2 Tragédie lyrique has often found a historiographical foil in its less esteemed and more politically ambiguous comic counterpart, opéra comique. If lyric tragedy was intimately associated with Louis XIV’s Versailles, French dialogue opera had urban origins, at the seasonal fairs of Paris. If serious opera was devoted to the spectacular and allegorical affirmation of the king, the fairground players specialized in deflating this celebratory rhetoric, with plots that valorized the conditions of the working classes and music that drew upon the popular language of the vaudeville. And if the administrators of tragédie lyrique held legal controls over operatic production throughout France, the authors of early opéra comique existed at the margins of this official system, constantly adjusting to judgments passed down from above. This theatrical order seems to offer a tidy microcosm of the society that constructed it, reflecting the competing impulses of court and capital, privileged and popular, authoritarian grand siècle and reforming century of Enlightenment.

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As with most binaries, of course, such a starkly conceived division of theatrical forms contains both an underlying truth and many elements of oversimplification. Tragic opera was “highly institutionalized and firmly identified with the political and social hierarchy,”3 from its founding through the early stages of the Revolution. But it did not remain a perfect mirror of the agenda and musical aesthetic of the roi soleil. By the death of Louis XIV in 1715, tragédie lyrique had already begun to elicit the scrutiny of opposing factions at court.4 As the eighteenth century progressed, it would accommodate a variety of cosmopolitan styles and respond to the demands of a widening public at its home base in Paris, the Académie Royale de Musique (also known as the Opéra). Although opéra comique has endured a certain scholarly stigma as a result of its fairground roots,5 it too was subject to remarkable development, especially from the 1750s onward. Spurred by the innovations of imported Italian intermezzi, the genre emerged as a threat to France’s three Crown-sanctioned theaters, the Opéra, the ComédieFrançaise, and the Comédie-Italienne. In 1762 the government responded by engineering a merger between the forains (fair players) and the youngest of these official companies (the Comédie-Italienne), in the process elevating lyric comedy to the status of royal entertainment. Opéra comique thus joined tragédie lyrique under the protection of the French Crown, diversifying the traditional identity of monarchical spectacle and consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined. The Comedians of the King investigates the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the period between the 1762 merger and the Revolution. In the simplest terms, the book presents the history of an understudied musical genre and the material structures that supported it, determining how royal sponsorship contributed to the rapid evolution of this lyric form. As composers and librettists grappled with the legitimized standing of dialogue opera at the Comédie-Italienne, they began to test and expand its conventional limits, transforming it into a substantive alternative to the elite tragédie lyrique. This stylistic shift, coming at a time of tremendous cultural change, had sizable political implications. I address, on this larger scale, how comic theater was exploited in (and worked against) the construction of the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image. In the waning ancien régime, opéra comique increasingly appropriated the rhetoric of courtly ceremony, but it did so uneasily, and in a manner that

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contradicted the established expectations of its form and social message. In essence, The Comedians of the King examines the institutional, aesthetic, and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular roots was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine— and when a collection of actors trained at the fairs of Paris became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.6 I ask of opéra comique a question that has long stood at the heart of inquiry for French tragic opera: what did it mean for comedy to be put into the service of the monarch?7 The central claim of this book is that there was a fundamental conflict between the modernizing taste of the Bourbon regime and the longstanding— and politically symbolic— organizational system for lyric theater that the Crown itself had put in place. In eighteenth-century France, operatic production was based on a hierarchy of privilège, a set of bureaucratic regulations that protected the cultural supremacy of the Opéra and reinforced the homogeneity and exclusivity of the tragédies lyriques that it staged. However, as the government admitted the lighter and more cosmopolitan opéra comique into the rubric of acceptable courtly art, it undermined this legal and aesthetic precedent in a number of significant ways. On the one hand, the legitimation of opéra comique represented a considerable, and potentially transgressive, challenge to the conventional demarcations of French theaters and theatrical forms. For conservative critics, the rise of dialogue opera was an affront to dramatic, and by extension, to social, propriety— a dangerous effacement of the original “kingly” opera, Lullian tragédie lyrique. On the other hand, and somewhat counterintuitively, this redrawing of generic boundaries was a direct consequence of opéra comique’s adaptation to existing systems of royal representation and display. Put another way, if the monarchical emphasis on lyric comedy constituted a disruption to the theatrical status quo, this was largely because the genre was so successfully adorned with the trappings of traditional courtly spectacle. The Comedians of the King intervenes in three areas critical to the field of opera studies and to the historiography of prerevolutionary France, more broadly. First, this book integrates the comic theater into wider narratives of the politically charged institutionalization of culture under the Bourbon regime. Drawing on extensive new work in the archives of the royal household and the Comédie-Italienne, I emphasize the pragmatic ways in which legal regulations, administrative structures, and economic shifts dic-

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tated how opéra comique evolved. If the interventionist cultural programs of Louis XIV and his finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert have long formed a starting point for research on the tragédie lyrique, their legacy also exerted an impact on the development of dialogue opera, demonstrating how firmly and comprehensively invested the monarchy remained in its lyric production through the final stages of the ancien régime. Second, this research sheds new light on the famed, eighteenth-century disputes over French and Italian operatic style, asserting that opéra comique functioned as a locus of musical and dramatic innovation and a crucial intermediary between imported opera buffa and native tragédie lyrique. This line of argument emphasizes the continuing influence of the court, and especially of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette, in the negotiation of national and cosmopolitan musical taste. In the 1770s and 1780s, the aging corpus of tragedies by Lully and Rameau— the eminent and eminently “French” musique ancienne— fell from favor in the wake of foreign threats. This did not imply that the monarchy abandoned its entrenched policies of theatrical affirmation, but that the queen’s favored genre of lyric comedy might now also, however imperfectly, fulfill this role. Finally, and most importantly, The Comedians of the King revaluates the political stakes of opéra comique in the period immediately preceding the French Revolution, while interrogating the tensions of continuity and rupture across the fault line of 1789. Many scholars have underscored the genre’s fairground beginnings, Enlightenment influences, and progressive emphasis on characters from the third estate. However, as the Crownsupported repertory indicates, the humble origins of the comic theater did not prevent the Comédie-Italienne from acquiring an elaborate musical and scenographic apparatus, nor did it limit the company’s ultimate appeal to aristocratic audiences. As dialogue opera became increasingly fashionable in court circles, it frequently reflected the worldviews of the elite public that consumed it. Indeed, the growth of the genre in the late ancien régime was heavily dependent on the material patronage of upper-class spectators in Paris and Versailles. If opéra comique would subsequently be reclaimed as an emblematic artistic expression of the 1790s, the foundation for this transformation was laid with support from the Bourbon monarchy in the years before the Revolution began.

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Institutional History The Comedians of the King builds upon recent researches into the history of operatic institutions, emphasizing how the organizational structures and material conditions of production influenced the evolution of lyric genres in France.8 Theatrical life under the ancien régime was subject to constant regulation. In the words of Henri Lagrave, “At any given moment the authorities intervened in the theaters’ activities, sometimes to a persnickety degree; this constant surveillance translated into numerous orders and counter-commands. . . . Every breach of the rules was punished.”9 Such standards served to preserve a system of hierarchy, distinguishing the three royally sanctioned (or “privileged”) theaters of the capital from the popular entertainments of the fairs and boulevards. This institutional bureaucracy exerted a powerful influence in the realm of dramatic music. The place of performance shaped the scope, audience, and form of an opera and also affected the way it was received. The programming announcements from the Journal de Paris provide one illustration of the accepted organization of the city’s theaters (fig. 0.1).10 The listings for the boulevard troupes— run by independent entrepreneurs, without financial or legal assistance from the Crown— are sequestered at the end of the announcements, squeezed in between the day’s exchange rates and burial notices. They are kept entirely separate from the schedules of the three privileged companies, which are given a prime position and boldface heading in line with their relative clout. France’s royally affiliated theaters shared several defining features. Though centered in the capital, these institutions were each subject to internal interference from the menus plaisirs du Roi, the administrative bureaucracy charged with monarchical entertainment, and they benefitted from various forms of material, governmental support. (The Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne collected annual subventions; the Opéra received periodic bailouts for debts and exceptional expenses.)11 In exchange for these financial protections, the “privileged” actors were considered employees of the king, and bore exclusive responsibility for the spectacles he enjoyed at court. These artists presented regular showcases of the monarchy’s patronage: a season of ceremonial entertainments in the autumn months at Fontainebleau, and

6

Figure 0.1 lection.

•

Introduction

Journal de Paris, 3 May 1777. Yale University Library, Franklin Col-

another at Versailles during the winter and early spring.12 Despite their common duties, the three Crown-supported troupes were not perceived as equal or interchangeable, by either the regime or the Parisian public. At the pinnacle of the newspaper arrangement, as it always stands, is the most highly esteemed of French dramatic institutions, the Opéra.13 The Opéra’s status was reinforced by certain pragmatic rights: since its founding under Louis XIV, this company had possessed a monopoly on through-composed musical theater. No other troupe could legally produce “opera, whether in French or any other language,” without having obtained this permission from the nation’s most prestigious lyric stage.14 The Opéra’s preeminent position in this institutional hierarchy is reflected in a healthy body of scholarly literature. Several recent monographs have examined the bureaucratic structures of this theater and the ways that it

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7

was influenced by the state— and explored the impact of these factors on the works it produced. Solveig Serre has described the administration, finances, and personnel of the Opéra between 1749 and the fall of the Bastille,15 while Mark Darlow has traced its evolution into the revolutionary era.16 Darlow places “the theatrical institution at the hub of interactions between the various organs which regulated culture,”17 investigating its role in the creation of repertory and the shaping of artistic policy. The Comédie-Italienne, the most significant rival to the Opéra at the end of the ancien régime, has yet to serve as the subject of a dedicated musicological study.18 But it arguably offers even richer fodder to these questions of institutional and material history; the development of opéra comique was closely intertwined with the administration of the venue where it was performed, while simultaneously placing pressure on the wider organizational system that governed it. The Comédie-Italienne of the late eighteenth century was a uniquely structured company, indeed a literal mix of Italian and French and of courtly and popular, and as such a locus of hybridity and stylistic innovation. As mentioned above, this troupe was formed from the union of two discrete groups, the royal Italian comedians and the Opéra-Comique of the Parisian fairs. The first of these, the “original” Comédie-Italienne, had been resident in the French capital, on and off, since the reign of Louis XIV.19 It performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, a theater in the present-day second arrondissement, though contemporary commentators commonly used “Comédie-Italienne ” to refer to both venue and troupe. Granted its official charter only in 1723, it was the least prominent of the royal companies and often struggled to stay afloat. Its repertory was founded on works in the commedia dell’arte tradition but over time expanded to include spoken plays in French, ballets, satires of tragédie lyrique, and— by the 1750s— adaptations (or newly composed imitations) of imported opera buffa.20 The primary competition to the Italian players was the Opéra-Comique, a title given to the successive bands of French actors that had performed at the seasonal trade fairs of Paris— the Foire Saint-Laurent and the Foire Saint-Germain— since the turn of the eighteenth century (fig. 0.2).21 The company was best known for its namesake genre of opéra comique: a lyric form founded on the alternation of dialogue and re-texted popular tunes (known as vaudevilles), but later incorporating substantial, original music.22 On account of its fair venue and mixed public, the Opéra-Comique was

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F i g u r e 0 . 2 Jacques Jollain, Plan de la foire Saint-Germain (F-Pn, FOL-ICOARC, foires). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

considered a second-class spectacle. By the time of the querelle des bouffons, however, it had grown much more sophisticated than this reputation implied: it performed in well-equipped halls, employed top-rate vocal talent, and had built a repertory of works by highly respected authors, from AlainRené Lesage to Charles-Simon Favart.23 Such was the success of the OpéraComique, indeed, that government officials called for the merger of the two comedic troupes in 1762, integrating select actors from the fairs into the Italian theater. (This event and its ramifications will be discussed in detail in the next two chapters.) In brief, the blended company retained the title of Comédie-Italienne but was otherwise substantially altered. Reorganization confirmed this institution as a site where performers and authors negotiated contrasting operatic styles and where elite and popular cultures came into close contact. While the Opéra was administered through a consolidated, “top-heavy” power structure, passing between the city of Paris, the menus plaisirs, and a series of managing directors,24 the postmerger Comédie-

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Italienne was run as a société, a collaborative venture in which the actors were responsible for their own internal governance and in return received shares of the profits. If all of the royal theaters felt the competing pulls of court and capital, the configuration of the Comédie-Italienne exacerbated this sense of bifurcated identity. Its artists supplied new works for the pleasure of the king, but they remained financially dependent upon— and thus highly responsive to— the evolving tastes of their Parisian audiences.25 More significantly, the institution exerted its influence on the growth of opéra comique because of the prevailing system of theatrical privilège. From the early years of the eighteenth century, the forains had maintained an uneasy alliance with the Opéra, paying hefty annual fees for the rights to perform entertainments incorporating vaudevilles, dance, and instrumental music.26 After 1762, the Opéra imposed more explicit terms on the ComédieItalienne, invoking its monopoly to limit competition from the newly legitimized opéra comique. A contract signed in 1766, for example, itemized organizational and aesthetic constraints on the output of the consolidated troupe. The Comédie-Italienne was forbidden from programming musical works on Tuesdays and Fridays (evenings on which the Opéra performed), and from hiring singers, dancers, or machinists in the current or former employ of the rival company. Its repertory was likewise delineated to minimize overlap with the offerings of the Opéra: both “simple ” and “composed” choruses were proscribed, as was the use of “continuous music” (meaning recitative), and any aria or orchestral interlude that had previously appeared on the tragic stage.27 To the consternation of the comédiens, these protections were strengthened in 1779;28 new translations of Italian opera buffa were prohibited and ensemble writing became more stringently circumscribed.29 The development of French dialogue opera was thus molded by the politics of artistic privilège, and its composers and librettists were under legal obligation to structure their works according to regulations negotiated with the Opéra and the menus plaisirs.30 It is important to clarify, however, that just because these rules were prominently articulated, does not mean that they were treated as inviolable or uniformly enforceable. While I will explore how the authors of the Comédie-Italienne worked within the confines of their genre, I intend to illuminate those moments where they rebelled against— or were tacitly allowed to ignore— these strictures, undermining the traditional divisions

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between the serious and comic domains. Such genre bending was prompted by shifts in public demand, certainly; but it was also intimately tied to the ceremonial apparatus and elaborate theatrical conventions of the Bourbon court. Georgia Cowart has described the repertory of the Opéra as a “dialogic system,” in which authors and works “engaged with each other, over time, through a variety of means”— and often in ways that contradicted the official messaging of the regime.31 I take this approach one step further, emphasizing that intertextual exchange took place not only within institutions but also between them. A fundamental goal of this book is to demonstrate the substantial degree of interaction between court and capital, and the formidable impact of rivalry between the Opéra and the Comédie-Italienne. If we are to counter the tragédie-centric view of French music under the ancien régime, it is not sufficient to provide a separate and parallel survey of the production of dialogue opera during this period. It is essential, rather, to examine both how institutional boundaries were established and what it meant when they were broken.

Dialogue Opera and the Cosmopolitan “Revolution” The success of the Comédie-Italienne in the late eighteenth century, instigated by the genre-bending efforts of its leading composers and librettists, overturned conventional ideas about where French musical innovation might be centered and cultural patrimony defined. The authors of opéra comique inserted themselves into the well-known controversies over imported Italian music and helped to consolidate a new alternative to the increasingly antiquated corpus of tragedies by Lully and Rameau. In exploring this comic repertory, The Comedians of the King sheds light on one of the most important methodological threads of opera studies in the age of Enlightenment: that of the tension between “the formation of national taste ” and “the hegemony of the international style” (i.e., the style of Italian vocal music, which then predominated on European stages outside of France).32 The interrogation of these competing impulses rests at the foundation of much recent scholarship on tragédie lyrique. Musicologists have addressed the interaction of local and cosmopolitan traditions in serious opera through the lenses of reception history, musical analysis, and large-scale repertory formation. These planes of investigation have coalesced around a common narrative— one of increasing (though still modest) openness at the long-

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insular Opéra. The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a gradual loosening of the ingrained aesthetic outlook and political alignment of French lyric tragedy, distancing these facets of the genre’s identity from the twin cultural legacies of Lully and the roi soleil. Critical catalysts for this process were the arrival in Paris of Eustachio Bambini’s Italian buffa players in 1752, and the partisan querelles that erupted around them in the years that followed. David Charlton, for example, has reconstructed the context of the bouffons’ performances and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Le devin du village, charting the modernizations of acting style, subject matter, and ensemble writing— among other factors— that took hold at the Opéra around these watershed events. If Charlton traces a nascent reform-from-within in French works of the 1750s and 1760s, William Weber devotes his attention to the definitive, and externally oriented, rupture that followed: the arrival of Christoph Willibald Gluck in late 1773. Weber’s analyses of programming at the Opéra confirm that the advent of the Bavarian-born, Italian-trained Austrian composer signaled a break with the historical and exclusionist orientation of this theater.33 A subsequent influx of international composers and idioms within the tragédie lyrique, Weber argues, demonstrated the waning importance of the distinctive, courtly strains of musique ancienne and an increasing influence of cosmopolitan taste in French musical life.34 The history of opéra comique in the second half of the eighteenth century presents a complementary, but by no means identical, view of this negotiation of the French and cosmopolitan poles. While foreign-born composers of tragédie lyrique remained a rarity before Gluck (the gallicized Lully being a major exception), the roster of the Comédie-Italienne was long defined by its comparative diversity. Although several of the featured players in this book were native Frenchmen— including Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, François-André Danican Philidor, and Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac— many others were transplants from abroad. At the time of the merger, the music director of the Comédie-Italienne was the Neapolitan-trained Egidio Duni;35 arguably the most important opéra comique composer of the period, André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, was born in Liège and arrived in Paris after studying with Giovanni Battista Casali in Rome. The authors of lyric comedy experimented with Italian styles of vocal expression earlier and more extensively than did their counterparts in the serious domain; they were vital in the consolidation of the innovations of the bouffons and unquestionably paved the way for the acceptance of these foreign ideas at the Opéra.

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And yet, a crucial feature of opéra comique, during the last decades of the ancien régime, was its self-conscious stylistic mixture. The genre’s Italianate characteristics were placed in dialogue with elements of the French musical and dramatic heritage. Within this repertory, ultramontane ariettes and obbligato recitatives stood side by side with songs of the fairgrounds and the “folk” (chansons, romances, and the like). And all this music was incorporated into plots that reflected the most important trends of contemporary French literature and theater— the rise of the Diderotian drame, for example, and the prerevolutionary vogue for stagings of patriotic national history. The authors of opéra comique were fluent in the pan-European strains of the galant style but naturalized them, subtly adapting them to fit the expectations of audiences both at court and in the capital. It was this emphasis on cosmopolitan mixture, paradoxically, that enabled opéra comique to be claimed as a national art form in its own right. By the 1770s, at the very moment that tragédie lyrique lost its exclusive aura of “Frenchness,” dialogue opera began to be incorporated into protectionist discussions of the nation’s artistic patrimony.36 If the tragic genre was prized because it was unique and idiosyncratic— that is, because it could not have been conceived or developed anywhere else37— dialogue opera generated value from its synthetic appeal. The composers of the Comédie-Italienne, in this view, had not only preserved local musical traditions but also improved upon the foreign music brought into France. As Laurent Garcin reflected in his Traité du mélo-drame (1772): By “French Music” I mean the new genre adopted in the past several years [opéra comique], the genre which from now on will be that of the Nation. . . . We really must stop protesting that this music doesn’t belong to us simply because we were inspired by the Italians. To be sure, what makes this music melodious (and not mere noise) owes much to our study of the Italian style. But what makes this music French owes much to our study of nature. We have a dramatic song; the Italians do not. It is here that the fundamental distinction between the two musics lies.38 To Garcin, opéra comique represented a melding of the best aspects of competing aesthetic traditions, a marriage of ultramontane lyricism with the “natural” expression of Gallic theater. While it would be inappropriate to

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describe such critical writings as nationalist in the modern, politically inflected sense,39 they resonated with intensifying patriotic discourses that portrayed France as “a new Rome, the open and welcoming center of a universal civilization.”40 The repertory of the Comédie-Italienne proved the cultural authority of the French by perfecting music developed abroad, thereby creating an art form capable of international popularity. Indeed, while opéra comique originated as a secondary lyric form within France, it soon came to dictate the experience of French music for many audiences outside of the nation’s borders. To a far greater extent than the tragédie lyrique, dialogue opera was an emblem of l’Europe française, taking part in the broad transfer of French language and culture throughout the “republic of letters” in Enlightenment Europe.41 As presented by traveling French actors and adapted by foreign troupes, the genre attained a truly stunning diffusion in the second half of the eighteenth century. Permanent companies were established in Germany (Dresden, Frankfurt, and Berlin), Austria (Vienna), Scandinavia (Stockholm and Copenhagen), Russia (St. Petersburg), and throughout the French colonial empire.42 Periodic productions also took place across the Low Countries (Brussels, Liège, Amsterdam, and the Hague) and in the United States (New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston).43 To the delight of patriotic critics, opéra comique even gained a foothold in Italy, with performances recorded in Modena, Naples, Venice, Parma, and Monza in the two decades before the Revolution.44 In a letter published in the Mercure de France in 1776, the composer Étienne-Joseph Floquet praised Grétry for the enthusiasm with which his operas had been embraced south of the Alps: A troupe of French players recently visited Florence, where they performed Lucile, Les deux avares, Zémire et Azor, etc. with astonishing success. The latter of these, in particular, was passionately received, even though it was presented without sets and by mediocre singers. Here they see you as the greatest of all the masters who have worked in the comic genre. Over dinner the marquis de Ligniville . . . remarked that a single aria from Zémire et Azor was worth more than all the Italian opera buffa of the last thirty years combined.45 Opéra comique should be recognized as a “new repertory of national music,” Floquet continued, because of its ability to dictate an international sound.46

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No less an authority than the monarch agreed. In a 1779 administrative edict, Louis XVI lauded the genre for improving the reputation of France’s lyric production as a whole: “French music, which was once greeted with scorn or indifference from foreigners, has now spread throughout the continent. . . . [The Italian comédiens] have succeeded in making their theater infinitely pleasing to our nation and to foreign ones.”47 In the first decades of the eighteenth century, French opera— and particularly French courtly opera— was strongly identified with the Lullian corpus of musique ancienne. By the end of the ancien régime, however, this was no longer the case: opéra comique had mounted a challenge to the prestigious tragédie lyrique within France and served as a key artistic export abroad. A crucial contribution of The Comedians of the King is to show that this politically fraught transformation in how French lyric theater was defined stemmed not merely from the initiatives of the Comédie-Italienne but also from the evolving preferences of the Bourbon regime. As the king’s words of praise indicate, the rise in esteem of opéra comique was hardly anathema to aristocratic taste but a direct reflection of changes taking hold at Versailles. A primary instigator of these shifts— and a living symbol of the new and vibrant interchange between national and cosmopolitan currents— was Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette. Exposed to a wide array of international music during her childhood in Habsburg Austria, the queen exerted a profound influence on operatic programming, both at court and in Paris, throughout her reign. Marie Antoinette’s support for Gluck is well documented, but she and members of her inner circle also became important patrons of opéra comique, developing personal ties with Grétry, Dalayrac, and Jean-Paul-Gilles Martini, among others. Dialogue opera served as a vehicle for Marie Antoinette’s personal entertainment, programmed extensively for the small-scale concerts and performances she presented to her associates at court. The public face of Bourbon spectacle soon mirrored this repertory, with opéra comique largely dictating the seasons of ceremonial theater at Versailles and Fontainebleau and not infrequently expressing the kinds of political ideals more commonly associated with la musique ancienne. The modernization of serious opera, then, is but one facet of the wider acceptance of cosmopolitan music in late eighteenth-century France. This period did witness a loosening of the link between tragédie lyrique and the absolutist state, as the aging repertory of Lully and Rameau ceded to the

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more outward-looking aesthetic of Gluck and his Italian rivals. But this did not mean that the Bourbon regime ceased to further its agenda through lyric spectacle, nor that it suddenly lacked a coherent system of theatrical affirmation. As la musique ancienne declined in cultural and political relevance, dialogue opera evolved to fulfill certain prerogatives of ceremonial display. The musical images of nation and monarchy were now increasingly shaped by the cosmopolitan strains of opéra comique— and by the progressive patronage of a foreign-born queen.

The Politics of Genre In the three decades before the French Revolution, dialogue opera was rapidly expanded, a development central to this book’s narrative. Responding to public demand at the Comédie-Italienne in Paris and to changing royal taste at the court theaters of Versailles and Fontainebleau, the authors of opéra comique increasingly blurred the distinctions between their genre and its tragic counterpart. Plots grew more serious and substantive, and featured characters from a range of social classes; orchestral writing increased in complexity; the chorus was granted a prominent role; and scenographic resources were continually extended. Critics frequently lauded opéra comique for its emphasis on variety, for the innovative manner in which its librettists and composers moved between registers and combined elements of diverse dramatic and musical styles. Dialogue opera was thus a leading agent in a larger process of modernization— an erosion of generic expectations now recognized as one of the most important artistic transformations of the late ancien régime.48 The rise of opéra comique and the ways it challenged the more obviously aristocratic tragédie lyrique seem to invite connection to the world outside of the theater. How are we to interpret the significance of institutional and stylistic boundary crossing beyond the realm of the aesthetic? What did it mean that a subsidiary lyric form was reappropriated as a respectable national art and an emblem of monarchy, given that this shift coincided with a moment of acute political change? Both art and music in ancien régime France were conceived in strictly regulated terms, and scholars have persuasively explored the parallels between these rigid orders of classification and the broader social structures in which they were developed. Mark Ledbury, for example, has described

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how authors of the grand siècle were limited by the hierarchical organization of the French academy, and how the painters of the period were categorized according to the same “complex and finely graded systems by which rank was understood at court.”49 The relationships between theaters and theatrical genres suggest a similar manner of thinking in the dramatic realm. The spectacles offered by the three companies with royal privilège and by the fair troupes were assumed to perform sharply different functions, acting analogously to the divided culture that they served. If links can be drawn between systems of artistic and societal order, a disjunction in the former might plausibly be read as a harbinger of upheaval in the latter. A number of historians have investigated the radical implications of the “triumph” of popular theatrical forms. Walter Rex, for instance, identifies “the presence of a time bomb” in prerevolutionary critiques of neoclassical tragedy.50 Along similar lines, F. W. J. Hemmings has compared the flourishing fair and boulevard enterprises to the restless lower classes in 1789: “The forains constituted a ‘third estate’ in the theatrical kingdom; and, like the Third Estate as Sieyès saw it, they were nothing to begin with, but destined, as the politician foretold, to become everything.”51 Other standard treatments of opéra comique reinforce this rhetoric by emphasizing the genre’s role in the spread of enlightened ideology and in the “desacralization” of traditional forms of royal representation.52 By emphasizing rustic characters and musical styles, by concretizing the theatrical reforms of the philosophes, and by foregrounding a modern and accessible vision of the regime, lyric comedy presented an idealized alternative to the authoritarian status quo. Philip G. Downs thus places dialogue opera “at the heart of the political and intellectual ferment of the time.”53 And Richard Taruskin argues that the upstart idiom— or, more precisely, the controversies it engendered— “struck the beginnings of a blow from which not only the tragédie lyrique but the absolutist monarchy itself never fully recovered.”54 As Taruskin’s statement implies, another important vein of French theater studies considers not merely the themes contained within dramatic works, but how the acts of discussing and attending the theater became increasingly politicized over the course of the eighteenth century. The querelle des bouffons and its aftershocks have been interpreted in light of the evolving political culture of the late ancien régime. This explosion of musical discourse can be read as evidence of reverberating courtly intrigue,55 of veiled

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political dissent during parliamentary crisis,56 and— most broadly— of the expanding authority of the public sphere and the changing “mechanisms by which opinion was formed and expressed.”57 Furthermore, scholars have moved beyond the domain of print to examine the physical venues where social identities were articulated and judgments developed. James Johnson, for example, has argued that changing patterns of audience behavior precipitated a disintegration in the symbolic image of courtly order once projected within the boxes of the royal theaters. If spectators chose seats for optimum immersion in the spectacle, and not simply as an expression of rank, this meant that the “precise map of social hierarchy . . . had now lost all its focus.”58 Jeffrey Ravel shifts his attention from the subscription loges to the standing places of the pit, or parterre; he posits that the growing status of this heterogeneously populated area of the theater, and the debates over its regulation, provide an apt example of “the limitations of an absolutist political culture ” on the brink of Revolution.59 I do not seek to reject entirely these long-established conceptions of opéra comique and its countercultural import. But I do aim to complicate them, and in particular to rebalance the public, “revolutionary” face of the genre with a consideration of the very prominent manner in which it was integrated into the elite culture of the late ancien régime. It is critical, that is, to distinguish between the theoretical position of French dialogue opera and the pragmatic condition of its spectators and resources. That the art form had a subsidiary aesthetic status does not imply that it suffered from a simplicity of means, attracted a uniformly lower-class audience, or espoused a radical political worldview.60 Even in its formative years at the fairs, opéra comique was far from unsophisticated; in the years that followed the merger, the Comédie-Italienne drew spectators from the highest circles of Parisian and court society, in addition to eminent visitors from abroad. The support of these notable consumers allowed the company to extend the material possibilities of lyric comedy and also influenced the moralistic content of this repertory. While a number of dialogue operas continued to foreground elements of social critique, others furthered the reactionary perspectives of their elite supporters. What the expansion of opéra comique ultimately threatened was not the established social order but, to borrow Thomas Crow’s description of fair culture, “the fit that had existed between a clear, articulated cultural hierarchy and a corresponding social one.”61 Although

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many authors have tied the definitive “coming of age ” of French dialogue opera to the upheaval of 1789, the archival record confirms a sweeping artistic transformation that predated the fall of the Bastille and that was strongly allied to the conservative patronage structures of the Bourbon regime. A more complete understanding of eighteenth-century opéra comique, then, is necessarily Janus-faced, admitting that the genre developed markedly while interacting in complicated ways with the emerging political crisis. If ferment brewed in the parterre of the Comédie-Italienne, Marie Antoinette looked on comfortably from the boxes. If the company’s programming featured the exploits of virtuous peasants, it by no means excluded sympathetic portrayals of the nobility. And if some authors glorified the ideals of Enlightenment, many others, as the Revolution approached, voiced their concern for the fate of the king. An eagerness to read backward from 1789 has obscured the multivalent social and political potential inherent in the opéra comique of the late eighteenth century. Explicating that potential is the primary aim of this study. • • •

The Comedians of the King is organized along both chronological and thematic lines. It presents the history of the Comédie-Italienne from the middle of the eighteenth century through the fall of the monarchy, covering the lead-up to the theatrical merger and its aftermath in the 1760s; the revolution in musical taste precipitated by Marie Antoinette in the 1770s; and, finally, the widespread aristocratic patronage of opéra comique and its material effects on the eve of the Revolution. Every interior chapter after the first combines this historical and institutional framing with analysis of a representative subcategory of lyric comedy, moving from the generically and socially progressive drame, to the queen’s favored operatic parodies and pastoral works, to the expansive, historical comédie héroïque. The book as a whole traces two broad and interrelated narrative arcs. The case studies of the individual chapters show how the political messages of opéra comique became increasingly reactionary as the Revolution approached and as the genre was integrated into the apparatus of Bourbon court spectacle. At the same time, however, they demonstrate how the very nature of the medium (its musical forms, scenic requirements, and dramatic structures) became ever more radical, pushing against the institutional and stylistic limitations that had once been emblematic of the ancien régime.

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Chapter 1 outlines the circumstances that compelled the Bourbon monarchy to elevate opéra comique into an official royal art. I draw upon the rich archives of the Comédie-Italienne to explore the causes of the 1762 merger and to untangle its direct and longer-term consequences for the administration of French lyric theater. This change was, to be sure, a response to localized conditions: the fairground producers of opéra comique had enjoyed a remarkable run in the 1750s, and government ministers wished to mitigate the ensuing competition to the Crown-supported stages of the capital. But the takeover was justified through the broader, protectionist rhetoric of Colbertism, which advocated lavish royal investment in spectacle on both economic and patriotic grounds. It was necessary to harness the output of the forains, officials reasoned, to draw foreign capital to Paris, to consolidate international acclaim for opéra comique, and to affirm the cultural authority of the French abroad, all critical concerns after the military embarrassment of the Seven Years’ War (1756– 1763). This project had mixed results, achieving some its original goals but in the process creating new and unforeseen disruptions to the theatrical status quo. Although dialogue opera increased rapidly in sophistication after 1762, it did so in a manner that challenged both the supremacy of the tragédie lyrique and the legal and stylistic monopolies that shielded it. The suppression of the Opéra-Comique thus demonstrates both the longevity of Colbertian protectionism and the ways this rigid rhetoric had grown out of touch with the flexible demands of the Parisian musical marketplace. The late eighteenth century witnessed not a waning but an apex of Bourbon involvement in cultural politics, but such initiatives no longer yielded readily predictable results. Chapter 2 builds on these institutional premises, exploring how the events of 1762 were reflected in the opéra comique of the immediate postmerger period. The most provocative effect of the theatrical union, I argue, was a reconfiguration of the relationship between social class and musical style— a correspondence, long accepted in France, between the societal position of operatic characters and their expected modes of expression. This tension was especially acute within the subcategory of dialogue opera known as the lyric drame. Inspired by the writings of Denis Diderot, this repertory rejected the farcical plot types of the Parisian fairs, instead prioritizing sympathetic and naturalistic portrayals of middle-class characters in contemporary settings. The emerging sentimental vein of opéra comique answered the philosophes’ calls for theatrical reform, valorizing the deeds of

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ordinary citizens and granting them forms of singing and declamation once reserved for the heroes of the tragic realm. Through analysis of such “forbidden” music in the works of Philidor, Monsigny, and Grétry, I underscore the paradoxes engendered by the newly respectable standing of dialogue opera at the Comédie-Italienne. Composers had been encouraged to elevate the content of their works for the Crown-supported troupe, but their experiments with a more serious musical aesthetic were often stylistically subversive. In the opéra comique of the 1760s, the traditional lyric order was challenged by a progressive hierarchy of character, where even noble “savages” might be rewarded with more dignified tones than aristocrats of lesser virtue. The governmental legitimation of opéra comique had an immediate effect on the style of the genre and the balance of power among Parisian theaters. The greatest impact of the reorganization on the Bourbon court entertainments came slightly later, coupled with Marie Antoinette’s introduction at Versailles in 1770. The Habsburg princess expressed strong opinions about music from the moment of her arrival on French soil; by the time of her accession as queen, she had emerged as one of the nation’s most powerful operatic patrons since the reign of the roi soleil. In the domain of serious opera, the queen’s interventions have been extensively documented. It was her support of an updated corpus of tragédies lyriques that instigated the Gluckian “revolution” at the Opéra, overturning the hegemony of Lully’s works within its repertory. Chapter 3, however, offers a wider, archivally based assessment of the queen’s influence, integrating both the ComédieItalienne and the opéras comiques it presented at Versailles and Fontainebleau into this well-known narrative of musical modernization. The records of the menus plaisirs suggest that changes in court programming were even more significant than those taking hold in the theaters of the French capital. From the 1770s onward, these seasons of ceremonial entertainment were dominated by the upstart genre of opéra comique— which was made increasingly extravagant to fit its new royal context. An examination of two types of lyric comedy favored by Marie Antoinette (translations of Italian opera buffa and satires of tragédie lyrique) demonstrates that the Comédie-Italienne was an active contributor to contemporaneous stylistic querelles, and that the company markedly expanded its traditional terrain for its productions at Versailles. As dialogue opera evolved to match the

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conventions of royal display, it placed a strain on the engrained systems of artistic privilège— evidence of a growing rift between the modern musical taste of the monarchy and its aging bureaucracy of theatrical administration. Chapter 4 delves further into the patronage projects of Marie Antoinette, addressing the pastoral opéras comiques that she presented and promoted in the late 1770s and early 1780s. During this period the queen lavished attention on her famed faux-rustic retreat, the Château du Petit Trianon. Here Marie Antoinette stylishly (and controversially) reappropriated the architecture, fashions, and mannerisms of the French countryside; she also began to perform lyric comedies on country themes with her closest allies at Versailles, a group known to posterity as the troupe des seigneurs. Taking the repertory of the troupe des seigneurs as a starting point, I show how the preferences of the queen resonated between court and capital, generating problems for her own reputation and for Bourbon ceremonial rhetoric, more broadly. The small-scale opéras comiques performed by Marie Antoinette and her associates were condemned not merely for their subversive themes, but also for the way that they broke with the long-standing expectation of monarchical accessibility; these productions garnered criticism, in parallel with the Petit Trianon project as a whole, because they were exclusive and insular, momentarily removing the mechanisms of court entertainment from public view. Even as the activities of the troupe des seigneurs came under fire for their secrecy, however, they entered into dialogue with spectacles offered for wider consumption at Versailles and at the Comédie-Italienne in Paris. Counterbalancing the theatricals of the troupe des seigneurs was a corpus of extravagant “public” pastorals, which served to neutralize the negative publicity elicited by Marie Antoinette’s withdrawal into the private realm. This latter repertory emphasized aristocratic engagement with the plight of the third estate, depicting the mutual devotion of charitable seigneurs and the peasants they supported. Despite their sympathetic portrayals of the nobility, such works were themselves not without controversy, raising questions about the monarchy’s actual investment in (or rather, detachment from) the lives of its common subjects. Whereas chapters 3 and 4 center on the real-world actions of the queen, chapter 5 considers the staged representation of the king. It focuses in particular on a new category of dialogue opera solidified in the 1780s— a body of expansive historical works dedicated to the allegorical celebration of mon-

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archy and described by the Comédie-Italienne as “heroic” comedies. Analysis of this repertory complicates two prominent components of the musical historiography of the French Revolution: the assumed correlation between artistic and political rupture in 1789, and the conventional link between the countercultural orientation of opéra comique and its revolutionary-era success. The first section of the chapter charts the material conditions that facilitated the development of the comédie héroïque, highlighting the staging capacities of a new venue for the Comédie-Italienne, the Salle Favart, which opened in 1783. The records of the theater confirm that the spectacular scenographic and choral effects associated with the turbulent 1790s were first made possible in this hall and were therefore strongly dependent on the support of Crown and aristocracy. The second half of the chapter delves more deeply into the defining features of heroic comedy, using as a case study Sargines (1788), by Dalayrac and Jacques-Marie Boutet (known as Monvel). A medieval epic detailing the exploits of the French king Philip Augustus, the opera pairs a reactionary political message with a highly progressive musical and dramatic idiom, serving as a reminder that conservative patronage might support daring experimentation within the confines of the stage. The epilogue to this book expands beyond the pragmatics of production to consider a pressing issue of reception. Given the irrefutable evidence of association between the Bourbon monarchy and opéra comique during the early decades of its development, when and why did the genre acquire its now commonplace reputation as a “people’s” art? To explain this inconsistency, I address two bodies of evidence from the nineteenth century: the earliest scholarly histories of French dialogue opera and a series of revivals of ancien régime works stretching from the Empire through the Third Republic. Ultimately, I contend that the reframing of the genre from monarchical to national was a widespread and politicized means of grappling with the Bourbon legacy— and a quirk of historiography that has influenced the reception of opéra comique to the present day.

C hapter One

Opéra Comique and the Legacy of Colbert During the final three decades of the ancien régime, the tasks of administering the French royal spectacles were concentrated in the hands of a beleaguered government official named Denis-Pierre-Jean Papillon de la Ferté. Papillon de la Ferté was the acting supervisor, or intendant, of the menus plaisirs, the bureaucracy that organized the ceremonial apparatus of the state— processions, religious festivities, weddings, funerals, coronations, music, dramatic entertainment, and the like.1 A significant portion of Papillon de la Ferté ’s budget, and certainly the largest number of his headaches, was related to his responsibilities in the theater. The intendant acted as an intermediary between the Crown-sponsored troupes and the court. He arranged the logistics and programming for the seasonal visits of the Opéra, Comédie-Française, and Comédie-Italienne to Versailles and Fontainebleau; he managed the squabbles that emerged between these companies and their competitors; and he interceded in their internal affairs, ensuring that they maintained artistic and moral standards befitting the Bourbon regime.2 In the administrative philosophy of Papillon de la Ferté, no figure loomed larger than the architect of the intricate and politically charged regulatory system in which he now worked: Jean-Baptiste Colbert. When vexed by the actors and theaters in his command, the intendant looked back to the interventionist doctrine of his predecessor, developed in the golden age of the roi soleil. The arts— and opera above all— were

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indispensable tools for advancing the interests of the king. In consequence they were to be supported lavishly, but controlled stringently.3 Papillon de la Ferté drew closely on these principles in the winter of 1761– 1762, as France’s three privileged theaters, and their partisans at court and in the capital, became embroiled in disputes over the Opéra-Comique. The popularity of the fair players was viewed with suspicion by the directors of the Crown-sanctioned stages. In response, the intendant composed a series of memoranda justifying the protection of these royal troupes via the suppression of the forains.4 Papillon de la Ferté ’s writings on this topic, addressed in detail below, are threaded through with the lofty rhetoric of Colbertism. As he later recalled, he had sought “to demonstrate the necessity of supporting good spectacles, not only for the honor of the nation and the amusement of the public but in continual relation to the political views of the state.”5 Given the paramount political value he saw in French theater, the intendant was aggrieved when his dispatches received a nonplussed reaction from his overseers, four noblemen known as the premiers gentilshommes de la Chambre du roi. While he had employed “all of [his] expertise ” in preparing them, Papillon de la Ferté noted, “the documents were not entirely to the liking of M. le maréchal, who found that I took the affair too seriously.”6 For the contemporary historian of the ancien régime, it is surprising to find a representative of the Bourbon government accused of approaching the theater too seriously. And, indeed, these statements reveal an intriguing ambivalence at the heart of official attitudes toward opéra comique and its regulation. As it happened, the premiers gentilshommes were strongly in favor of an institutional reorganization to mitigate the threat of the Parisian fairs. Their own reasoning, however, was rather more pragmatic than that of the intendant: lyric comedy was a budding favorite of the court, and consolidating the rights to perform the genre within the royally sanctioned Comédie-Italienne would support its refinement and make it easier for the monarch to enjoy without impropriety.7 Authorities agreed that something had to be done about the flourishing fair entertainments, but set forth two competing arguments for the shift— one steeped in the august discourse of Colbert, the other based on the practical considerations of musical taste. The affair of the Opéra-Comique, then, demonstrated both the longevity of Bourbon theatrical protectionism and the ways that the execution of such policies had become muddied by the midpoint of the century of Lumières.

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This tension— between a symbolic and politicized legacy of artistic administration and the messier reality of its implementation— would be repeatedly invoked as dialogue opera moved away from its fairground roots. This chapter draws upon new work in the archives of the ComédieItalienne and the menus plaisirs to reconstruct the “thick” context of the governmental takeover of the Opéra-Comique. I examine the musical and political background of the merger and unravel its repercussions— both short and longer term, intended and unintended. The institutional changes of the 1760s, I argue, did achieve several of the aims of Papillon de la Ferté and the premiers gentilshommes. As opéra comique rose in sophistication and status, it safeguarded the fortunes of the Comédie-Italienne in Paris, while enabling the court to update and diversify its programming at Versailles and Fontainebleau. And yet, the intervention would also introduce complications into the wider infrastructure of Bourbon-supported spectacle— these generated by the remarkable creative and commercial success of the blended troupe. While the reorganization provided a clear benefit to the ComédieItalienne, it would prove challenging to the prospects of the Opéra, transferring the focus of musical and dramatic innovation away from the nation’s most prestigious lyric stage. Rather than eliminating competition against the privileged companies, the events of 1762 heightened the opposition between them, creating an alternative site where French opera might be developed and refined. Moreover, if new channels of patronage burnished the features of opéra comique for royal consumption, the ways that the genre transformed were not immune to political critique. As dialogue opera was expanded and “ennobled,” going forward, it would increasingly strain both the spirit and the letter of the expectations that governed it, blurring the boundaries between comedy and tragedy, high and low culture, and French and Italian lyric styles. The legitimation of opéra comique may have been justified through the political ideals of Colbert, but it also— somewhat counterintuitively— mounted a challenge to the artistic regulatory system that the minister had set in place. In investigating the implementation and consequences of the 1762 merger, this chapter offers, on one level, an introduction to the history of the Opéra-Comique and the Comédie-Italienne, examining the impact of royal mediation on the evolution of these institutions. More broadly, it underscores the importance of this episode in the configuration of the French

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theatrical landscape and in untangling the complex and enduring legacy of Colbert. If the strongest influence of dramatic Colbertism has often been relegated to the seventeenth century, the affair of the Opéra-Comique demonstrates that the Bourbon regime remained powerfully invested in the administration of its spectacles throughout the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. As the Revolution approached, it was not the monarchy’s interest in theater that waned, but the efficacy with which its venerable cultural politics interacted with modern paradigms of musical production and taste. The government could set artistic policy in motion, but the authors of opéra comique were not easily corralled, for they were equally accountable to the court and to the demands of a rapidly evolving musical public.

Comic Theater and the Querelle des Bouffons The origins of the merger can be traced back at least a decade, to the early 1750s. This period witnessed a succession of events pivotal to the modernization of French lyric theater— a multifaceted infusion into court and capital of the latest currents of musical comedy. In 1752 the Opéra-Comique reopened after a six-year hiatus, inaugurating a new hall at the Foire SaintLaurent under the directorship of the entrepreneurial Jean Monnet.8 That same year saw the premiere of Rousseau’s Le devin du village at Fontainebleau and the advent of the Italian buffa players of Bambini at the Opéra in Paris. The contributions of Bambini’s troupe are well-known for the critical controversy they engendered, pitting advocates of imported ultramontane idioms (Rousseau foremost among them) against defenders of the grandly French tragédie lyrique. But if the querelle des bouffons centered on the fate of the tragic tradition at the Opéra, the greatest practical impact of the new cosmopolitan repertory was felt in the comic realm. Prior to mid-century, opéra comique had yet to assume its stabilized, mature form: the output of the early fair theaters encompassed a wide variety of works— including parodies of tragic opera, farces, and moral and rustic comedies— united by a general sense of gaiety and by the incorporation of retexted vaudevilles.9 The productions of the bouffons provided a powerful stimulus to French dialogue opera, solidifying an emerging vogue for “ariettes,” or newly composed numbers in an Italianate mold.10 Even before Bambini’s company left Paris, the artists of the Opéra-Comique were primed to fill

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the void, attracting crowds to the fairs with works that reinterpreted and gallicized the novelties of the foreign spectacle. David Charlton has extensively discussed the culture of theatrical innovation in 1750s Paris, so I will provide only an overview of the OpéraComique’s experiments here.11 Shortly after the arrival of the bouffons, the fair players began to mount French adaptations of the intermezzi staged at the Opéra. In 1754, for example, Louis Anseaume prepared versions of Vincenzo Ciampi and Carlo Goldoni’s Bertoldo in corte (as Bertholde à la ville) and Giuseppe Sellitto’s Il cinese rimpatriato (as Le chinois poli en France).12 These comedies borrowed the general outlines of their models but hewed to certain conventions of the fairs; they contain arias from their Italian sources alongside dozens of popular vaudevilles.13 More significant than these reworkings of existing intermezzi were opéras comiques that foregrounded original, mock-Italian music. A watershed in this regard was Antoine Dauvergne and Jean-Joseph Vadé’s Les troqueurs, which premiered at the Opéra-Comique at the height of the querelle, in the summer of 1753. While the plot of the opera is drawn from a quintessentially French subject, the tales (contes) of Jean de La Fontaine, its score bears a clear debt to the sound world of the Neapolitan composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. The overture is a three-movement sinfonia and the orchestration typically Italianate, simple in texture and dominated by the strings. Ariettes are generally in short da capo forms, with the same clear-cut harmonies, rhythmic vitality, and four-measure phrase structures that we hear in La serva padrona.14 In commissioning this work, Monnet wished to demonstrate that French musicians might embrace and improve upon recent trends in Italian comic opera. The impresario recounted in his memoirs that he falsely marketed Les troqueurs as the invention of a foreign composer to prove this very point to the supporters of the bouffons.15 The wildly popular Les troqueurs established the primary features of “modern” opéra comique. By the end of the decade, the fair theater had emerged as the showcase for a younger generation of artists building upon Dauvergne’s template. Philidor, a descendant of court musicians and a student of André Campra, wrote a string of hits that integrated new, ultramontane ariettes (what Charles Burney would describe as an “Italian plunder”)16 within the structures of the French comic tradition: Blaise le savetier (1759), Le soldat magicien (1760), and Le maréchal ferrant (1761).17 He shared the

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spotlight with the financier-turned-composer Monsigny, whose career was launched with several immediate and ultimately enduring repertory staples, including Le maître en droit (1760, after the ballad opera The Devil to Pay) and On ne s’avise jamais de tout (1761, after La Fontaine).18 Philidor and Monsigny benefited from their collaborations with a gifted cohort of librettists: associated with the Opéra-Comique during this period were well-regarded veterans (C. S. Favart) as well as notable newcomers (Anseaume, AntoineFrançois Quétant, and Michel-Jean Sedaine). These authors provided the foundation for opéra comique’s future expansion by exploring an updated array of plot types— ranging from buffa-inspired domestic intrigues to topical social satire— and by penning aesthetic justifications for a lyric form that critics had historically treated with some skepticism. Sedaine’s prefaces supplied the “pretexts for a new musical drama,”19 defending the kinds of registral mixture and “natural” expression that would soon be identified as the progressive hallmarks of the genre. Taken together, these creative efforts attracted a great deal of attention to the once-lowly Opéra-Comique. As the Mercure de France reported at the end of the winter fair in 1761: “The care and intelligence displayed so consistently by the Directors of this theater have garnered the enthusiastic support of the Public; during this fair season the crowds descended upon [the Opéra-Comique] in great numbers and without interruption.”20 Favart confirmed this account in his correspondence with Giacomo Durazzo, director of the imperial theaters in Vienna.21 The librettist noted that the forains “had such a brilliant triumph at the last fair that it awakened feelings of jealousy in all of the other spectacles.”22 In light of this critical and boxoffice success, the Crown-supported institutions began to conspire against their upstart challenger. The Comédie-Française, as it had on a number of previous occasions, argued for a total suppression of the fairground troupe. The administration of the Opéra took a similarly aggressive stance, petitioning the government to incorporate the productions of the OpéraComique into its own repertory.23 No faction had more to lose from the rise of the Opéra-Comique than the Comédie-Italienne. While the Italian players had long specialized in improvised spoken comedy, they had made particular efforts to profit from Paris’s opera buffa craze, setting themselves into competition with the energetic forains. In the wake of the bouffons’ departure, the royal company

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earned accolades for its arrangements of established Italian repertory. In 1754 Pierre Baurans made an important contribution to the stylistic disputes with La servante maîtresse, a French version of La serva padrona; Favart also occasionally lent his talents to the Comédie-Italienne, producing both translations (La bohémienne, after Rinaldo di Capua’s La zingara, in 1755) and a perennially popular pasticcio, Ninette à la cour.24 The impact of these initiatives should not be underestimated: the intermezzi adapted by Baurans and Favart would maintain a robust presence on French stages for the duration of the ancien régime. Still, the output of the Comédie-Italienne often suffered in comparison with that of the fair theater, especially when it came to the most fashionable form of cosmopolitan experimentation, newly composed opéra comique.25 “This company languishes without new works,” bemoaned the critic of the Mercure de France in July of 1759, a complaint he repeated throughout the summer and into the following fall.26 Alarmed by the growing disparity between the two comedic troupes, the premiers gentilshommes enlisted Papillon de la Ferté to bolster the fortunes of the Comédie-Italienne. The intendant approved several notable hires to support the “musicalization” of the Crown institution, including the Italian soprano Maria Anna Piccinelli, the playwright Goldoni, and the composer Duni, who had honed his craft at the Bourbon court of Parma.27 The theater was galvanized by these engagements but nonetheless entered the 1760s in serious financial difficulty. Its operating expenses were significant, and in recent seasons it had accrued several hundred thousand livres in debts.28 The comédiens’ receipts tended to plummet during the months the fairs were in session, and these actors were well aware of the cause.29 “We fear,” reads a glum note in one ledger book, “that the Opéra-Comique is doing us a great harm.”30 In the strictly ordered world of French theaters, such an embarrassment would not be long tolerated. By the middle of 1761 government officials were debating a more significant intervention to harness and exploit the innovations of the ascendant forains.

Theater and the Nation On the surface, a restructuring of the Opéra-Comique would seem a practical reaction to a relatively circumscribed problem: government action was

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necessary because the prosperity of the forains came at the expense of the nation’s three privileged stages in general and the Comédie-Italienne in particular. What is striking about Papillon de la Ferté ’s accounts of the situation, however, is that they portray the threat of the fair players in exaggeratedly urgent terms. These memoranda describe the regulation of the Opéra-Comique not as a simple response to theatrical competition but as a larger reinvestment in the economic and political utility of the monarchy’s spectacles. The intendant’s writings seem to reflect a wholesale revival of dramatic Colbertism, or the incorporation of theater into fiscal and foreign policy, as had been so strongly advocated at the Opéra’s founding by the controller-general of Louis XIV. At the heart of Colbert’s philosophy of theatrical administration was the mercantilist association of economic and cultural development. Most basically, Colbert believed that global monetary systems possessed a fixed amount of capital and that, as a result, a nation enhanced its status by drawing resources away from its rivals. These principles had far-reaching implications, undergirding the minister’s colonialist foreign policy as well as dictating the management of industry within the metropole. In the latter case, for example, Colbert had famously encouraged the internal manufacture of goods fabricated abroad while aggressively protecting existing market strengths.31 To foster the high standards necessary for self-sufficiency, Colbert relied upon stringent oversight and regulation.32 These same values he applied to artistic production, establishing the royal academies to make “France so superior in the arts that other countries would eventually send their artists to study French models.”33 As one early plea for support of the Opéra emphasized, the institution was designed to “draw foreigners to France . . . these foreigners came to Paris, they continue to come to Paris, and they sometimes remain for the entire year, spending considerable amounts of money, which is no doubt profitable for the [city’s] economy and by extension for that of the State.”34 Put another way, France was to be a net exporter of culture, augmenting both its international reputation and its material wealth. The critical role that opera occupied in the nation’s political economy justified the regime’s heavy-handed approach to its governance. Papillon de la Ferté ’s memoranda from the early 1760s are littered with allusions to such venerable bureaucratic ideals; it was a political imperative to reconfirm the hierarchy of French theaters as “Colbert proposed it to

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Louis XIV.”35 Central to the intendant’s outlook was the conviction that the Crown troupes were drivers of fiscal growth. In a “Mémoire pour le soutien des spectacles” from the winter of 1761– 1762, he asserted that “the interests of the king are very much tied up in [the affair of the Opéra-Comique],” echoing traditional justifications for the protection of the Opéra. “Each year the spectacles attract a great number of foreigners to the capital who come to draw upon our good taste and bring about a kind of circulation useful for the state.”36 Papillon de la Ferté surmised, in a burst of wild optimism, that the privileged stages might contribute millions of livres to the royal purse; the economic potential of the theater would only be realized, however, if the most rigorous of benchmarks were enforced. For artists and consumers of other nations to be enticed by French dramatic forms, it was essential to “maintain [the privileged spectacles] in their position as the greatest institutions in all the world.”37 Papillon de la Ferté thus framed a takeover of the Opéra-Comique as a means of assuring the preeminence of the Crown-supported companies and, in turn, the artistic and financial prosperity of the state. In the intendant’s alarmist view, the current prominence of the forains worked against both facets of this ideological agenda. The dialogue operas performed at the fairs, he argued, were harmful to the general populace, propagating licentious behavior and moral decay. They also exerted a pernicious influence on “proper” playwrights, who were all too easily corrupted by the style of the fairground spectacles.38 In essence, the rampant popularity of opéra comique had overturned the finely tuned theatrical equilibrium of the capital: The near-total desertion of the [Opéra], as well as the utter failure of all efforts made to recall its public, should prove that it has been vanquished by bad taste. The music of its most striking works has lost its appeal; indeed, many partisans of the Opéra-Comique would find it presumptuous if Rameau dared to compare himself to the author [Monsigny] of Le maître en droit. The workshop of the blacksmith [in Philidor’s Le maréchal ferrant] makes a grander impression than the palace of Armide or the temple of the sun.39 Even more troubling than these internal effects was the danger of opéra comique to the international standing of French theater. As Papillon de la

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Ferté ominously concluded, “Foreigners whom we once mastered will become our own models, and we risk a descent into savagery if we do not take it upon ourselves very seriously to correct this bad taste through the sacrifice of a theater that is entirely without merit.”40 The royal companies could hardly maintain their wider prestige if they were threatened within the walls of Paris. Allowing the Opéra-Comique to flourish would risk France’s sovereignty as the tastemaker of Europe— a grievous injury in a political order based on cultural mercantilism. These official descriptions of the Opéra-Comique are so hyperbolic in tone, and so incongruent with the subsequent reception history of the forains, that they present the modern interpreter with some difficulty. The scale of Papillon de la Ferté’s anxieties can be partially explained by the historical context in which he wrote: that of the calamitous conclusion of the Seven Years’ War.41 The war years witnessed a marked intensification of musical and dramatic oversight from the Bourbon regime; although the nation faced a loss of geopolitical influence among European powers, it was not too late to compensate as the region’s artistic leader, exporting its language, literature, and drama throughout l’Europe français. (Or, as Voltaire sarcastically reflected after France’s disastrous losses to the British at the Siege of Pondicherry, “We must love the theater, for it is the only glory we have left.”)42 In a meticulous documentary study, Rahul Markovits confirms that the most significant international diffusion of Gallic repertory, both spoken comédie and opéra comique, coincided with this period of military weakness. Between the late 1740s and the 1760s, the presence of French actors abroad reached its eighteenth-century peak, with permanent companies installed in seventeen foreign cities and dozens more itinerant troupes.43 Markovits suggests that this dramatic imperialism did not promote a coherent ideology beyond French borders: local governments employed French players and adapted imported material to suit their own political and pragmatic ends.44 But while it was difficult to control the ways that works were received far from Versailles, the administrators of the menus plaisirs remained deeply concerned with the symbolic value of this corpus and with the French reputation for cultural achievement writ large. Their reforms during this period included the standardization of roles and payment schemes within the Musique du Roi at Versailles, new governing statutes for the Comédie-Française, a stricter distribution

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of theatrical responsibilities among the premiers gentilshommes, and a more rigorous policing of actors as they traveled outside of the capital.45 Such was the atmosphere of regulation that by February of 1760 the Correspondance littéraire was accusing the government of holding the Crown-supported performers in a tyrannical grip, instituting a reign of “despotism amidst our spectacles.”46 The intendant’s response to the Opéra-Comique was therefore not entirely an aberration; rather, these memoranda reflected a network of serious concerns regarding the shape of the nation’s artistic patrimony. At the same time, however, it is clear that Papillon de la Ferté ’s arguments should be approached with caution, for his extreme rhetoric belies a healthy dose of ambivalence and hypocrisy. Ultimately, the minister’s writings are less revealing of the forains’ actual influence than of the remarkable persistence of Colbertian ideals and the deepening rift between “official” cultural policy and the exigencies of the expanding musical marketplace. As the intendant outlined the perils of dialogue opera to the French theatrical aesthetic, he remained well aware of the genre’s appeal to powerful consumers, both at home and abroad. After all, not even the court establishment, from the premiers gentilshommes to the monarch, could resist the charms of the latest opéras comiques. Following the favorable reception of Le devin du village in 1752, several other lyric comedies had been produced at Versailles and Fontainebleau. The Comédie-Italienne presented the vaudeville parodies Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne (1753) and Raton et Rosette (1754), while the Opéra supplied La coquette trompée (1753), a comédie en musique from the pens of Dauvergne and Favart. The autumn of 1761 saw an even more exceptional piece of programming, when two works from the fairs— Le maréchal ferrant and On ne s’avise jamais de tout— were performed before Louis XV.47 Mindful of the pull of this modern repertory, Papillon de la Ferté and his superiors came to a pragmatic compromise: not a total elimination of the fair company, but a merger between these artists and those of the struggling Comédie-Italienne. The minister identified several benefits in a new official status for the forains. Incorporating dialogue opera into the roster of Crown entertainments would stabilize the finances of the Italian theater while introducing pleasing variety into the schedule at Versailles. It would also lighten the burden on the Comédie-Française and the Opéra, whose actors were often stretched thin as they moved between capital and court to entertain the king.48 Most of all, Papillon de la Ferté

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and the premiers gentilshommes aimed to exert a greater influence over opéra comique as it continued its upward rise; the genre might, they hoped, be “purified of all that is dangerous to the spirit and the heart” and adapted for the needs of a more “dignified” type of spectator.49 To the official economic and political rationales for the reorganization of the Opéra-Comique, we thus add a third critical factor: that of evolving musical taste. In the end, court factions were enamored of the fair repertory, and so the menus plaisirs composed an elaborate theoretical apparatus to justify its takeover. The events of 1762— and the rich paper trail that documents them— attest to the tensions present within the bureaucracy of privilège by the middle decades of the eighteenth century. In the regulation of opéra comique, the government invoked the protectionist discourse of Colbert while making concessions to cosmopolitan fashion; and it exploited the progressive advances of Paris to suit the entrenched ceremonial needs of Versailles. The final form of the merger, as well as its ongoing institutional and aesthetic repercussions, reflected these competing impulses. From this point onward, the development of opéra comique would stand poised between the prerogatives of court tradition and public-driven innovation— between mercantilist cultural politics and lyric and dramatic pleasure.

La Nouvelle Troupe Papillon de la Ferté and the premiers gentilshommes moved quickly to finalize the merger, confirming an agreement by the end of January 1762. The Comédie-Italienne would take over the legal contract between the OpéraComique and the Opéra, acquiring the sets, costumes, and repertory of the forains in the process.50 The five best actors from the fairs were incorporated into the royal theater, while the rest of the group was dispersed.51 The newly enlarged company had a truly multifaceted and binational identity,52 bringing together an “all-star” contingent of privileged and popular, Italian and French, and speaking and singing artists. While partisans of the OpéraComique expressed anger at the demise of their preferred spectacle,53 the performances of the reorganized Crown troupe were met with great enthusiasm in Paris.54 As the Correspondance littéraire reported, the first weeks of combined programming drew “prodigious crowds” to the Comédie-

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Italienne; these productions displayed such “truthfulness” and “finesse ” that they positioned the institution among “the best . . . in all of France.”55 The merger achieved several of its initial goals in short order. To start, the finances of the Comédie-Italienne improved dramatically with the acquisition of the fair actors and their repertory. By the end of the 1763 season its receipts had more than doubled from their lowest point in the late 1750s;56 by the end of the 1764 season it had begun to construct lucrative subscription boxes, or petites loges, in the Hôtel de Bourgogne to accommodate a burgeoning crowd of well-heeled fans.57 Opéra comique was the theater’s largest draw by a considerable margin, and the fiscal boon proved lasting: the company would chart a clear (if occasionally uneven) path of growth through the end of the ancien régime.58 Moreover, as the premiers gentilshommes had desired, the legitimation of the forains facilitated the incorporation of dialogue opera into the ceremonial programming of the regime. The first Fontainebleau season after the restructuring, spanning October and November of 1762, featured an impressive total of eight lyric works from the expanded Comédie-Italienne against only one from the repertory of the Opéra— a single entrée from Les festes de Paphos (1758), a ballet héroïque by Jean-Joseph de Mondonville.59 By the 1770s, and especially after the arrival of Marie Antoinette, opéra comique would consistently dominate the schedule of lyric theater at court, overturning the conventional predominance of tragédie lyrique within this context. The merger’s effect on theatrical finances and court programming were straightforward enough to measure. Less immediately quantifiable was the impact of the takeover on the themes and tone of opéra comique. How much power could the government actually leverage to safeguard the moral prospects of the privileged stage? Papillon de la Ferté ’s writings are emphatic in the conviction that the reorganization should contain the “dangers” of the forains, and he floated several ideas on how this project might be realized. The minister suggested, for example, that the older works of the fairs be maintained for a few months and then forcibly removed from rotation or restricted to the slow summer season. This brief interlude, he reasoned, would temper the disgruntlement of the Opéra-Comique’s supporters as they became accustomed to the new ensemble and more refined productions of the royal troupe.60 Later, the intendant proposed that the menus plaisirs

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fund a prize for comic authors in order to encourage the creation of more sophisticated output at the Comédie-Italienne.61 It does seem that the performers, librettists, and composers of opéra comique felt pressure to reform the less genteel aspects of the popular company for their new Crown-sanctioned venue. Sedaine’s memoirs describe that the members of the two troupes had different styles and standards of acting that had to be regularized in the years around the merger. An opera like Le jardinier et son seigneur (1761), a collaboration with Philidor for the Foire Saint-Germain, achieved a success at the fairs that “it had never had and could never have at the Italian theater,” for “the dignity of the [royal] actresses prevented them from doing justice ” to roles incorporating slapstick or coarse physical comedy.62 Favart’s correspondence reveals, along similar lines, that he took the recently elevated status of dialogue opera into account in librettos he wrote for the 1762 season. A farce once destined for the forains, for instance, was deemed less appropriate for the ComédieItalienne. “I was obliged to denature this folly,” Favart recalled, “to adapt it for the more noble theater.”63 Ultimately, though, it was both regulatory and financial concerns that impacted the direction of the company’s repertory. If the Comédie-Italienne did move away from old-fashioned vaudeville comedy in the 1760s, this was largely because the corpus had lost its clout at the box office. The ariette-based pieces of the shuttered Opéra-Comique were still profitable and therefore remained prominent within the rotation of performances, despite Papillon de la Ferté ’s grandstanding to the contrary. The fate of the forains’ hall at the Saint-Laurent fairgrounds offers an apt metaphor for the broader contradictions underlying the “suppression” of their works. The intendant mandated that the theater of the popular actors be demolished after their disbanding, to prevent any other “illicit” spectacle from filling the gap.64 In fact, however, he had the edifice deconstructed and reassembled at the Parisian headquarters of the menus plaisirs for the rehearsal of court performances:65 far from having been removed, it had merely been reappropriated for royal use. The musical innovations of the fairs faced a similar destiny— not actually diminished but amplified, laying the groundwork for opéra comique’s aristocratically fueled expansion in the years that followed. The takeover of the forains thus stabilized the finances of the Comédie-

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Italienne while providing a vital injection of fresh ideas into its repertory. However, the change was not uniformly positive for the theater’s existing artists: as the fair players and their output won prominence within their new venue, the established character of the institution was thrown into flux. While the works staged by the blended troupe presented a vibrant image of musical and dramatic hybridity, the situation behind the scenes was rife with conflict. The organizational structure of the Comédie-Italienne, as a société rather than a directorship, tended to heighten internal competition between French and Italian, and between speaking and singing performers. Each actor in the company was assigned a “share ” (or part thereof ) that dictated his or her say in governance and portion of yearly profit. Any expansion of the troupe was a threat to existing constituents because it diluted the value of a single stake; the equitable division of receipts, in turn, was a source of resentment for stars who felt that they pulled more than their own weight. Both of these tensions were exacerbated with the sudden and tremendous success of the promoted forains. Original members of the company protested to the menus plaisirs that they were no longer a “unified family” but had been divided into factions of jealous rivals.66 In the decade after the merger, the actors responsible for nonmusical works vehemently defended their institution’s heritage in Italian commedia dell’arte and French comédie and consistently downplayed to their superiors the contributions of their lyric colleagues. The company’s own financial records, though, radically contradict such accounts of the relative popularity of its offerings. Evenings of opéra comique at the Comédie-Italienne generally outsold nonoperatic programs four or five times over.67 Boosting the esteem of spoken works at the theater— and managing the growing disparities and jealousies between its sparring artists— became a cause of protracted stress for Papillon de la Ferté and the premiers gentilshommes. In 1769 these officials removed French-language plays from the troupe’s repertory, hoping a more focused concentration of resources would at least sustain the prospects of the beleaguered commedia dell’arte players. When this change proved ineffective, the government reversed course, forcing the Italian contingent into retirement in 1779 and reinstating a handful of French speaking actors in their place.68 What remained constant amid these reshufflings was the united power of dialogue opera and its performers at the Comédie-Italienne. As

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the marginalized groups within the société complained, the artists of opéra comique had essentially mounted a coup, insisting that the majority of the company’s resources be devoted to their own genre: “The so-called lyric actors of the Comédie-Italienne chased the Italian players— the old masters of the house— from their theater under the pretext of wanting to establish French comedy there. They are now ready to force out the French actors as well, leaving them with sole control of the terrain.”69 We might say, then, that the aggressive “protection” of the Italian theater in 1762 was too successful: what began as an annexation of the OpéraComique ended as a takeover from within of the Comédie-Italienne, with the former forains soon reigning as “masters and despots” of the royal spectacle.70 The new internal dynamics of the Comédie-Italienne also fundamentally shifted this company’s relationship with the other privileged theaters of the capital. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Italian troupe had occupied a particular niche among Parisian and court entertainments: neither the Opéra nor the Comédie-Française routinely presented the lighter improvised fare of the commedia dell’arte. After the merger, by contrast, the Comédie-Italienne came to rival these preeminent institutions. With the mandated retirement of the Italian players in the 1770s, some observers speculated that the Comédie-Italienne might develop into a second Comédie-Française, recommitting itself to the legacy of French playwrights such as Marivaux. In its own discussions, the company positioned itself as a legitimate alternative to the Opéra, contemplating a rebranding as the nation’s “Theâtre Comico-Lyrique.”71 Thus, as the reorganization launched a period of extraordinary commercial and creative growth at the Comédie-Italienne, it simultaneously brought to light incongruities in the bureaucratic system that underpinned it. In theory, the Colbertist approach to cultural administration was grounded in specialization over diversity and monopolistic regulation over free-market competition. As officials described it, a theater achieved its optimal influence over the “morals of a well-policed state ” by being “tightly constrained within its proper limits . . . and thereby perfecting with ardor the genre that most essentially defines it.”72 In the affair of the Opéra-Comique, however, government intervention produced the opposite of this intended result. In the final years of the ancien régime, the offerings of the Comédie-Italienne were increasingly set in dialogue with those of the nation’s most prestigious lyric stage.

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New Rivalries Vigorous competition between the Comédie-Italienne and the Opéra— and the ensuing movement of composers, librettists, and aesthetic ideas between these institutions— would prove vital to the modernization of the repertories of both. In that sense, the merger was of unquestionable benefit to the musical and dramatic development of French opera. (Exactly how this competition played out between the two Crown-sponsored theaters will be explored in detail in the next chapters of this book.) Yet for the administrators of the more illustrious company, the immediate outlook was not optimistic. François Rebel and François Francoeur, directors of the Opéra in the 1750s and 1760s, viewed the alliance of the forains and the Italian troupe with considerable trepidation, and not without reason: the merger would transform the producers of opéra comique from occasional nuisance to persistent and substantial threat. If Papillon de la Ferté ’s grandly Colbertist rhetoric had overstated the moral dangers of opéra comique, it also significantly misrepresented the interests of the Opéra in the theatrical affair. The intendant was adamant that curtailing the Opéra-Comique was a benefit to each of France’s Crown-sponsored theaters. It is true that Rebel and Francoeur had been concerned with the popularity of the forains. They were even more alarmed, however, by the potential for collaboration between the capital’s two purveyors of dialogue opera. When the Opéra had last renewed its contract with the fair players in 1758, it had aimed explicitly at suppressing the commingling of Italian and French strands of lyric comedy. This legal agreement was designed “to prevent, on the one hand, the merger of the Comédie-Italienne and the Opéra-Comique and, on the other, to prevent the Opéra-Comique from introducing any intermezzi or Italian operas” into its repertory.73 Rebel and Francoeur’s position on this matter had not changed by the early 1760s. As the terms of the restructuring were being negotiated, the municipal government of Paris— which then bore financial liability for the tragic stage— pleaded vehemently with the menus plaisirs to reconsider its intended plan.74 Ultimately, the merger put into effect two outcomes that the Opéra administration deeply feared: the strengthening of institutional support for opéra comique and the consolidation of the genre’s leading artists under royal protection.

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The Opéra was particularly sensitive to competition from the reorganized Comédie-Italienne, for the legitimation of opéra comique coincided with a period of relative stagnation at the tragic company; the institution struggled to find its creative bearings between Rameau’s retirement in 1760 and the arrival of Gluck in late 1773. As the librettist Louis-Hurtaut Dancourt cheekily proposed in Ésope à Cythere, a vaudeville comedy from 1766, the Opéra was so desperate for fresh talent that a group of moderately gifted barnyard animals might succeed there: Un Ane grand compositeur, Dit aux animaux, je vous prie, Servés moi de tout votre Coeur, Que chacun chant son parti. On beuglera, Miaulera, On heurlera, On hannira, Mon Opéra, Réussira.

A great composing donkey Told the other animals: I beg of you, Serve me with all your heart And everyone sing your part. We will moo, Meow, Howl, And whinny, And my opera Will be a triumph.75

Compounding the sense of general artistic inertia was a catastrophic twist of circumstance. On the morning of 6 April 1763 a fire broke out at the Opéra’s theater in the Palais Royal.76 Despite the efforts of nearly five hundred bystanders, the hall burned to the ground in less than an hour, forcing the company to put an immediate stop to performances.77 The troupe would mount no full-scale production until the following January, when it revived Rameau and Pierre-Joseph-Justin Bernard’s Castor et Pollux in a temporary venue in the Tuileries. And it did not stage a single new commission in Paris until 1766, a full three years after the calamity. The official response of the Comédie-Italienne to the fire was an expression of sympathetic support. On 13 April the comédiens, under pressure from the menus plaisirs, offered the use of their own theater to the displaced Opéra (a plan that would not actually come to fruition).78 Unofficially, however, supporters of dialogue opera appeared quite delighted by the sudden removal of tragédie lyrique from the boards of the capital. As Favart related to Durazzo in the days after the tragedy: “A good third of the Palais was destroyed; if it had only been the Opéra, I would say so much the better. We had always predicted that the Opéra would succumb to the cold [qu’il

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mourrait de froid ]. This goes to show that one should never believe astrologers: the heat ultimately brought about its demise.”79 Favart paired his humorous deflections with a serious challenge to the Opéra’s leadership. For the comic librettist, the disaster offered a silver lining in the possibility of renewal. The institution stood to gain from a clean slate with regard to costumes, sets, machinery, and even repertory: “So we’ll have no more of those old costumes, weighted down with rags and reused year after year; those ancient sets, periodically repainted; nor those outdated machines with ropes visibly hanging. Hopefully we’ll get something new. Ah! If only that would extend to the actresses! It really is too bad that the blaze made it only as far as the Opéra’s stockrooms and didn’t consume the entire library of classic French music.”80 The conflagration merely emphasized, in other words, that the center of French musical innovation was shifting away from the tragic stage. And, indeed, throughout the 1760s the Comédie-Italienne vastly outpaced the Opéra in lyric production. While the serious theater presented roughly one or two new operas or ballets in each of these seasons, the comédiens maintained an astonishing output, averaging more than ten original musical works annually. Changes in lyric and dramatic taste, coupled with logistical setbacks at the Opéra, had created an opening for the cosmopolitan styles now being forged by the comic troupe. All of fashionable Paris flocked “chez les Italiens.”81 The decade of the 1760s was an altogether transformative one in the history of French theatrical institutions and forms. Rather than mitigating the impact of the forains, the restructuring had granted these performers an unprecedented measure of authority in their adopted venue while rebalancing the levers of power between the Opéra and the expanded ComédieItalienne. One critic described the government takeover as the moment when opéra comique received its “letters of naturalization”— a peculiar turn of phrase given that the genre had originated within the nation’s borders.82 What he presumably meant to imply was that the novelties of the fairs had transcended their humble position and come to occupy a place of significance on the Parisian and court operatic scenes. The following chapter turns from the administrative to the aesthetic ramifications of the merger, examining how changes in the constitution of and relationship between operatic troupes influenced the evolution of their output in the years after 1762. The blended structure of the Comédie-Italienne— and the elevated status of the

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lyric comédiens within it— each helped to determine the future trajectory of opéra comique. With its diverse mix of artists, the theater confirmed its identity as a hub of musical invention and hybridity and established dialogue opera as the primary vehicle for the assimilation of Italianate idioms into France. At the same time, the resources and prestige of the Crownsupported institution facilitated the material and thematic expansion of opéra comique and emboldened comic authors to exert pressure on the explicit and implicit limitations of their art form. Crucially, these efforts had wideranging repercussions: the Comédie-Italienne would soon export its stylistic flexibility and forward-looking generic mixture to the long-insular Opéra.

C hapter Two

Character, Class, and Style in the Lyric Drame The months that followed the merger were vibrant ones at the ComédieItalienne, with a series of notable revivals and commissions taking the stage in short succession. In keeping with the meta-theatrical traditions of the fairs, many of these works offered commentary on the recent changes in the Parisian operatic scene. For its first performance after the reorganization, the company included a vaudeville comedy entitled La nouvelle troupe. From the pens of Anseaume, C. S. Favart, and Claude-Henri de Fusée de Voisenon, this farce centers on the backstage dynamics of comédiens, painting the hijinks that ensue when an entrepreneur must assemble a harmonious assortment of players for his new theater. A few months later the troupe added Jean Galli de Bibiena’s topical pasticcio, La nouvelle Italie, in which a group of French soldiers is shipwrecked on an island populated by Italians. In the end, the leader of the Gallic contingent is betrothed to the princess of the foreign colony— a transparent allusion to the “marriage ” of lyric and dramatic cultures then being forged at the Comédie-Italienne.1 Other plays and operas moved beyond pragmatic aspects of the merger— the literal blending of Italian and French, of privileged and popular— to reference the broader uncertainties of theatrical hierarchy that accompanied the legitimation of the forains. Sancho Pança dans son île, from July of 1762, offers a cheeky reflection on the problems of social transgression— and, by extension, the ambiguous new position of the fairground artform at the Crown-supported theater. This opéra comique, the product of a collabora-

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tion between Philidor and Antoine-Alexandre-Henri Poinsinet, is a liberal reworking of an episode in Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The title character is a country squire who experiences a sudden “promotion” in status: he is tricked into believing that he has become governor of the fictional kingdom of Barataria. The action revolves around the absurdities of displacement: Sancho Pança passes his time putting on airs, both figuratively and literally, to comic effect. Although the character is inept and patently undeserving of his new post, he is enthralled by the perks of an aristocratic existence— demanding gourmet meals, for instance, and attempting to marry his daughter to a nobleman. This sense of unmerited pretension is mirrored in Sancho Pança’s overblown music: he reacts to trivial problems with disproportionately artful forms of lyric expression. Worried he will miss his dinner, the governor soliloquizes in an extended accompanied recitative; annoyed with his handlers, he adopts the anguished simile aria of Metastasian opera seria (ex. 2.1). The heroes of Italian tragic opera drew parallels between their tortured internal states and phenomena of the natural world. Philidor and Poinsinet’s protagonist, by contrast, likens himself to a bouncing ball batted about by a careless child. The setting deflates the character’s distress and pokes fun at his newfound self-importance. Sancho Pança, this music suggests, is wildly out of his depth, and it comes as no surprise when he is ultimately humbled. After a fumbled response to an attack on his dominion, the governor forgoes his title and prepares to return to his farm. As he leaves the ranks of the ruling elite, he likewise relinquishes his ostentatious style of singing, reverting to the popularly infused idiom of the fairground vaudeville (ex. 2.2). The moral of the work’s finale is unambiguous: “Whatever happens, everyone should remain in his proper place ” (Il faut quoi qu’il arrive, que chacun vive dans son état). This lesson, cheerfully confirmed in an ensemble refrain, is meant to apply on the levels of both plot and music. Country farmers should not be entrusted with affairs of state. And neither should the leading figures of opéra comique, emboldened by their new status, adopt the mannerisms of their more dignified counterparts from the tragic realm. By the 1760s the codes of behavior referenced in Philidor and Poinsinet’s opéra comique had become firmly ingrained. The theatrical institutions and genres of the ancien régime were rigidly hierarchical in conception, an arrangement that prioritized the Opéra and the prestigious tragédie lyrique.

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E x a m p l e 2 . 1 François-André Danican Philidor, Sancho Pança dans son isle, scene 10, “Je suis comme une pauvre boule” (mm. 21– 49). Paris: de la Chevardière [1762]. I am like a poor ball, / that children turn into a plaything. / Large and small, as it pleases them, / they push and chase and roll me. / Never, never does the poor ball / get a moment’s rest.

This stratification of lyric idioms was, as I have noted, a result of France’s system of legal privilège. Official memoranda emphasized that the purpose of the Opéra’s monopoly on lyric production was to preserve the distinct identity of the spectacles it staged— to prevent “opéra comique from ever taking on, in any fashion, the form of a [tragic] opera.”2 Though instituted in the bureaucracy of privilège, the delineation of stylistic registers was also, crucially, a function of dramatic decorum. Central to French neoclassical

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E x a m p l e 2 . 2 Philidor, Sancho Pança dans son isle, scene 18, “Je vais revoir ma chere métairie ” (mm. 5– 30). I will see my dear farm again. / I shall bid farewell to grandeur forever. / Let the future hold what it will, / good bread at home is better than chicken elsewhere. / He who thinks he finds a magpie in his nest, / more often finds nothing but a rat. / Whatever happens, / everyone should remain in his proper place. (Translation adapted from Nick Olcott, liner notes to Sancho Pança [Naxos, 2011]).

theater was the notion of bienséance, or propriety, which dictated that tragedy and comedy be distinguished in subject and tone, and that characters speak in a manner appropriate to their age, sex, and social position. The gods and kings that predominated in tragédie lyrique were expected to encounter more substantial situations and to present a more elevated form of expression than the lower-class figures that generally inhabited the comic domain. While Sancho Pança dans son île resolves its traversals with ease, tidily consigning its rustic protagonist back to his “proper station,” this belied a thornier set of stylistic questions in play at the Comédie-Italienne in the years after mid-century. The primary goals of the institutional reorganization had been to harness the innovations of the fair troupe and to “purify”

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the production of opéra comique in the years ahead.3 And yet, it remained a point of some contention how the tone and aesthetic position of the genre might best be adjusted to reflect the contingencies of the Crown-supported stage. This process occasionally placed a strain on the paradigms of theatrical propriety, as the conventional character types of dialogue opera were granted ever more substantive means of lyric communication. Artists associated with the Comédie-Italienne after the restructuring negotiated a complex terrain, alternately adhering to and bristling against accepted legal and literary strictures as they refined dialogue opera for elite consumption. Significantly, these developments played out against a wider backdrop of theatrical reform. The postmerger period at the Comédie-Italienne coincided with the rise of the Diderotian drame, the modern, “intermediate ” genre whose sentimental themes and contemporary settings charted a course between the traditional boundaries of spoken comedy and tragedy. Throughout the 1760s the authors of opéra comique capitalized on Diderotian ideals in ways that both extended the dramatic and musical conventions of their art form and confounded the existing order of bienséance. The librettists of the Comédie-Italienne, including Poinsinet, Sedaine, and Jean-François Marmontel, turned away from the lighter comedic foundations of the fairs; their works broadened the subject matter of dialogue opera, incorporated more serious and sympathetic characters and plots, and underscored with poignancy the issues facing the nation’s third estate. The company’s leading composers— including Duni, Philidor, Monsigny, and Grétry— were the drivers of complementary stylistic changes. Their music advanced the existing language of dialogue opera while fleshing out the innovations of the bouffons, consolidating a sophisticated and cosmopolitan idiom inspired by Italian models. Taken together, the artists of the Comédie-Italienne responded to the merger of 1762 with remarkable initiative. They ushered in an era of creative expansion that tested the limits opéra comique, imbued the genre with unprecedented moral force, and made their institution the locus of theatrical progressivism in France.4 The novelty of my approach in this chapter lies not in pointing out that this evolution occurred, but in interrogating its significance through the dual lenses of the monarchical takeover of opéra comique and the neoclassical hierarchies of musical and dramatic style. I suggest that intensified theatrical oversight stimulated a refinement in French lyric comedy, but at

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the same time introduced confusion into the organization of the Bourbon spectacles. Even as librettists and composers accommodated the content of opéra comique to the interests of the Crown, the works they produced contained a number of potentially transgressive elements— traits that broke both the legal terms of the Comédie-Italienne’s charter and the standards of dramatic bienséance. As dialogue opera was invested with the ideas of the drame, it also came to challenge a defining principle of French literary practice: the notion, articulated so clearly in Sancho Pança dans son île, that both the inner essence and the outward expression of a person were determined by the fixed prerogatives of birth and social station. In the sentimental operas of the later 1760s, the construction and illustration of character would become increasingly malleable. Within this corpus, it was nobility of spirit, rather than nobility of rank, that began to dictate how one acted, spoke, and sang. In an age of rapidly shifting dramatic values, it is notable that this stylistic fluidity was enacted in both directions: as the repertory of the Comédie-Italienne grew more substantive, the directors of the Opéra deliberately appropriated— and, in so doing, validated— the Italianate lyricism and “natural” refinement of opéra comique.

Bienséance in Ancien Régime Opera The infrastructure that granted the Opéra its protected legal status was grounded in a broader literary context, both indebted to and justified by the conventions of French neoclassical theater. In most basic terms, tragédie lyrique and opéra comique were distinguished via two aesthetic criteria: through the nature of the intrigues and the standing of the personages featured within them, and through the means these characters used to express themselves. It would be overly facile to map the qualities of tragédie lyrique directly onto those of spoken tragedy: the lyric form was more flexible with regard to the Aristotelian unities and foregrounded mythological or allegorical, rather than historical, subjects to accommodate the merveilleux. But the stakes and focus of serious opera nonetheless owed their general lineage to the tragédie, with both genres typically setting forth a “grand and serious action taking place between illustrious persons.”5 Opéra comique, for its part, was not a perfect parallel to prose comedy but shared with its spoken analogue an emphasis on the less rarified sentiments and occurrences of

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“everyday” life.6 As the comte de Lacépède underscored in his Poétique de la musique of 1785, a dialogue opera should be restrained in the intensity of the emotions it evoked, depicting “less important events [and] less vehement and less eminent characters” than those found in the tragédie lyrique.7 True to form, the repertory of dialogue opera from the years around the merger abounds with protagonists of humble condition— cobblers (Blaise le savetier, 1759), blacksmiths (Le maréchal ferrant, 1761), woodcutters (Le bûcheron, 1763), locksmiths (Le serrurier, 1764), coopers (Le tonnelier, 1765), reapers (Les moissonneurs, 1768), and a host of other working-class or provincial figures (fig. 2.1).8 This alignment of genre and character type fulfilled venerated tenets of literary and social decorum. As the librettist Quétant argued, the humorous situations essential to opéra comique were most realistically furnished by the “jovial” members of the third estate: The best intrigues are those that take place between merry characters; it is for this reason that country folk are more pleasurable in this genre than city dwellers, and of the latter, artisans are more successful than bourgeois types. It would be awkward to use a famous prince or an illustrious conqueror as the main subject of an opéra comique, unless such personages could be placed in those exceptional and amusing circumstances that marked a contrast, to some extent, with their dignity.9 Contemporaneous writings on theatrical aesthetics are laden with anxiety that noble figures might be debased on the comic stage. The inclusion of a king in Monsigny and Sedaine’s Le roi et le fermier was unusual enough to arouse the suspicion of the royal censors in 1762.10 The following year a production of Paul-César Gilbert and Poinsinet’s Apelle et Campaspe, which featured Alexander the Great in a prominent role, was a box-office failure at the Comédie-Italienne. “It was apparently not so simple,” reported the Mercure de France, “for spectators to see this prince onstage at the OpéraComique, speaking in dialogue and singing in ariettes.”11 If tragédie lyrique and opéra comique were separated by the kinds of plots they depicted, they were also marked by differences in tone— these understood to result from the divergence in rank of the figures that populated

F i g u r e 2 . 1 Engraving after Philidor’s Le maréchal ferrant (1761). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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them. The correspondence between the inner essence and outward articulation of dramatic characters was established as a priority in French opera from its origins under the roi soleil. In his 1702 Parallèle des Italiens et des Français, François Raguenet emphasized that in proper courtly theater, “gods speak with all the dignity of their character; kings, with the majesty of their rank; [and] shepherds and shepherdesses with the gentle banter appropriate to them.”12 Such statements are ubiquitous in the theoretical literature of the eighteenth century. In the late 1770s Le Pileur d’Apligny was still urging composers to “observe carefully that which nature prescribes . . . [and to] distinguish, by means of different accents, the king from the laborer, and the hero from the ordinary man.”13 This stylistic distance between heroes and ordinary men was conceived as fundamental rather than situational, driven by variations in the passions that were so firmly embedded that they transcended outer circumstance. As the abbé Joseph de La Porte stressed, even if characters of contrasting social positions were confronted with identical travails, their emotions would resonate dissimilarly before an audience. “A bourgeois might be assassinated like Pompey,” he reasoned, “but the death of Pompey will have an entirely distinct impact from that of a bourgeois.”14 These discussions of theatrical verisimilitude, or vraisemblance, are clearly and often condescendingly divorced from the realities of existence beyond the Parisian and courtly stage; these are the writings of an elite literary public on a set of elite cultural forms. Still, this body of criticism held considerable traction, advancing an idealized aesthetic framework for the organization of prerevolutionary society and the function of the art it produced. In her study of caractère in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jane Stevens posits that the work of such theorists as Lacépède, Le Pileur d’Apligny, and La Porte inscribed a fixed and deeply hierarchical view of identity; for these authors, “social rank and other classifications of worldly station were a determining element of inner character, not an accident of birth or circumstances but an essential condition of the nature of the individual.”15 These reflections on how operatic actors should sing thus encapsulate a crucial assumption of the ancien régime order: that a person’s passions, emotions, and means of expression could not be disassociated from his or her position and external signs of status.16 The relationship between character type and refinement of poetic lan-

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guage was a subject of extensive commentary in the spoken theater. Critics disputed, for example, whether the noble protagonists of neoclassical tragédie should ever converse in prose rather than in the loftier lines of alexandrine verse.17 When it came to opera, such boundaries were more ambiguously drawn. There were many more techniques for distinguishing between musical registers than between registers of speech alone, and lyric expression stood at a starker remove from the ways that people communicated in the outside world. While the theoretical literature does not articulate all of the implicit and explicit limits of opéra comique, it is nonetheless possible to identify a few of the most important traits in play. Most generally, discussions of class and style in the dialogue opera of the 1750s and 1760s intersected with debates over the decline of the vaudeville and the new prominence of the modern Italianate ariette. Traditionalists had long maintained that the fairground idiom was best suited to the rural and village-dwelling personalities foregrounded in early opéra comique. As the Journal des théâtres would patronizingly confirm, such simple, memorable melodies formed the most logical music of the peuple, helping them “bear the fatigue of work and the heat of the sun.”18 The cosmopolitan experiments of mid-century had offered a different path forward, seeking to reconcile “nobility and cheerfulness” when presenting lower-class characters before an increasingly aristocratic audience.19 Rousseau’s Le devin du village reflected a self-conscious compromise between Italian and French, and between “rustic” and refined, registers. Several of the opera’s arias are overlaid with a “patina of Italian brilliantine”— as in the soothsayer’s “L’amour croit,” with its Pergolesian violin snaps and repeated cadential structures.20 Others are newly composed imitations of popular song, marked by dance rhythms and melodic doublings that evoke a polished reformulation of the vaudeville.21 A decade after the premiere of Le devin du village, composers of opéra comique frequently adopted Rousseau’s model for the representation of country mores; there was little critical consensus, however, as to how far these idioms should be developed and stylized. The reception of Annette et Lubin— which contains a mix of popular melodies, parodied Italian music, and original ariettes— provides an apt example.22 This opera, a collaboration of Marie-Justine-Benoîte Favart and Adolphe Benoît Blaise, was the first new work to appear at the Comédie-Italienne in the aftermath of

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the restructuring, premiering on 15 February 1762. Reviewers praised the authors’ integration of vaudevilles into the action, deeming their straightforward melodic language a suitable match for the opera’s overriding atmosphere of paysannerie. More problematic were numbers reworked from the Italian repertory. Blaise had adapted a climactic ariette for the heroine, Annette, from a recent setting of Metastasio’s Adriano in Siria (ex. 2.3) by Johann Adolph Hasse.23 But critics were alarmed by the disjunction between the naive disposition of the title shepherdess and the relatively sophisticated music— in da capo form, and with melismatic passagework and modest textual repetition. It was a mistake to include this extract in the

E x a m p l e 2 . 3 Adolphe Benoît Blaise, Annette et Lubin, scene 6, “Ah! Pauvre Annette ” (mm. 23– 38). Adapted from the critical edition (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2016). Ah! tender mother / of children in misery. / Such a desperate plight: / Who can help me?

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Italian manner, argued André-Guillaume Contant d’Orville, because its style was “unnatural” and incongruous with rural life.24 The Mercure de France emphatically agreed: a “young girl raised in a hovel in the country” would have had little opportunity to be schooled in the art of virtuoso singing.25 Just as vocal flourishes drew skepticism in mid-century opéra comique, so too was complicated orchestral writing considered antithetical to the lighter situations that then prevailed within the genre. The extended introductory ritornello, for instance, which French critics viewed with suspicion even in the tragédie lyrique, was deemed particularly out of place at the fair theaters and the Comédie-Italienne. As Jean-Baptiste Nougaret described in his De l’art du théâtre (1769), an instrumental prelude might occasionally be permitted in a serious opera, for kings and princesses could use this time to “walk gravely and reflect . . . on the passions that agitate them.”26 Such musical framing would not, however, be convincing in a lyric comedy. After all, Nougaret contended, the artisans and laborers of opéra comique were unaccustomed to deep contemplation; to avoid straining credibility, these characters should “speak promptly when an idea comes to them.”27 The most clearly articulated prohibition in opéra comique concerned the use of recitative. The literary justification for this state of affairs will by now seem familiar: critics and theorists insisted that traditional French declamation was too dignified to be employed by lower-class characters. In his Traité du mélo-drame (1772), Laurent Garcin remarked that “tragedy, on the one hand, must be sung from beginning to end. This necessity arises from the nobility of the genre. The delivery of a scene of Rose and Colas [in a successful opéra comique by Monsigny and Sedaine from 1764] has no connection with that of a scene of Phèdre or Mérope. The former is nothing but a peasant conversation; the latter is a sustained declamation, closely approaching song.”28 This stylistic restriction was reinforced by legal statute and emblematic of the power divide that persisted between the Opéra and producers of dialogue opera.29 Indeed, the convention was so firmly entrenched that the protagonists of an opéra comique might even acknowledge it onstage. In Monsigny and Charles Collé ’s L’isle sonante (1768), the valet, Durbin, is stranded with his noble master, Zerbin, on a mysterious island where the inhabitants communicate exclusively through song. Durbin investigates the customs of the island and then relates them to his employer: “I learned that according to the law of the country we are forbidden to speak in

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prose, or to speak in verse without singing. And as I immediately declared that I only knew Pont neuf songs, they gave me the order to make myself heard in vaudevilles.”30 The servant is expected to be conversant in nothing but the popular melodies of the fairs, while his master receives a musical sentence more fitting for his aristocratic station: “You, my lord, are ordered to express yourself only in ariettes or in récitatif obligé.”31 In theory, then, the composition of eighteenth-century opéra comique was governed by an array of written and unwritten rules that mirrored elite perceptions of the ancien régime social order. However, neither the extensive discourse on decorum nor the copious regulations of the Opéra should be taken to imply that these dictates were uniformly followed, especially after the promotion of the forains. On the contrary, the intensity of critical and bureaucratic anxiety testifies to the opposite trend— to a growing sense that the organizing principles of style and genre were under threat. While the authors of the Comédie-Italienne faced rigid expectations regarding the acceptable tone of their works, they also encountered pressure to refine their output for the Crown-sanctioned stage. After 1762 it was the latter impulse that increasingly won out: composers and librettists turned to elevated dramatic subjects and “forbidden” forms to imbue opéra comique with greater complexity and musical depth. This expansion in the possibilities of plot, character, and register was not an unmarked compositional act, but rather one that carried both expressive and political weight. The creators of dialogue opera began to voice their displeasure with the traditional restrictions of their art form and, more broadly, with the social and theatrical hierarchies of their day. These developments intersected with a larger climate of reform, building on the scaffolding of the Diderotian drame.

Opéra Comique and the Drame The evolution of opéra comique after mid-century was indebted to changes theorized and put into practice by Diderot, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, among others.32 The defining ambition of the drame (or genre sérieux) was a renewed moral force in French spoken theater, achieved through the spectator’s sympathetic identification with the staged action. Diderot and his successors believed that neoclassical tragédie and comédie no longer sustained the interest of their audiences, for

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their inherent artifice produced but “small and fleeting emotions,” “cold applause,” and “rare tears.”33 The drame, however, promised a relatable middle ground, dismantling the divisions between existing forms to exert a stronger emotional impact. There was no reason, modern dramatists suggested, for the elite characters of the tragic sphere to hold a monopoly on heartrending emotions or events. As Mercier argued, “Nature has none of these clear-cut colors [of conventional tragedy and comedy]; all aspects are blended and based upon transitions that are sensitive and nuanced.”34 The playwright accordingly sought to represent sentiment and pathos in quotidian circumstances.35 To do so, Diderot confirmed, was to create a work that “is closer to us. It is a portrait of the miseries that surround us. What! Can you not imagine the impact of a realistic setting, ordinary clothing, language in keeping with the action, straightforward plots, dangers that [in your own life] must have made you tremble for your relatives, your friends, for yourself?”36 Plays such as Diderot’s Le fils naturel (1757) and Le père de famille (1758) and Beaumarchais’s Eugénie (1767) reconceptualized the appropriate subject matter, styles of gesture and staging, and registers of expression at the Comédie-Française. Each of these innovations was aimed at rendering the performance more “truthful,” and therefore more resonant with the experiences of the spectator. The sentimental opéras comiques of the 1760s are not bound by a single generic label and might be marked comédie, comédie larmoyante, or drame (among other terms).37 These dialogue operas are unified, however, by the ways that they engage the progressive tendencies of the Diderotian repertory, “bridg[ing] the gap between self and other” and eliciting audience sympathy for the characters onstage.38 These lyric works shared with the spoken drame a common set of sources, rooted in the trials of modern domestic life. This corpus drew on contemporary literature, including the English novel (as in Philidor and Poinsinet’s Tom Jones, 1765, after Henry Fielding); the short story (Grétry and Marmontel’s Le Huron, 1768, after Voltaire); and the conte moral (Grétry, C. S. Favart, and Voisenon’s L’amitié à l’épreuve, 1770, after Marmontel). More than earlier opéra comique, the lyric drame struck a serious tone, its action centered on “a virtuous person threatened by a loss of wealth or social position or even life.”39 In Grétry and Marmontel’s Lucile (1769), for example, the eponymous heroine learns on the morning of her wedding that she was switched at birth with another

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child; she is the daughter not of a wealthy bourgeois but of a household servant, Blaise, and therefore unfit to marry her beloved. In Monsigny and Sedaine’s Le déserteur (1769), the stakes are higher still: the soldier Alexis is so distraught over his fiancée’s suspected infidelity that he deserts the army and is imprisoned (fig. 2.2); he is saved in the work’s final scenes only by the merciful intervention of the monarch. In short order, as the comédiens themselves described, the Comédie-Italienne had become the capital’s principal exponent of sensibilité, providing its spectators with both “the sweet pleasure of laughter and the even sweeter pleasure of tears.”40 The wider-ranging tone of the lyric drame was matched in its approach to character type: these works contained increasingly nuanced portrayals of lower-class protagonists while extending to embrace bourgeois figures and minor noblemen. Authors exploited these contrasting roles for registral variety, appropriating the drame’s prioritization of generic mixture while divorcing prerogatives of rank from gravity of circumstance.41 The most pathetic monologue of Lucile is delivered not by a high-born character but by the servant, Blaise, distraught at his daughter’s despair. As Grétry recalled, the alignment of peasant protagonist and weighty situation was

F i g u r e 2 . 2 Atelier Ziesenis, act 3, scene 10 from Le déserteur, watercolor and ink (F-Pn, Album Ziesenis, Fol-O-ICO-003). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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a considerable novelty and initially caught spectators by surprise. At the first entrance of the actor Joseph Caillot, the audience reacted with delight, assuming they “would chuckle with the good nourricier of Lucile.”42 But this expectation was undercut from the opening lines of text: Blaise is not an object of ridicule but a richly sympathetic figure, communicating above all the intensity of his pain. Such emphasis on the tribulations of the third estate might be accompanied by a strong moralizing flavor. Grétry and Marmontel’s Silvain (1770), for example, pairs a lesson in domestic reconciliation with an attack on aristocratic privilege. The title character has been estranged from his noble relatives since his marriage to the upright peasant Hélène; his benevolent father ultimately intervenes, having been convinced by Hélène’s example that “simple virtue held more weight than birth.”43 Critics remarked that these messages might have repercussions outside of the theater— evidence of the ways the “dangerous opinions of the philosophes” had infiltrated the once lighthearted realm of opéra comique.44 The overarching goal of the drame was what Marc Buffat has termed a “totality of the real,”45 an effect truthful enough to collapse the gulf between the fictive action and the perspective of the spectator. This emphasis on verisimilitude in subject matter was reinforced by the innovative manner that the genre was “brought to life ” in the theater. Diderot and his followers are well-known for their insistence that the personal vanity of the actor be secondary to the accurate representation of the role he or she embodied. As the philosophe argued in the Discours sur la poésie dramatique, an ornate style of costume was a dangerous distraction from the internal elements that rightfully formed a dramatic character: “Beneath a jacket weighted in gilding, I see merely a rich man when it is the man [alone] that I seek.”46 The artists of the fairground Opéra-Comique and the Comédie-Italienne were consistently praised for their attentions to stage dress. M. J. B. Favart wore the simple woolen gown and slippers of the French peasantry in Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne, ironically “spar[ing] no expense and overlook[ing] no detail to heighten the degree of theatrical illusion.”47 Her colleague Caillot went a step further, not merely imitating but acquiring clothing from an inhabitant of the countryside to appear as Blaise in Lucile. In this same production he made the apparently unprecedented decision to forego a wig, sacrificing his own ego on the altar of “extreme vérité.”48 In the pursuit of dramatic realism, the actors and authors of opéra comique

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also contributed to the modernization of French acting practice, distancing themselves from the stylized conventions of both serious opera and neoclassical tragedy. Many commentators have emphasized the importance to the spoken and lyric drame of tableaux— moments that set forth striking and identifiable visual imagery to foster the viewer’s absorption into the framed “picture ” onstage.49 But equally representative of the genre’s reformminded approach was its emphasis on vraisemblance in expressive gesture.50 If tragédie lyrique librettos from this period are restrained in their stage directions, those of dialogue opera abound with detail. At the dramatic climax (act 3, scene 7) of Duni and Anseaume’s L’école de la jeunesse (1765), nearly every line of verse is accompanied by an explicitly delineated gesture. The troubled youth Cléon has broken into his uncle’s study to steal from him; as he faces this crisis of conscience, he paces anxiously about the set: Mais le temps presse . . . Il tourne la clef. La clef tourne sans cesse . . . Avec impatience. Ouvrirai-je enfin? Il soupire. Fatal dessein! Fuyons . . . En voulant retirer la clef pour s’enfuir, le secrétaire s’ouvre. Elle est ouverte. Pour éviter ma perte, Mes soins sont superflus. O Dieux! Je n’en puis plus. Il se repose un instant en s’accôtant sur le sécretaire. Il parcourt le secrétaire à la hâte. Point d’argent! . . . point d’argent! . . . Il prend un porte-feuille. Ce porte-feuille, au moins, renferme quelque chose. Il passe de l’autre côté du Théâtre, pose sa lumière sur la table, & se jette dans le fauteuil.51

But time is running out . . . He turns the key [in the locked secretary]. The key just keeps turning . . . With impatience. Will I ever get this open? He sighs. Terrible fate! I should flee . . . As he removes the key to leave, the secretary opens. It is open. To avoid disaster, All of my precautions are useless. Oh, God! I can’t do this anymore. He rests for a moment on the secretary, then rummages through it in haste. There’s no money! . . . no money! . . . He finds a wallet. Perhaps this wallet will have something. He passes to the other side of the stage, rests his candle upon the table, and throws himself onto an armchair.

In this monologue, text and action are in symbiotic balance, with the character’s frantic motions deepening the impression of his ethical quandary.

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The scene offers a stark contrast to the largely stock delivery of contemporaneous tragédie lyrique and neatly encapsulates the recent Diderotian rejection of artifice in theatrical staging. The actors of opéra comique were no longer static “marionettes”— Diderot’s pejorative for the wooden performers of the neoclassical tradition— but living beings whose “interest and passion” projected past the boundary of the proscenium.52 Musicologists have reflected at length on these topical and scenographic intersections of drame and opéra comique. They have yet to account fully, however, for the ways in which the innovations of the “intermediate” genre were translated into the musical language of the Comédie-Italienne. How were the drame’s emphases on realism and identification communicated through the conventions and structures of lyric composition? And to what extent were the most radical tenets of Diderotian reform, particularly its challenge to the accepted hierarchies of class and style, reflected in the dialogue opera produced after mid-century? Two strands of musical development are of special relevance here. First, the output of the 1760s substantiated the kinds of lyric expression commonly associated with lower-class figures: strophic chansons, romances, and the like. While the drame had validated characters from the third estate as theatrical subjects, the opéras comiques of Monsigny, Philidor, and Grétry elevated their stereotyped musical forms; the works of these composers exploited the realism of diegetic song while simultaneously investing such numbers with greater sophistication and emotional weight. Second, and more provocatively, these artists began to experiment with types of music— recitative and Italianate virtuosity above all— that had historically been off-limits to the protagonists of dialogue opera (and officially remained so). If opéra comique had long satirized the Opéra and its offerings from afar, the drame-inspired repertory of the Comédie-Italienne instigated a new sort of interchange. The authors of dialogue opera first borrowed from, and then began to productively inspire, the authors of tragédie lyrique.

Romance and Refinement Even before the emergence of the spoken drame, opéra comique had foregrounded verisimilitude and directness in musical expression. As Thomas Betzwieser has noted, “No other genre of music theater was so ‘shot-through’

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with drama-inherent music as the French dialogue opera.”53 The vaudevilles that proliferated in early opéra comique were melodies drawn from the outside world; after the reopening of Monnet’s Opéra-Comique in 1752, the genre was also identified with staged numbers— songs that existed as such within the narrative frame of the work. The legacy of popular chansons and strophic romances was carried forward into the drame-influenced repertory of the 1760s and beyond. These forms, however, came to be selfconsciously abstracted as opéra comique grew more complex in structure and more serious in subject matter. While still presented as a “natural” outgrowth of the genre’s humble roots, diegetic music was now almost always newly invented rather than adapted from existing material; furthermore, it was frequently a focus of compositional display, blending the fairground emphasis on vraisemblance with the new demands of refinement at the Comédie-Italienne. What resulted was a transformation in the definition and dramatic function of “realistic” song. On the one hand, this category of lyric expression became more operatic— detached from the ways that actual people might sing— which lent new authority to both the authors of opéra comique and the modest characters they placed onstage. On the other hand, this corpus tracked the wider theatrical culture of sensibilité, progressively recasting the “natural” to reflect purity of character in addition to simplicity of circumstance. Representative of the first of these impulses are the “combinatory” ensembles found in operas by Monsigny, Philidor, and Duni: seemingly rustic chansons that are subjected, after their initial presentation, to calculated demonstrations of contrapuntal technique. The second act of Le déserteur, for example, offers a break from the somber main action— a comedic interlude for the drunken prisoner Montauciel and his companion, Bertrand. Each character performs a drinking song, together producing a pair of gavottes in popular style and simple AABB form. At the end of the scene, the two men commingle their individual extracts, unveiling the dexterity latent in the construction of the originals (fig. 2.3 and ex. 2.4). The effect made a lasting impression on both audiences and critics. The Mercure de France attributed much of the opera’s success to the “bawdy gaiety” and “realism” of Montauciel.54 Nearly a century after the work’s premiere, Hector Berlioz would note that the duet remained “one of the most pleasurable incorporations of counterpoint applied to a dramatic cause.”55

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F i g u r e 2 . 3 Atelier Ziesenis, act 2, scene 17 from Le déserteur, watercolor and ink (F-Pn, Album Ziesenis, Fol-O-ICO-003). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

These appraisals of the double chanson in Le déserteur underscore the utility of such memorable ensembles to composers of postmerger opéra comique. These moments introduced stylistic variety within the increasingly solemn edifice of the lyric drame while at the same time providing a showcase for the elite ambitions of the genre and the theater that produced it. Such intricate treatment of ostensibly simple “real-world” music would be extended elsewhere: a trio for the three female leads in Le roi et le fermier (act 3, scene 1); a canonic choeur des buveurs in Tom Jones (act 3, scene 1); and a remarkable septet in L’école de la jeunesse (act 2, scene 5), which coalesces out of a performance-within-a-performance for soprano, keyboard, and harp. Even as these combinatory numbers became more elaborate and operatic, they upheld their reputations as bearers of affective comedic truth. Despite the complexity of the procedures involved, critics continued to praise such music for its realistic logic and popular feel. This corpus thus offered a creative take on the restraints of stylistic decorum and verisimilitude, granting

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E x a m p l e 2 . 4 Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, Le déserteur, act 2, scene 17, “Tous les hommes sont bons/Vive le vin, vive l’amour” (mm. 1– 7). Paris: Hérissant, 1769. Bertrand: All men are good, / we see only honest folk, / when it serves their interest. Montauciel: Cheers to wine, and cheers to love, / lover and drinker in turn, / I scoff at melancholy.

the characters of opéra comique a more highly developed idiom of expression by reframing how a “natural” song might be conceived.56 Around this time, standards of musical vraisemblance were also rapidly evolving in the most emblematic of opéra comique’s song forms, the romance.57 The mid-century romance was, both literally and thematically, a “detachable ” number. These tuneful arias were commonly excerpted for sale to amateur performers; in their primary theatrical context, they offered a reprieve from the central action, serving as staged glosses on the larger ideas of the narrative rather than reflecting the subjectivity of individual characters.58 Setting a historical or love poem, the romance was defined by its simple, often pastoral subject, its strophic structure, and its naiveté or archaism in melody and harmonic support.59 As Rousseau outlined in the Dictionnaire de musique (1768), the preferred style was devoid of artificial ornaments and mannerisms and remained “sweet,” “natural,” and “rustic” throughout.60 (Rousseau’s own “Dans ma cabane obscure ” from Le devin

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du village, with its homophonic texture and old-fashioned branle de Poitou rhythm, was a widely influential example).61 Romances in the postmerger repertory of the Comédie-Italienne grew more refined in their surfaces and structures, reflecting the mounting seriousness of the personages that sang them. Monsigny and Grétry, in particular, stylized the conventional markers of musical rusticity; romances by these composers might retain their “detachable ” function while adopting a technical language far beyond the form’s accessible foundations. In Le roi et

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E x a m p l e 2 . 5 Monsigny, Le roi et le fermier, act 3, scene 12, “Que le soleil dans la plaine ” (mm. 5– 28). Paris: Hue, 1762. The sun in the plains / may beat down upon the sheep and the shepherds, / a sudden storm may flood the orchards; / But when we are near the object that binds us / and links us to his desire, / nothing is pain, all is pleasure.

le fermier, for instance, the romance (act 3, scene 12; ex. 2.5) is positioned in the traditional manner: the shepherdess heroine, Jenny, is asked to perform a chanson for a group of assembled guests. Although Jenny frames her response, “Que le soleil dans la plaine,” as an homage to country life, her own description of the number belies its artifice. The orchestration is more complex than that of “Dans ma cabane obscure,” with active string figuration and an evocative, musette-like drone. The structure is not straightforwardly strophic but includes a central interlude in the minor mode and a soaring refrain. And the demands on the performer are comparatively substantial, with an extended range and large leaps in the vocal line. This is not a simple pastoral song but a studied refraction of the forain legacy; the romance has been transformed, as Charlton describes, from “a popular idiom into a fully operatic one.”62

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This musical development had dramatic ramifications: as romances were imbued with greater compositional weight, they increasingly made claims for the elevated “character and moral status” of the figures that executed them.63 In the lyric drames of the later 1760s and 1770s, authors exploited the existing connotations of the song form for new interpretative ends, using the traits of “natural” simplicity to evoke not merely a rural setting but a sincerity of expression and purity of sentiment. In essence, the romance grew more personal, mirroring what Mary Hunter has termed the “sentimental statement aria” of mid-century opera buffa. (These were refined but “relatable ” settings of texts related to love “desired, achieved, or denied,” which generated sympathy between characters or between a protagonist and the audience.)64 L’amitié à l’épreuve, for example, features a superficially typical romance for its heroine, Corali (“A quel maux il me livre,” act 2, scene 3). The number is comprised of five couplets with refrain over a delicate accompaniment of string filigree and obbligato oboe. This pastoral musical idiom, however, has been transplanted into the urban sphere— to the study of a London townhouse. The topical allusions reinforce Corali’s inherent sensibilité: her integrity does not depend on an unspoiled backdrop but stays with her as she travels from country to city. In Le déserteur, a romance for the female protagonist, Louise, is stylized yet further.65 In contrast to the detachable songs of earlier opéra comique, this number (“Dans quel trouble te plonge,” from act 2, scene 8) is embedded into the plot of the opera.66 Louise does not recount the plight of another but voices her own affliction— begging her fiancé, Alexis, not to doubt her fidelity. Here Monsigny deploys a descriptive marking, key, and orchestral gesture (amoroso, A major, muted strings) that he reserved for moments of plaintive and sincere expression. But if the romance is direct in its affect, it builds in musical and emotional intensity, moving from a tenderly lyrical opening to a florid, Italianate outpouring of despair (ex. 2.6). “Dans quel trouble te plonge ” is more sophisticated than previous examples of its type, signaling an evolution in the manner in which opéra comique communicated its “realistic” effects. The extract references the straightforward language and sympathetic appeal of the romance tradition but builds these features into a nuanced portrayal of Louise’s psychological state. As Hunter has noted in the case of Italian opera, the sentimental statement was a malleable sort of lyric expression, occupying an ambiguous

E x a m p l e 2 . 6 Monsigny, Le déserteur, act 2, scene 8, “Dans quel trouble te plonge ” (mm. 8– 25). Paris: Hérissant, 1769. Has it thrown you into confusion, / what I have told you? / If it is a lie, / what difference should it make to you? / This cruel ruse / should no longer offend you. / You! Believe me unfaithful! / Oh, cruel one, could you really believe it?

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position in the hierarchy of aria forms. If such music did not constitute a perfectly democratic middle ground between the comic and serious domains, it was nonetheless adopted by characters of diverse status “on the merits of their sentiments rather than on the basis of their social place.”67 This observation— that sensibilité might outweigh rank— holds true to a pronounced degree in the French lyric theater of the 1760s. The romances of Monsigny and Grétry extended the emotional and compositional gamut of “simple ” music in opéra comique, enhancing, in turn, the standing of the genre’s lower- and middle-class protagonists. This generic mixture would be intensified as the form filtered into opéra-ballet and tragédie lyrique, a point to which I shall return below.

Recitative for the Peuple It was one thing for the composers and librettists of the Comédie-Italienne to elevate the “popular” and strophic forms that had come to be associated with their genre. But the rise of the lyric drame was accompanied by another forward-looking impulse: the incorporation into opéra comique of music traditionally reserved for the characters and dramatic situations of tragic opera. Particularly important in this regard was Italianate obbligato recitative, or the style entrecoupé, which was eagerly embraced by Philidor, Monsigny, and Grétry in the late 1760s. More than any other kind of lyric expression, the style entrecoupé exemplifies the expansion of opéra comique’s technical capacity and communicative range in the years after the merger. If the authors of dialogue opera had previously made use of recitative for parodic purposes, this modern Italianate music was unequivocally earnest, used to accentuate the emotions of protagonists in distress. The idiom would, moreover, exert a wide-ranging impact— reversing the established course of influence between the comic and tragic theaters and consolidating the Comédie-Italienne’s position as the primary point of entry of cosmopolitan styles into France. As Jacqueline Waeber has outlined, the “forbidden” status of recitative had not historically prevented opéra comique composers from deploying such music for comedic effect.68 Philidor, especially, seems to have delighted in poking fun at the Opéra, sprinkling his early output with satire of both the musical language and the supernatural spectacle of lyric tragedy. In Le

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soldat magicien an incantation in mock-serious recitative leads to a parody of the famous “Trembleurs” chorus from Lully and Quinault’s Isis.69 In Le bûcheron Jupiter descends on a cloud, granting three wishes to the titular woodcutter in somber declamatory style. (Turning the solemn intervention on its head, the character squanders his wishes, requesting an eel for dinner and for his quarrelsome wife to be rendered mute.)70 The most acerbic of Philidor’s recitatives is found in Le sorcier (1764), a collaboration with Poinsinet that is farcical in spirit and pointed in social commentary. Here, a virtuous peasant, Agathe, is in love with a valiant soldier, Julien. Complications ensue when Agathe’s mother urges her to marry a local vigneron, Blaise, who has been enriched through unscrupulous means. The soldier ultimately wins Agathe’s hand by staging an elaborate ruse: he poses as a sorcerer and is “possessed” by infernal spirits, frightening away his gullible rival. As Julien is overtaken by the “devil,” he addresses Blaise in a manner that exploits the stereotypes of recitative performance in contemporary tragédie lyrique (ex. 2.7). The score features a monotonous delineation of text and requests that the actor employ “all of the ornaments that one would use at the Opéra, such as portamento, long cadenzas, etc.”71 (This kind of sardonic delivery was a specialty of the flexible-voiced Caillot, who originated the role.) Overwhelmed by this terrifying specter and his imposing musical language, Blaise relinquishes his stolen largesse— and his potential fiancée— to Julien. The scene thus marries critique of operatic tragedy with parody of the music it employs and the class it embodies; the setting exposes the naiveté of Blaise and, by extension, that of spectators swayed by this pretentious form of lyric expression.72 Philidor would later reportedly describe the inspiration for the infernal episode, tongue firmly in cheek. He “had never been to Hell and was therefore unacquainted with the style of music favored there. The best approximation he could think of was to have [Julien] sing a grand Récitatif français” as they would at the Opéra.73 By the 1760s Philidor was hardly alone in his suspicion of traditional French recitative, echoing sentiments that had circulated in pro-Italian circles since the querelle des bouffons.74 Rousseau, in the Lettre sur la musique française, had famously decried Lullian recitative as “extravagant screeching”;75 the modernization of operatic declamation had subsequently been appended to the cause of theatrical reform— one of a handful of musical

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E x a m p l e 2 . 7 Philidor, Le sorcier, act 2, scene 7, “Si tu veux d’une épouse tendre ” (mm. 90– 99). Paris: de la Chevardière, [1764]. If you want to earn the amorous desire / of your tender wife, / O, Blaise, if you wish to manage this, / begin by giving back to Julien / the money that you stole from him. / You must listen to me.

ideas discussed in detail by Diderot in his writings on the drame. A critical component of the spoken genre’s corporeality was the style haletant or style entrecoupé, a manner of speech that was self-consciously breathless or broken, filled with interjections and digressions mimicking the disorganized mental state of a character in turmoil or pain. What most effectively moved an audience, the philosophe noted, were not smoothly ordered phrases but the naturally discordant utterances of the passions— “cries, unarticulated words, broken-off vocalizations, monosyllables set forth at uneven intervals, murmurs that escape through the throat and between the teeth.”76

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Toward the end of the Entretiens sur le fils naturel (1757), Diderot theorized how this gestural technique might be translated from spoken into lyric theater, offering texts suitable for a new musical equivalent of the style entrecoupé. Diderot’s examples, drawn from Jean Racine’s Iphigénie, portray the anguish of the queen, Clytemnestra, as she describes the horrors that await her daughter, Iphigenia, at the sacrificial altar. For Diderot, the intensity and rapidity of the queen’s emotional shifts presented ideal opportunities for the interjection of descriptive support from the orchestra: These first lines— what a perfect subject for a récitatif obligé! One might easily divide them into different phrases with a plaintive ritornello! . . . Oh heavens! . . . oh unfortunate mother! . . . first time through for an orchestral interjection . . . My daughter crowned with odious garlands . . . second time . . . Her father’s knife poised at her throat . . . third time . . . By her father! . . . fourth time . . . Calchas proceeds through her blood . . . fifth time . . . What affective traits could this orchestral music not provide? . . . I can almost hear it . . . it paints for me [the queen’s] pleas . . . her sadness . . . her fear . . . her horror . . . her furor. . . .77 Diderot’s inspiration was the obbligato recitative of contemporary opera seria, then an object of considerable interest among the ultramontane philosophes. (Rousseau, for his part, would praise such récitatif obligé as comprising “the most touching, the most ravishing, the most energetic passages in all of modern music.”)78 Marked by fragmented vocal lines, sudden shifts of dynamics and tempo, and frequent orchestral interruptions, this category of declamation was typically reserved for the one or two most pathetic moments in the action, or for the articulation of a character’s delirium, dreams, or displacement from reality. If the protagonist was too distraught to present his or her thoughts in a coherent manner, it was left to the accompanying forces to fill in the expressive gaps.79 Gluck would ultimately respond to the setting proposed in the Entretiens sur le fils naturel, adapting Clytemnestra’s monologue in his 1774 Iphigénie en Aulide for the Opéra.80 A full decade earlier, however, composers at the Comédie-Italienne were already making substantive experiments in this regard, developing récitatif obligé into a vital musical and expressive feature of

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the lyric drame. Philidor and Poinsinet’s Tom Jones, written in 1765, differs drastically from the previous efforts of these collaborators.81 The opera contains few comic elements, instead showcasing the sentimental love story of the title character, a youth of unknown birth, and his neighbor, Sophie, the daughter of a country squire. Like Le sorcier, Tom Jones contains a central recitative scene, but the tone and style of this music in the latter work are entirely new. While Julien’s incantation in Le sorcier was satirical through and through, the stakes of Sophie’s monologue are gravely serious. Forbidden by her family from marrying her beloved, the despondent heroine runs away from home and is soon lost, alone, and deeply frightened. The opening of the scene— a textbook illustration of the Italianate and drame-influenced style entrecoupé (ex. 2.8)— mirrors Sophie’s disorientation, replete with abrupt changes in tempo (between allegro, adagio, and andante) and blustery interruptions from the strings. From here the musical and dramatic shifts multiply: the monologue builds to a tremolofueled climax as Sophie describes her terror, and then eases to state of tender resolve, as she looks beyond her circumstances to envision the reassuring presence of her beloved.82 Critics immediately recognized the originality of this extract— a bellwether for the future advancement of opéra comique and of French lyric genres, writ large. If tragédie lyrique was plagued by its antiquated and monotonous recitative, Tom Jones proved that progress was well underway elsewhere. As Garcin argued, Philidor had crafted an innovative and flexible form of declamation, one that expertly adapted the Italian style “to our language, to our theater, and to the accent of our passions.”83 The third-act monologue of Tom Jones not only marked an important step in the importation of progressive musical ideas from Italy; it also signified a breach in the French order of stylistic decorum. When Julien parodied such “forbidden” music in Le sorcier, he still understood the idiom as foreign to his own, fleetingly mimicking the sounds of the supernatural to deceive his credulous rival. Sophie, however, has fully appropriated this manner of E x a m p l e 2 . 8 Philidor, Tom Jones, act 3, scene 4, “Respirons un moment” (mm. 14– 29). Paris: de la Chevardière [1767]. Stop here for a minute; calm yourself, my heart. / Where am I? . . . What have I done? What a night! . . . What horror! / My father! . . . how distraught you must be . . . / I hear no more cries . . . it is quiet . . . the noise ceases.

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expression and employs it at a moment of intense pathos, in precisely the manner modeled in contemporary opera seria and in the Racinian examples of Diderot. Indeed, the success of Sophie’s recitative spurred a sort of democratization of serious declamation in the years that followed. Within the decade, the soldier Alexis and his fiancée Louise would be opining in obbligato recitative to great effect in Monsigny and Sedaine’s Le déserteur, as would the sentimental protagonists of Grétry and Marmontel’s Le Huron (a foundling raised in New France and the object of his affections, Mlle de St. Yves).84 In just a few short theatrical seasons, then, the attitude of opéra comique authors toward recitative underwent a remarkable evolution, one that paralleled the larger influx of aesthetic ideas from the drame. Spectators might now “swoon and go into ecstasies,” observed the librettist Dancourt, “when they hear a little peasant girl, a villager, or a soldier taking up the tones and accents that good sense used to reserve for Armide, for Castor, and for Pollux.”85 Grétry would later formulate a theoretical basis for the musical changes set in motion in the postmerger period. While the composer did not entirely dismiss the entrenched association between high-born figures and refined forms of lyric communication, he did introduce a critical nuance, stressing that in moments of heightened emotion, passion should override considerations of rank: “The peasant and the noblewoman emit the same cry of horror and cry of love. Regardless of the [status of the] individual, all preconceptions of education are erased when the soul is strongly moved; and in these cases the musician must employ but a single manner of tone painting.”86 Even as he admitted a superficial link between style and character type, Grétry also validated an underlying “universality” of human experience. His prescription places the norms of neoclassical propriety under considerable pressure: in times of agonizing despair and amorous joy, the heroes of tragédie lyrique and opéra comique might react in similar ways, united by the common language of sensibilité.

Lyric Drame at the Opéra As Grétry forecast, the innovations of dialogue opera soon resonated beyond the Comédie-Italienne, percolating upward to affect the repertory of its more prestigious rival. The postmerger period coincided with a period of

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creative and practical difficulties at the Opéra. Thus an important impetus in the modernization of this institution— and a significant first step toward the reform of la musique ancienne— came from authors affiliated with the upstart opéra comique.87 After the 1763 fire at the Palais Royal, the Opéra’s administration made an overt gesture toward new paths, granting its first major commission to the team of Monsigny and Sedaine.88 The result was Aline, reine de Golconde (1766), a ballet héroïque that weds the spectacular traditions of the tragic stage with the sentimental impulses of the lyric drame. The plot of Aline, reine de Golconde was drawn from a conte philosophique of Stanislas Jean de Boufflers, a didactic fable that had enjoyed wide popular currency in Paris since its publication in 1761.89 The ballet’s plot, highly simplified from its episodic source, traces the relationship of the noble St. Phar and the peasant Aline, childhood lovers separated by a twist of fate. At the outset of the work, the protagonists have been dramatically displaced from their French village roots. St. Phar is now an esteemed army general, while Aline has risen to rule the utopian kingdom of Golconda, near present-day Hyderabad, India. (This improbable development remains unexplained in the ballet; in the fable, Aline’s position stems from an off-course ship and a kidnapping by Turkish pirates.) In act 1, St. Phar stumbles upon Golconda while on a military expedition; the queen recognizes him immediately but conceals her identity to test his affections. In act 2, Aline transports St. Phar to a bucolic landscape that recalls their first, youthful encounter; she appears in shepherdess garb, and the pair rejoice in having been reunited. In the final act, Aline— once again veiled and in royal costume— offers her hand to St. Phar. Only after he refuses, professing his loyalty to another, does she reveal the happy truth: that the simple villager and the noble queen are one and the same. Although Sedaine sanitized much of the more pointed material in Boufflers’s fable to meet the affirmative political demands of the Opéra,90 the work’s central conflict is clearly indebted to the tropes of recent opéra comique, vaunting a love that is threatened by the vicissitudes of status and circumstance but ultimately transcends them. Charlton has observed several ways that Monsigny and Sedaine’s collaborations at the Comédie-Italienne influenced the structure and feel of their work for the Opéra. While the exoticist scenery and costumes of Aline, reine de Golconde conform to the marvelous expectations of the elite theater, the exactitude of their detail reflects a new realism infiltrating from the lyric

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drame. A similar care for verisimilitude extends to the ballet’s ensembles, which are more fully integrated into the action than was customary in contemporary tragédie lyrique. The most important link between Aline, reine de Golconde and the modernizing currents of opéra comique is found in the vocal writing for the ballet’s leading lovers.91 Charlton emphasizes the directness of register associated with both Aline and St. Phar, which, he asserts, might allude to “Rameau’s great confessional arias” while at the same time foreshadowing the restraint of Gluck.92 But these extracts demonstrate an even closer affiliation with the “natural” song forms of Monsigny’s output for the comic stage.93 In act 2, for example, as St. Phar awakens in the countryside, he expresses his astonishment in a pair of simple gavottes tendres (“La terre semble respirer” and “Jamais sur un plus beau trône ”);94 the rhythmic patterns and plucked string accompaniments of these numbers are strongly reminiscent of romances found in the composer’s earlier hits, Le maître en droit and On ne s’avise jamais de tout.95 A profusion of plaintive ariettes for the queen traces a similar stylistic lineage, bridging from the shepherdess, Jenny, in Le roi et le fermier through the village-dwelling Louise, in Le déserteur. Aline’s initial recognition of St. Phar, “Ah quel moment pour un coeur tendre,” has much in common with the excerpt for Louise discussed above (see again ex. 2.6). Both numbers are marked amoroso and feature the key of A major, lilting triple meter, and melody overlaid with graceful turns and triplets96— all normative, in Monsigny’s operas, for utterances of elevated but “natural” sentiment (ex. 2.9).97 The opening lines of Aline’s subsequent romance, “My lips speak but one language, the expression of my heart,” are thus doubly suggestive. 98 On the one hand, the queen’s lyric style is remarkably consistent throughout the ballet. Whether presiding as monarch or appearing in peasant guise, Aline relies upon the widely fashionable idiom of musical sensibilité. On the other hand, and more provocatively, this type of expression is virtually indistinguishable from that popularized in recent opéra comique. If critics were divided on the merits of Aline, reine de Golconde, they were united in recognizing the novelty of its stylistic interchange. The Mercure de France described Monsigny and Sedaine’s experiment as an entirely new form, one that showcased “the new genre of music that [composers] were currently extending from opéra bouffon to opéra héroïque.”99 Aline, reine de Golconde constituted but a first wave of lyric and dramatic

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E x a m p l e 2 . 9 Monsigny, Aline, reine de Golconde, act 1, scene 4, “Ah, quel moment pour un coeur tendre ” (mm. 51– 58). Paris: Bailleux, [ca. 1774]. Ah, what a moment for a tender heart! / No, no, you cannot imagine it.

reform at the Opéra in the 1760s. More radical was a second contribution from leading artists of the Comédie-Italienne: Philidor and Poinsinet’s Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège, of 1767.100 The musical language of dialogue opera was not an illogical fit for the pastoral atmosphere of the ballet héroïque; the latter authors, however, attempted a bolder sort of mixture, turning their attentions to the venerable traditions of the tragédie lyrique. The subject of Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège was unusual for the Opéra, being historical, rather than mythological, and entirely devoid of the merveilleux.101 The plot unfolds in medieval Nidrosie (Trondheim, Norway) where the monarch, Rodoard, presides with his daughter, Ernelinde. Their realm is threatened by the evil Ricimir, king of Sweden, who is joined in an uneasy coalition with Sandomir, an upstanding Danish prince. Underpinning this political conflict is an affair of the heart: Sandomir was happily betrothed to Ernelinde before the war intervened, but Ricimir turns on his reluctant ally, conspiring to marry the princess himself. Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège had even more concrete ties than did

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Aline, reine de Golconde to the progressive dramatic ideals of the philosophes. Following the model of recent opéra comique, Philidor and Poinsinet’s opera integrated staged actions into the solo and ensemble numbers, and it placed an unprecedented emphasis, within the tragic domain, on the realistic, dramatic function of the chorus.102 Many of these innovations may be attributable directly to Diderot, who was acquainted with both of the authors and had a hand in revising the libretto;103 contemporary reports claim that the philosophe tightened the work’s text and suggested a much-praised double chorus in the third act.104 While we do not have explicit evidence of Diderot’s contributions to the opera’s most widely acclaimed scene105— an obbligato recitative for the title character— the setting conforms closely to the ideas proposed in the Entretiens sur le fils naturel. It is also clearly related to Sophie’s central recitative in Tom Jones, then still on the boards at the Comédie-Italienne. Ernelinde’s Italianate set piece, like those of her predecessors in opéra comique, comes at her moment of greatest confusion and despair. In act 2, scene 10, the villainous Ricimir has imprisoned both the heroine’s father and her fiancé, Sandomir, and will allow her to spare only one of the men. The princess is torn between her allegiances, a tension reflected in the frequent ellipses and breaks in the disjointed phrases she declaims. Philidor’s musical setting— with its restless string writing, fragmented vocal line, and abrupt tempo changes— is well matched to the tenor of the scene and is also in line with his work elsewhere.106 Indeed, brief portions of the opening melody, reproduced in example 2.10, seem to have been transplanted directly into the tragic work from Tom Jones. (This was a not uncommon occurrence for the notoriously light-fingered composer.)107 Importantly, the two monologues are bound by a common structural trajectory, moving from tormented and highly disjunctive opening material to a calmer and more lyrical state of acceptance (delineated in the latter opera as an interior cavatina). If Ernelinde’s obbligato recitative builds upon the example of earlier opéra comique, it seems also to have inspired subsequent experiments by the composer’s colleagues at the Comédie-Italienne. Philidor’s writing for the tragic princess makes expert use of the obbligato instruments— in particular a solo horn, which stands in for the absent Sandomir. As the heroine weighs the repercussions of her decision, she imagines her lover pleading from beyond the grave. Within two operatic seasons, the same

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technique would be used to great effect in both Le Huron and Le déserteur, reflecting an intensifying feedback loop between the capital’s two principal lyric stages. Progressive critics lauded the Italianate changes that Philidor had made to both simple and accompanied recitative in Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège. Pierre-Louis Ginguené reported that Philidor’s work “marked an epoch” at the Opéra for the manner in which it lent structure and variety to the “ancient and soporific French psalmody.”108 Nicolas-Étienne Framery delighted in the fact that Philidor had banished the “portamentos, cadenzas, runs, grace notes . . . and all that rubbish” that traditionally marred the French declamatory style.109 And Diderot (though admittedly self-interested) would hail the tragédie lyrique as Philidor’s greatest accomplishment, the opera that established its composer as “the founder of Italian music in France.”110 The music of Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège was forward-looking, and so too was the flexibility in generic norms it represented. In the comedies of the fair tradition, peasants and tradesmen had appropriated the elite style of lyric tragedy to satirize its flaws. Now the tables had turned: a tragic princess adopts a sophisticated, cosmopolitan idiom developed by the protagonists of the Comédie-Italienne. After a decade of creative inertia, the Opéra was invigorated by music from a theater it had consistently endeavored to suppress. And opéra comique, a genre defined by its very lack of recitative, contained some of the most modern and innovative recitative in all of French opera. The lighthearted Sancho Pança dans son île, discussed at the outset of this chapter, was the first collaboration between Philidor and Poinsinet; the tragic Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège would be the last. (The partnership was ended by the untimely death of the librettist in 1769.) During the five years that separated the premieres of the two works, the landscape of lyric composition in Paris had been altered dramatically. The integration of popular actors into the royally sponsored Comédie-Italienne called into question the strict organization of French institutions and theatrical forms. The merger also accelerated the transition of opéra comique from low to high culture and encouraged the incorporation within it of more substantial plots, characters, and music.111 The legitimization of dialogue opera coincided with, and was reinforced by, evolving aesthetic ideals. The emergence of the lyric drame answered the philosophes’ calls for theatrical reform, valorizing the deeds

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E x a m p l e 2 . 1 0 Philidor, Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège, act 2, scene 10, “Où suis-je? Quel épais nuage” (mm. 5– 15). Paris: de Lormel, 1768. Where am I? . . . What thick clouds / obscure the light of the skies from me? / How is it that I am dragged to this gloomy shore? / Morbid veils cover my eyes.

of “ordinary” citizens and rewarding them with types of expression once reserved for the heroes of the tragic realm. But this sort of musical and dramatic exchange proceeded in both directions: as the Comédie-Italienne adopted elevated musical styles, the Opéra built upon and so validated the advances of its rival. No longer was it unproblematic— to extend the moral of Sancho Pança dans son île— for every character to “remain in his proper station.” Philidor’s son would later claim that his father had incited a “musical revolution” in his body of sentimental opéras comiques and in Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège.112 At several decades’ remove from the upheavals of 1789, the implications of these stylistic shifts remained predominantly aesthetic in nature. Put another way, the provocations of the lyric drame were refracted less in lived politics than in the “political imaginary” of the ancien régime— that is, in the conceptual framework authors and audiences deployed to make sense of the modernizing social structures that surrounded

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them.113 And yet, the reforms set in motion in the postmerger period would only intensify in the years that followed. So too would the role of the monarchy in these processes of transformation, with more tangible effects for the image of the regime. The 1770s would witness a second round of operatic “revolutions,” shaped by two pivotal new players in the French operatic scene: the music-loving Austrian princess, Marie Antoinette, and her protégé from the Habsburg court, Christoph Willibald Gluck.

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The Musical Revolutions of Marie Antoinette The 1770s were defined by major shifts in French political and musical life. This decade witnessed the end of Louis XV’s staggering fifty-nineyear reign (in 1774), and a swell of public optimism upon the succession of his grandson, Louis XVI. This historic moment was also marked by a wave of theatrical regeneration: most famously, the arrival of Gluck in Paris, and an ensuing set of debates over the reform of the Opéra (the socalled querelles of the Gluckistes and the Piccinnistes). Critics were quick to grasp the scope of the transformations they observed in the operatic landscape. Shortly after the premiere of the Parisian Alceste (1776), the librettist Marmontel published an account of the skirmishes it provoked— an Essai sur les révolutions de la musique en France— using for the first time in the title of a piece of music criticism the term “revolution” in the progressive (rather than cyclical) sense.1 In this view, Gluck’s modernization of the serious lyric idiom signaled a point of no return, his contributions— and the aesthetic controversies that surrounded them— rendering suspect all previous iterations of the French tragic style. Such was the perceived scale of these developments that commentators soon began to draw connections between artistic innovation and the broader social and political context in which it took place. For Voltaire, these two changes in regime (a new outlook for the monarchy, on the one hand; a new figurehead of national opera, on the other) were inextricably linked: “It seems to me that you

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Parisians are about to witness a great and peaceful revolution both in your government and in your music. Louis XVI and Gluck will found a new French nation.”2 Voltaire’s prediction, of course, would prove to be only partially accurate. Across the fault line of 1789, the impact of Gluck’s lyric achievement was still readily acknowledged, but the nature of his revolution was reimagined as decidedly less peaceful. The critic Ginguené identified in the dissonant pamphlet wars of the 1770s a foreshadowing of the coming societal rupture. In his entry “France ” in the musical Encyclopédie méthodique, published in 1791, Ginguené described Gluck’s decade in Paris in evocative and politically charged terms: In speaking of a musical revolution, I refer to the most brilliant— and also the stormiest— period in the history of music in France. . . . At that time, one saw great disruptions and great intrigues, stretching from the court to the parterre, and from the foyers of the theaters to the academies, all over issues that now seem rather inconsequential. French discursive culture, then constrained by despotism, needed a form of release; we found one in this quarrel over opera.3 If the early years of Louis XVI’s rule were the most tumultuous in recent operatic history, Ginguené argued, this was because their querelles functioned as a proxy for the articulation of more pressing anxieties; these debates allowed men of letters to push back against the prevailing strictures of musical repression and in the process to give voice to simmering discontent about the political status quo. Assessing the situation in the aftermath of the Terror, the legislator and music pedagogue Jean-Baptiste Leclerc was more explicit, finding not merely a suggestive parallel but a causative link between the rise of Gluck and the fall of the Bourbon regime: Succumbing to national pride, [Marie] Antoinette summoned to France the celebrated German who invented our own dramatic music; in so doing, she acted recklessly. It would not be inappropriate to point out that the musical revolution instigated by Gluck should have instilled fear in the government: for his vigorous harmonies awakened the French consciousness. Our souls were immersed,

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and soon afterward an energy rose to the surface and burst forth: the throne was shaken.4 Here, responses to Gluck’s music have been converted from a symptom of social unrest into a catalyst of revolutionary action, with his principal supporter, the queen, depicted as the instigator— through ill-conceived operatic patronage— of her own demise. If contemporary musicologists have tempered the evident hyperbole of Leclerc’s claims, revolution has remained a key theme in the historiography of opera during the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Taking their cues from the legacy of eighteenth-century commentary, scholars have used the concept both to assess the musical and institutional changes that took place during the 1770s and to explore the political implications of these shifts. James Johnson identifies a “revolutionary” expansion of public opinion in the debates over Gluck and his imported Neapolitan rival, Piccinni— a transfer of authority in matters of musical taste from the Crown to the diverse populations of the capital.5 William Weber, for his part, has applied the term in his analysis of programming at the Opéra.6 It was the success of Gluck’s works, he demonstrates, that led to a large-scale modernization of this theater’s repertory. Crucially, the composer overturned the longstanding hegemony of la musique ancienne, the aging body of tragedies by Lully and Rameau that had its origins in the seventeenth century and remained closely associated with the golden age of the roi soleil. There remain, however, several ways in which our understanding of the musical “revolution” of the 1770s might be expanded— or, rather, in which our readings of the founding documents of this historiography might be approached more critically. First, it is clear that many appraisals of Gluck’s impact from the revolutionary period (when the Gluckian legend was solidified) misleadingly downplay the role of the Crown in this process of operatic disruption. Leclerc’s assessment, for example, should be attributed at least in part to discomfort over the court-affiliated artist’s continued popularity through the 1790s.7 For the composer to be programmed after the fall of the Bastille, his oeuvre had to be reframed as radical avant la lettre— a harbinger, in hindsight, of the coming disorder. Second, and more importantly, we should recognize a trend toward oversimplification in treatments of this pivotal musical decade, a gradual coalescence of agency in the hands of the Aus-

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trian musician. As Michael Fend has pointed out, the first critical descriptions of lyric theater in the 1770s referred not simply to the advances of Gluck but to a series of upheavals stretching forward from the querelle des bouffons. Marmontel’s foundational assessment, in the end, emphasized revolutions in the plural, rather than attributing this rupture to a single heroic figure.8 For all the emphasis placed on Gluck within the Essai sur les révolutions de la musique en France, Marmontel recognized schisms across the fabric of French musical life, encompassing the innovations of Rousseau, of Piccinni and his ultramontane followers, and especially of composers of opéra comique. As the librettist saw it, the infusion of contemporary and cosmopolitan styles at the Opéra had been prefigured by the efforts of the authors described in the previous chapter. It was at the Comédie-Italienne and, in particular, in the forward-looking, Italianate works of Duni, Monsigny, Philidor, and Grétry, that artists had taken the “first happy steps to set off the revolution.”9 The fate of dialogue opera in the era of Gluck has often been overshadowed. But it was intimately intertwined with that of tragédie lyrique, for the genre shared with its serious counterpart a significant benefactor: Marie Antoinette, the rising queen of France and the nation’s most important operatic patron since the death of Louis XIV. The general outlines of Marie Antoinette’s artistic training and influence are well-known. Her support of Gluck, her childhood music tutor, was instrumental in establishing him at the Opéra and instigating long-overdue changes in the programming of this theater. This chapter, however, provides a broader reevaluation of the queen’s impact on French lyric culture in the “revolutionary” 1770s, integrating opéra comique into this narrative of musical modernization and drawing clearer links between the aesthetic of Versailles and changes that took hold in Paris. The holdings of the menus plaisirs confirm that royal taste was a key factor in repertory transformation, and that with Marie Antoinette’s backing, progressive changes were even more acutely reflected at the Bourbon court theaters than they were on the public stages of the capital. The Austrian-born queen cemented the reorientation in ceremonial fashion that had been initiated with the merger of 1762, bending court spectacle away not only from the aging corpus of Lully and Rameau but from serious opera altogether. Marie Antoinette’s patronage of opéra comique situated her at the vanguard of musical development in the late eighteenth century, bringing the entertainments of Versailles and Fontainebleau more

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closely in line with the international and popularly infused musical idioms then widely in favor in other Western European cultural centers. Although the presence of opéra comique at the French court was not entirely new, its sudden and overwhelming predominance within this repertory was remarkable. Indeed, given the heady symbolic value of la musique ancienne, such a realignment of the monarchy’s operatic priorities appears rife with political overtones. What did it mean for the conservative Bourbon court to be reconfigured as a bastion of musical modernity in the final decades of the ancien régime? An examination of two subtypes of lyric comedy backed by Marie Antoinette— satires of sung tragedy and translations of Italian opera buffa— provides a richer picture of the tumultuous Gluckian decade, demonstrating how closely the Comédie-Italienne was involved in contemporaneous disputes over national style and how openly it was allowed to defy its customary restrictions during its residencies at Versailles. For Marie Antoinette’s many critics, her disregard for institutional expectations represented an affront to French theatrical decorum; this was but one of many examples of improper conduct from a frivolous and suspiciously foreign queen. At the same time, however, this blurring of musical boundaries was a by-product of opéra comique’s recently consolidated function within the ceremonial apparatus of the regime. If systems of artistic privilège were dismantled at the end of the eighteenth century, this was a process accelerated from within, as dialogue opera was altered to meet the entrenched demands of royal display. The extension of lyric comedy at Versailles seemed to signal, then, both a loosening of theatrical regulation and a new instantiation of monarchical despotism. The Bourbon regime encouraged a flexible and forward-looking approach to generic innovation that it did not uniformly grant to theaters and audiences outside of this aristocratic sphere. While future chroniclers would underscore the links between musical and political revolution, the situation on the ground was not so straightforward: in the 1770s the height of operatic progressivism emanated from the center of reactionary, absolutist control.

The Musical Patronage of a Habsburg Queen While the roi soleil had been an avid connoisseur of lyric theater, succeeding generations of French monarchs lacked his expansive politico-cultural

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vision. Louis XV was personally fond of music, but he was far less active as a patron than either his wife, Marie Leszczyńska, or his maîtresse en titre, Madame de Pompadour. (These women were the principal organizers, respectively, of an important series of court concerts and an influential amateur troupe.)10 Louis XVI was outright apathetic toward the art form— so much so, apparently, that it made the news in 1783 when he stayed awake all the way through a performance of Didon, a new tragédie lyrique by Piccinni and Marmontel. Never before, mused one wry critic, had the nearly thirty-year-old sovereign accomplished such a momentous feat.11 When Marie Antoinette arrived at the Bourbon court from Habsburg Vienna, administrators feared that she too might share her new husband’s “decisive aversion” to musical theater.12 For the royal wedding festivities in 1770 she was treated to an extravagant display of balls, concerts, and spectacles that stretched from May into the early summer. In the opera house at Versailles, inaugurated for the occasion (fig. 3.1), she witnessed a retrospective of the greatest lyric hits of the previous century, including lavish revivals of Lully and Quinault’s Persée and Rameau and Bernard’s Castor et Pollux. (The former production alone required five freshly designed sets, 527 new costumes, and a chorus of nearly one hundred singers.)13 To the distress of the events’ organizers, the dauphine appeared immune to the charms of the traditional courtly repertory, even in revised and updated form.14 The critic of the Journal des spectacles, assuming that she had never encountered anything other than Italian works, noted that French recitative “bored [her] to tears.”15 Papillon de la Ferté, for his part, surmised that the program had been “rather too serious” for Marie Antoinette, given that she was “not yet familiar with the [tragic] genre ” and seemed “not to like music.”16 These initial appraisals of Marie Antoinette’s knowledge and taste are laced with xenophobic suspicion, a theme that would remain prominent in criticism of her patronage endeavors throughout her time at Versailles. The marriage of the future king with an archduchess from Austria, a longtime geopolitical rival, had provoked widespread hostility in France. The union was meant to reinforce relations between the two European powers— a culmination of the “reversal of alliances” initiated by the Franco-Austrian treaty of 1756— but in fact represented a bitter defeat for conservative factions opposed to the diplomatic détente. As Thomas Kaiser has shown, Marie Antoinette was destined to “bear the brunt of . . . scheming and hatred

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F i g u r e 3 . 1 Jean-Michel Moreau, View of the Opéra Royal at Versailles (1770). Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Photo Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

as the living emblem of the alliance,” her actions dissected as evidence of lingering loyalties to her Habsburg roots.17 This skepticism colored many aspects of the reception of the young dauphine. If Marie Antoinette’s true political allegiances were subject to question, it was similarly easy to presume that she would be naive and dismissive toward French cultural forms. These impressions of the dauphine’s tastes were, however, utter misperceptions. The Habsburg royal family was an exceptionally musical one, and Marie Antoinette had been trained in the arts from an early age. Her mother, Maria Theresa, was a fine singer and dancer, and the royal children were given instruction in keyboard, figured bass, and rudimentary composition. In addition to her lessons with Gluck, Marie Antoinette trained with Hasse and with Georg Christoph Wagenseil.18 And while Italian opera seria was certainly prevalent in Vienna during the 1750s and 1760s, the repertory

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to which the dauphine had been exposed in her early years was not nearly as superficial or as uniform as French critics supposed. It is ironic that Marie Antoinette’s preferences were perceived as hostile to the aesthetic of Versailles, for her own upbringing was indebted to the Francophile atmosphere of the Austrian court. The archduchess’s youth coincided with a period of vibrant artistic exchange between Paris and Vienna.19 Marie Antoinette’s father, the emperor Francis I, had been born in Lorraine and had enthusiastically supported French artists, architects, writers, and men of the theater in the Austrian capital in the years around midcentury.20 French was the language of choice of the Viennese aristocracy, and for most of Marie Antoinette’s childhood a French theater company was in residence at the Burgtheater and performed frequently at the royal palaces at Laxenburg and Schönbrunn. The archduchess was trained in declamation and deportment by a pair of actors from Paris,21 and she attended a number of French ballets and opéras comiques imported from the repertory of the Comédie-Italienne.22 Her first documented musical performance— at the age of four— was not of an Italian opera aria or Viennese keyboard divertimento but of a French vaudeville, which she sang for the familial celebrations marking the name day of her father in October of 1759.23 For the queen-in-waiting, then, the discomfort exhibited during the festivities of 1770 was neither with music writ large nor with French music, but with the traditional corpus of musique ancienne.24 Marie Antoinette resumed her artistic education shortly after her arrival at Versailles. She received regular lessons in singing, keyboard, and in harp— activities she would keep up, on and off, for the next decade and a half— and devoted an hour or more every afternoon to the practice.25 She would later go so far as to request that her harp tutor, Philipp Joseph Hinner, undertake his own course of advanced study in Italy so that he would be able to instruct her more effectively. Music making was not just a solitary activity but also a vital form of diversion among the members of Marie Antoinette’s elite social circle. The dauphine sponsored small-scale concerts in her private apartments several times each week (or upward of a hundred times every year).26 The payment records of the menus plaisirs attest that the works copied for Marie Antoinette’s personal library and accumulated for these lessons and performances reflect a clear progressivism in musical taste; these are skewed almost entirely toward arias and arrangements from the

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latest opera buffa and opéra comique.27 She ordered full scores of recent repertory from the Comédie-Italienne every quarter, along with dozens of extracted musical numbers from this same body of works. During her reign as queen she was also a regular subscriber to the Journal d’ariettes italiennes, a bimonthly compendium of modern Italian composition, and would often request to have copies bound and given as gifts to her relatives and close friends.28 Contrary to her reputation for frivolity in other domains, the evidence suggests that Marie Antoinette approached her musical endeavors earnestly. After the births of each of her children, for instance, she requested that a stage be built in her apartments so that operatic performances might continue unabated as she convalesced.29 The all-encompassing nature of this engagement is perhaps best demonstrated in the rehearsal and scheduling of the famed troupe des seigneurs, the amateur company Marie Antoinette formed to mount spoken and lyric comedies in her private theater at the Petit Trianon.30 (This group will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapter.) Table 3.1 provides an overview of the group’s activities from the summer of 1780, the first and most active of these theatrical seasons, reconstructed from the archives of the royal instrument porters.31 The society troupe prepared its performances extensively, with up to five days of rehearsal before the presentation of each. The comte de MercyArgenteau (Marie Antoinette’s Austrian “minder,” who reported on her activities to Maria Theresa in Vienna) seems not to have been exaggerating when he noted that opéra comique had become the “single and unique ” obsession of the monarch.32 Marie Antoinette’s fondness for opéra comique was thus established during her childhood and reinforced through her extensive activities as an amateur performer. But from her very first months in France, these private preferences also influenced the public face of the Bourbon entertainments, exerting an impact on the repertory offered at court by the Opéra, Comédie-Française, and Comédie-Italienne. Spectacles at Versailles and Fontainebleau had been curtailed in the late 1760s; the menus plaisirs had made economies in the wake of the Seven Years’ War and had observed extended mourning periods following the deaths of Marie Leszczyńska and of Marie-Josèphe de Saxe, Louis XVI’s mother. Marie Antoinette’s arrival, however, was met with a prominent revival in ceremonial productions.

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Ta b l e 3 . 1 Activities of the troupe des seigneurs, 1780 (F-Pan, O1 3058.188) 27, 28, 29, 31 July

Daily rehearsals for Le roi et le fermier

1 Aug.

Performance of Le roi et le fermier

3 Aug.

Courier sent to Paris to purchase scores

5, 8, 9 Aug.

Rehearsals for On ne s’avise jamais de tout and Les fausses infidélités

10 Aug.

Performance of On ne s’avise jamais de tout and Les fausses infidélités

21, 24, 27, 30 Aug.; 4 Sept. Rehearsals for Rose et Colas and L’anglais à Bordeaux (up to twice daily)

1

6 Sept.

Performance of Rose et Colas and L’anglais à Bordeaux

12, 14, 16, 18 Sept.

Rehearsals for Le devin du village (up to twice daily)

19 Sept.

Performance of Le devin du village and Rose et Colas

20, 25, 27 Sept.

Rehearsals for Le sorcier and L’amant jaloux (Grétry summoned to the Petit Trianon to assist)

9, 10 Oct.

Rehearsals for Le roi et le fermier and Le devin du village

12 Oct.1

Performance of Le roi et le fermier and Le devin du village

The performances of 12 October are not described in the archival document but are recorded in Gierich, “Theater am Hof,” 161.

After the disastrous reception of the wedding entertainments in 1770, the summer calendar at Choisy was dominated by light comedies. So too was that year’s autumn schedule at Fontainebleau; while this program contained no full-length works from the repertory of the Opéra, it featured nine different opéras comiques, including premieres by Duni (Thémire), Grétry (L’amitié à l’épreuve and Les deux avares), and Josef Kohaut (La closière). Commentators underscored the increasing prominence of the ComédieItalienne at court and attributed it to the wishes of the dauphine. As Bachaumont remarked in the Mémoires secrets:

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Since this princess little appreciates tragedies and even less our grands opéras, Italian plays and comic operas were performed on the stage of this château [Choisy]. Arlequin had the good fortune to delight Madame la Dauphine, and the light and agreeable music of these little operas . . . seemed to please her as well. As a result, the authors of this spectacle [the Comédie-Italienne] triumph over their rivals, and they will rise in the estimation of polite society.33 By the winter of 1771, the change in emphasis had been formally codified, a shift that was understood as a mark of Louis XV’s esteem for his new granddaughter-in-law. Mercy-Argenteau recounted that opéra comique had been added to the yearly slate of productions at Versailles for the sole reason that “it was suggested to the king that this would be agreeable to Madame la dauphine.”34 After the death of Louis XV, Marie Antoinette took an even more active role in shaping the theatrical calendar at court. Given the lack of interest in such matters from her husband, it was she who began to submit suggestions for repertory or to request that a planned program be adjusted to suit her current inclinations. There are instructions in the holdings of the menus plaisirs for couriers sent from Versailles to Paris to alter the itinerary of the Comédie-Italienne to accommodate the queen,35 and the diaries of Papillon de la Ferté are filled with complaints of the frustrations he endured to ensure that her changeable wishes were fulfilled. During one court season, the intendant was forced to rush to the capital and work overnight to prepare costumes for a ballet that had been suddenly added to the next day’s festivities.36 Directly after the turnover in regime, certain long-standing conventions of court scheduling were also modified in ways that mirrored the tastes of the new queen. Before 1774 the Comédie-Italienne almost invariably offered a mix of entertainments on each of the evenings it journeyed to court in the winter months, presenting a spoken comédie followed by an opéra comique. After 1774 the proportion of prose works was curtailed. The company now performed two or more dialogue operas per evening, doubling the production of the genre within a typical theatrical residency at Versailles. A few years into her reign, Marie Antoinette was even more firmly in charge. As Papillon de la Ferté wrote matter-of-factly before the

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Most popular court composers, 1770– 1789 (repertory of the Opéra).

opening of the Fontainebleau season in 1777: “The trip to Fontainebleau will take place. The queen chose the spectacles as she desired.”37 An analysis of the operas staged at the court theaters during this period reveals a broad evolution in this repertory and a striking tendency toward contemporary composition.38 As shown in figure 3.2, the works selected for court performance by the Opéra anticipated and reinforced the modernizing trends that affected this institution’s output in Paris. The tragedies of Lully disappeared from court stages after 1773, several years before their final ancien régime appearances in the capital.39 Indeed, the wedding reconstruction of Persée seems to have made a strong impression on Marie Antoinette, though precisely the opposite intended by officials: she would witness only one further production of Lully’s tragédies lyriques at Versailles (and none at all during her reign as queen). Rameau fared little better, with a single full-scale revival after the royal wedding: a presentation of Castor et Pollux to mark a visit from the queen’s brother, the emperor Joseph II, in 1777. (In this case the choice seems to have been approved grudgingly; the French royals had little interest in the work but consented because their esteemed Austrian guest was curious to see it.) Such time-honored examples of musique ancienne were replaced with updated tragedies by the younger generation of cosmopolitan composers favored by the queen. Many of Gluck’s French-language operas were given at court, as were well-

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publicized premieres of leading Italian artists, including Piccinni (Phaon and Pénélope), Antonio Sacchini (Chimène and Oedipe à Colone), and Antonio Salieri (Les Horaces). The history of tragédie lyrique in the 1770s has often been framed in binary oppositions— between conservatism and progressivism, or between the heightened dramatic expression of Gluck and the “periodic” melodic structures of Piccinni. In actuality, however, as Mark Darlow and R. J. Arnold have discussed, both the musical stakes of operatic reform and the cultural politics involved in its patronage were complex and highly malleable. First, it should be emphasized that the composers at the heart of the journalistic querelles were never personally antagonistic or radically divergent, and the technical basis of their “battles” was accordingly often ambiguous. Even if they approached tragédie lyrique through disparate musical means, Gluck, Piccinni, and other foreign artists in France had a common goal: the modernization of the genre through the incorporation of cosmopolitan styles. Second, it is clear that the political factions in these disputes shifted palpably over the course of the decade and generally could not be reduced to straightforward royalist-patriot or French-Italian divisions.40 The terms of debate were initially court-centric, with musical allegiances mapped according to the party lines of localized aristocratic grievances. When Marie Antoinette expressed support for Gluck around the premiere of Iphigénie en Aulide, opposition emanated from the circle of Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV and the then-dauphine’s fiercest rival at Versailles.41 After du Barry’s fall from power, to stand against Gluck had a different meaning, with partisans of the Italianate idiom more frequently aligned with progressive or anti-Crown sentiment.42 These schisms in theoretical discourse were also muddied by the pragmatic links between the composers: if the new artists of tragédie lyrique were pitted against each other in the periodical press, they were ultimately united through their shared association with the queen. By 1777 Marie Antoinette was an active benefactor of both Gluck and Piccinni, and she was also a key agent in bringing Sacchini and Salieri to France. The details of the wars of the Gluckistes and the Piccinnistes have been reported elsewhere and need not be rehearsed here. For the purposes of the present argument, the facts of reform in tragédie lyrique are less important than what these changes eventually came to signify. By the end of the

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decade, and especially in the run-up to the Revolution, enemies of Marie Antoinette had effaced much of this historical nuance, narrowing the multivalent strands of musical and political development into two prominent themes of dissent. One the one hand, the queen was censured for the ways in which her meddling had disrupted the operatic tradition associated with the Bourbon court; on the other, she was viewed with suspicion for her excessively foreign taste— this irrespective of the wide popularity enjoyed by the composers she patronized. These criticisms were reflective of, and played strongly into, broader currents of French “Austrophobia,” a point to which I will return below. Even more dramatic than the development in the court repertory of the Opéra— and with political repercussions for the monarchy that remain largely unexplored— was a substantial shift in the overall balance of theatrical genres in favor at the royal residences. Between 1770 and 1789 the vast majority of lyric works produced at court were not tragédies lyriques but opéras comiques, featuring the actors of the Comédie-Italienne (fig. 3.3). Indeed, for all the legitimate scholarly attention surrounding Marie Antoinette’s impact on serious opera, Gluck does not even make the list of the top ten most frequently staged composers during her time in Versailles; the

Figure 3.3

Most popular court composers, 1770– 1789 (total repertory).

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seven performances of his reform tragedies pale in comparison to the nearly two hundred performances of opéras comiques by Grétry. It was Grétry who would become the queen’s personal director of music, an act of patronage mimicked by other members of her entourage.43 The inclusion of dialogue opera in these theatrical seasons was neither unprecedented nor unexpected; a key aim of the merger, after all, had been to legitimize the genre’s presence at Versailles and Fontainebleau. But the explicit royal sponsorship did not erase the differences in status between opéra comique and the more elite tragédie lyrique, nor did it ensure a seamless and universal acceptance within the courtly context. The musical language of dialogue opera remained bound by the bureaucracy of privilège, which set limits (at least in theory) on its potential for ceremonial expansion. And even after the rapid stylistic evolution of the postmerger years, the genre continued to feature lower-class or bourgeois characters and “humble” settings that stood apart from the grandly allegorical traditions of the tragic realm. What seems to have been most striking to contemporary observers was the scale and speed of these repertory changes: what had begun as a gradual diversification of court programming in the 1760s resulted in a total overhaul of these productions during the 1770s. Marie Antoinette’s impact on the development of French lyric theater was thus highly significant, moving the outdated spectacles of Versailles closer to the mainstream of European operatic modernity. Even though the queen’s patronage was sanctioned by the menus plaisirs and in line with prevailing musical taste, this did not grant her immunity from criticism. For opponents of the monarchy, Marie Antoinette’s support for Austrian and Italian musicians and her identification with the historically nonroyal opéra comique marked her artistic preferences— and her character— as dangerously and doubly foreign.

Tragédie Lyrique and Its Parodies The last decades of the ancien régime witnessed the culmination of a largescale transformation in the lyric programming of the Bourbon court. This musical revolution matched or even surpassed the scope of the Gluckian revolution at the Paris Opéra. Even more importantly, the period was marked by changes in the ways theatrical genres were regulated and by con-

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tinued erosion of the boundaries that had once existed between them. We have already traced the pressures placed upon these lines of demarcation by the postmerger repertory of the Comédie-Italienne. One might expect that legal and generic specificity would be more carefully upheld at Versailles, the seat of government from which such rules technically emanated. (The theatrical contracts, after all, bore the direct authority of the monarch, taking the form of arrêts du conseil d’état du roi.) But this was decidedly not the case. From the 1770s onward court entertainments were defined by an increasing fluidity of generic exchange, as the gap between the tragédie lyrique and competing varieties of musical comedy began to collapse. The evolving attitudes toward musico-dramatic distinctions have several critical implications for our understanding of the Gluck–Piccinni era. First, contrary to Julian Rushton’s assertion that the Comédie-Italienne “went its own way” during this period,44 the authors of dialogue opera were directly involved in the contemporaneous aesthetic disputes, both commenting on and providing fodder to the controversies over stylistic innovation. The works they contributed, moreover, suggest a second sort of revolution in progress: a revolt, reinforced by the Crown, against the long-standing and politically symbolic system of theatrical hierarchy and privilège. When the demands of court performance contradicted the existing statutes, the latter were overlooked, and the directors of the Comédie-Italienne were repeatedly allowed to test their restraints in the material that they presented for the royal household. These dual developments were vividly demonstrated in the court revival of vaudeville parody, a subset of French dialogue opera most closely associated with the Parisian fair entertainments of the early eighteenth century. In general terms, a parody offered a satirical or burlesque take on a serious work, transplanting its plot to a less rarified locale and recasting its music into vaudevilles. The result was a humorous setting that underscored the shortcomings of the source and, on occasion, those of its original aristocratic audience.45 There had always been significant overlap between popular theater and the privileged stage, between vaudeville parodies and the tragédies lyriques that they mocked. The fairs of the French capital attracted spectators from a range of social classes, and many who frequented these entertainments also attended the Crown institutions on a regular

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basis.46 It is clear, however, that parody was considered something of a countercultural art and that, in consequence, it was viewed with a measure of skepticism by many of those accustomed to the “real thing.” A visitor to the fairground Opéra-Comique in 1745, for example, was appalled to see Lully and Quinault’s Thésée “mutilated” there and lambasted the satirical genre for ruining French taste: “You know, Madame, that this poem is one of the most beautiful of the gracious Quinault. If you had seen it disfigured, distorted, how hideous it would have appeared to you! Ah, Madame, the terribly thing that a parody is! . . . Must we really put up with this miserable genre of writing in the Republic of Letters?”47 Although elite consumers often descended upon the fair spectacle and even appropriated its parodic works for their private theaters, this repertory was nonetheless conceived at an aesthetic remove from the more rarefied offerings of the Opéra or the Comédie-Française. Given the lowbrow reputation of vaudeville parody, it is hardly surprising that the genre was not a conventional fixture of ceremonial entertainment for the Bourbon regime. The fair troupes that originated this lyric form had not typically been allowed to appear at the royal residences. The Comédie-Italienne, which featured parodies in its repertory in the early decades of the century, had presented them only sporadically at Versailles and Fontainebleau during the reign of Louis XV.48 (The privileged company had largely abandoned vaudeville satire between the 1762 merger and Gluck’s arrival in Paris, as it distanced itself from traditional associations of the forains.)49 In the 1770s, however, the situation changed dramatically. During this decade the Comédie-Italienne presented runs of more than a dozen distinct parodies in the capital. Interest in the genre was even more intense at court, with more than thirty performances of at least fifteen satirical works (table 3.2).50 The latter corpus included the contributions of the comédiens as well as a set of original commissions from Jean-Étienne Despréaux, the court ballet master and a personal associate of the queen.51 Thus, Marie Antoinette was not only the leading supporter of a new generation of tragédie lyrique composers, but also the most prominent patron of the comic send-ups of these same artists. The archival record confirms that the queen might be consulted prior to the initial performance of a parody,52 and that the authors of the satirical genre were regularly granted

Ta b l e 3 . 2 Vaudeville parodies at the Comédie-Italienne and at court (1773– 1786)1 N e w Pa r o d i e s Title

Source opera ( l i b r et t i s t, composer)

Librettist(s) (music arr.)

Premiere of source

Premiere o f pa r o d y

*Nanine, soeur de lait de la reine de Golconde

Aline, reine de Golconde (Sedaine, Monsigny)

Gondot 2

15 Apr. 1766 (Opéra) Notable revivals: 16 May 1771 (Versailles); 26 May 1772 (Opéra)

1773 (Salle de la Ville de Fontainebleau)

*†Roger Bontems et Javotte

Orphée et Eurydice (Moline, Gluck)

Dorvigny, Moline

2 Aug. 1774 (Opéra)

13 May 1775 (ComédieItalienne)

24 Jan. 1777 (Versailles)

*†La bonne femme, ou Le phénix

Alceste (du Roullet, Gluck)

Barré, Desprès, de Piis, Resnier (Moulinghen)

23 Apr. 1776 (Opéra)

7 July 1776 (CI)

23 July 1776 (Petit Trianon); 31 Jan. 1777 (Versailles)

†Les gémeaux

Castor et Pollux (Bernard, Rameau)

Gondot

24 Oct. 1737 (Opéra) Notable revivals: 21 Jan. 1772 and 11 Oct. 1778 (Opéra); 9 June 1770 and 5 May 1777 (Versailles)

10 May 1777 (CI)

*Berlingue

Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège (Poinsinet/ Sedaine, Philidor)

Despréaux

24 Nov. 1767 (Opéra) Notable revivals: 11 Dec. 1773 (Versailles); 8 July 1777 (Opéra)

13 Sept. 1777 (Choisy; after private performance at Chausée d’Antin)

†Sans dormir

Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège

Rousseau

See above

12 Oct. 1777 (CI)

*†L’opéra de province

Armide (Quinault, Barré, Desprès Gluck) de Piis, Resnier (Moulinghen)

23 Sep. 1777 (Opéra)

17 Dec. 1777 (CI)

Additional c o u rt performances

3 performances at Choisy (1777– 1778); 5 Aug. 1784 (Petit Trianon)

19 Dec. 1777 (Versailles)

T a b l e 3 . 2 (continued ) *†La rage d’amour

Roland (Marmontel, Piccinni)

Dorvigny

27 Jan. 1778 (Opéra)

19 Mar. 1778 (CI)

20 Mar. 1778 (Versailles)

*†Romans

Roland

Despréaux

See above

30 May 1778 (Marly)

22 Aug. 1778 (Choisy)

*Momie

Iphigénie en Aulide (du Roullet, Gluck)

Despréaux

19 Apr. 1774 (Opéra)

22 Aug. 1778 (Choisy)

4 performances at Choisy, Marly, and the Petit Trianon (1778– 1781)

†Les rêveries renouvelées des Grecs

Iphigénie en Tauride (Guillard, Gluck)

C. S. Favart, Frémicourt, Voisenon (Prot)

18 May 1779 (Opéra)

26 June 1779 (CI)

*Christophe et PierreLuc

Castor et Pollux

Despréaux

See above

1 June 1780 (Versailles)

†Constance

Pénélope (Marmontel, Piccinni)

Barré, de Piis, Radet, La Rosière

2 Nov. 1785 (Fontainebleau)

6 Jan. 1786 (CI)

*Syncope, reine de Mic-Mac

Pénélope

Despréaux

See above

31 Jan. 1786 (Versailles)

21 Feb. 1786 (Versailles)

O l d e r Pa r o d i e s R e v i v e d Title

Source opera ( l i b r et t i s t, composer)

Librettist(s) (music arr.)

Premiere of source

Premiere o f pa r o d y

Additional c o u rt performances

*†Raton et Rosette, ou La vengeance inutile

Titon et l’Aurore (de la Marre, La Motte, Voisenon, Mondonville)

C. S. Favart

1 Jan. 1753 (Opéra)

28 Mar. 1753 (CI)

23 July 1776; 28 Feb. 1777; 20 Sept. 1781 (Versailles)

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T a b l e 3 . 2 (continued ) *†Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne

Le devin du M. J. B. Favart, village (Rousseau) Guerville (Sodi)

*†Jerôme et Fanchonette

Daphnis et Alcimadure (Voisenon, Mondonville)

*†Les ensorcelés, ou Jeannot et Jeannette *†Gilles, garçon peintre, z’amoureuxt-et-rival

18 Oct. 1752 (Fontainebleau)

4 Aug. 1753 (CI)

6 performances at Versailles, Choisy, and Marly (1776– 1785)

Vadé

29 Oct. 1754 (Fontainebleau); Notable revival: 17 Mar. 1773 (Opéra)

18 Feb. 1755 (Foire SaintGermain) Notable revival: 17 May 1781 (CI)

29 June 1781 (Petit Trianon)

Les surprises de l’amour (Bernard, Rameau)

C. S. Favart, M. J. B. Favart, Frémicourt, Guerville

27 Nov. 1748 (Versailles, Théâtre des Petits Cabinets)

1 Sept. 1757 (CI)

23 Jan. 1778 and 15 Jan. 1779 (Versailles); 5 June 1778 (Marly)

Le peintre amoureux de son modèle (Anseaume, Duni)

La Borde

26 July 1757 (Foire SaintLaurent)

2 Mar. 1758 (Foire SaintGermain)

30 Mar. 1781 (Versailles)

Performance information is recorded in Beaucé, Parodies d’opéra; Wild and Charlton, Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique; and F-Pan, O1 3026– 3086. 2 On the disputed authorship of this work, see Beaucé, Parodies d’opéra, 401. * Denotes parody performed at court † Denotes parody performed at the Comédie-Italienne 1

special financial gratifications— a mark of royal esteem— alongside their serious counterparts.53 There were more court productions of parodies of the tragédies of Gluck and Piccinni, in fact, than there were productions of the tragédies themselves. In arranging these events, Marie Antoinette and the administrators of the menus plaisirs seem to have acted less in response to their own tastes than to those of Louis XVI. Despréaux’s Berlingue (1777; after Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège), presented at Choisy, was said to have been the work that had roused the young king from his apathy toward theater.54 Or, as the Mémoires secrets reported of La bonne femme (a collaborative work, after Gluck and François-Louis Gand Le Bland du Roullet’s Alceste)55 in the summer of 1776:

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The king was so pleased with the parody of Alceste that the queen had ordered played before the royal couple at the Trianon that he dispatched La Ferté, intendant of the menus plaisirs, to communicate his satisfaction to the three authors . . . and to encourage them to compose more examples of this genre. This rather aggravated the management of the Comédie-Italienne, which had been attempting, in the meantime, to move away from such works.56 During the Gluckian decade the distinctions between source and satire— and the presumed patrons, audiences, and authors of each— grew ever more porous. As the commentary in contemporary periodicals makes clear, this trend was driven from the very top echelons of the court establishment and might extend to the Parisian programming of the privileged troupes. The parodies that flourished in the waning ancien régime were far removed from their fair predecessors, both in spirit and in substance. These works were often lavishly expanded, more closely aligned with the scenographic vocabulary and grand scope of tragédie lyrique than the efficient character of the popular repertory. This was true of satires that originated at the Comédie-Italienne, and especially of those written or adapted explicitly for the court context. Despréaux’s Syncope, reine de Mic-Mac (1786; based on Pénélope), for instance, contained explicit visual parallels to the realization of its target at the Opéra: its actors were dressed in costumes borrowed from that august institution.57 The cast of the same author’s Christophe et Pierre Luc (1780; based on Castor et Pollux), for its part, was so large that it required a full six pages in the libretto to cover the featured players, many of whom had also performed in the recent revival of Rameau’s opera.58 This parody was so grandly conceived— mirroring the five-act structure and containing even more divertissements than its source59 — that it was chosen to inaugurate the new theater at the Petit Trianon in 1780, a pointed transferral of ceremonial function to the realm of lyric satire. The overlaps in scenic apparatus and personnel are notable, given that the Opéra maintained its aura of exclusivity through a strict guardianship of the artists it employed. The Comédie-Italienne and other competing groups were generally forbidden to cast any actor, singer, or dancer associated with the more venerable lyric stage.60 At court, however, these rules no longer applied: the heightened spectacle of the Bourbon entertainments necessi-

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tated special dispensations for the comic theater, especially when this repertory was included among the festivities marking an important royal event.61 Rather ironically, in order to deliver an appropriate rhetoric of monarchical celebration, the creators of satirical works broke a set of mandates fixed by the monarchy itself. Where the new venues of parodic performance inspired an enlargement in the genre’s scenic ambitions, they also seem to have sparked a taming of its once-transgressive edges, or a certain evolution in critical intent. The Crown-supported satires are based less on irreverent subversion than on the sophisticated “inside jokes” of an elite public. Moving away from the form’s forain roots, these works catered to an audience that possessed a detailed knowledge of both the tragic sources and the discourses that surrounded them. The plot of La bonne femme, for example, which Marie Antoinette saw at least five times,62 parallels that of Alceste, and its humor hinges on the terms of debate then percolating in the periodical press. A key point of contention here was Gluck’s engagement with the French operatic heritage— specifically, with the setting of the same subject penned a century earlier by Lully and Quinault. To summarize: Gluck’s original conclusion strayed from that of his predecessors. The composer and his librettist, du Roullet, omitted the character of Alcide, and the work ended with the descent of Apollo. After the public protested this change, the opera was revised to more closely mirror the Lullian tragedy, with the missing character, now named Hercules, reinstated to rescue the royal couple. Yet the altered dénouement had its own set of complications: as contemporary critics were quick to protest, the arrival of Hercules is abrupt and renders the deus ex machina puzzlingly redundant.63 The authors of La bonne femme playfully underscore the troubles surrounding Alceste’s ending, making the final scenes of their satire purposely nonsensical. Mathurine— a peasant set to join the army in the place of her drunken husband, René— is shocked and confused when an old friend, the Hercules stand-in Barbarigo, suddenly arrives to save the day. M at h u r i n e Grand Dieu! le ciel nous aime. Barbarigo lui-même.

M at h u r i n e Good God! The heavens are smiling upon us. It’s Barbarigo himself.

The Musical Revolutions of Marie Antoinette René Barbarigo! c’est toi! . . . Comment! c’est toi! qui t’amene Presqu’au moment du combat? Barbarigo Moi? j’étois là pour la scene. J’attendois un coup d’éclat.

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René Barbarigo! It’s you! . . . How in the world? It’s you! What has brought you here at precisely the moment of combat? Barbarigo Me? I’m just here for this scene. I was waiting for something big to happen.64

In the final chorus, Barbarigo apologizes for the work’s disappointing conclusion: (Air: Qu’en voulez-vous dire?)

(Air: Qu’en voulez-vous dire?)

C’est finir assez maigrement; Un peu d’indulgence, Un peu d’indulgence. C’est finir assez maigrement; Mais il falloit un dénouement.65

Things have finished rather weakly; A little indulgence, please, A little indulgence, please. Things have finished rather weakly; But we needed to end somehow.

Jokes like these echoed journalistic appraisals of Gluck’s role in the modernization of the French lyric tradition and provided spectators with another means of untangling the details of the stylistic debates. As such, La bonne femme offers a vivid example of the cross-pollination between the serious and satirical domains during the 1770s. The comic play both references and participates in the relevant critical invective, but the humor reflects an awareness of the multifaceted allegiances of its public, remaining good-natured throughout. Although Gluck himself was averse to parodies of his work,66 the feeling was not reciprocated by comic artists and audiences. C. S. Favart’s Les rêveries renouvelées des Grecs (1779; after Iphigénie en Tauride), for instance, ends with a deflation of the censure contained in its interior acts. In performance, the vaudeville finale was preceded by a compliment not to its own authors but to Gluck and his librettist, NicolasFrançois Guillard; these praises, the Journal de Paris noted, were “roundly applauded” by those in attendance.67 Indeed, as Pauline Beaucé has argued, many operatic satires from this period function less as pointed reproaches than as comic reconfigurations of

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their targets.68 The principal aim of this corpus was no longer to “make fun of the original” tragedy but rather to “render it more humorous.”69 Pierre-Yves Barré, Augustin de Piis, Jean-Baptiste-Denis Desprès, and Louis-PierrePantaléon Resnier’s L’opéra de province (1777; after Armide), for example, offers only limited critique of the source work, functioning instead as a jovial meta-commentary on the polemical furor that it had generated. (Appearing at the height of the quarrels between the Gluckistes and the Piccinnistes, the tragédie lyrique had become a touchstone in controversies over the limits of verisimilitude in lyric expression. As Gluck remarked: “There never was a more terrible battle, or one more fiercely fought, than the one I caused with my opera Armide.”)70 In the satire, the protagonist, Adelaide, has been transformed from a magical sorceress into the frazzled director of a provincial theater company. As the curtain rises, Adelaide is preparing for the premiere of a divisive new opera, Gluck’s Armide.71 She is distracted, however, by her illicit desire for Rigaut, a handsome law student with a beautiful voice and a distressing secret. Like her serious counterpart, Adelaide is torn between love and duty: she wishes to cast Rigaut as her male lead, Renaud, but is enraged that he has colluded with her greatest enemy, the cabal that threatens to disrupt performances of the upcoming show. Throughout L’opéra de province, Adelaide and her uncle, Hiradot,72 are obsessed with the scandal erupting around their production: Adelaide Le choix d’Armide, enfin, plaît-il en ce moment? Lit-on l’Annonce? Hiradot Assurément. Déjà même on s’échauffe & la dispute est vive. Chacun disserte: on s’invective, On veut avoir un sentiment.73

Adelaide Armide, are people pleased with the choice? Have they read the announcement? Hiradot Most certainly. They’re already getting worked up & the dispute is quite lively. Everyone has things to say: there’s lots of name-calling, One simply has to have an opinion.

At a time when “one simply had to have an opinion” about Gluck’s operatic innovations, a comedy like L’opéra de province offered a knowing and accessible method of entry. It is not coincidental that performances of the tragédie and its parody were closely coordinated, both at court and in the capital. In

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the winter of 1777– 1778, for instance, Armide was staged on Wednesdays and Sundays at the Opéra in Paris; throughout December and January, L’opéra de province occupied intervening days at the Comédie-Italienne, a testament to the increasingly symbiotic links between the two types of works.74 Royally supported satires like La bonne femme and L’opéra de province demonstrate both how the authors of vaudeville parody were involved in the aesthetic debates of the 1770s and how the patrons of this corpus introduced confusion into the geography of French theatrical forms. The career of the librettist Pierre-Louis Moline exemplifies these increasingly cozy relationships between customarily disparate domains. Moline is best known for helping Gluck adapt the Viennese Orfeo ed Euridice into the Parisian Orphée et Eurydice, which premiered at the Opéra in the summer of 1774. Just a few months later, Moline wrote his own parody of the tragedy, Roger Bontems et Javotte, transforming the lyre-playing mythological hero of the original into a poor fiddler who toils in a mine.75 Roger Bontems et Javotte was scheduled at the Comédie-Italienne to align with the production at the serious theater, generating publicity for the satire but also for its target. Moline even went so far as to make a brief cameo in the comic version.76 A critic for the Correspondance littéraire was puzzled by the links between the author’s two librettos, noting that “the two works are essentially modeled on the same plan. . . . In fact, it is not easy to determine whether the parody was constructed after the opera or the opera after the parody.”77 Never before, in other words, had the aims and expectations of the serious and satirical genres been so closely intertwined. The original Orphée et Eurydice was famously dedicated to the queen, but only the parody Roger Bontems et Javotte was ever performed before her at Versailles.78

Italian Opera at the French Court Even as the authors of lyric comedy poked fun at the querelles over operatic reform, the Comédie-Italienne was cementing its own reputation for cosmopolitan experimentation. In addition to its success at integrating Italianate innovations into newly composed opéra comique, the company was a trendsetter in the realm of translation-parody, or the nonsatirical adaptation of Italian opera into French.79 (Here “parody” is used in the musical rather than the literary sense, referring to the setting of new words to a shared

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melodic source.) The comédiens had taken important steps in this direction during the querelle des bouffons;80 responding to the new round of controversies in the 1770s, the troupe produced seven further examples of the genre (table 3.3). This latter variety of parody constituted a second, even more influential contribution to the disputes over national style and concomitant confusion in French dramatic regulation. Librettists and composers introduced audiences in Paris and Versailles to the latest Italian music while correcting the “deficiencies” in imported works to satisfy contemporary Gallic standards. The popularity of translation-parodies at the Comédie-Italienne, and the active cultivation of the genre by the court, soon prompted the Opéra to experiment with its own corpus of adaptations and imported opera buffa, a significant change in the programming of the serious theater. The two companies then began to squabble over this contested Italianate terrain, underscoring how the expectations that governed their respective repertories began to crumble in the years leading up to the Revolution. Once again the modern preferences of Marie Antoinette contributed to the disruption of hierarchical theatrical norms. And even more acutely than in the case of vaudeville satire, her intervention would exert enduring effects on the composition of the court entertainments, the organization of the Crown companies in Paris, and— in larger terms— the reputation of the monarchy and its artistic projects. It is worth noting that two of Gluck’s reform tragedies for the Opéra, Orphée et Eurydice and Alceste, were themselves rewritings of extant Italianlanguage works. But the fashion for translation-parody in the 1770s was initiated not by output of the Austrian composer but by a smash hit from the Comédie-Italienne. This was La bonne fille, an adaptation of Piccinni and Goldoni’s sentimental comedy La buona figliuola, which had first appeared in Rome in 1760 and been disseminated widely throughout Europe thereafter.81 The French version of the popular opera buffa, arranged by JeanFrançois Cailhava de l’Estandoux and Domenico Baccelli, premiered in the spring of 1771 to rousing acclaim. It enjoyed nearly one hundred performances in Paris in the two decades that followed and— with nine separate revivals— also earned an esteemed position in the repertory at Versailles.82 The Comédie-Italienne thus served as a conduit for the music of Piccinni well before he was officially summoned to France and entangled in aesthetic debate. As Darlow has argued, the Italian imports of the Comédie-Italienne

Ta b l e 3 . 3 Translation-parodies at the Comédie-Italienne, 1771– 17791 Title

Source opera ( l i b r et t i s t, composer)

T r an s lat i on & Dat e o f arrangement premiere, ( libretto/ t h e at e r music)

La bonne fille La buona figliuola (Goldoni, Piccinni)

Cailhava/Baccelli

17 June 1771, Comédie-Italienne

La colonie

L’isola d’amore (Gori, Sacchini)

Framery

16 Aug. 1775, CI

Le duel comique

Il duello (Lorenzi, Paisiello)

Moline/Lefroid de Méreaux

16 Sept. 1776, CI

L’inconnue persécutée

L’incognita perseguitata Moline/Lefroid de (Petrosellini, Anfossi) Méreaux

Pomponin, ou L’auteur mystifié

Lo sposo burlato (Casti, Piccinni)

Ginguené

25 Oct. 1776, Fontainebleau 3 Nov. 1777, Fontainebleau

Pa s t i c c i o s L’Olympiade, ou Le triomphe de l’amitié

Music from at least Framery five different operas by Sacchini, including L’Olimpiade, Il Cid, Montezuma, Tamerlano, and Lucio Vero, on a text by Metastasio

Les deux Contains parodied amis, ou Le airs by Anfossi, faux vieillard J. C. Bach, Majo, and Paisiello 1

Durosoy, Ginguené/Rigel

2 Oct. 1777, CI

15 Mar. 1779, CI

Performance information is recorded in Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien.

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fulfilled an explicit cultural program, informing the broad public of cosmopolitan musical trends and suggesting a pragmatic, blended model for the continued development of the native operatic idiom.83 The French La bonne fille, accordingly, is not an exact translation of the Italian La buona figliuola, but a comedy that mediates between the two lyric traditions. Cailhava and Baccelli conserve the framework of the original text and score while tempering the most stereotypically Italianate features of each to make them more palatable to Parisian spectators. To begin, the translators tightened the action of the Goldonian libretto. The plot of this source work, after Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, epitomized the norms of recent opera buffa.84 Cecchina, a virtuous orphaned gardener, is in love with her aristocratic employer, the Marchese della Conchiglia; the Marchese  returns Cecchina’s affections, but his sister, Lucinda, conspires to thwart to the union, for she fears rejection by the arrogant Cavaliere, Armidoro, if her brother commits to an improper match.85 In the adapted version of the opera, the secondary romantic plot is eliminated: Lucinda is transformed from the sister of the male protagonist to his elderly aunt, the Comtesse, and the character of Armidoro is removed.86 With Armidoro excised, the action is brisker and more straightforward, and the ensemble sheds its most troubling defect, from the French point of view— its castrato role. The Comédie-Italienne’s authors not only transformed the character relationships and voice types of the Goldonian libretto; they also altered fundamental aspects of its pacing, replacing recitative with spoken dialogue (as was customary for their company) and repositioning many of the arias. Three-quarters of the musical numbers in La buona figliuola are exit arias, while not a single scene of the adaptation ends in this manner;87 the musical interludes of La bonne fille are instead embedded flexibly into the course of the comedy, more closely mirroring the rhythms of French lyric theater. Commentators in Paris applauded these changes, emphasizing how Cailhava and Baccelli had improved and clarified the Italian original. Antoine d’Origny, for instance, praised the authors for the “exquisite taste ” and “fine grasp of theatrical propriety” that inspired them to render “the action more regular and the situations more realistic.”88 In addition to these large-scale dramatic changes, Cailhava and Baccelli made numerous alterations within the individual arias of La buona figliuola. These modifications anticipate the criticisms that would dominate the Gluck–

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Piccinni debates on several fronts, providing a practical paradigm for how imported opera might be rehabilitated to adhere to the precepts of the French stage. After all, not even the most enthusiastic members of the Italianate camp in Paris advocated the wholesale adoption of the foreign aesthetic. Marmontel, for example, an ardent Piccinniste, maintained that French composers should cultivate tuneful, periodic music that had been stripped of its ultramontane “excesses.”89 Cailhava and Baccelli appear to have consciously tidied up the writing of their source to comply with contemporary expectations of theatrical restraint. First, as is well-known, partisans of the French tradition— and of operatic reform more broadly— were suspicious of bravura arias, whose music highlighted vocal fireworks at the expense of realism and textual intelligibility.90 Changes in La bonne fille reflect this unease. Removing the castrato role of Armidoro allowed the translators to dispense with two of the most elaborate numbers of Piccinni’s original (“Cara s’è ver ch’io vami” in act 2 and “Chi più di me contento” in act 3). Elsewhere the authors condensed coloratura passages and “softened” melismas, adding extra text beyond the initial syllable (as in “Sento che il cor mi dice ”/“Quelque chose me répete,” ex. 3.1). The music still belongs unmistakably to the Neapolitan composer but is moderated and “gallicized” throughout. Next, Cailhava and Baccelli expunged musical repetition throughout their work, in an apparent effort to parallel the more naturalistic practices of text setting found in opéra comique. La bonne fille retains only the opening A sections of Piccinni’s most extended dal segno arias (Armidoro’s “Della sposa il bel sembiante ” and Lucinda’s “Furie di donna irata”). And nearly every musical number of the French version features small but consistent

E x a m p l e 3 . 1 Niccolò Piccinni, La buona figliuola, act 3, scene 4, “Sento che il cor mi dice ” (mm. 21– 24); Domenico Baccelli, La bonne fille, act 3, scene 1, “Quelque chose me répete ” (mm. 21– 24).

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internal cuts. In the first-act “Sono una giovane,” for example, the artists not only abbreviate Piccinni’s score but split a repeating line between two characters, turning an aria into a duet to make the reiteration of music and text more realistic to the situation at hand. In this scene in La buona figliuola, the servant girl, Sandrina, swears that she will not divulge the details of Cecchina’s relationship (ex. 3.2). The aria is humorous— Sandrina sings at length about how she shouldn’t speak up— but not especially well motivated dramatically, for no one is pressuring Sandrina to divulge her secrets. In the adaptation of this number, “Vous pouvés en croire,” the final measures of each section are shortened (ex. 3.3), and the Comtesse inserts herself into the action, pressuring the conflicted servant (renamed Annette) to reveal all. The alteration provides an explanation for the repetition within the aria and negates the seemingly illogical behavior depicted in the original. This overview of a representative translation-parody shows, quite concretely, how the Comédie-Italienne acted as a leader in the musical querelles of the 1770s. In works like La bonne fille, authors anticipated and concretized the reforms discussed in the periodical press, molding the fashionable idiom of opera buffa into a format that appealed widely to French audiences. Notably, the impact of this repertory extended beyond aesthetics to the realm of institutional organization; the vogue for this and other adapted works from the comic troupe inspired a proliferation of imitations at court and among the theater’s competitors in the capital. As Andrea Fabiano and Alessandro

E x a m p l e 3 . 2 Piccinni, La buona figliuola, act 1, scene 6, “Sono una giovane ” (mm. 46– 56). I know all the rest, / but more than this / I cannot say.

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E x a m p l e 3 . 3 Baccelli, La bonne fille, act 1, scene 6, “Vous pouvés en croire ” (mm. 31– 37). Annette: When it comes to marriage / one must be discreet in the village. / It’s a secret. La Comtesse: When it comes to marriage / there are no secrets.

Di Profio have discussed, Marie Antoinette was not merely a supporter of the genre, but an active agent in the integration of Italianate opera into the system of royally sponsored entertainments. Following the success of La bonne fille, she spearheaded original court commissions, translations, and sponsorships for Sacchini and Giovanni Paisiello, and encouraged the programming of ultramontane comedies by Mademoiselle Montansier, the entrepreneur of the city theater in Versailles.91 The queen’s taste also, remarkably, seems to have impacted the scheduling of performances outside the courtly sphere. Her enthusiasm probably helped to install Anne-PierreJacques de Vismes at the head of the Opéra— a directorship marked by unprecedented variety and cosmopolitanism in the company’s output. De Vismes’s first major initiative was to engage a troupe of Italian singers for a season of opera buffa that ran in parallel in Paris and Versailles throughout the summer of 1778.92 As an Italian invention and subcategory of lyric comedy, adapted opera buffa had traditionally been considered the purview of the ComédieItalienne. But the massive popularity of these works, along with the courtinfluenced ambiguity regarding which players should be allowed to produce them, resulted in a veritable war of the parodies between the Crown’s two operatic theaters. De Vismes contended that the Opéra might serve its

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own interests and those of the French public by “welcoming all genres” into its repertory;93 in practical terms, this meant wielding the company’s institutional clout to encroach upon the terrain of the Comédie-Italienne. The latter troupe, for example, premiered a translation of Pasquale Anfossi’s L’incognita perseguitata (as L’inconnue persécutée, with a libretto by Moline) at Fontainebleau in the fall of 1776.94 Before the comédiens could present the parody in Paris, however, the Opéra moved to have it struck from their schedule.95 And not long thereafter, with suspicious fortuitousness, the Opéra presented its own version of the work, drawing openly upon the output of its principal competitor.96 In one aria, “Gentilles fillettes,” the second arranger, Barnabé Farmian Durosoy, changed only a handful of words from Moline’s initial adaptation, as represented in bold text in the example below. (The music is set identically in each.) Moline,

l’inconnue

persécutée,

act 1, scene 3 ( C o m é d i e - I ta l i e n n e ) Gentilles fillettes, Craignez les fleurettes, Et méfiez-vous Des Amans trompeurs:

D u r o s o y,

l’inconnue

persécutée,

(Opéra)

act 2, scene 6

Gentilles fillettes, Craignez les fleurettes, Craignez les ardeurs

Des Amans trompeurs:

Ils ont un air tendre, C’est pour vous surprendre; Cherchez à défendre Vos foibles coeurs:

Ils ont un air tendre, C’est pour vous surprendre; Mais sachez défendre Vos foibles coeurs:

Loin de vous rendre A leurs douceurs, Il faut défendre Vos foibles coeurs.97

Loin de vous rendre A leurs ardeurs, Sachez défendre Vos foibles coeurs.98

In the preface to his libretto, Durosoy admitted that he had kept Moline’s translation at hand while generating his own. Since someone else had already expended the effort, he reasoned, “it would have been absurd to torment [himself ] to come up with alternate turns of phrase ” in the new text.99 The administration of the Comédie-Italienne was justifiably infuriated by

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the violation and railed against the Opéra for its “unprecedented” act of plagiarism.100 In the autumn of 1777 a similar skirmish erupted over Framery’s reworking of Sacchini’s L’Olimpiade (known in France as L’Olympiade). The opera was originally intended for the tragic stage but encountered resistance from partisans of Gluck.101 Despite the fact that it contained “serious” music, including complex ensemble numbers, the translation-parody was allowed to go forward at the Comédie-Italienne instead. But as soon as L’Olympiade achieved success at the subsidiary theater, the directors of the Opéra had a change of heart. After just a handful of performances, they appealed to have their discarded work suppressed on the grounds of contract infringement.102 A reviewer for the Journal de politique et de littérature dryly noted that “four performances that attracted all of Paris [to the Comédie-Italienne] were enough to make the Opéra remember that it had an exclusive privilège to perform works with extended choruses.”103 The generic upheaval incited by these Italianate operatic arrangements goes several steps further than that displayed in vaudeville satires of the same period. If satire represented a kind of dialogic interaction between the repertories of the Comédie-Italienne and the Opéra, adaptations such as L’inconnue persécutée and L’Olympiade directly traversed these boundaries, moving from one stage to another. Indeed, the heightened competition over translation-parody demonstrates how the court’s casual attitude toward its own system of theatrical divisions had encouraged the transgression of these statutes elsewhere. Official regulations were initially disregarded at Versailles when convenient for the ceremonial festivities of the monarchy; by the end of the decade, these rules might independently be broken or affirmed at will by the Opéra in Paris. And as this kind of generic transgression evolved from a casual, localized exemption to a broadly acceptable practice for the elite theater, it began to detract from the integrity of the organizational structure on a larger scale. As the aforementioned review of L’Olympiade indicates, it was difficult to take this institutional bureaucracy seriously when it was so capriciously enforced or ignored by the government and the Opéra. It was also problematic to view this legal order as rational when it might abruptly be changed— as soon transpired in the regulation of imported Italian works.

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The clashes over adapted opera buffa culminated in a bitter contract dispute between the Opéra and the Comédie-Italienne— with enduring consequences for the ways that their respective repertories were defined. In 1779 de Vismes insisted that the bail between the two troupes be renegotiated to protect the exclusivity of his new, cosmopolitan programming initiatives. The most novel aspect of the agreement, confirmed by the Crown on 1 January 1780, was how boldly it defined Italianate music as the property of the Opéra.104 The administration of the more prestigious theater reserved for itself the rights to exploit foreign talent and to stage Italian-language works. The Comédie-Italienne, by contrast, was subjected to a complete ban on the translation-parodies that it had invented and long disseminated.105 The latter company was now obligated “not only to never perform such parodies . . . but also to make absolutely no future use of Italian music or other kinds of parodies with translated French texts. This concession has the objective of granting the Italian players the right to perform only those opéras comiques that are based on original French poems.”106 The reorganization thus enshrined into law the institutional and generic confusion that had been introduced by the fashions of the court and exacerbated in the capital throughout the 1770s. The Opéra went so far as to reverse its traditionally nationalist charter to incorporate imported musical idioms. The ComédieItalienne, in the meantime, saw its rights constrained: it was now limited to the production of original dialogue operas, using music composed in France on French texts. This was the first moment— highly significant even if the by-product of bureaucratic happenstance— that opéra comique was defined as an exclusively French art. The “Frenchification” of lyric comedy would have a critical impact on the genre going forward (in particular, in the development of the patriotic aesthetic of the Revolution, as will be addressed in chapter 5). But in the immediate aftermath of the legislation, partisans of the Comédie-Italienne were incensed at the injustice of the mandate imposed from above. As the librettist Framery argued, the art of adaptation was intrinsically linked to the growth of opéra comique; to strip the theater of this corpus was to deny it an advantage it had enjoyed since the very birth of the comic genre in France.107 Even more grievously, the new arrangement deprived Parisian spectators of a popular source of established repertory and a potential fount of future innovation. In this instance, the order of privilège came to be seen as a symbol less of power than of despotism— an

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inequitable expression of the law that impeded the progress of the arts as a whole.

Despotism and Privilège During the final years of the ancien régime, the Bourbon-sponsored entertainments were rapidly modernized. Their organization was also turned on its head, with the system of theatrical privileges called into question and the hierarchy of operatic forms increasingly confused. The decline in the hold of the old tragic repertory, and the subversion of generic norms it engendered, can be interpreted in a number of ways. We might, for example, draw useful parallels with Weber’s study of Gluck at the Opéra, which sees emerging traces of social discord refracted in artistic rupture— evidence of a “society in the process of liberation” in the toppling of the absolutist musique ancienne.108 Or we might go one step further to read the new royal emphasis on lyric comedy as symptomatic of a broader erosion in the symbolic authority of the regime— one of many signs of a monarchy losing control over traditional patterns of royal etiquette and representation.109 It is certainly true that Marie Antoinette’s artistic patronage became entangled with the larger critical discourses that plagued the regime from the 1770s onward. As Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden frames it, the queen’s “musical tastes bred bad politics because they underscored her foreignness.”110 The monarch’s preference for lighter lyric genres could be tied to French suspicions of Habsburg informality and her support for nonnative musicians used to underpin wider skepticism of her “treasonous” allegiances.111 The slanderous libelles of the late eighteenth century reinforce these links between the musical and the political, making reference to Marie Antoinette’s theatrical endeavors and even, on occasion, taking on operatic form.112 Both L’autrichienne en goguettes (1789) and Le branle des Capucins (1791), which illustrate a pornographic relationship between the queen and her frequent acting partner, the comte d’Artois, are structured as old-fashioned opéras comiques, with alternating dialogue and retexted airs.113 And in the latter of these, the sensationalized queen is made to sing music that the real-life queen actually did sing with her troupe des seigneurs.114 In Les fantoccini français (1789), Marie Antoinette’s insidious foreign identity is highlighted not in direct relation to her Habsburg roots, but through allusion to her

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association with the Comédie-Italienne. In the context of this intermède, the character “Maria-Antonia” comes across as decidedly Italian, reimagined as the leading lady of a commedia dell’arte troupe. In each of these cases, the queen’s taste for cosmopolitan, comic theater serves as a mirror for her supposed deficiencies in character: her inappropriate friendships and frivolous leisure activities, her Austrian birth, and her refusal to conform to expectations of courtly decorum. The royal patronage of dialogue opera might consequently be construed as a breakdown in the rhetoric of monarchical display, a disruption in the manner in which the Crown fabricated itself through public art. If the Mémoires secrets described the style of the bouffons as a threat to the “majesty of [national] lyric theater,”115 the wording seemed simultaneously to suggest a threat to the majesty of the regime that brought it to the stage. It must be stressed, however, that both the nature of opéra comique’s rise and the changes it engendered were fraught with internal tensions, these strongly linked to the demands of the court apparatus and the modern and sophisticated tastes of the queen. On the one hand, if lyric comedy was occasionally perceived as a threat to the standards of ceremonial pageantry, it might equally draw criticism when it was molded to conform to these standards; many affronts to the hierarchies of dramatic regulation, as I have traced, were directly inspired by the spectacular traditions of Bourbon theater. On the other hand, while Marie Antoinette was disparaged for her disruptively foreign preferences, she was also attacked for having guarded this repertory too closely. In the end, the queen was attuned to trends that were eagerly embraced and awaited elsewhere; the heart of the matter was not simply that she had broken from established expectation at Versailles, but that the capital was not always allowed to follow suit. Nowhere were these contradictions of reception more forcefully demonstrated than in the final fate of the cosmopolitan experiments of the 1770s. The forward-looking de Vismes would have a short tenure at the Opéra. His directorship was a clear artistic success, paving the way not only for ultramontane music but also modern ballet d’action and refined lyric comedy within the repertory of the elite theater (initiatives that will be treated in the following chapter).116 De Vismes’s term was also, however, plagued by financial negligence, and an insurrection among the company’s singers forced the entrepreneur’s ouster in early 1780.117 The management of the

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institution was turned over to the Crown, and in the wake of economic uncertainty its programming priorities shifted. While the new administration continued to commission French-language works from foreign composers, the project of direct Italian imports and adaptations was largely abandoned. With the Opéra turning away from opera buffa in the 1780s and the Comédie-Italienne now forbidden from producing this repertory, translation-parodies faded from Parisian stages. Critics were alarmed at this unjust exploitation of legal bureaucracy. It was one thing for the Opéra to hold exclusive rights to foreign composition if the troupe wished to perfect this idiom for the benefit of its audiences. It was quite another if— as it seemed— the theater kept the clause intact largely to inflict harm upon the prospects of its rival.118 The suppression of Italianate comedy was held as a paradigmatic example of the flaws of privilège. When those in power were granted additional rights in the eyes of the state, the less fortunate segments of the population inevitably suffered. These perceptions of injustice were reinforced by the fact that Italian opera remained in prominence at the Bourbon court. Thanks to a purposeful loophole in the new legislation, the queen continued to hear translationparodies from the Comédie-Italienne at Versailles and Fontainebleau; she also encouraged similar productions from the troupe of Mademoiselle Montansier, culminating in a controversial French version of Paisiello and Giovanni Battista Casti’s Il re Teodoro in Venezia (as Le roi Théodore) in 1787.119 Marie Antoinette had long displayed a casual attitude toward the French system of theatrical divisions. (As the Austrian ambassador complained, opera in France was governed by “a number of privileges as extraordinary as they are absurd.”)120 The public, however, was taken aback by the hypocrisy of a queen who would willfully ignore the statutes that she herself was tasked with upholding. A commentator in the Mercure de France wrote scathingly of this uneven enforcement of theatrical regulation, which deprived ordinary citizens of pleasures that the monarchs openly enjoyed: At the time of the last contract passed between the Académie Royale de Musique and the Comédie-Italienne, the latter was forbidden to perform any work containing foreign music— La servante maîtresse, Ninette à la cour, La colonie, La bonne fille, and so on. . . . Who has suffered the most from these mutual regulations? The [Parisian] Pub-

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lic. . . . How many musical masterworks might have been imported into our theaters? . . . We assembled with great delight at Fontainebleau and Versailles to hear the sublime music of Le roi Théodore and the capital derives no benefit! They would allow a similar performance by inept fair players twenty steps outside of the city boundaries; but these divine productions of Paisiello, Sarti, Anfossi, and Cimarosa are stopped at the walls of Paris as if they were contraband!121 It was disingenuous, in other words, for the court to overlook the restrictions that were imposed in the capital and to benefit from entertainments that less rarified audiences were not permitted to witness.122 Such enlightened artistic taste had become, however ironically, a symbol of aristocratic despotism: the rules of privilège appeared all the more corrupt and arbitrary when it was the monarchy that broke them with greatest abandon. This study of the patronage activities of Marie Antoinette affirms that the famed musical “revolution” of the 1770s referred not to the single movement of Gluck, but to a set of broad and multifaceted shifts in the production and reception of opera in Versailles and Paris— incorporating the evolution of critical discourses, the large-scale transformation of court programming, the ongoing Italianate developments within opéra comique, and the legal changes in the relationship between the Opéra and the Comédie-Italienne. It seems, moreover, that the term “revolution” applied to a change that was necessary but had yet to be fully realized: the dismantling of the institutional monopolies that had been instated in the age of Lully and Louis XIV. For writers like Marmontel— to circle back to the Essai sur les révolutions de la musique en France— it was in this stifling bureaucracy that the urgency of musical and political revolution coincided. “Liberté ” is something of a watchword within the Essai, as the author develops a protracted analogy between the flexibility he desires in artistic creation and the freedom from arbitrary restriction so clearly lacking in ancien régime France. In his discussion of text setting, for example, Marmontel envisions a pliable alliance between music and poetry, which gives neither facet of operatic composition universal priority but shifts fluidly depending on the dramatic context: “In the arts, as it is between men, the happiest society is that in which each individual is least constrained with regard to his natural advantages and his liberty.”123 The concluding sentences of the pamphlet make explicit this

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fundamental theme. Although the librettist is concerned in the main body of the work with contemporary aesthetic debates, toward the end he clarifies that greater issues of equality and innovation are at stake: “Exclusive legal privileges, which are highly detrimental to industry, are likewise anathema to the cultivation of talent and genius in the fine arts. We harm ourselves thoroughly when we adopt this kind of intolerant fanaticism that condemns music never to develop beyond the constrictive boundary of historical precedent. Liberty, mother of invention, must reign on our lyric stage.”124 The ultimate irony of the 1770s was that there was one site in France where Marmontel’s utopian vision had already been fulfilled. Versailles— in almost every other respect an embodiment of absolutist control— had emerged as a beacon of liberal modernization in the operatic sphere. Marie Antoinette’s preferences were remarkably forward-looking and sophisticated, but it was these same traits that clashed most aggressively with the regime’s system of theatrical regulation and exposed its flaws. This misalignment of political and musical progressivism is the central concern of the following chapter, as I trace the queen’s patronage into the 1780s and into the multivalent symbolism of the pastoral sphere. As we will see, the most genre-bending and structurally complex opéras comiques of the late eighteenth century were often closely associated with the court context and, in consequence, highly conservative in their thematic orientation. For many contemporary critics, the most pressing issue was not that the plots of opéra comique might harm the reputation of Versailles, but that monarchical intervention was distorting the fundamental identity of the genre; the concern was not only for how the Bourbon image was debased, but for the complications introduced when the characteristics of lyric comedy were improperly altered or ennobled.

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The Decadence of the Pastoral Grétry and Desforges’s L’épreuve villageoise, a triumph in Paris and Versailles in 1784, ends with an extended tribute to the charms of country life. In the finale of this opéra comique, La France (a morally suspect city dweller) attempts to convince Denise (the village-born heroine) to join him on a trip to the capital. He enumerates the many delights of the metropolis, but is rejected at every turn. La France first sings the praises of the theater, with its marvelous ability to imitate the beauties of nature. Denise is puzzled at the concept, refusing to settle for an artificial rendering of forests and meadows when she already enjoys access to the real thing. La France tries again: perhaps Denise would enjoy attending balls and concerts, and hearing the harmonies produced by the nation’s greatest musicians? Denise dismisses the idea: in the countryside she is serenaded by nightingales, who must surely warble as skillfully as the artists in Paris. Finally, La France suggests that his companion would be impressed by the most brilliant earthly sight he can imagine— the French court. Denise remains nonplussed; in the village she takes in the sunrise, which she assumes to be comparably spectacular.1 As Denise completes her denunciation of La France’s proffered amusements, the ensemble enshrines her sentiments in a hushed and reverent chorale (ex. 4.1). Even without this concluding benediction, the moral of the opéra comique would be obvious: the amenities of court and capital pale in comparison to the natural— indeed, divinely sanctioned— manners of the countryside. Of course, this lesson is also dripping with irony, given the

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E x a m p l e 4 . 1 André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, L’épreuve villageoise, act 2, scene 4 (mm. 155– 162). Paris: Houbaut, [1784]. I have seen the sunrise / it must be pretty much the same.

means through which it is communicated and the audience to which it was first addressed. This vivid censure of theatrical artifice takes shape within a polished dramatic form. And the work’s vehement critique of noble values is tempered by its political function, as a centerpiece in the monarchy’s season of autumn entertainments at Versailles. L’épreuve villageoise is a refined court spectacle wrapped in a veneer of stylish rusticity— a hymn to simplicity whose medium contradicts its overarching message. Despite the outward incongruity with its performance venue, L’épreuve villageoise was at the height of aristocratic fashion in the 1780s, part of a larger mania for paysannerie in the art, literature, and theater of the late eighteenth century. These trends were driven by Grétry’s chief patron, Marie Antoinette, and embodied in her “country” retreat on the grounds of Versailles, the Château du Petit Trianon. The queen’s domain at the Petit Trianon was the locus of her rebellion against rigid court etiquette and of her eclectic experiments with the pastoral mode;2 here Marie Antoinette strolled in artfully overgrown gardens, wore informal cotton gowns, and constructed a pseudo-Norman “hamlet,” replete with a mill, pleasure dairy, and farm. In 1780 the queen inaugurated another important showcase for countrythemed art: a custom-built theater where she took in opéras comiques from the Comédie-Italienne and then performed them with her own amateur company, the troupe des seigneurs. In these activities the queen provocatively reconfigured ideals of royal display, both asserting her burgeoning authority

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and becoming mired in criticism and debate. These controversies only intensified as Marie Antoinette’s aesthetic preferences reverberated between the court and the capital— from the Petit Trianon, to the grand stages of Versailles and Fontainebleau, and ultimately back to the Crown-sponsored theaters in Paris. This chapter examines two categories of pastoral theater linked to the queen at the end of the ancien régime:3 older, “villageois” opéras comiques adapted for amateur performance at the Petit Trianon and new ceremonial works, created for the official court seasons and for the Comédie-Italienne and the Opéra in Paris. Each of these groups of operas raised thorny issues for the cultivation of the royal image, presenting a chasm between presumed representational intention and actual (often counterintuitive) contemporary reception. The drame-influenced repertory of the troupe des seigneurs, for example, would seem politically out of touch in the hands of its new, noble practitioners. In the Petit Trianon theater, Marie Antoinette took on roles beneath the dignity of a reigning queen of France and voiced sentiments that challenged the established class structures of the ancien régime. At the same time, however, the act of performance was interpreted (and contested) as a demonstration of power— as a way of articulating her sway over the complex social dynamics of the Bourbon court. The queen’s amateur productions derived their impact not only from their questionable thematic content, but also from their explicit exclusivity, as events marking favor within an esteemed aristocratic circle at Versailles. As the queen appropriated older opéras comiques for her personal leisure, she also influenced an original corpus of more expansive pastorals— public commissions for court and capital that seemed to counter the criticisms raised by her withdrawal into the private sphere. These works, by Grétry, Martini, and Nicolas Dezède, among others, have been scrubbed of their transgressive themes and transformed into lavish encomia of monarchy. They portray noblemen that benevolently immerse themselves in the lives of their common subjects, affirming the hierarchical and heavily symbolic bonds between peasant and seigneur. Despite their “Crown- approved” morals, these latter operas were themselves not without controversy, provoking questions regarding the boundaries of genre and the limits of upward mobility for rustic-themed opéra comique. Considered as a whole, I argue, the queen’s pastoral operatic projects were not quite as frivolous as

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they have often been portrayed, engaging a coherent and culturally relevant set of dramatic principles. But they nonetheless presented a tangle of musical and political tensions— between appropriate standards of private behavior and modes of public display, between modern theatrical taste and traditions of royal symbolism, and between the very nature of lyric comedy and the mechanisms of courtly propaganda. Indeed, these case studies build upon the paradox presented in the previous chapter, exposing another rift between forward-leaning currents of theatrical practice and entrenched expectations of Bourbon ceremonial rhetoric. It is clear that the courtly projects of paysannerie were in dialogue with a number of fashionable and widely accepted strains of contemporary thought. These operas resonated with literary and medical discourses that urged French citizens to access moral and physical renewal through country retreat,4 while responding to larger political anxieties about the degeneration of the landed aristocracy in the waning ancien régime.5 Once again, however, the ways in which these modern stylistic vocabularies were deployed would prove problematic, both for the existing organization of the Crown entertainments and for the reputation of the queen. The upward motion of rustic tropes from opéra comique to the Opéra was construed as a threat to the integrity of the preeminent royal company, and to the allegorical conventions and Arcadian themes of the eclogue. More broadly, the monarchy’s dramatic fixation with the conditions of the third estate was perceived less as a sign of engagement than of detachment— as a troubling displacement of real-world responsibilities into the vibrant, but illusory, realm of the theater.

Pastoral Living at the Petit Trianon Marie Antoinette’s idealized recreations of country life are enduring facets of her reputation and emblems of the problems of her image. The center of these pastoral fantasies, in art and fashion as well as theater, was the queen’s domain at the Petit Trianon— a gift from Louis XVI upon his accession to the throne.6 Situated only a few hundred meters from the main structures of Versailles, the neoclassical château presented an architectural and spiritual antithesis to the aesthetic of the central court. If the primary palace was calculated to astonish with its massive scope and gilded décor, the Petit

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Trianon fostered throughout an impression of beguiling intimacy. It was composed of small and cozy rooms and adorned with textiles and furniture embroidered with lilies, jasmine, and Habsburg roses.7 And it was fitted into a landscape that reflected a similar atmosphere of grace and rustic charm. Soon after acquiring the grounds, Marie Antoinette replaced the traditional sculpted landscaping with an English garden, filled with artificial streams, wild-looking meadows, and purposefully disordered shrubbery.8 In the 1780s the queen extended the illusion in her model hamlet, a collection of thatched cottages surrounded by fruit orchards and fields of buckwheat and alfalfa (plate 1).9 Marie Antoinette’s pastoral endeavors represented a modern twist on a well-established— if often ambiguous— strain of French aristocratic symbolism. As Meredith Martin has shown, the roots of the queen’s milkmaid fantasies can be traced back at least two centuries. During the 1560s Catherine de’ Medici, the wife of Henri II, constructed several faux-rustic havens, including farms at Saint-Maur and at Mi-Voie, on the outskirts of Fontainebleau. Here she projected a politically savvy “rootedness” to counteract suspicions of her Italian heritage, while investing in Arcadian-inspired cultural projects (the bergeries of the poet Pierre de Ronsard, for example, and performances of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso).10 Similar practices were reiterated by subsequent generations of French royal women. In the late seventeenth century, Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, the mother of Louis XV, was given a menagerie by her father-in-law, the roi soleil; Pompadour would later develop garden retreats at Versailles, Fontainebleau, and Compiègne.11 Marie Antoinette’s activities at the Petit Trianon infused this traditional pastoral vocabulary with gestures to the fashionable theories of Rousseau, answering— albeit mostly superficially— the philosophe’s calls for natural simplicity over artifice and outward luxury.12 Rousseau’s novel Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (1761), which featured a morally upright heroine presiding over an idyllically rustic estate, had inspired new discourses linking country living with ideals of health, social reform, and sentimentalized, feminine virtue.13 The values propagated in the literary sphere found an analogue in contemporary political developments: the 1760s and 1770s witnessed the peak of the economic movement known as physiocracy. This school of thought, expounded by writers such as François Quesnay and the marquis de Mirabeau, claimed that the basis of France’s cultural and fiscal inertia

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lay in the recent migration of its aristocracy to urban centers, which had become beacons of vice and wastefully extravagant living. A revitalization of French society, in this view, could only be achieved by a noble class that reclaimed its traditional function as the driver of the nation’s agricultural economy.14 Marie Antoinette’s hamlet, and a host of similar villages built by the Parisian and court elite in the late eighteenth century, signaled their creators’ purported aversion to metropolitan decadence— realigning conventional markers of wealth and power with an emerging currency of bucolic well-being.15 The Petit Trianon thus reflected an updated vision of aristocratic prestige, meant to project simultaneously “an empathetic attachment to the land and its commoners” and an assertive “dominion over them.”16 The lush farms, dairies, and gardens tied their patron to emerging paradigms of pastoral virtue; at the same time, they promoted an image of royal prosperity and fertility that, it was implied, might spread to the community as a whole. Marie Antoinette’s experiments with country living articulated her control not only over her common subjects, but also within the complex hierarchies of the French court. After all, the Petit Trianon was a terrain in which the queen held total command of aesthetic and access, even above the wishes of her husband.17 Nearly every element of the palace was governed according to her exacting personal oversight— from the composition of the flower arrangements that dotted the interiors to the temperament of the livestock that roamed the gardens.18 (She once wrote a letter to her chief farmer requesting that he purchase goats that were prettier and “less mean.”)19 All regulations of the Petit Trianon bore the imprint “par ordre de la reine” (by order of the queen), challenging the traditional expectation of masculine authority and establishing the realm as one contingent on the wishes of the queen alone.20 Famously, however, as Caroline Weber has outlined, neither the widespread vogue for rusticity nor the confident manner in which the queen wielded it would prevent her activities from being engulfed in criticism. Marie Antoinette’s expenditures on the Petit Trianon reinforced suspicions about her irresponsibly lavish lifestyle, for it cost an extraordinary amount of money to craft the impression of artlessness on such an expansive scale. In the end, the queen’s milk pails were made of fine Sèvres porcelain, and her rustic cottages filled with elegant furnishings; her “overgrown” gardens

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in fact required the labor of hundreds of men.21 Such wasteful spending would become a pervasive, if occasionally exaggerated, theme in the pamphlet literature disparaging the queen.22 But the irony inherent in Marie Antoinette’s luxurious hamlet, and its blatant detachment from the actual hardships facing the third estate, was apparent even to loyal members of the royal circle. As the marquis de Bombelles, whose wife served the king’s youngest sister, Madame Élisabeth, ruefully observed: “It is at great expense that they have tried to give the queen’s hameau the appearance of a very poor place. Perhaps with a few more expenses, Her Majesty could manage to wipe out . . . the misery that our real hamlets bear.”23 Rather than affirming the queen’s commitment to purified, rustic values, her elaborate recreations of a pastoral world emphasized the hypocrisy at the heart of the enterprise. Marie Antoinette was importing into the countryside, at great expense, the profligate trappings of the court she claimed to be escaping. Marie Antoinette’s retreat to the Petit Trianon was also scrutinized for the manner in which it upended assumptions about appropriate monarchical behavior and modes of representation. In contrast to Versailles, where the royal family was generally accessible and on display, the Petit Trianon remained closed off from the wider court infrastructure, its guests limited to the favored associates of the queen.24 In creating this intimate realm, Marie Antoinette broke a cardinal expectation of the regime— the notion, expressed memorably by her lady-in-waiting Madame Campan, that “kings have no interior. Queens have neither cabinets nor boudoirs.”25 As a figurehead and dispenser of privileges, Marie Antoinette had no right to an existence free from courtly protocol. And, indeed, those noblemen disgruntled about their exclusion from the Petit Trianon spread pernicious rumors about the activities taking place behind its flower-bedecked walls. Some censured the queen, long distrusted for her Habsburg allegiances, for turning her palace into a “little Schönbrunn,” an alternative court immune from Bourbon decorum.26 The pamphlet press spuriously reported that Marie Antoinette had engaged in affairs with the gentlemen in her inner circle and turned to the “German vice,” entering into romantic entanglements with her closest female companions.27 In short, these critical libelles accused the monarch of presiding over a playground for depravity and social inversion— a venue shrouded in mystery, where she might rebuff the hallowed demands of French royal etiquette.28

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It seems, then, that while Marie Antoinette was not entirely ignorant of the ramifications of her country affairs, her attempts to capitalize upon this emerging rhetoric of noble symbolism backfired dramatically. Ideals of fashionable behavior that made sense within a limited sphere of associates did not cohere with paradigms of outward ceremonial display. The classic example here is Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s portrait, Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress, which caused a scandal when it was unveiled at the Parisian Salon of 1783 (plate 2). This painting depicts the queen not in formal regalia but en gaulle— dressed in the kind of loosely fitted muslin gown that she often wore at her country estate.29 By the 1780s the chemise was a common piece of aristocratic clothing, a marked luxury item despite the simple material of its construction. When the queen wore a dress of this type among her inner circle at the Petit Trianon, it had one particular meaning: it defined Marie Antoinette as receptive to trends in contemporary attire and solidified her status as a member of the nation’s stylish elite. But difficulties arose when she translated these preferences into a portrait meant for ceremonial consumption. Because standards of official display had not yet evolved to meet those of broader noble fashion, the imagery was construed as highly provocative.30 As Vigée Le Brun described it, this was akin to painting the queen “in her underwear,”31 an assertion of individualized identity that was inadmissible for a communally emblematic monarch of France. This critical theme— of modern taste at odds with representational tradition, and of private behavior spilling over problematically into the public realm— is also well in evidence in the queen’s theatrical affairs, beginning with the activities of the troupe des seigneurs.

“Private” Pastorals: The Troupe des Seigneurs It is a scholarly commonplace to frame the Petit Trianon as a site where the divisions between art and life were perpetually and provocatively blurred.32 One historian describes Marie Antoinette’s country retreat as a “threedimensional realization” of the themes of contemporary pastoral literature.33 Another portrays the queen’s hamlet as an open-air stage, where she originated the role of fashionable peasant in a tragicomedy of her own making.34 But if Marie Antoinette’s pastoral domain was permeated by metaphorical theatricality, it also fostered a literal and vibrant culture of dramatic perfor-

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mance. In June of 1780 the queen opened the théâtre de la reine, an intimate but elegant venue on the palace grounds (plate 3).35 For the next five summers, this stage hosted residencies from the actors of the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne. During the same period, it served as the testing site for the monarch’s own amateur company, a group known to posterity as the troupe des seigneurs. Marie Antoinette first demonstrated an interest in amateur (or “society”) theater shortly after arriving in France. Madame Campan makes note of private spectacles in the royal apartments as early as 1773; Marie Antoinette prepared these plays with her sisters-in-law in secrecy, for Louis XV “would surely not have approved of such amusements, had he known about them.”36 At the Petit Trianon, however, Marie Antoinette had the freedom to indulge this hobby on a larger scale, mounting prose comedies and opéras comiques with her closest associates from court.37 The leading players of the troupe des seigneurs included the future Charles X, the comte d’Artois; the queen’s best friend, the duchesse de Polignac; and the duchesse’s rumored lover, the comte de Vaudreuil, one of the finest aristocratic actors in France. These amateur productions, I argue, might usefully be read as a microcosm of the tensions and contradictions of the Petit Trianon project as a whole.38 The operas presented at Marie Antoinette’s country retreat reflected her multifaceted engagement with modern theatrical practice: both the rustic themes of these lyric comedies and the act of performing them were at a zenith of popularity among the French noble classes. And yet, the ways that the queen deployed these new forms of prestige went resoundingly awry. The productions of the troupe des seigneurs posed one set of problems when judged by the standards of public court ceremony, for they were scandalously incompatible with prevailing expectations of royal display. They were less out of place within the realm of elite leisure but here generated a different collection of issues, pertaining to the relative openness of the monarchy and the social dynamics configured through access to the queen. As Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval has documented, society theater was a prevalent and well-regarded pastime in the Parisian salons of the late eighteenth century.39 When the queen took up acting, she adopted a leisure pursuit that was both acceptable and fashionable for a French noblewoman, one that might confer considerable accolades upon its organizer. So important was theater to the rhythms of aristocratic sociability that it was one

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of the first cornerstones of mondanité to be imported into the countryside. The Manuel des châteaux of 1779, a sort-of how-to guide to setting up one’s retreat, contains an entire section devoted to the topic. The work begins with an epistolary query to the author from a certain Madame de ***, who wishes to be tutored in the appropriate organization of spectacles at her rural estate: “I also have been meaning to ask you about a third room in my country house: a very agreeable salle de spectacle. . . . I imagine that I will use this all the time, performing comedies there with a troupe that I will form with my group of friends from Paris (who will surely come to visit me frequently in the country) and with some new neighbors, with whom I soon hope to associate.”40 The parallels to Marie Antoinette’s own circumstances are striking: the queen had recently constructed her own salle de spectacle and wished to entertain those members of her private circle whom she welcomed at the Petit Trianon. Within this context of aristocratic leisure, the repertory choices of the troupe des seigneurs were anything but radical. In fact, most of the lyric works prepared by the group seem to have been taken directly from a list recommended for this purpose in the Manuel des châteaux.41 The corpus produced at the Petit Trianon, outlined in table 4.1, conforms to a model that Elizabeth Bartlet terms “villageois” comedy. These opéras comiques were logical selections for a society setting because they were both established hits at the Comédie-Italienne and self-consciously “on theme ” at a country retreat. The works take place within rural or village milieux and foreground lighthearted romantic themes. Moreover, they have relatively modest aspirations with respect to scale, tone, and literary form, making them well matched to the capabilities of their amateur performers.42 Monsigny and Sedaine’s Rose et Colas, premiered in the spring of 1764 and presented by the queen in 1780, may serve as a characteristic example. The dialogue opera is a concise one act in length and written in prose. The action takes place on a single set— a room in the home of Mathurin, a country farmer— and the small cast of characters is limited to members of the third estate. If the comedy is not heady or profound, it is enhanced by an easy charm and an array of cantabile ariettes. The critic of the Correspondance littéraire was swayed by the opera’s “abundance of natural details and pleasing sense of naiveté ”;43 the Manuel des châteaux pointed out that its music was most “agreeable ” for budding thespians to sing.44 Rose et Colas was

Ta b l e 4 . 1 Complete lyric repertory of the troupe des seigneurs1 Title

L i b r et t i s t, composer

Le roi et le fermier: Comédie en Sedaine, Monsigny 3 actes, mêlée de morceaux de musique

1 Aug. and 12 Oct. 1780 [22 Nov. 1762, Comédie-Italienne]

On ne s’avise jamais de tout: Opéra comique en 1 acte en prose mêlé de morceaux de musique

Sedaine, Monsigny

10 Aug. 1780 [14 Sept. 1761, Foire Saint-Laurent]

Le sorcier: Comédie lyrique mêlée d’ariettes; en 2 actes

Poinsinet, Philidor

Rehearsed but not performed, Sept., 1780 [2 Jan. 1764, CI]

L’amant jaloux, ou Les fausses D’Hèle, Grétry apparences: Comédie en 3 actes, mêlée d’ariettes

Rehearsed but not performed, Sept., 1780 [20 Nov. 1778, Versailles]

Rose et Colas: Comédie en 1 acte, en prose et musique

Sedaine, Monsigny

6 and 19 Sept. 1780 [8 Mar. 1764, CI]

Le devin du village: Intermède

Rousseau

19 Sept. and 12 Oct. 1780 [18 Oct. 1752, Fontainebleau]

La matinée et la veillée de Piis, Barré villageoises, ou Le sabot perdu: Divertissement en 2 actes et en vaudevilles

1

Petit Trianon pe r f o r m an c e [ Dat e o f p r e m i e r e , t h e at e r ]

11 April 1782 [27 Mar. 1781, CI]

Le tonnelier: Opéra comique en 1 acte

Audinot, Gossec, et al.

Rehearsed but not performed, May, 1783 [16 Mar. 1765, CI]

Les sabots: Opéra comique en 1 acte

Sedaine, Duni

6 June 1783 [26 Oct. 1768, CI]

Isabelle et Gertrude, ou Les sylphes supposés: Comédie en 1 acte, mêlée d’ariettes

C. S. Favart, Blaise 6 June 1783 [14 Aug. 1765, CI]

Les deux chasseurs et la laitière: Comédie en 1 acte mêlée d’ariettes

Anseaume, Duni

6 June 1783 [21 July 1763, CI]

Details on these performances are taken from Desjardins, Le Petit-Trianon, 142– 161, 207– 225, and 238– 249; Jullien, La comédie à la cour; Nolhac, The Trianon of MarieAntoinette, 180– 199; and F-Pan, O1 3058.188.

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in many respects, then, perfectly in keeping with the general ethos of the Petit Trianon. It represented an appealing and accessible interpretation of the contemporary pastoral mode, while providing ample opportunity for its leading ladies to be flatteringly showcased. The repertory of the troupe des seigneurs seems to have been selected mainly for its topical relevance. But Marie Antoinette was invested in theatrical practice, more broadly, for its role in the accrual of social capital. The Manuel des châteaux and other guides to society performance are ultimately less concerned with aesthetics than with noble etiquette, filled with advice about how to use theater to avoid boredom, facilitate proper friendships, and promulgate one’s own reputation as an educated and authoritative host. Extant descriptions of the queen’s private pastorals confirm that she exploited these occasions to affirm her connections within her innermost social sphere. Several accounts, for instance, emphasize the sheer delight these events provided to their participants. As Mercy-Argenteau reported in a letter to Maria Theresa, “I heard . . . that the productions were highly pleasurable, full of grace and gaiety, and that the king was so satisfied that he applauded continuously, especially when the queen executed the musical numbers of her own role.”45 Marie Antoinette aimed in these activities to demonstrate her talent as a gracious salonnière— to accentuate her gifts for entertaining her respected guests, Louis XVI foremost among them.46 She also reinforced her hold over the court hierarchy by making these exciting affairs nearly impossible to get into. While numerous courtiers clamored to take part in the performances, the queen reserved the privilege of participation for a restricted circle of elites. Mercy-Argenteau, who was himself often excluded from the festivities, clarified that “the queen has until now been very firm in her decision not to admit to these amusements any spectators besides the king and the royal princes and princesses— no members of their entourages. None of the women of the palace, not even the close associates of the queen’s household, will be exempted from this exclusion.”47 Such selectivity transformed the productions of the troupe des seigneurs into coveted emblems of royal esteem (or, as Mercy-Argenteau described them, “a highly marked indication of favor for those who are admitted”).48 The queen thus took heed of the priorities articulated in contemporary guides to society theater: she was less concerned with how dramatic themes might be reflected outward than with how the act of performance created pleasure and consolidated relationships within an exclusive social group.

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Most historical assessments of the troupe des seigneurs are justifiably harsh, portraying the Petit Trianon performances as the ill-fated hobbyhorse of a frivolous and reckless monarch. As Jacques Revel argues, the queen “lived so impudently for so long that the only possible explanation is that she did not realize what she was doing.”49 Without absolving Marie Antoinette of culpability, I would counter out that she did, in fact, know what she was doing: the queen’s favored programming was doubly fashionable, reflecting both successful trends from the Comédie-Italienne and a tremendous vogue for théâtre de société. However, Marie Antoinette left herself open to critique in these performances by articulating her identity as a modern noblewoman rather than a politically involved head of state. The same aspects of the queen’s theatrical endeavors that defined her contemporary outlook also exposed her to a storm of controversy, underscoring the disjunction between modish norms of aristocratic behavior and the venerable expectations of royal representation. There was an important precedent for society theater on the grounds of Versailles: Pompadour had engaged in amateur performance in the Théâtre des Petits Cabinets around the middle of the century.50 Pompadour’s troupe specialized in pastoral productions of a refined sort;51 the group presented both classic works from the repertory of the Opéra (Lully and Jean Galbert de Campistron’s Acis et Galatée, 1686) and commissions that would later be transferred to the prestigious public stage (Pierre de La Garde and Pierre Laujon’s Aeglé, 1748). By comparison, Marie Antoinette’s favored opéras comiques must have seemed quizzically informal. Several of the operas performed by the troupe des seigneurs clashed awkwardly with the traditionally heroic self-imagery of the regime. The queen and her associates portrayed characters that were foolish and simple-minded, or were placed in situations of slapstick physical comedy that were beneath the dignity of the reigning royal family of France. The principal female role in Monsigny and Sedaine’s On ne s’avise jamais de tout, for example, is compromised for humorous effect: the ingénue is doused from head to toe in white hair powder which is knocked from a windowsill onto the street below.52 If the characters of villageois opéra comique occasionally behaved in coarse or unflattering ways, they might also be inappropriately provocative. As the peasant girl, Babet, in Duni and Sedaine’s Les sabots, Marie Antoinette would have enacted a number of erotic flirtations. The heroine escapes one suitor by shedding her outer garments and climbing a tree; then (still partially disrobed), she descends

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Louis Joseph Masquelier, Les sabots (1784). © Trustees of the British

to coyly banter with another, a plot point immortalized in several contemporary paintings and prints ( fig. 4.1).53 While not reflective of the queen’s real-world behavior, such performative promiscuity reinforced the rumors of licentious activity that plagued her existence at the pastoral retreat. In addition to these targeted issues of royal comportment, the operas produced at the Petit Trianon interacted in ambivalent ways with the larger

P l a t e 1 Richard Mique, View of Marie Antoinette’s farm [hameau] in the Park at Versailles (1786). Biblioteca Estense, Modena, Italy. Photo Credit: Alfredo Dagli Orti / Art Resource, NY.

P l a t e 2 Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress (1783). Schlossmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany. Photo Credit: bpk Bildagentur / Art Resource, NY.

P l a t e 3 Théâtre de la Reine, Petit Trianon, Versailles. Photo Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

P l a t e 4 Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette with a Rose (1783). Petit Trianon, Versailles. Photo Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

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political messages endorsed by the Crown. Troublesome in this regard was a progressive segment of repertory influenced by the sentimental drame. The first operatic role the queen performed was that of the heroine, Jenny, in Monsigny and Sedaine’s Le roi et le fermier. (We first encountered this work in chapter 2.) The opéra comique does not simply humanize the conditions of the third estate, but critically contrasts rural virtue with aristocratic decadence and immorality. At the outset of the opera, Jenny is kidnapped by a malevolent local seigneur (Lurewel); after she escapes she encounters her king, who has been lost in the woods while hunting and “for the first time . . . sees the conditions in which his subjects live.”54 Jenny and her fiancé, Richard, use this opportunity to expose the misdeeds of Lurewel and the complicity of the court that sanctions his power. As Richard relates, he “cannot imagine how a king can be good” when he is manipulated by his noble entourage; “it is to [their] advantage ” that the ruler behave unethically.55 The final portrait of the monarch in Le roi et le fermier is not entirely unfavorable; while he is subject to gentle reproach, the character is sympathetic toward his subjects and open to reform. As the Correspondance littéraire approvingly confirmed, every good “sovereign might benefit from losing himself ” among the less fortunate classes that he ruled.56 But while such sentiments had become commonplace at the Comédie-Italienne by the 1780s, they remained jarring when expressed by royal players on the outskirts of Versailles. If the queen renounced court corruption in the broad, metaphorical theater of the Petit Trianon, and then again at the théâtre de la reine, the impression was not of double conviction but of double detachment. Marie Antoinette had not endeavored to understand her subjects but instead “made a spectacle of [their] misery.”57 The private pastorals thus became emblems of dangerous withdrawal— of the gulf that had emerged between the fashionable desires of the monarchy and the more pressing needs of ordinary French citizens. While the themes of the troupe des seigneurs’ repertory reinforced a distance between Marie Antoinette and her disadvantaged dependents, the privileged atmosphere of their staging introduced rifts within the social fabric of the French court. Indeed, the queen’s withdrawal from public life at Versailles— her abdication of official duty in favor of contemporary taste— would become a focus of intense criticism, one more immediately harmful

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to her reputation than the specific ideological content of the roles she portrayed.58 In insisting upon privacy for her entertainments, Marie Antoinette charmed her closest associates while alienating a larger group of courtiers who derived status through proximity to the royal family.59 Observers recounted that many women of the palace were disgruntled at having been deprived of their usual marks of service in the Petit Trianon theater;60 the duc de Fronsac wrote a series of letters to the queen, conveying his displeasure at being denied his rightful duty to serve as stage manager to her troupe.61 These feelings of aggrievement were soon exposed in the press, which percolated with rumors of the king’s boredom and with the famous charge that the performances had been done “royally poorly” (royalement mal joué).62 The queen’s involvement with the troupe des seigneurs reflected a clear tension between the demands of her competing constituencies. What was perceived as ordinary, even appealing, behavior within a limited, private sphere was reinterpreted as an offensive suspension of etiquette among a wider faction of the aristocracy. In a sense, then, the reception of the troupe des seigneurs mirrors that of Vigée Le Brun’s royal portrait. While wearing a cotton gown behind the walls of the Petit Trianon was marginally acceptable, posing in such attire for a ceremonial painting was not. Amateur productions of villageois comedy were not inherently scandalous, but they became so when judged against the traditions of courtly civility. The ultimate corrective to Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress was straightforward enough: Vigée Le Brun provided a new version of the painting for display, retaining the pastoral atmosphere of the original but now depicting the queen in a more appropriate gown of rich silk (plate 4).63 The aesthetic of rustic opéra comique would be similarly redressed, reimagined to project a more fitting vision of the Bourbon regime on the public stages of Versailles and Paris.

Ceremonial Pastorals for Court and Capital While she lavished attention on her theatrical projects at the Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette by no means swore off her involvement in larger-scale operatic productions at court and in the capital. The ceremonial spectacles at Versailles and Fontainebleau proceeded under her influence through the

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final years of the ancien régime, and she continued to actively patronize the privileged institutions in Paris. As the queen revived villageois opéras comiques with her amateur company, she also supported the development of newly composed and more sophisticated pastoral works from the artists of the Comédie-Italienne. (Representative examples of this corpus are listed in table 4.2.) The expansive pastoral operas of the late 1770s and 1780s mitigated the questionable optics of the troupe des seigneurs’ repertory, presenting a refined and stylized view of country life filled with noble protagonists whose beneficence is consistently reaffirmed. If Marie Antoinette was criticized for the frivolity of her lifestyle at the Petit Trianon, the new opéras comiques produced under her protection offered a utopian view of aristocratic utility, demonstrating how the French nobility might repair its standing through a renewed and more charitable relationship with the nation’s third estate. As the Bourbon regime came under fire for its irresponsible isolation from court and society, the operas it endorsed publicly set forth a corrective fiction: showcasing kings and seigneurs that travel to the countryside for the benefit of those they encounter there. Marie Antoinette’s reign was defined by a vibrant interchange between the Comédie-Italienne and the theatrical infrastructure of Versailles and Fontainebleau. During this period the court seasons appropriated dozens of works devised for Paris, while ceremonial commissions often achieved subsequent success in the capital. Many of the leading authors of the ComédieItalienne, who were the driving agents of the expanded pastoral aesthetic, also enjoyed close ties with the royal family. Alexandre Masson, marquis de Pezay, the librettist of La rosière de Salency (1773), had been a tutor to Louis XVI in his youth; the actor and playwright Monvel, recognized for his country-themed collaborations with Dezède, seems consistently to have advanced his career by ingratiating himself with the queen.64 (As Monvel related in the preface to his prose comedy L’amant bourru in 1777, his greatest ambition was to enjoy her protection and “occupy [her] hours of leisure.”)65 Marie Antoinette’s personal music director, Grétry— then at the height of his success at the Comédie-Italienne— was called to assist with operatic rehearsals at the Petit Trianon.66 Martini, too, was closely involved with the theatrical endeavors of the troupe des seigneurs. This Bavarian-born composer (the Italian name was a pseudonym adopted to suit the Parisian

Ta b l e 4 . 2 Pastoral opéras comiques at Versailles and Fontainebleau (composed 1770– 1789)1 Title

L i b r et t i s t, composer

L’amoureux de quinze ans, ou Laujon, Martini La double fête: Comédie mêlée d’ariettes en 3 actes

Dat e o f p r e m i e r e , t h e at e r [ n u m b e r o f c o u rt pe r f o r m an c e s ] 18 Apr. 1771, ComédieItalienne [13]

La rosière de Salency: Opéra lyri-comique en 4 actes 2

Masson de Pezay, Grétry

23 Oct. 1773, Fontainebleau [4]

Les trois fermiers: Comédie mêlée d’ariettes en 2 actes

Monvel, Dezède

24 May 1777, CI [10]

Blaise et Babet, ou La suite des trois fermiers: Comédie mêlée d’ariettes en 2 actes

Monvel, Dezède

4 Apr. 1783, Versailles [6]

Le droit du seigneur: Comédie mêlée d’ariettes en 3 actes

Desfontaines, Martini 17 Oct. 1783, Fontainebleau [9]

L’épreuve villageoise: Opéra bouffon en 2 actes

Desforges, Grétry,

5 Mar. 1784, Versailles [3]

Alexis et Justine: Comédie lyrique en 2 actes

Monvel, Dezède

14 Jan. 1785, Versailles [3]

This table outlines pastoral operas from the Comédie-Italienne that were (1) composed during Marie Antoinette’s time in France and (2) either premiered at court or especially popular there (i.e., among the fifteen most frequently performed lyric works at Versailles and Fontainebleau during these years). Missing from this list are two collaborations of Dezède and Monvel ( Julie [1772] and its sequel, L’erreur d’un moment [1773]). These paired opéras comiques premiered in Paris; while both were ultimately seen at court, they did not have an enduring success in this repertory— perhaps due to the manner that aristocratic characters within them become figures of “grossest ridicule.” On this latter point, see Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 224. 2 This opera was subsequently reduced to three acts. 1

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market) worked his way through a series of prestigious posts, serving as directeur de la musique for the comte d’Artois and later as the organizer of the queen’s private concerts.67 Records in the menus plaisirs attest that Martini regularly supplied copies of his music to the monarch’s inner circle,68 and several of his faux-rustic operas for Versailles and Fontainebleau can be linked to the influence of this group. The allegorical L’amoureux de quinze ans was produced for the wedding of the duc de Bourbon in 1771 and frequently revived before the queen; the lavish Le droit du seigneur was written at the apex of Marie Antoinette’s interest in the pastoral mode and rehearsed under her supervision before its 1783 court premiere.69 Thus, even if these new operas looked to the innovations of the Comédie-Italienne, many bore the imprint of direct royal sponsorship. There was a symbiotic feedback loop between the private preferences of the queen and the manner in which the pastoral aesthetic evolved for wider consumption at court and in the capital. The pastoral opéras comiques of the 1770s and 1780s are more substantial than the villageois comedies of mid-century, reflecting both the ongoing development of the genre and the extensive resources of the courtly operatic apparatus. Most of Dezède’s compositions span at least two acts; Martini’s L’amoureux de quinze ans and Le droit du seigneur both have three acts and conclude with divertissements. An expansive impulse also applies to character type and stylistic mixture within the new pastoral repertory. While these later opéras comiques rely upon elevated poetic forms— they might be written in verse rather than in prose— they accentuate the naiveté of peasant characters through the use of an overblown country patois. L’épreuve villageoise, for instance, opens with the heroine, Denise, bemoaning the suffocating behavior of her suitor, André: Oh! Oui, Monsieur André, faut vous apprend’à vivre. Quoi! Toujours d’pis queuq’tems m’espionner, toujours m’suivre; Non, non, je l’corrig’rai . . . C’est là qu’c’est résolu; Et si ça l’fâche un peu, c’est lui qui l’a voulu.70

Oh! Surely, André, I must teach you to behave. For some time now he has spied on me, and followed me around. No, no, I shall correct him . . . It’s been decided. And if that bothers him, he well deserves it.

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Denise speaks with a “provincial” accent (marked by mispronunciations, dropped phonemes, and grammatically incorrect elisions) but molds this country dialect into elegantly rhyming couplets of twelve-syllable alexandrines. The passage encapsulates the artifice inherent in this subtype of opéra comique: these pastoral comedies pair an exaggerated caricature of rusticity with a sense of refinement often lacking in works of the villageois type. An analogous approach to rusticity— patronizingly heightened but decoratively polished— defines much of the music of the expanded pastoral corpus. The collaborations of Dezède and Monvel, in particular, abound with nods to an idealized style champêtre. A peasant figure is even more likely in their works than in earlier villageois comedy or lyric drame to sing in simple strophic forms. In Les trois fermiers, fully half of the musical numbers are based on tuneful couplets or mimic the performative expectations of the romance.71 As Michael Fend has described, the opera contains so many detachable extracts that it functions more “as a drama with insertion pieces . . . than a [true] opéra comique.”72 Like the country patois shaped into meticulous alexandrines, these moments of musical rusticity might be incorporated into edifices of considerable structural complexity. Martini and Desfontaines’s Le droit du seigneur, indeed, contains some of the longest stretches of continuous music yet to appear in a French dialogue opera. At the work’s opening, a programmatic overture leads into a multisectional ensemble evoking the preparations for a country wedding.73 At its conclusion, a series of vaudevillelike couplets are incorporated into a larger framework of polished country dances (a march, minuet villageoise, and contredanse, among others) that recall the ceremonial conventions of opéra ballet and court divertissement. In some examples of courtly paysannerie, the refinement in scenic structures is in dialogue with the innovations of the lyric drame, granting musical, and by extension moral, validation to peasant protagonists.74 Frequently, though, the effect is more ambivalent: these characters are so closely associated with strophic brunettes and chansonettes that they are flattened into prettified, onedimensional stereotypes, providing local color but little scope for nuanced social critique. The court pastorals of Marie Antoinette’s reign generally refrain from challenging established class structures. This is not to say, however, that these lyric works were closed to contemporary social concerns, for they engage serious anxieties over the role of the landed aristocracy in the

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modernizing century of Lumières. The late ancien régime was marked by a crisis of self-legitimation among the French nobility. New currents of Enlightenment thought had emphasized character-based meritocracies over hierarchies of birth, while consolidating conceptions of “economic inequality as a problem to be addressed rather than part of the natural order.”75 For a faction of French aristocrats, the best response lay in displays of benevolence, or bienfaisance— justifying the accumulation of property through the possibility of its charitable dispersal. The director general of finance Jacques Necker had articulated public assistance as a new priority of Louis XVI’s government in the late 1770s.76 Marie Antoinette was herself known to engage in symbolic— and largely self-congratulatory— acts of charity. As dauphine she was said to have tended to an injured peasant she met during a hunt in the forests of Fontainebleau;77 years later she would instill this same spirit of generosity in her daughter, Marie Thérèse, instructing the young princess to donate her toys to the needy.78 The baron d’Holbach spoke for many in the nation’s privileged classes in La morale universelle (1776) when he argued that noblemen might validate their status by contributing to the economic betterment of the third estate. Among France’s rural populations they would “find opportunities for making an honorable use of their wealth, and for showing themselves to be citizens.”79 The fashion for aristocratic bienfaisance was colorfully reflected and reinforced in evolving theories of the pastoral mode. The pastoral archetype in French neoclassical theater had long been linked to the tradition of the eclogue, centering on the allegorical treatment of contented nymphs and shepherds. The underlying aim was not la vraie nature but la belle nature, a vision of the countryside that aggressively sidelined elements of hardship to elicit feelings of pleasure in the viewer.80 As Amy Wyngaard has shown, the later eighteenth century witnessed a transformation in this aesthetic system: there emerged a new emphasis on peasant over shepherd imagery and an increasing commitment to theatrical verisimilitude (though in highly fetishized form).81 Authors such as Marmontel and Jean-François de Saint-Laurent contended that literary and dramatic depictions of rural life should be “realistic” or doleful enough to arouse sympathetic sentiments among their elite audiences.82 In his “Réflexions sur la poésie pastorale ” in the Encyclopédie— part of a larger discussion of the eclogue— Marmontel noted that the genre had typically abstracted its subject matter, painting

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country manners “in [their] most beautiful simplicity.”83 It might now, instead, be extended to include more serious and pathetic topics, inspiring both pity and “moral generosity” in the learned reader.84 The corpus of ceremonial pastorals adeptly fulfills these new political and aesthetic ideals, foregrounding the relationship between “simple” commoners and a benevolent aristocracy. Dezède and Monvel’s wildly popular Les trois fermiers and Blaise et Babet,85 for instance, emphasized how aristocratic charity could provide enduring advantages to a rural community. The first comedy of the paired set depicts the love and gratitude of a group of peasant families for Belval, the owner of the property upon which they farm. When the seigneur reveals that he has lost an unjust legal trial and risks foreclosure on his lands, his dependents react with gracious generosity. Affirming the success of a proto-trickle-down economics, the villagers provide an improbably massive loan (a sum of 300,000 livres) so that Belval may retain his holdings— a signal of their contentment with their station in life and also of the prosperity that his noble guidance has fostered. In the sequel Belval returns to repay the peasants’ munificence many times over, settling his original debts and bestowing prizes and years of land revenues upon the deserving inhabitants of the village.86 Other pastoral operas stressed the benefits to peasant morality that might result from the example of an upright local seigneur. Several works drew inspiration from the contemporary vogue for fêtes de la rose, ceremonies with medieval roots, in which a noble figurehead granted monetary rewards and a crown of roses to a rosière, the most virtuous young woman in his domain. The tradition originated in the hamlet of Salency, northeast of Paris, and had generated widespread attention from the late 1760s onward, when it was commemorated in the memoirs of the comtesse de Genlis.87 Accounts of the country fête touted the considerable social dividends from establishing such incentives for upstanding behavior. In his history, La rose, ou La fête de Salency (1770), Edme-Louis Billardon de Sauvigny credited the seigneur of Salency for cultivating a utopia of goodwill in his village, in stark contrast to the degradation experienced in neighboring communities: All of the inhabitants of the village . . . are good-natured, honest, sober, and industrious. . . . They assure me that [in recent memory] there hasn’t been a single incidence of crime in Salency— not a

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single one. And more than that, there haven’t even been reports of basic vice or the temptations of licentiousness— and this while the peasants in surrounding villages are just as violent and lecherous as ever. How much good has resulted from the establishment of this one social institution!88 We should underscore the self-serving transfer of agency in this elite literature on French morality: if the fount of societal good fortune resides in the countryside, it nonetheless requires intervention from above to keep it on track. The rose festival thus held a multifaceted appeal for a generation of aristocracy mired in crisis. As Sarah Maza has suggested, “The virtue and destitution of the rural world became mediating categories, through which noble men and women sought to persuade one another . . . of their collective moral stature and social utility.”89 Grétry and Masson de Pezay’s operatic interpretation of the festival subject, La rosière de Salency, headlined the Fontainebleau season in 1773 and was revived several times in subsequent years.90 The opéra comique takes place on the eve of a village rose ceremony. The heroine, Cécile, has already been selected as rosière, but several vindictive adversaries conspire to wrest away her laurels. The proceedings are set aright by the arrival of the seigneur, who displays all of the requisite hallmarks of a sentimental, enlightened leader. When he hears of the machinations against Cécile of a corrupt bailiff, he is moved to tears by her plight and vows to restore justice to the village. As Bartlet has noted, the aristocratic protagonist of La rosière de Salency functions as a prototype for an emerging, though as yet unrealized, iteration of the French monarchy— paternalistic, humane, and generously immersed in the well-being of its subjects.91 At the same time, the work was used to pay explicit compliment to Marie Antoinette: the Fontainebleau premiere concluded with admiring couplets for “Madame la Dauphine,” who retained the manuscript score in her personal music library.92 Several eighteenth-century commentators proposed that théâtre champêtre might be staged in rural communities to demonstrate codes of charitable noble behavior before peasant audiences.93 The themes of these pastoral operas, however, were aimed squarely at the court elite for whom they were frequently performed. The repertory of ceremonial pastorals might, indeed, be read as a symbolic counterbalance to Marie Antoinette’s withdrawal at

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the Petit Trianon. By insinuating the corrupting influences of court and city living, these works offered a justification for the queen’s pastoral retreat; they asked their viewers to consider the Petit Trianon as the locus not of wasteful extravagance, but of high virtue and self-sustaining prosperity. The corpus of pastoral operas was, moreover, unambiguous in its portrayal of monarchical accessibility, with its plethora of noble characters sowing good deeds in the French countryside. These opéras comiques suggested that, even if Marie Antoinette took temporary respite at her private château, she remained deeply engaged in the well-being of the nation as a whole. Along these lines, the final couplets of La rosière de Salency drew laudatory links between the opera’s patron and two of its principal characters: C horus Chantés, dansés, amusés-vous, Amusés-vous, ô mes compagnes. Les ris, enfin, sont fais pour nous, Et le Bonheur pour les campagnes. Pour faire partout des heureux, Antoinette a partout des yeux.

C horus Sing, dance, enjoy yourselves, Enjoy yourselves, my companions. Laughter, after all, is meant for us, And happiness for the countryside. In order to make her people happy, Marie Antoinette keeps an eye on everything.

Si le Ciel avoit négligé D’orner son front d’une couronne; Son destin n’auroit point changé; Ses vertus l’appelloient au Thrône: Et le sort lui remit des droits Qu’elle tiendroit de notre choix.

If Heaven had forgotten To adorn her brow with a crown, Her fate would not have changed at all; Her virtues would call her to the throne; And destiny gives her rights That she would hold by our free choice.94

In the first strophe of text, Marie Antoinette is compared to the country lord, watching over her people and ensuring their happiness and good fortune; it is she who “keeps an eye on everything” and creates the flourishing atmosphere for the country fête. In the second stanza, she is elevated alongside Cécile, distinguished within her community through the purity of her character alone. (Had she not been born a princess, her integrity would nonetheless have “call[ed] her to the throne.”) Marie Antoinette stands as both munificent seigneur and upstanding rosière, beacon simultaneously of ordained authority and of pastoral virtue. The glaring problem (we might say) was that she made no concerted effort to play either of these roles off

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the stage, so thoroughly had she subsumed them within the confines of the theater.

The Pastoral as Adaptation: C. S. Favart’s Ninette à la cour Updated pastoral works like La rosière de Salency made attempts to alleviate the troubling optics of villageois opéra comique, projecting both a sympathetic view of royal authority and an elevated interpretation of the pastoral mode. Despite its Crown-sanctioned messages, however, this countrythemed repertory remained problematic for the reputation of the regime. In hindsight, to be sure, such courtly paysannerie underscored the monarchy’s deep complicity in the social inequities of the ancien régime, demonstrating a blatant disregard for the harsh realities of rural life.95 For the elite audiences of the late eighteenth century, the more pressing question related to expectations of theatrical representation: as in the productions of the troupe des seigneurs, there might be a disjunction between the themes of an opéra comique and the manner in which it was interpreted within its institutional frame. To illustrate this point— and the tensions that remained as the tenets of villageois comedy were refined— I turn to one final case study: C. S. Favart’s Ninette à la cour (1755).96 This popular opera, about a peasant who visits the court, was premiered at the Comédie-Italienne but repeatedly reimagined for more prestigious venues in the 1770s and 1780s. In this process of adaptation, we find a refraction of the broader aristocratic appropriation of “rustic” art and a fitting commentary on the political implications of opéra comique’s rise within French theatrical culture. This series of works encapsulates how the traits of villageois opéra comique were “prettified” to match court tastes and ultimately, as a result, came to disrupt the order of the Crown-sponsored theaters in Paris. As the tale of the displaced Ninette was recast for more esteemed stages, it was altered in ways that tamed its oppositional message while amplifying the ambiguities of its generic status. Favart’s original Ninette à la cour was a critical work that rested tidily within the boundaries of the comic domain; its subsequent iterations were lavish encomia of the monarchy that, in their dramatic and musical forms, challenged the appropriate subject matter for the court theaters and the

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E x a m p l e 4 . 2 Charles-Simon Favart, Ninette à la cour, act 1, scene 4, “Tout va vous rendre hommage ” (mm. 5– 28). Paris: de la Chevardière, [1758]. Astolphe: We will all pay you homage / if you leave your village. / Good fortune will follow you, / my goal is to please you, / is this too bold? / If I might be accused of excessive temerity, / your beauty must excuse this. Ninette: Er, yes. / Monsieur, you must wait a minute. / I am distressed / by such an honor.

Opéra. If the moral of Ninette à la cour was the incompatibility of a peasant in the realm of noblemen, the reception of its adaptations paints a parallel story— of the complications that arose when dialogue opera was itself dislocated and made to acclimatize to the demands of Bourbon court spectacle. Favart’s Ninette à la cour dates from the same period as, and bears a resemblance to, the “private ” pastorals performed by the troupe des seigneurs. The opera is modeled after mid-century opera buffa, with a libretto translated from Goldoni and parodied airs by Ciampi, Leonardo Vinci, and Niccolò Jommelli, among others.97 The work opens in the countryside with a pair of peasant lovers, Ninette and Colas, preparing for their upcoming wedding. The bucolic scene is interrupted by the arrival of Astolphe, the king of Lombardy, who asserts his aristocratic privileges by hunting disruptively in the nearby forest. Astolphe becomes infatuated with Ninette and pursues her aggressively, even though he is already betrothed to the princess Emilie. The king persuades Ninette to accompany him to court, but she finds the atmosphere there revolting: Astolphe’s entourage mocks her viciously for her country manners. At the conclusion of the opera, the heroine tricks the king into revealing his intended infidelity. After he repents, the rightful couples are reunited, and Ninette and Colas return to their home in the countryside. Although Ninette à la cour ends with class hierarchies affirmed and socially appropriate lovers set to wed, the first version of the work is otherwise emphatic in its condemnation of aristocratic morality. Throughout, the king behaves dishonestly: infringing upon the land of his subjects and mistreating the two virtuous women between whom he is torn. His musical introduction, fittingly, establishes the opera’s links to the critical spirit of Goldoni. After describing his engagement to Emilie, the king immediately begins to woo Ninette; his slippery modes of persuasion are captured in the shifting patter of their buffa-style duet (ex. 4.2).98

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Although Ninette is chided by the king’s courtiers for her rustic inelegance, it is made clear throughout that she holds the higher moral ground. The heroine spends much of the opera passing judgment on the artifice and hypocrisy of life at court. The sharpest moment of reproach comes in a speech to Emilie during the work’s final act. Ninette cannot fathom remaining at the palace, so exasperated is she with the duplicitous ways that noblemen behave there: En un mot, tout cela me lasse, Et je quitte un pays maudit, Où sans dormir on reste au lit, Où sans affaire on se tracasse, Où l’on mange sans appétit, Où pour s’étouffer on s’embrasse, Où poliment on se détruit, Où la gayté n’est que grimace, Où le plaisir n’est que du bruit.99

In a word, all of this wearies me, And I will leave this wretched place, Where you lounge without sleeping, Where you fret for no serious reason, Where you eat when you are not hungry, Where you smother while embracing, Where you insult with politeness, Where gaiety is but a grim façade, And where pleasure is nothing but noise.

This censure of aristocracy goes several steps further than the criticism leveled in other pastoral opéras comiques described in this chapter. The atmosphere of the palace is only vaguely reformed at the conclusion of Ninette à la cour, with the courtiers left to resume their debauchery after the departure of Ninette and Colas. More perniciously, the center of the intrigue stems not solely from corrupt members of the king’s entourage but radiates outward from the monarch himself. The relationship between village and court remains largely unbridgeable— to the detriment, it is implied, of the latter. Given the negative appraisal of court and king at the heart of Ninette à la cour, it is hardly surprising that the work was not performed at Versailles or Fontainebleau in this initial incarnation by Favart.100 But as Marie Antoinette developed her interest in paysannerie, she requested the subject revived in a new guise: in 1777 Ninette à la cour was presented at Choisy in a balletic adaptation by Maximilien Gardel, a choreographer and assistant ballet master at the Opéra. The updated version of Ninette à la cour reflected a surge of courtly interest in the ballet d’action, an autonomous form combining pantomime and dance that was popularized by artists such as Gardel, Jean-Georges Noverre, and Gaétan Vestris.101 While several early examples of the genre had begun as spin-offs from tragédie lyrique—

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divertissements created within and subsequently detached from largerscale serious works— Gardel drew inspiration from the repertory of the Comédie-Italienne. Beginning in the court season of 1777, Gardel produced ballets that borrowed their music and subject matter directly from wellknown opéras comiques, stripping the original scores of text and refashioning them to accompany gesture. His adaptations of Favart’s villageois comedies (including Ninette à la cour, La chercheuse d’esprit, La rosière, and Le coq du village) met with great success at Choisy, Versailles, and Fontainebleau and quickly earned a place of prominence in the repertory of the Opéra.102 The outline and music of the ballet d’action generally follow those of Favart’s dialogue opera.103 There are, however, a number of key changes in Gardel’s work necessitated by the capabilities of the gestural medium and the prestigious court venue of the work’s premiere. Logically enough, the choreographer’s main structural alterations involve supplemental allowances for formal dancing, none of which is present in Favart’s libretto: a minuet lesson for Ninette, a ball at the palace, and a concluding divertissement for the wedding of the country lovers. These additions enabled Gardel to take advantage of the large corps of the Opéra ballet, outfitting the work to the typical scale of Bourbon pageantry; approximately forty members of the troupe took part in the first performance, portraying peasants, courtiers, members of the king’s entourage, and palace servants. If opportunities for divertissement are expanded in the balletic Ninette à la cour, its plot is otherwise streamlined, with wordless gesture substituting for more nuanced passages of dialogue. These changes dilute the critique of aristocratic privilege so strongly present in Favart’s libretto, especially as it pertains to the title character. In the original opéra comique, Ninette’s befuddlement over court protocol had been played not only for comic effect but also, crucially, as a foil for aristocratic corruption and hypocrisy. At the outset of the second act, for example, her manners were derided by Astolphe’s confidante, Fabrice, even as he purported to acquaint her with courtly customs: Fa b r i c e Quel air gauche! Ninette Hem! que dites-vous bas?

Fa b r i c e What an awkward manner! Ninette What’s that you mumble?

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Fa b r i c e Que nous vous trouvons adorable, Que rien n’égale vos appas. . . . À la Cour, la grande science Est de voiler ce que l’on pense. De la politesse toujours, La haine n’y paroît qu’en masque de velours.104

C hapter Four Fa b r i c e That we find you adorable, That nothing equals your charms. . . . At court, there is a great science In obfuscating what you really think. We always maintain a polite façade, While hatred lurks behind this velvet mask.

In Favart’s telling, Ninette is an outsider not only because she lacks polished manners, but because her innate honesty far exceeds the standards of the king’s noblemen. By contrast, the ballet d’action consistently downplays the shortcomings of the aristocracy and emphasizes Ninette’s failure to blend in with the genteel atmosphere at court. The climax of the work comes at the king’s ball, where Ninette performs in a “ridiculous” manner (act 2, scene 8).105 This scene was immensely popular with critics, who delighted in the energies expended by the graceful Marie-Madeleine Guimard, a leading light of the Opéra ballet, to capture her character’s lack of finesse. The Journal de Paris devoted several reviews to the subject in the summer of 1778, praising Guimard’s virtuosity in the role: “If Guimard was astonishing in the manner that she portrayed the silly attitude of Nicette in La chercheuse d’esprit, she is no less gifted in Ninette, emphasizing the gaucherie of her character’s countenance and the stupidity with which she examines the new objects she happens upon [at court].”106 The tone of these appraisals mirrors the general attitude of Gardel’s adaptation: the choreographer converts Ninette from a naive but astute conveyor of criticism to an object of mild condescension and ridicule, attributes that Guimard emphasized in her portrayal. Gardel’s ballet d’action addresses several pitfalls of ceremonial representation that arose in Favart’s initial take on the Ninette subject. With the support of Marie Antoinette, a modestly scaled, thematically provocative opéra comique was transformed into a more extravagantly appointed and topically appropriate court divertissement. Although the adaptation tempered the veracity and critical acuity of the original libretto, it did not escape controversy: as the subversive aspects of Favart’s text were effaced, the pragmatic questions it raised became increasingly vexing. By the late

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1770s pastoral ballets (and other similarly expanded opéras comiques) were caught in political debate over the financing of the royal entertainments. The year of the balletic Ninette à la cour’s premiere coincided with Necker’s appointment as the French minister of finance. It is evident from the writings of Papillon de la Ferté that Necker’s influence irrevocably altered the discourse surrounding Bourbon court spectacle, providing the first inklings that the regime’s lavish, Colbertist investments in ceremonial production were unsustainable. During this period the administrator of the menus plaisirs faced intense and entirely incompatible pressures— from the public and the finance minister to economize, on the one hand, and from the queen to maintain an appropriately elaborate atmosphere of festive events, on the other.107 The intendant, notably, proposed works like the Ninette à la cour adaptation as a fiscal compromise, advising that opéra comique and ballet be refined and substituted for tragédie lyrique as a cost-saving measure. As this particular example makes clear, however, cutting tragic commissions from the court seasons did not actually deliver economies, but merely ushered in greater expenditures on the works that took their place. As Papillon de la Ferté detailed with respect to one busy month in 1778, the proliferation of lighter genres could prove highly detrimental to the monarchy’s reputation for financial management: Since the 12th of October, there have been fourteen days of performances, at Marly, at Versailles, and in the queen’s quarters— comedies, operas, buffa works, ballets. This does nothing to reduce our expenses, either in the productions themselves or in the little theaters that had to be erected for the occasion. . . . None of this pleases the minister of Finance, and it amuses me even less, for the public likes nothing more than to enormously exaggerate this sort of expenditure.108 Papillon de la Ferté ’s fears did come to fruition, as the expense of the court theaters became a persistent talking point in discussions of monarchical excess. In 1780 the journalist Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet argued that the royal spectacles had become “one of the greatest of the financial plagues on the nation.”109 He offered as proof a recent encounter with a government

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official who had “protested vociferously against allegations of financial irresponsibility, asserting that such spending had only gone over budget by [the enormous sum of ] 180,000 francs in the previous three months.” 110 This account testifies to the position of lyric comedy and ballet in criticisms of Bourbon extravagance, as well as to the contradictions raised by these genres’ status as prominent Crown entertainments. When Papillon de la Ferté allocated too few resources to a small-scale comedy, he was accused of debasing the conventions of ceremonial imagery; when he invested too heavily, he was reproached for plunging the menus plaisirs into unseemly deficit. Pastoral adaptations thus became engulfed in irony: these works no longer staged noble corruption within their plots, but their costs were interpreted as a sign of corruption behind the scenes. Put another way, themes of royal benevolence and propriety meant little when couched in pieces of theater whose ostentatious financing involved reckless indulgence. As in the wider reception of the Petit Trianon, gestures toward austerity were construed as fundamentally hypocritical; the queen had done little to amend her profligate ways, and a façade of simplicity rendered the underlying decadence all the more maddening. The upward movement of pastoral tropes from the Comédie-Italienne to the court and the Opéra would also elicit anxieties about paradigms of generic division and the integrity of the tragic stage. These concerns intensified as the Opéra developed a second adaptation of Favart’s work, Colinette à la cour (1782), with music by Grétry and a new libretto by Jean-Baptiste Lourdet de Santerre.111 Colinette à la cour reflected recent modernizing initiatives at the nation’s most prestigious lyric theater. In the early 1780s the Opéra made a concerted effort to expand the presence of comedy within its repertory; the resulting output, including four commissions from Grétry,112 built on the emphasis on cosmopolitan variety that had been fostered during the directorship of de Vismes.113 Although Lourdet de Santerre professed that he had “little interest in the glories of invention,”114 the librettist significantly modified his source material to suit its new venue. In this throughcomposed, full-length opera, the expansionist tendencies suggested in Gardel’s ballet are pursued to the point of near absurdity. Colinette à la cour has seventeen named roles (compared to five in Favart’s opéra comique), a chorus of roughly fifty singers, and protracted divertissements, featuring

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dancing villagers, noblemen, priestesses, shepherds, bohemians, Catalans, hunters, and falconers, in turn. This escalation in scale is accompanied by alterations to the plot structure of the original comedy. Colinette à la cour goes several steps further than Gardel’s ballet d’action in removing elements of critical censure: indeed, the opera centers unabashedly on the celebration of authority. Colinette’s first description of Alphonse (here demoted from a king to a prince) is that he is “charming” and “honest,” an explicit correction to this figure’s dubious moral behavior in Favart’s opéra comique.115 At the Opéra, the ruler does not fall in love with the heroine but merely pretends to pursue her to evoke jealousy from Emilie, the socially appropriate match to whom he is entirely faithful. What is more, Alphonse is surrounded by an innocuous group of courtiers; denunciation of aristocratic hypocrisy is absent from Colinette à la cour and pushed aside by a series of choruses (at least one in each act) that laud the generosity of the prince and the joy he brings to his subjects. While the opera’s finale includes choral strophes praising the beauties of the countryside, these charms do not stand in contraposition to the atmosphere of the court or the character of its leader. Far from it: the villagers urge Alphonse to visit them whenever he desires a respite from the palace, for it is he who embellishes their lives with pleasure and ensures their continued protection (ex. 4.3). As they remark to the prince in an extended ensemble setting, their dependence and “mutual love will render [them] perpetually joyful.”116 Colinette à la cour appears outwardly to adhere to the conventional markers of Bourbon affirmation. However, when Grétry and Lourdet de Santerre outfitted a simple comic plot to match the topical and scenographic expectations of the Opéra, they prompted another set of aesthetic controversies: like Gardel’s ballet before it, the through-composed opera seemed to create new problems (even as it solved others) for existing structures of ceremonial display. For one thing, Colinette à la cour was a critical flop; commentators were aggrieved that the authors had ruined a perfectly good opéra comique by overburdening it with the trappings of a more substantial lyric tragedy. As the Mercure de France complained, Grétry and Lourdet de Santerre had taken a tale very agreeably treated by Favart and “transformed it into a drama that is disjointed, lacks interest, is conceived with

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E x a m p l e 4 . 3 Grétry, Colinette à la cour, act 3, scene 9, “Oui, nous sommes vos enfans” (mm. 9– 16). Paris: Houbaut, 1782. Yes, yes, we are your children, / you are our father: / our hearts, our wishes, our good feelings / will be with you always.

inexcusable negligence, and is weighed down with dances that arrest or prolong the action at every conceivable instant.”117 More seriously, reviewers were concerned that the opera’s nonchalance toward generic boundaries constituted a threat to dramatic propriety. As R. J. Arnold has shown, new comic commissions at the tragic theater provoked significant concerns about the dilution of its inherent gravitas: to import the plot types of opéra

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comique was to denature the very identity of this institution.118 As the Mercure de France report continued: You have asked me if I believe bouffon-style comedy can be successfully performed at the [Opéra]. I do not believe so. Comedy may exist at this venue, to be sure, but it must be of an elevated style. If it is not adequately refined, it will force the singers [of the Opéra] to lower their standards to that of comic acting and will destroy their facility with the more noble style that befits the serious genre. . . . Double [the demands] placed on these artists, and you will ruin them entirely.119 Critics feared, in essence, that adding a new type of opera to the theater’s roster would damage the presentation of its finest asset, tragédie lyrique. The journalistic apprehension toward Colinette à la cour was largely overblown; there is little evidence that this work detracted from the efforts of the tragédiens who performed it. But one might well argue, in a broader sense, that the proliferation of rustic-themed comedies and ballets at the Opéra altered the norms of pastoral expression in this venue, supplanting the Arcadian paradigm that had reigned there since the age of Louis XIV. In the final decade of the ancien régime, the Opéra made various attempts to sustain a neoclassical, pastoral aesthetic within its repertory— as demonstrated, notably, in a revival of Acis et Galatée in 1780 and in the wellpublicized commission of Gluck and Louis-Théodore de Tschudi’s Écho et Narcisse in 1779. Both of these projects drew on the Metamorphoses of Ovid— and both were spectacular failures, with six and twenty-one total performances, respectively. The emphatic rejection of Gluck’s final opera for Paris has elicited some consternation from modern scholars, given that it followed so closely on the heels of his greatest critical and commercial success, Iphigénie en Tauride. But the collapse of the later work appears less surprising when considered against the other pastoral productions of its day: in this same period, the Opéra staged nearly seventy performances of Colinette à la cour, more than one hundred of Rousseau’s Le devin du village, and more than two hundred of the opéra comique adaptations of Gardel.120 As the Opéra diversified its repertory in the late 1770s and 1780s, the most successful of its offerings distanced themselves from the mythological merveil-

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leux.121 Gluck’s Arcadian nymphs, and the tradition they represented, were crowded out by an infusion of more realistic figures from the contemporary French peasantry. The three iterations of the Ninette subject provide an apt analogy for a larger artistic process at work: that of the refinement and displacement of French dialogue opera on the eve of the Revolution. Favart’s Ninette à la cour is the story of a country heroine removed from her “natural” environment. The title character is dressed in formal attire and taught to dance a minuet but never fully adjusts to the demands of courtly life. The same might be said of the expanded, ceremonial iteration of pastoral opéra comique. This category of entertainment had enjoyed a notable rise in prominence since the middle of the eighteenth century, but even as these works were adorned with the accoutrements of court spectacle, they continued to be confronted by issues of reception. If the character of Ninette offered a voice of enlightened reason in a realm of hierarchical aristocracy, so too did the corpus of opéra comique signal a clash of representational systems— between a modern dramatic framework and an aging apparatus of ceremonial rhetoric. The following chapter explores this same theme— of the tension between evolving stylistic and generic principles and venerated conventions of royal display— from an opposing perspective. As we have seen, the archetypes of “rustic” opera migrated upward from the fair theaters and the Comédie-Italienne to the court institutions and the Opéra. Our next case study involves the converse motion of a lyric topic, tracing the adoption of traditionally tragic subject matter by composers of dialogue opera. While the present chapter took as its starting point the literal stage presence of the queen, chapter 5 broadens its focus, to the symbolic configuration of the king within a body of heroic and historical opéras comiques.

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“Heroic” Comedy on the Eve of 1789 The final extravagant state spectacle of the ancien régime was the opening of the Estates-General, on 5 May 1789. On this day thousands of onlookers flocked to Versailles to greet their new political representatives, delegates drawn from across the nation to serve their king and patrie.1 The deputies of the Estates-General had been elected in the spirit of reform: after a series of grave financial crises, Louis XVI consented to give voice to the three principal French orders, or estates (clergy, nobility, and commoners, respectively). The festivities themselves, however, were steeped in the tradition of la vieille France, seemingly calculated to enshrine the hierarchical status quo.2 The assembly hall was arranged strictly by rank, with the king flanked by his court on a grand royal stage and the third estate sequestered behind a balustrade. The décor glorified the august achievements of the monarchy, with sculptures depicting events of historic significance and paintings of Louis XVI’s predecessors in stately repose.3 If the visiting deputies were immersed in political spectacle by day, their leisure hours were devoted to spectacle of the dramatic sort: productions of the court-affiliated theatrical companies, which had been summoned by the monarch to mark the occasion.4 In the week before the opening ceremony, the assembled officials witnessed a performance of Sargines, an opéra comique by Dalayrac to a libretto by Monvel.5 A standout from the previous year’s theatrical season in Paris, Sargines was the lyric corollary of the tab-

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leaux that now adorned the hall of the delegates— that is to say, an elaborate reenactment of historical, monarchical heroism. Its plot centers on a famed medieval battle, the victory of the king of France (Philip Augustus) over the king of Germany (Otto of Brunswick) at Bouvines in July of 1214.6 The final scene of the opera’s third act (excerpted in example 5.1) resonated particularly strongly with the events at hand.7 On the eve of battle, Philip Augustus stands in a great hall before a statue of Charlemagne and urges his soldiers to prepare for the impending siege. He removes his crown and places it at the base of the statue, then asks if any of his subjects might be worthy of leading the charge in his place. This renunciation of the crown was intended not as a critique of absolute authority but as a symbolic affirmation of its renewal: the knights refuse to usurp their leader, breaking into passionate cries of “Vive le roi” over a triumphant C major fanfare in the orchestra. The moment serves to legitimize the monarchy, underscoring the ties between the Carolingian Charlemagne, the Capetian Philip Augustus, and, implicitly, the reigning Bourbon Louis XVI.8 In a manner redolent of the ancien régime, it also allegorically invokes the government’s hopes for the upcoming meeting of the Estates-General. Like the soldiers of yore, the deputies of 1789 had been granted a measure of representational power. Perhaps they, too, would consent to follow their king through the crisis. Sargines offers a remarkable confirmation of the processes I have traced throughout this book, demonstrating how firmly dialogue opera had been integrated into the French court context— and how forcefully it had come to represent the interests of the nation’s elite— in the years since 1762. It was not only the “kingly” tragédie lyrique, but also the rapidly evolving opéra comique, that might now function as a vehicle of monarchical allegory and affirmation. Dalayrac and Monvel’s work, though, is stylistically Janusfaced, oddly tangled up between old and new. While the politics of the opera are grounded in the established order, its music and dramatic structure foreshadow the tempestuous decade ahead. With its patriotic plot, expansive choral numbers, jarring registral contrasts, and spectacular stage effects, Sargines exemplifies the lyric innovations of the revolutionary period but predates the tremendous social turmoil that supposedly inspired them. This chapter examines the material and aesthetic changes that made a work like Sargines possible and, in so doing, interrogates the relationship

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Philippe Allons mes enfans . . . arrêtez, arrêtez . . . voilà l’image de Charles le Grand, du plus vaillant, du plus grand Roi qu’ait illustré notre patrie. Généreux Français, je dépose à ses pieds ma couronne; s’il est quelqu’un parmis vous que vous jugiez plus capable que moi de porter ce premier diadême du monde, nommez le . . . et je suis prêt à lui obéir.

Philip Augustus Come my children . . . stop, stop . . . before you is the image of Charlemagne, the most valiant, the greatest King that has ever brought honor to our nation. Generous Frenchmen, I place my crown at his feet; if there is any among you whom you judge more worthy than I of wearing this illustrious diadem, name him . . . and I am ready to obey.

Seigneurs, peuples, soldats, se jettent aux genoux de Philippe et chantent en choeur:

Noblemen, townspeople, soldiers, kneel before Philip Augustus and sing together:

Philippe, reprenant son Casque qu’il avoit déposé aux pieds de la statue. Eh bien! si vous ne me croyez pas indigne de vous commander, suivez-moi et songez que vous avez à défendre aujourd’hui votre Roi, vos familles, vos biens et l’honneur de la France.

Philip Augustus, taking up the crown that he had placed at the base of the statue. Very well! If you believe me capable of commanding you, follow me and know that today you will defend your king, your families, your livelihoods, and also the honor of France.

Example 5.1

Sargines, act 3, scene 12. Paris: Leduc, 1788.

between the practices of the 1790s and their foundations in the late ancien régime. Scholars have often identified 1789 as a crux of theatrical transformation, the moment when dialogue opera became sufficiently sophisticated, sufficiently politicized, and sufficiently “French” to challenge tragédie lyrique as one of the nation’s flagship lyric forms. This narrative holds that during the Revolution audiences expressed skepticism toward the privileged trappings of the tragic stage and embraced the more “popular” opéra comique as a legitimate national art. The genre in turn grew increasingly

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patriotic and moralistic, responding to its diversifying public and to the violent circumstances of the era.9 Here, however, I posit an alternative explanation and chronology for the final phase of opéra comique’s eighteenthcentury ascent. Certainly, as I have outlined, the authors of dialogue opera had worked steadily to legitimize their genre in the decades since the merger. The records of the Comédie-Italienne confirm, moreover, that the theater benefited from a substantial new infusion of aristocratic and royal investment during the 1780s.10 The comédiens acquired the infrastructure to support their revolutionary rhetoric well before the fall of the Bastille, as they catered to upper-class consumers in Paris and as their trademark works were deployed in celebration of the monarchy at Versailles. Particularly important to the expansion of opéra comique on the eve of the Revolution— as a sign of the genre’s status and a catalyst for its future development— was the opening of a large and well-appointed venue for the Comédie-Italienne, the Salle Favart, in the spring of 1783. In its new hall the company had more space, enabling it to increase both the size of its performing forces and the scale of the operas it mounted. The troupe installed the latest in lighting and staging technology, facilitating the implementation of dramatic scenic effects. And, significantly, it solidified the appeal it had built among an upscale clientele, allowing it to finance increasingly elaborate productions and present itself as a full-fledged rival to the esteemed Opéra. The composers and librettists working at the Comédie-Italienne in the 1780s exploited the resources of their theater to offer a legitimate alternative to tragédie lyrique, a spectacle that approached the scope of serious opera while modernizing its content and style. In their records the comédiens described this new category of repertory— which combined elevated historical subject matter with ambitious musical and scenographic effects— as “heroic” comedy. It would encapsulate, paradoxically, both the spirit of the ancien régime and the emerging dramatic ideals of the Revolution. As the “heroic” Sargines affirms, opéra comique was not an upstart “people’s” art that rose to prominence in 1789, but a well-established spectacle that was subsequently adapted to meet the needs of a new order. While it is intuitive to search for links between political and artistic upheaval, Dalayrac and Monvel’s work reminds us that conservative patronage structures might also provide an impetus for radical musical change.11

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Opera and Revolution at the Salle Favart Dialogue opera occupied a place of special prominence in the lyric repertory of the revolutionary era. Many of the emblematic works of the 1790s— from the competing Lodoïska settings of Luigi Cherubini and Rodolphe Kreutzer (1791)12 to Pierre Gaveaux and Jean-Nicolas Bouilly’s Léonore (1798) and Étienne-Nicolas Méhul and François-Benoît Hoffman’s Ariodant (1799)— were opéras comiques, premiered outside of the nation’s first stage.13 If it is clear that the Comédie-Italienne (and a newly founded competitor, the Théâtre Feydeau) dominated the operatic landscape of revolutionary Paris, it remains a matter of some contention how directly this development was linked to stylistic changes and how much it was indebted to the broader social upheavals of the age.14 The influential work of Winton Dean and Edward Dent saw the opéra comique of the 1790s as largely new, related more closely to the rising tide of Romanticism than the outmoded entertainments of the ancien régime.15 The paradigm of aesthetic rupture was supported by the pathbreaking scholarship of Elizabeth Bartlet, which focused on the ways that Méhul broke away from the lighter expression of Grétry and his contemporaries.16 Jean Mongrédien, though skeptical of an innovative and coherent revolutionary idiom, nonetheless identified an abrupt transformation in the opéra comique of this period: “From 1789,” he asserts, “the profile of this genre [i.e., the genre as composed before the Revolution] began to evolve in an unexpected way, short of completely disappearing.”17 More recently scholars have provided nuance to this foundational perspective by examining the tensions between continuity and change in the opéra comique of the revolutionary years. David Charlton has shown that the genre known, perhaps erroneously, as “rescue opera” can be linked to earlier works in the repertory of the Comédie-Italienne,18 while Michel Noiray has underscored the ancien régime origins of the “terrifying” orchestral sounds of the 1790s.19 Mark Darlow and James Johnson, meanwhile, have each posited that a measure of stability in musical poetics was not incompatible with evolving modes of social engagement and radical new listening practices.20 The archival materials presented below build upon these latter strands of investigation, outlining how the theatrical infrastructure of the late ancien

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régime supported musical and dramatic experiments that carried across the fault line of 1789. More importantly, these findings challenge a key aspect of the “classic” view that has yet to be sufficiently interrogated: the idea that a social insurrection should be accompanied by a parallel disruption in the organization of cultural forms;21 or, more precisely, that opéra comique flourished during the revolutionary decade because it was less intimately linked than its tragic counterpart to the old courtly system. As Dean suggested, tragédie lyrique had been “an idealized projection of the Ancien Régime. It was in no position to reflect the social struggles and aspirations of the common man.”22 A recent appraisal of Cherubini’s Lodoïska is even more blunt in its anti-aristocratic rhetoric: What in the cast of Barons, Counts, Tartars . . . so fascinated the contemporary public? Fed up with aristocrats gorging themselves on sweets and lounging about on their estates, the people . . . revolted in 1789. . . . Theatregoers wanted reality, not arcane or Arcadian stories of gods and goddesses descending from heaven or riding in on chariots. The conventions of the primary form of French opera, the tragédie lyrique, that had reigned since Louis XIV gave way to a new realism infiltrating from the lower class opéra comique.23 A number of studies of the Opéra have repudiated the notion that this insitution’s elite reputation was irreconcilable with revolutionary-era success. The serious company had, in fact, been set on a path of reform from the late 1770s onward: royal officials recognized the need for continued repertory renewal after Gluck’s departure, cultivating an atmosphere of thematic experimentation that would prove crucial to the theater’s subsequent survival.24 We should therefore be skeptical, as Darlow warns, of the revolutionaries’ own accounts, which falsely conflated “Crown administration with stagnation” and “the liberation of individual creative sensibilities . . . with liberty” writ large.25 Ultimately, the Opéra seems to have endured past 1789 because of, rather than despite, its ancien régime status; the uniqueness and prestige of this institution made it a valuable tool for the revolutionary state, just as it had been for the Bourbon monarchs.26 A similar degree of caution must be applied to the pre- and postrevolutionary history of the Comédie-Italienne. The class-based framework

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that underpins modern assessments of this troupe bears little resemblance to the manner in which its members described themselves in the late eighteenth century. By the eve of the Revolution, the comédiens were solidly established in Paris and had grown comfortably into their roles as servants of the court. Rather than trumpeting their fairground lineage, they were eager to discard the remaining traces of their genre’s popular roots. Nowhere is this branding strategy more apparent than in the final phase of the company’s ascent to ancien régime respectability, which was precipitated by the opening of its new, custom-built venue in 1783. Throughout the planning and construction of the Salle Favart, the former forains and their colleagues insisted that they were no longer a second-class institution but rather a settled alternative to the Opéra and the Comédie-Française. And not unreasonably so: during this period the Comédie-Italienne benefited from rapid and interrelated increases in cultural and financial capital, acquiring the resources to match— and, critically, to further augment— its cachet among the nation’s elite. By the late 1770s critics were increasingly identifying a disconnect between the vibrant productions of the Comédie-Italienne and the cramped and decrepit condition of its theater. As one commentator bluntly put it, the aging Hôtel de Bourgogne “threatened to bury in its ruins the crowds that flocked there seeking pleasure.”27 In response, the comédiens took concrete steps toward expansion, working with the menus plaisirs to solicit and debate at least nine proposals for a new venue.28 The planning of the hall, documented in a manuscript entitled “Historique de la nouvelle salle des comédiens italiens,” sheds light on the troupe’s lofty aspirations around this time.29 Both the comédiens and Crown officials viewed the move as an opportunity to reshape the image of this institution, and they made every effort to commission a venue grand enough to enhance its reputation and reflect its recent escalation in royal esteem. When reviewing proposals from architects, the troupe’s first priority was the size and quality of its performance space. The company was bursting at the seams of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which was too narrow to accommodate elaborate machinery and lacked proper storage space for costumes, props, and sets.30 The comédiens also demanded expanded and well-appointed surroundings for their audience, articulating a desire to entice larger— and potentially more elite— crowds. They insisted that the new hall hold at least a third more

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spectators than the Hôtel de Bourgogne, for a total capacity of approximately two thousand,31 and that it be lavish enough to suit the aristocratic ticket holders that frequently attended performances. One proposal requested a private entrance for the queen;32 another stressed that the hall should be impressively “vast and commodious,” with “richly decorated and well-placed boxes ready to receive the court.”33 Obtaining a prime location for the new theater, one convenient for a well-heeled public, was also a fundamental concern. The Hôtel de Bourgogne was situated in a congested commercial district, and the carriages of the theater’s patrons clogged the narrow medieval alleyways in the vicinity, creating dangerous traffic jams.34 The actors were eager to set up shop in a stylish and centralized neighborhood with wider avenues that might facilitate the passage of vehicles.35 Several otherwise promising proposals were rejected for their “isolated” (read: less-than-posh) settings. A welldesigned plan for a hall north of the city was dismissed because the area was “frequented by the riffraff, from whom the Comédie has little hope of drawing a profit and the presence of which . . . will serve as a source of continual embarrassment.”36 The members of the troupe failed to acknowledge that, ironically, the rejected location adjoined the Saint-Laurent fairgrounds, in the very district where opéra comique had originated nearly one hundred years before. The search for a new venue, then, underscored how differently the genre’s performers had come to define themselves and their audience over the course of the eighteenth century. The comédiens turned away from opéra comique’s fair heritage and sought a theater with direct appeal to the court and the Parisian beau monde. After extensive deliberations, the sociétaires reached an agreement on the new hall in the fall of 1780. They accepted a plan from the king’s architect, Jean-François Heurtier, and prepared to move to the quarter of Paris just north of the Palais Royal; the land for the project was acquired by the royal household from the duc de Choiseul, the former foreign minister, whose name graces a prominent box at the Opéra-Comique to this day.37 Within the year the company had secured the financial backing of an outside investor and received the official lettres patentes to begin construction.38 The process was not a seamless one: the troupe repeatedly clashed with the architect, who made several widely criticized errors in the initial design of the site.39 When Heurtier failed to live up to the comédiens’ exacting stan-

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dards, they engaged a second architect— Charles de Wailly, creator of the Comédie-Française’s new Odéon theater— to retrofit the space, expanding its seating capacity, improving poor sightlines, and making the boxes more accommodating.40 Though not without its flaws, the completed Salle Favart represented a substantial upgrade from the comédiens’ previous home in the Hôtel de Bourgogne (fig. 5.1). It provided more space for the actors both on the stage and behind the scenes,41 and it was noted to have excellent acoustics throughout.42 It also boasted improvements for the comfort of its visitors, including an enlarged public foyer, two cafés, an assortment of boutiques, and heated vestibules in which patrons could await their carriages after the end of a show.43 Contemporary commentators compared the décor of the retrofitted auditorium favorably with those of the other privileged troupes in Paris. If the Salle Favart lacked the grandeur of the well-regarded Odéon, it was more sumptuously ornamented, filled with extravagant gilt work and green marble from the royal quarry in Campan. “The new hall is less august and imposing than that of the Comédie-Française,” wrote the critic for the

F i g u r e 5 . 1 Exterior view of the Salle Favart (F-Po, NQ-C-033188). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Journal de Paris, “but more glamorous, calling to mind a site done up for a fête.”44 At this time the Salle Favart was even more impressively decorated than the traditionally opulent home of the Opéra. Following another fire in the Palais Royal, the latter company spent most of the 1780s in a nondescript temporary venue outside of central Paris, near the Porte Saint-Martin; this hall, erected in a mere four months, was said to be highly functional but poorly located and rather plain.45 In terms of theatergoing experience, the comédiens thus gained ground on their nearest competitors. Never ones to miss a profit-taking opportunity, they promptly petitioned the city government to raise their ticket prices to match.46 The Comédie-Italienne’s efforts to consolidate its appeal among an upscale demographic were amply rewarded and quickly had an impact on the types of works it was able to produce. Put simply: the troupe was suddenly earning a lot more money, and, taking full advantage of its new venue, it mounted productions that drew nearer to the scale of both court spectacle and tragic opera. Several years before the Revolution began, the company was able to finance many of the innovations we commonly associate with revolutionary theater. As figure 5.2 indicates,47 the years following the inauguration of the Salle Favart were the most lucrative in the history of the Comédie-Italienne: its receipts exceeded one million livres in each of the

Figure 5.2

Receipts at the Comédie-Italienne, 1773– 1793 (F-Po, Th.OC.55– 78).

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seasons between 1783 and 1788 for which records survive. This level of income was twice that of the early 1770s and also consistently surpassed the earnings of the Opéra.48 My analysis of these figures represents a revision of previous assessments of the company’s financial state. Clarence Brenner has described the condition of the troupe during this period as “precarious,” because its receipts only barely covered its expenditures after 1783. For Brenner, this implies that the comédiens were overextended by the costs incurred in the construction of the Salle Favart.49 We must note, however, that the company’s reported income had never surpassed its expenses by any significant amount. In the Comédie-Italienne’s bookkeeping, “expenses” included the sommes partagées— the earnings split among the shareholding actors at the season’s end.50 In fact, such profits roughly doubled after the opening of the new hall— a sign of the theater’s robust financial health. These financial gains can be attributed partially to strong sales of door tickets, purchased on the day of the performance. More significant, however, was the rise of income from the petites loges, private boxes rented to subscribers on an annual basis. Such revenue more than doubled after 1783 and soon furnished nearly half of the Comédie-Italienne’s entire operating budget (see again figure 5.2).51 It is notoriously difficult to make concrete claims about audience composition in the theaters of eighteenth-century France. But the subscription lists of the Comédie-Italienne are still extant and provide a vivid picture of its popularity among an esteemed clientele. Renting boxes in the Salle Favart were a host of prominent statesmen and military officials, wealthy tax farmers, princes and princesses of the blood, the two younger brothers of the king, and the queen and her closest associates— a luxury that cost up to ten thousand livres per annum.52 (To put this luxury in context, a spectator purchasing a single standing-room ticket paid less than two livres; the annual household income for a shopkeeper or artisan was, according to recent estimates, roughly six hundred livres; and Marie Antoinette paid “only” seven thousand livres for her subscription at the Opéra.)53 Jeffrey Ravel’s account of the Comédie-Italienne in the 1780s emphasizes the voice of the “contested” parterre, a socially heterogeneous group of spectators that emerged as an arbiter of taste and a symbolic microcosm of political discourse and dissent.54 In numerical terms, the parterre and the petites loges were weighted not dissimilarly: the Salle Favart was designed to accommodate roughly 650 and 540 spectators, respectively, in these two

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F i g u r e 5 . 3 Fixed costs and work orders at the Comédie-Italienne, 1773– 1793 (FPo, Th.OC.55– 78).

sections.55 In monetary terms, however, it was the latter faction that exerted a rapidly increasing impact on the kinds of operas the theater was able to produce. The influx of income had two immediate effects on the repertory of the Comédie-Italienne, both of which exerted pressure on the traditional limitations of opéra comique and helped pave the way for the company’s grand and spectacular productions of the early revolutionary years. First, the troupe had the funds and the space to expand its performing forces. (The rapid rise in the theater’s fixed costs, consisting almost exclusively of personnel spending, is shown in figure 5.3.)56 The orchestra pit at the Hôtel de Bourgogne was twenty feet in length, the new one about twice that size.57 Accordingly, as Charlton has discussed, the comédiens began their 1783 season by holding auditions for orchestral musicians. On 22 April they noted that they wished “to improve the orchestra and increase its size ” in order to meet the needs of the new hall;58 shortly thereafter they would add five additional violinists and three cellists to the company’s permanent ranks, augmenting the string section by more than a third.59 In the years that followed, the theater also routinely hired supplemental musicians for more elaborate works (trumpeters, percussionists, even a military band), which

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brought its ensemble more closely into line with the augmented contingent it already enjoyed at court.60 The chorus, too, grew steadily after the move to the new hall, with a pool of singing actors that expanded from eighteen in 1783 to twentyfour in 1787.61 This group commanded a great deal of attention from the sociétaires of the company. It was granted a dedicated rehearsal space in the Salle Favart,62 and a leader was appointed and given broad authority to ensure that it was well prepared for performances.63 Such preoccupation with the ensemble is noteworthy considering that choral music was still technically prohibited at this theater. The terms of the most recent contract between the Opéra and the Comédie-Italienne, signed in 1779, limited the latter to small ensemble numbers featuring principal characters— and even then only when the gathering and singing of the group was dramatically motivated.64 The comédiens flagrantly disobeyed this regulation, adding to the tally of ways that generic divisions were eroded in the late ancien régime, with implicit and explicit Crown support.65 A second important consequence of the company’s improved financial state was the comédiens’ new ability to modernize and customize their staging resources. The rise in personnel costs at the Comédie-Italienne was accompanied by a dramatic increase in spending on “work orders” (see again figure 5.3), or investment in the elements of production. The troupe refreshed its costumes to coincide with the move and hired a technician from the Opéra to revamp its machinery.66 Perhaps the most important innovation concerned the lighting of the stage: shortly before the Salle Favart opened, the institution resolved “to establish a lighting system exactly as it is at the Opéra,” paying a considerable premium to install lamps that consumed “pure and clarified oil.”67 (The comédiens’ list of requirements included two hundred oil lamps for the footlights alone, each of which burned several times brighter than the set of wax candles it replaced.)68 A commentator in the Journal de Paris was delighted with the cumulative effect, claiming that the illumination afforded excellent views of the actors on stage and, as an added bonus, was most flattering to the women in the boxes.69 Opéra comique of the 1790s has gained a certain renown for its fusion of grand musical tableaux with spectacular stage effects, for the way it co-opts the aesthetic of the tragic merveilleux in the service of republican ideals.70 The innovative choral and orchestral sonorities of Kreutzer and Méhul

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have been linked to the massed scale of revolutionary festivals and outdoor pageants;71 the theatrical proliferation of stormed castles and terrifying tempests has been interpreted as a reflection of the violent climate of the age.72 The archives of the Comédie-Italienne, however, demonstrate that these trends were linked to financial as well as to political circumstances. Librettos and scores from the prerevolutionary decade are already filled with extensive descriptions of scenery and stage action. It is likely not coincidental, for example, that the prominent hits of the company’s 1783 and 1784 seasons featured impressive displays of stage technology. The dramatic sunrise at the outset of Martini and Desfontaines’s Le droit du seigneur was an effect aided by the new oil-lamp lighting at the Salle Favart; the composer indicates at which points the moon should set and the sun should appear, all in conjunction with gestures in the musical score.73 The final act of Grétry and Sedaine’s Richard Coeur de Lion (1784) culminates in a dramatic assault on the fortress at Linz, a clear precursor to the stormed-castle dénouements of the Lodoïska operas of Kreutzer and Cherubini, and one facilitated by the enlarged stage dimensions and machinery of the comédiens’ new venue.74 Future commentators would attribute the musical and scenic advances of revolutionary opera to the unrefined tastes of the lower classes infiltrating the theaters; as the librettist F. B. Hoffman asserted, it was the peuple who clamored for prison scenes, physical violence, and noisy spectacle.75 But this aesthetic outlook was also dependent on the financing of the aristocracy and reflective of the elite ambitions of the Comédie-Italienne. Now that the company had a hall to rival the other Crown troupes, it had the resources to develop a spectacle that did the same.

The Development of “Heroic” Comedy It is clear that the opening of the Salle Favart— together with the income it generated— expanded the material possibilities of what might be included within opéra comique. The enlargement in the genre’s scope that had been facilitated in a ceremonial court context now applied equally to its productions in Paris. This increasing sophistication of resources was mirrored, in turn, by a self-conscious broadening of style and subject matter. That the new hall might support an ongoing evolution in repertory is captured in two important bodies of evidence, which will be treated in succession below.

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The first of these (which we might term “negative ” evidence) derives from the records of the company’s programming committee; the nature of the librettos rejected by the comédiens suggests that they were interested in mounting more serious works, further diversifying their output from the lighter comedies that had predominated in the relatively recent past. The second group of sources (the “positive ” evidence, so to speak) consists of the aesthetic writings of critics and lyric authors. Central here are the contributions of Durosoy, a librettist who wished to elevate the status of opéra comique, drawing it closer to tragédie lyrique while retaining its established emphasis on variety and natural sentiment. Taken together, these sources point to the creation of an ambitious new category of repertory at the Comédie-Italienne— a subtype of dialogue opera the troupe described as “heroic” comedy. While such opéras comiques did not entirely forsake the conventions of the genre, they exerted pressure on its limits in several new and notable ways. First, the heroic comedies had high artistic aspirations, showcasing the deeds of aristocratic protagonists in a manner that exploited the recent enhancements (both scenic and instrumental) of the Salle Favart. More importantly, these works reflected a contemporary vogue for historicism: composers and librettists drew upon the French national heritage to deepen the affective range of their art form. As the testimony of Durosoy confirms, the aim was to cement the company’s status as a spectacle of national renown and to position opéra comique as a respected— and distinctively French— alternative to its tragic counterpart. The change in venue, then, coincided not only with an extension of the resources and clientele of the Comédie-Italienne, but also with a continuing reappraisal of its role within the shifting theatrical milieux of court and capital. In a body of heroic operas, the comédiens solidified their rebranding efforts, distancing themselves from any countercultural associations of their art; in so doing, paradoxically, they forged a patriotic idiom that would prove readily adaptable to the revolutionary cause.76 We are fortunate to possess a detailed record of the ways in which the Comédie-Italienne shaped its programming in the decade before the Revolution. An “Arrêt du conseil” dated 20 July 1781 admonished the comédiens for not being scrupulous enough with the texts they received, which had led to the production of a number of duds in recent months.77 This royal edict imposed strict regulations on the committee of actors responsible for select-

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ing new works, mandating that the group keep written records to support its staging decisions.78 While the resulting notes supply little information on successful submissions, the committee did not mince words when rejecting an unsatisfactory proposal. We thus have ample data regarding the kinds of operas and plays the company did not want to produce, information that sheds considerable light on the formation of its repertory. These rejections demonstrate that the comédiens’ main objective was to cultivate a unique voice for their institution— to program innovative, highminded works that would “outclass” those of competing Parisian theaters. Not surprisingly, this meant distinguishing the offerings of the ComédieItalienne from the reputedly lowbrow entertainments of the boulevard troupes (the successors to the fair enterprises, so called because they were located near the boulevard du Temple in northeastern Paris). Librettos and plays were commonly dismissed for being trivial or unsophisticated, or for lacking in morality and good taste. A two-act comedy entitled La politicomanie, for instance, was rejected for resorting to base humor and therefore being out of line with the company’s mission. “This work cannot be produced at the Comédie-Italienne,” wrote the committee in April of 1788. “The plot, the humor, and the intrigue of the play seem absolutely suited to the Théâtre des Variétés.”79 The troupe also seemed ready to cede its role as Paris’s leading producer of operatic parody.80 As the genre faded from its Gluckian heyday at court and rose in popularity on the boulevards, the committee grew wary of mounting such satires of tragédie lyrique.81 A vaudeville parody of Piccinni and Marmontel’s Didon, for example, was rejected for the reason that “there have been many parodies of this opera produced at the boulevard theaters.”82 The comédiens did not want their company to be associated with the petits spectacles of the French capital, downplaying a type of work that had once figured prominently in their repertory. It should therefore be stressed that, while there remained many conceptual and musical associations between opéra comique and nonprivileged theatrical culture,83 the comédiens were actively trying to minimize these facets of their reputation as the Revolution approached. If the comédiens took pains to differentiate their works from those produced on the boulevard stages, this did not mean that they aimed to elevate their programming through a straightforward imitation of the tragédie lyrique.84 The Comédie-Italienne received a surprising number of

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proposals for unabashedly tragic works— which may be indicative of the generic confusion engendered by the company’s continued development. Time and time again, however, the committee emphasized that such repertory could not succeed at the Salle Favart, criticizing the conventions of the Opéra as old-fashioned, monotonous, and overly reliant on empty spectacle.85 A three-act opera entitled Le chevalier de l’étoile, for instance, proposed an impressive array of stage effects but was otherwise “lacking in intrigue and substance.” In consequence, it was deemed most fitting for the serious venue, “where the pomp of the spectacle might help one overlook that the work is rather dull.”86 As the comédiens contended, the most promising librettos contained a mixture of serious and comic elements and distinct stylistic contrasts throughout. Their dismissal of a three-act work entitled Zimée, ou Le prince nègre is representative: The committee found this submission to be of a genre that does not suit our theater. The plot is forced . . . everything is of a uniform and monotonous color; within works of an elevated plot and style the public desires a mixture of comic elements, as in Aucassin [Grétry’s Aucassin et Nicolette], Richard [Grétry’s Richard Coeur de Lion], etc. The scant success of wholly serious pieces represents a clear judgment on the part of the public, one that is all the more justified because the operatic genre does not allow for much development; one must at least supply adequate variation to an elevated subject, adding lightly comic scenes alongside the principal intrigue.87 The criticisms of the committee overstate the one-dimensionality of the Opéra’s output and betray a hint of sour grapes on the part of the comédiens.88 But this does not negate the larger point— that the Comédie-Italienne was fashioning itself as a modern and substantive contributor to the French theatrical scene. The company’s administration trod a fine line when selecting librettos for musical setting, seeking to add polish and weight to opéra comique without forsaking the versimilitude and stylistic variety that audiences had come to expect from this genre. The programming committee was more forthcoming with the submissions it rejected than the ones it accepted. As in its discussion of Zimée, though, it did occasionally suggest succesful works as models to chastened

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authors. In the course of their assessments, the comédiens praised a select group of opéras comiques in this manner, four by Grétry (Aucassin et Nicolette, 1779; Richard Coeur de Lion, 1784; Le comte d’Albert, 1786; and Pierre le Grand, 1790) and two by the up-and-coming Dalayrac (Sargines, 1788; and Raoul, sire de Créqui, 1789), referring to these as heroic examples of the genre.89 I do not mean to imply that the records contain an exhaustive account of operas of this type, nor that the comédie héroïque ought to be classified as a separate and entirely fixed form.90 It does appear, however, that the troupe employed the label to delineate a consistent collection of stylistic traits, which together represented a departure from its traditional domain. When describing this new repertory as heroic, the comédiens made reference to a vocabulary established in other literary and artistic disciplines. In standard poetic usage the adjective indicated a refinement in language, encompassing the “noble and elevated” style in general, or the highest form of metrical structure (the alexandrine) in particular.91 In architecture it implied an imposing grandeur of dimension (as demonstrated, especially, in the relics of antiquity).92 The comédiens used the modifying “héroïque ” in a loosely parallel fashion: their recommended works prioritized an elevation of poetic tone while capitalizing on the new musical and scenographic possibilities of the court theaters and Salle Favart. At least four of the six operas in question required the hiring of supplemental musicians, and all shared an emphasis on impressive scenic tableaux, presenting four dramatic prison escapes and two violent battle scenes between them.93 More precisely with regard to dramatic norms, the comédiens conceived of heroic opera as a lyric equivalent to tragicomedy— opéra comique that retained its underlying form while incorporating character types and settings from the serious realm. The label comédie héroïque was most prevalent in spoken theater;94 the phrase denoted an oxymoronic mixing of generic elements, for the heroic was embedded within the very definition of tragédie. (Louis de Jaucourt’s article on the subject for the Encyclopédie, for instance, states that “the primary quality of tragic action is that it be heroic.”)95 A heroic course of action was determined, in this textbook view, by the elevated social class of its central characters. Dramatic heroism was exemplified in the valor of monarchs or illustrious princes, a valor that was pointedly “beyond the reach of common souls.”96 Such themes also, notably, derived their impact from a measure of temporal distance. The genre’s paradigmatic pro-

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tagonists were historical figures, whose exploits stood the test of time and might therefore resonate powerfully in the present day.97 The heroic operas of the Comédie-Italienne constituted the theater’s most ambitious efforts since the merger of 1762. These opéras comiques foreground the achievements of sympathetic counts, lords, and even kings— as in Martini and Durosoy’s Henri IV (written for the accession of Louis XVI) and Grétry and Sedaine’s Richard Coeur de Lion (shortly thereafter taken up in tribute to the Bourbon regime).98 And their stakes are significantly heightened, moving beyond the personal and domestic spheres to glorify the nation’s heritage and inspire emulation in the name of the patrie.99 This corpus represented a different, and more far-reaching, attitude toward thematic expansion than the comédiens’ experiments of the 1760s and 1770s. The lyric drame and modern pastoral had granted new seriousness and scenic support to the everyday situations expected within the comic form; the comédie héroïque enacted a bolder sort of mixture, importing the exceptional situations of noble tragedy into the generic frame of the opéra comique. The turn toward patriotic, historical subject matter at the ComédieItalienne did not develop in isolation, as Darlow, Brenner, and others have discussed at length.100 The aftermath of the Seven Years’ War witnessed a resurgence of interest in great Frenchmen of years past,101 a fashion that was encouraged by the government and propagated through the various artistic institutions it patronized.102 Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy established the template for a new tragédie nationale as early as 1765, his Le siège de Calais enjoying a resounding success and spawning scores of imitations at the Comédie-Française. Plots drawn from national history were more novel, and encountered greater critical resistance, on the lyric stage. At the Opéra such themes represented— somewhat ironically— a gesture toward dramatic modernity, catering to new audience demands for realistically grounded, rather than marvelous and mythological, spectacle.103 Here, works like the chivalric Adèle de Ponthieu (set by Jean-Benjamin de La Borde and Pierre Berton in 1772, and again by Piccinni in 1781)104 and Péronne sauvée (with music by Dezède, 1783) paired lavish set pieces with explicitly didactic framing.105 The libretto of the latter opera, by Billardon de Sauvigny, played up its “true-to-life ” inspiration, with a detailed preface on the background of its characters and its central event, the 1536 siege of Péronne.106 Commentators expressed general skepticism toward

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“singing the virtues” of the patrie,107 anxiety that was particularly acute at the Comédie-Italienne. It remained a matter of dispute, in other words, whether the comic theater had grown substantive enough to play host to the great luminaries of French history. The foremost advocate of historical opera at the Comédie-Italienne was the playwright Durosoy, who published passionate manifestos on the subject as well as numerous model librettos from the mid-1770s onward.108 In his influential Dissertation sur le drame lyrique, Durosoy argued that the troupe’s past reputation as a peddler of bouffonnerie should not now prevent it from mounting more dignified repertory.109 Durosoy railed against those conservative critics who believed that heroic knights and historic kings would be trivialized by appearing at the Comédie-Italienne.110 It was illogical, the librettist claimed, to be upset at the sight of a monarch at the venue where Pierrot and Arlequin once frolicked, or to protest the same actors’ giving voice to simple peasants one evening and brave seigneurs the next.111 After all, similar scandals frequently took place at the Opéra, where singers might portray both dastardly villains and virtuous protagonists without causing an uproar: “After an actor has portrayed Nero or Antenor [at the Opéra], should you not shudder to see him playing one of our national heroes the very next night? The role of the villain would seem to have a more revolting character than that of the good, virtuous gardener [at the Comédie-Italienne].”112 Durosoy not only defended a new prominence of noble characters in opéra comique but proposed—more radically— that the structure of the genre made it an ideal vehicle for the delivery of refined historical content. For Durosoy, the genre’s defining amalgam of speech and song offered an advantage in complex historical settings. (This was a truly remarkable assertion given that the disjunction between the two media was a long-standing point of critical consternation.) As the librettist argued, opéra comique was far more flexible than either prose or lyric tragedy; authors could exploit the expressive potential of the aria while retaining the dialogue so useful for the rapid presentation of detail.113 Durosoy endeavored, moreover, to justify the mixed dramaturgy of the comédiens, insisting that the sentimental archetypes of dialogue opera might heighten rather than detract from the impact of a patriotic topic. For many commentators, depicting historical subject matter within a lighter, lyric form was a frivolous endeavor that debased its source.114 Durosoy vehemently disagreed: he found it advisable

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to blend romantic subplots into the course of a historical drama, because they lent “interest, pathos, and generosity to those good patriots who are obliged to put their love aside in the interest of their country or their king.”115 Put another way, placing grand, historical action within the generic frame of opéra comique allowed audiences to identify more closely with heroic protagonists and to internalize the emotional repercussions of their sacrifices. The presentation and ultimate rejection of sentimental tropes served to underscore the more serious import of patriotic duty.116 Durosoy’s vindication of substantive, historical opéra comique encapsulates the broader processes of rebranding in play at the Comédie-Italienne at the end of the ancien régime. The librettist’s writings anticipated and fulfilled the aims of the theater’s programming committee, arguing for the legitimacy of opéra comique and its ongoing expansion, on the one hand, while insisting upon its unique status and rehabilitating its more aesthetically suspect features, on the other. Just as Durosoy validated the development of opéra comique, he also worked to secure the reputation of the theater with which it was associated. The Comédie-Italienne was, as both Durosoy and the comédiens insisted, no longer an Italian spectacle but a national one, having extinguished the purely bouffon from its repertory.117 By virtue of its increasingly respectable status and explicitly patriotic subjects, it might join (or even surpass) the Opéra and the Comédie-Française as a French “theater of history,” where children could “come to be instructed by seeing— in action— all the events that have exemplified (or tarnished) the glory of their Nation.”118 The large-scale revaluation of opéra comique at the Comédie-Italienne represented a subversion of the generic and institutional norms of operatic production in ancien régime France. But as I have repeatedly emphasized, such an upheaval in the schematization of theatrical forms was linked to the elite aspirations of the agents who directed this shift and to the high status of their intended audiences. No opera better illustrates these tensions— and their complex implications for revolutionary art— than the heroic work with which this chapter began: Dalayrac and Monvel’s Sargines.

The “Heroic” Sargines Sargines is an opera that looks both backward and forward, standing as the culmination of the heroic experiments of the 1780s, a proving ground

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for the musical innovations of the following decade, and a reminder of the genre’s often counterintuitive politics on the brink of revolution. The work resonated with the rebranding strategies of the Comédie-Italienne, most generally, in its depiction of an important event from French history: the military victory of Philip Augustus at Bouvines, Flanders, in 1214. On a midsummer Sunday the Capetian monarch defeated combined German, English, and Flemish forces, tripling the size of his realm in a single afternoon. The battle was memorialized almost immediately by one of Philip Augustus’s chaplains, William the Breton, and reached near-mythological status in retellings throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Indeed, the legend of Bouvines had become a cultural phenomenon and patriotic rallying point in France by the end of the eighteenth century, a fact that the comédiens were likely eager to exploit as they solidified the prestigious national standing of opéra comique.119 The work’s medieval setting, moreover, provided inspiration for the kinds of elaborate costumes, scenery, and stage effects that had recently gained favor at the Salle Favart.120 The company’s records indicate that it made lavish investments in the production, providing its principals with period-appropriate attire and spending well over one thousand livres (roughly the annual salary of the theater’s concertmaster) to outfit the king’s knights with swords, shields, and sabers (fig. 5.4).121 The comédiens poached a choreographer from the Opéra to direct the action,122 commissioned at least one new stage set for the climactic battle scene, hired extra brass players for the orchestra, and engaged a team of Italian fireworks masters to supply pyrotechnics.123 The result was notable enough to prompt discussion in three separate issues of the Costumes et annales des grands théâtres de Paris, the preeminent periodical devoted to theatrical productions in the capital— a distinction unmatched by any of the Opéra’s latest works.124 The most interesting aspect of Sargines, however, and the most pertinent to our investigation, is the manner in which these elements of expansion are positioned within their expected generic frame. Contemporary critics were particularly impressed with the opera’s emphasis on stylistic variety.125 Crucially, this diversity of affect is created not through the nuanced alternation of tonal registers but through the almost total abandonment of one aesthetic in favor of another. Sargines is, in essence, two operas for the

F i g u r e 5 . 4 Costume design for Sargines. Costumes et annales des grands théâtres de Paris 3, no. 7 (1788). Ville de Paris / Bibliothèque historique.

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price of one— a modest domestic comedy that gives way to an elaborate drama of noble heroism. The work seems to enact a dismantling of the pre-heroic conventions of opéra comique: the lighter content and tone that prevail throughout its opening are discarded by the end of the third act. The moment of transformation, which ushers in a new seriousness of mood and spectacularity of scale, coincides with the arrival of Philip Augustus on stage. In this sense, Sargines might be interpreted as an illustration of Durosoy’s defense of generic mixture, a historical chronicle whose portrayal of patriotic duty is strengthened through its rejection of sentimental tropes. More broadly, it can be taken as a symbol of, or a metaphor for, the recent evolution of opéra comique; the genre was developing the rudiments of its revolutionary rhetoric in response to the elite conditions of its production, and to the demands of monarchical celebration, in the final years of the ancien régime. The first three acts of Sargines have little to do with historical reality and much to do with the dramatic expectations of earlier opéra comique; these are based on a sentimental novel of chivalric love by François-Thomas-Marie de Baculard d’Arnaud.126 The opera begins in the shadow of the impending battle, as a young knight-in-training (the title character), his beloved cousin Sophie, and assorted servants and companions await the arrival of their king. While the characters are aware of the gravity of their circumstances and mention the enemy forces surrounding the nearby village of Bouvines, the course of the action is relatively mundane. The opening acts of Sargines are enlivened with pictorial details of the chevaleresque but mainly hew to the stereotypical conventions of romantic comedy (including faux-rustic couplets, bumbling sidekicks, and obstacles to surmount en route to a suitable marriage). These early events are contained within the domestic sphere of the castle grounds, as the mutually adoring Sargines and Sophie attempt to convince the former’s disapproving father that they should be allowed to wed. If Sargines bears an initial resemblance to the plot types of sentimental and bourgeois drama, this material betrays no hint of the genre’s previous explorations of socially progressive themes. The impediment to the marriage of the young lovers is not unusual: Sargines’s father has disavowed the union because Sophie has been promised to another, a gallant knight named Montigny. The precise dynamics of the triangle, however, offer a twist on

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the textbook romantic plot. While the opéra comique of the 1760s and 1770s teems with star-crossed lovers who overcome their social differences, the featured protagonists in Sargines are all upstanding members of the nobility. Sargines is initially unworthy of Sophie’s hand because he is not acting nobly enough by comparison with his battle-tested rival Montigny. (He is quite cowardly, for example, and has embarrassed himself while jousting.) Sargines’s romantic fate hinges not on the triumph of inner virtue but on the outward demonstration of chivalric ideals. Like the public pastorals discussed in the previous chapter, this plot engaged with contemporary debates over the regeneration of the French aristocracy, presenting the rigorous hierarchy of feudal life not as an antiquated oddity but as a system whose values merited preservation in present-day France.127 In a parallel fashion, Dalayrac’s music for the opening of Sargines engages a conventional, ariette-centric idiom to depict a strictly ordered social world. Characters of diverging classes are bracketed squarely within their appropriate musical domains. The teenaged servants, Iselle and Isidore, frame each of the first three acts with a jaunty duet or set of couplets— a stylized take on the traditional vaudeville. Iselle’s “Toujours à ma pensée ” exhibits a stilted patois, straightforward syllabic setting, and simple doubling of the voice in the violin and flute (ex. 5.2). The aristocratic leads, by contrast, occupy a more sophisticated register, one modeled after the sound of the modern Italian school. In Sargines’s da capo aria “Non, non, je ne puis,” Dalayrac reveals his debt to the polished lyricism, tidy phrase structures, and idiomatic string writing of Paisiello or Sacchini (ex. 5.3).128 The musical organization is in line with contemporary lyrical practice but also directly harmonized with the societal status quo. The first three acts of Sargines thus set forth a surprising medley of topical allusions: a lesson in idealized noble behavior presented within the basic musical and dramatic scaffolding of the lyric drame. The opera confounds expectations more radically in the approach to its dénouement, with the entrance of Philip Augustus (in act 3, scene 9) triggering a definitive shift in tone. (Sargines and Sophie are literally interrupted in the middle of a love duet as the chorus, accompanied by brassy militaristic fanfare, marches onstage to announce the arrival of the king.) The abrupt change in style reflects the librettist’s unorthodox approach to his source materials. From this point forward Monvel wrenches Baculard d’Arnaud’s characters

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E x a m p l e 5 . 2 Sargines, act 2, scene 1, “Toujours à ma pensée,” mm. 11– 19. Always in my thoughts / Isidore is present: / I let my guard down for a moment / and there I am, I don’t know how.

out of the novel and places them firmly into history, melding the fictitious situations of the literary work with details drawn from actual accounts of the Bouvines campaign. Philip Augustus figures in an entirely ahistorical way in Baculard d’Arnaud’s novel, encouraging Sargines as he prepares for a chivalric tournament. (In the book, the ultimate achievement of the title character takes place in a jousting match rather than on the field of battle.) In the operatic version of events, the circumstances are more serious: Sargines meets the king on the eve of the siege and is knighted, roused from his timidity by

E x a m p l e 5 . 3 Sargines, act 3, scene 4, “Non, non, je ne puis,” mm. 22– 30. You, the spirit of my life, / my divine Sophie, / I will no longer make you blush, / I will leave you forever.

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his monarch’s courageous example. While Monvel’s portrayal of events remains fictional (there was, as far as we know, no knight named Sargines at Bouvines), it reflects a more modern approach to the French past than that of Baculard d’Arnaud. Interest is situated less in the exotic color of the chevaleresque and more in the exemplary power of real-world detail. The crux of the action is placed not in a generically evocative historicism but in a specific and well-documented event of national importance. Remarkably, passages of text in the opera’s final scenes were lifted directly from a recent compendium of national history, Paul-François Velly’s thirty-volume Histoire de France,129 anticipating the true-to-life focus of the faits historiques that would proliferate at the Comédie-Italienne during the revolutionary decade.130 With this change in source material, from colorful, novelistic historicism to “true ” national history, Monvel’s emphasis moves from the individual to the communal, away from the domestic sphere and onto the battlefield. The secondary intrigues of Iselle and Isidore are entirely forgotten, subsumed into the course of the graver drama involving the threatened citizens of Bouvines. And Sargines momentarily pushes aside his preoccupation with sentimental romance, inspired by his sovereign to devote himself to the endangered nation. As one critic pointed out, the Sargines of Baculard d’Arnaud’s novel was a “student of love ” (élève d’amour), driven at every turn by his affection for Sophie. The operatic Sargines, by contrast, was a “student of honor” (élève d’honneur), patriotically drawing his sword at the behest of his king.131 These transformations— in the character of Sargines and the import of the drama— are mirrored in Dalayrac’s music. Tellingly, there is not a single solo number after the entrance of Philip Augustus: the authors abandon their ariette-focused approach in the opera’s dark and dramatic fourth-act tableau.132 This depiction of Bouvines and its aftermath exemplifies the forward-looking characteristics of the heroic repertory, with its violent subject matter, grand choral forces, and close coordination of “noisy” music and spectacular effects.133 The published score sets a scene grimmer than any previously presented at the Comédie-Italienne, in the ominous key of D minor. As martial rhythms sound in the orchestra, a signal of the approaching soldiers, the chorus performs a horrifying pantomime:

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The theater depicts a landscape bordered on one side and in the distance by a village. We hear the noise of clashing armor, drums, trumpets, timpani; from time to time we see passing groups of soldiers, some defeated, some victorious; in the background we perceive troops leaving the village in a disorderly fashion, chasing the peasant men and women who flee them. Shortly thereafter flames shoot up from the rooftops of several houses. Women, elderly villagers, and children struggle to extract themselves from the fire that surrounds them. We see mothers holding fallen children to their breasts, sons carrying fathers, fathers dragging dying wives and mothers from burning shacks. The backdrop must paint all the horror of a siege and a conflagration.134 The scene creates an impression of overwhelming force through its close and precisely notated relationship between music and stage action. The catastrophic events that transpire on stage are coordinated with important structural markers in Dalayrac’s music. For example, the first major break in the tableau is the onset of the B section in a straightforward ternary form. Here the women of the chorus make a desperate plea for salvation— a prayer that goes unanswered as the flames grow higher and the lighting more blinding. The blaze intensifies at the reprise of the A section (ex. 5.4a), an effect that is once more reinforced by dramatic gestures in the music (return of the minor tonic, broadening of tempo, and doubling of choral intensity). Motivic material based on the opening— a descending arpeggiated figure— is passed among the vocal groups and repeated obsessively, reaching its dissonant climax as a building collapses amid the raging inferno (ex. 5.4b–c). Dalayrac, it must be admitted, cannot match either the adventurous harmonies of Méhul or the more sophisticated orchestrations of Cherubini. He does, however, possess a command of the conglomerate of traits that would soon be defined as terrorisme musical: racing scales and angst-ridden syncopations, extravagantly deployed performing forces, a prioritization of tight rhythmic energy over melodic lyricism, and tension-building motives that are layered, reiterated, and sequenced rather than sophisticatedly developed.135 Tellingly, this kind of musico-scenic complex was critiqued in

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E x a m p l e 5 . 4 a Sargines, act 4, scene 1, “Dieu de vengeance,” mm. 85– 88. God of vengeance / defend us; / Sustain the innocent: / Our possessions have been ravaged, / our walls are destroyed. / Cry for our relatives, / cry for our friends.

precisely those terms that would be applied to moments of operatic “terror” throughout the 1790s. Jean Charles Le Vacher de Charnois, for example, groused that the surefire recipe for success at the Comédie-Italienne was to provide a plethora of optical illusions, accompanied by a general atmosphere of clamor and music that verged on noise.136 If the fourth act of Sargines foreshadowed the violent cataclysms of revolutionary-era opéra comique, it also codified, as Charlton has argued, this period’s “formal accents of patriotic song and chorus.”137 The pivotal battle scene has a triumphant conclusion: Philip Augustus is saved by Sargines, the youth he inspired, turning the tide of the combat. After the monarch’s troops emerge victorious, the cast joins in a rousing chorus to the glories of the patrie (ex. 5.5). Many of the ensembles in the opera’s earlier acts were

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Sargines, act 4, scene 1, “Dieu de vengeance,” mm. 97– 100.

influenced by the Italian tradition: these were intricately constructed numbers in which the characters gathered onstage and voiced distinct musical and poetic ideas about the affairs at hand.138 The work’s final chorus, by contrast, leaves little room for diverse perspectives. Its textual simplicity, equality of voicing, and straightforward homophonic texture create a uniformity of emphasis and message; here, to borrow Bartlet’s apt turn of phrase, is fraternité in operatic terms.139 So prescient was Dalayrac’s anticipation of the vocabulary of massed patriotic song that Sargines was often cited, quite

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Sargines, act 4, scene 1, “Dieu de vengeance,” mm. 101– 105.

erroneously, as the musical source for “La Marseillaise.”140 But there lingers in this passage a single, small measure of nuance, one that is firmly rooted in the philosophy of the ancien régime. While Philip Augustus extols the merits of the nation (“Chantez, célébrez, la France et sa victoire ” [Sing and celebrate France and its victory]), the citizens of Bouvines add a new exclamation: “Chantons, célébrons, Philippe et sa victoire” (Let us sing and celebrate Philip and his victory). Either poetic line can be adapted to any

Example 5.5 mm. 3– 10.

Sargines, act 4, scene 2, “Chantons, célébrons/Chantez, célébrez,”

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musical part. Country and king are textually, musically, and— we might infer— symbolically interchangeable, a clear embodiment of the worldview that would be so violently called into question after the opera’s premiere. With its reactionary message and proto-revolutionary music, Sargines encapsulates the contradictions inherent in late eighteenth-century opéra comique. By the waning years of the ancien régime, the Comédie-Italienne had established itself as a challenger to the Opéra, programming didactic works on patriotic themes that paralleled the high-minded tone and lavish effects of tragédie lyrique. Yet the rising prestige of dialogue opera by no means implied the triumph of a countercultural art form over an aristocratic one. On the contrary, the genre became more respectable and impressive as it solidified its appeal to upper-class consumers (rather than subversively seeking to undermine them). And it laid claim to national status through an intimate association with the monarchy rather than a Herderian elevation of the folk. This development is enacted over the very course of Dalayrac and Monvel’s drama. Sargines appears to appropriate the rhetoric of revolutionary opéra comique— its engagement with “true-to-life ” history, its emphasis on patriotic choruses and catastrophic spectacle— directly as it depicts the king’s heroic actions on stage. With these details in mind, it is not difficult to discern why Sargines was selected for the festivities opening the Estates-General. Clearly, the work resonated with the outlook of more conservative governmental factions in the spring of 1789, showcasing a model of leadership based on the cooperation of sovereign and aristocracy. After years of substantial transformation, opéra comique had now joined its tragic counterpart as an idealized projection of the ancien régime. In the words of one contemporary chronicler, Sargines was an opera for those Frenchmen who, even on the brink of Revolution, “would not believe there was a fire until they themselves were caught in the flames.”141

Continuity and Rupture The evolution of dialogue opera in the 1780s unsettled the hierarchies that dictated how French theatrical works were produced and received, representing the final step of the genre’s incorporation into the courtly system of the ancien régime. A snapshot of France’s privileged stages on the eve of the Revolution shows their repertories in a state of flux. A binary that

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aligned tragédie lyrique with a uniform aristocratic culture and opéra comique with unfettered fairground critique no longer captured the complexities of the lyric geography of court and capital. Recent studies of the Opéra have underscored that, contrary to assumptions of unilateral conservatism, this theater’s modernizing tendencies predated the fall of the Bastille. Its 1788 and 1789 seasons, for example, tied together a collection of new impulses from the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. In these years the company’s programming featured the reform tragedies of Gluck (Alceste, Armide, and Iphigénie en Tauride) and the cosmopolitan Italians that followed him (Piccinni’s Didon; Sacchini’s Arvire et Évelina). This serious corpus was presented alongside the ballets d’action of Gardel (Le déserteur and La chercheuse d’esprit), and Grétry’s commissions for the tragic stage (La caravane du Caire and Panurge dans l’isle des lanternes)— works that reflected the innovative spirit and wide-ranging influence of the comic domain. While the Opéra remained closely affiliated with the royal household, the institution was not a perfect mouthpiece for the regime. Olivia Bloechl has shown that the “political imaginary” of late eighteenth-century tragédie lyrique encompassed “both sovereign and governmental forms of power.”142 And Michael Fend has identified a nascent “rebellion against monarchical norms” in operas as early as Sacchini and Nicolas-François Guillard’s Oedipe à Colone (1786) and Salieri and Beaumarchais’s remarkable Tarare (1787).143 A similar nuance should be applied to the offerings of the Comédie-Italienne, even— or perhaps especially— as the results contradict our prevailing narratives of this troupe’s development. In the Salle Favart, the comédiens presented a vibrant panoply of repertory that they had cultivated since 1762: small-scale villageois opéras comiques and lavish courtly pastorals, classic vaudeville comedies and progressive lyric drames. In the later 1780s these were joined by a series of expansive and spectacular comédies héroïques, works that both encroached upon the conventions of tragédie lyrique and affirmed their genre’s status as a legitimate, national art. By the onset of the revolutionary age, dialogue opera had accrued a multivalent array of social and political potential, much of this now obscured by the long historiographical shadow of 1789. In outlining the musical, dramatic, and material state of opéra comique in the final decade of the ancien régime, we might also glean clues about its trajectory in subsequent years. I would argue, in sum, that the prominence

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of the genre within the lyric repertory of the 1790s was due less to its upstart appeal than to the solid reputation it had established, and the sophisticated resources it had developed, in the period before the Revolution began. Certainly, as Emmet Kennedy and others have demonstrated, many individual works and elements of staging practice were carried by the comédiens directly across the fault line of 1789.144 Even after the rise of the Jacobins, a libretto might be salvaged through a purging of its references to feudalism, privilège, and other vestiges of the old order. Sargines, for its part, serves as a rather blunt reminder of the genre’s adaptability, its ability to take on multiple, often conflicting meanings. Despite its original royalist conclusions, the opera enjoyed a healthy presence on the revolutionary stage, with more than seventy performances in the decade following its premiere.145 In this case, as in numerous others, the comédiens simply rewrote the work, preserving its music and spectacle while updating its message to suit new political contexts.146 Sargines enjoyed its greatest success under the Directory, appearing in revised form from the fall of 1796 onward.147 In the updated libretto, the title character has been stripped of his aristocratic standing, his story now a tamed variation on the youthful “everyman” heroism of such revolutionary martyrs as Joseph Barra or Agricole Viala.148 As the knight is replaced with a common soldier, the king becomes an army officer: Philip Augustus is removed from the main action and supplanted on the battlefield by a valiant general named Guillaume Desbarres. This latter figure, described by his compatriots as a “French Achilles” and charged with defending his countrymen from a host of foreign enemies, is almost certainly meant to evoke Napoleon, the rising star of the nation’s military machine. The revival of Sargines coincided with the turning point of Napoleon’s Italian campaign and provided an allegorical take on the kinds of militaristic events that would shortly be translated into a late round of revolutionary pièces de circonstance.149 The opera’s new symbolism is outwardly unambiguous. The rousing scene described at the outset of this chapter, for example— the moment, exploited by the organizers of the Estates-General, in which Philip Augustus is vehemently affirmed by his obedient subjects— is substantially altered. Monvel’s original libretto had hinged upon the emblematic power of the Crown:150 the king alone shares in the lineage of ancient sovereigns,

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F i g u r e 5 . 5 Sargines, act 3, scene 12 (manuscript libretto, F-Pan, AJ13 1101). Archives Nationales, Paris. Come, my children . . . stop, stop . . . Generous Frenchmen, I place this symbol of my power before your eyes. If there is any among you whom you judge more worthy than I of guiding us to victory, name him . . . and I am ready to obey.

and the king alone must consequently lead the defense of this heritage. The new version of the scene omits any mention of Charlemagne and replaces the “premier diadême du monde ” with an instrument of battle (fig. 5.5).151 The veneration of monarchy cedes to the cult of the military hero, a plot development perfectly in keeping with the emerging politics of the age.152 However direct the allusion, though, the audience would not necessarily have taken it at face value, for by 1796 or 1797 there was some debate as to the efficacy of such haphazard rewriting of history. As the Courrier des spectacles put it, everyone knew what classic works were really about, for

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Robespierre had not succeeded in “burning down the libraries,” and older librettos still circulated.153 The revised Sargines was apparently, then, an opera concerning either Louis XVI or Napoleon, or both simultaneously— one of countless vehicles of operatic meaning contingent on the tangled and often contradictory intersections of government oversight, audience interpretation, and authorial intent.154 References to the ancien régime had quite literally been scratched from its libretto, but the period’s cultural legacy stubbornly remained.

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Epilogue: The Foundation of a “People’s” Art The Comédie-Italienne lost its official institutional identity— as a privileged emblem of the Bourbon monarchs— in the winter of 1793, just weeks after the regicide of Louis XVI. In the late afternoon of 5 February, a group of concerned citizens gathered in the foyer of the theater. The assembly insisted that the actors alter the name of their company, disavowing its association with the fallen regime. That same evening the comédiens met and unanimously approved the proposition. By the following week they were preparing to emblazon the Salle Favart with a new moniker: Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique National.1 (As shown in figures 6.1 and 6.2, the change was also soon reflected in advertisements for the venue.) This turn of events was linked to its fraught political context, an example of the abrupt repositioning required of many French theaters during the radical phases of the Revolution.2 Around this time the Comédie-Française briefly became known as the Théâtre de la Nation; the Opéra, as the Théâtre de la République et des Arts.3 But if the rechristening of the Comédie-Italienne was an expedient expression of patriotic fervor, it also held a broader symbolic import. The company’s new title seemed to signal a definitive transfer in ownership of opéra comique— from the Bourbon monarchy to the French public— forecasting its recognition as le genre éminemment national of the Romantic age.4 Ultimately, of course, the smoothing over of opéra comique’s royalist past was not so simple as renaming the institution that produced it. The Théâtre

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de l’Opéra-Comique would be subject to new descriptive allegiances with each change in nineteenth-century governance, from national, to imperial, to royal, and back again. The reception of dialogue opera would be similarly contested, the different facets of its historical character emphasized or downplayed, going forward, to suit the diverse agendas of composers, entrepreneurs, and critics. As we have traced throughout The Comedians of the King, the body of opéras comiques written under the ancien régime contained many competing associations and impulses. With foundations in both imported opera buffa and the native vaudeville tradition, the genre drew on Italianate models while deftly incorporating French dramatic subjects and musical forms. Its plots served a variety of often ambivalent political ends, glorifying the sanctity of noble hierarchy and the progressive social vision of the philosophes, in turn. And its increasingly elaborate orchestrations and scenic effects betrayed the material support of the Parisian and court elite,

F i g u r e 6 . 1 Advertisement for the “Comédie-Italienne ” (F-Po, Affiches.Rés-4). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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F i g u r e 6 . 2 Advertisement for the “Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique National” (F-Po, Affiches.Rés-26). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

even as its trademark romances broadcast the “natural” melodiousness of the countryside. Over the course of the nineteenth century, critics increasingly lauded opéra comique as an exemplar of national cultural patrimony. The fundamental source of its “Frenchness,” however, remained a point of some dispute— based alternately in popular taste and artful refinement, rooted simplicity and cosmopolitan mixture.5 Modern treatments of early dialogue opera, especially the simplified ones found in standard textbooks, tend to privilege the direct and popularly oriented face of the genre. In such cases, opéra comique functions as a useful historiographical mirror to the more outwardly aristocratic tragédie lyrique, a crux of the broader narrative identifying currents of eighteenth-century opera reform with the progressive forces of Enlightenment. If sung tragedy in France reflected the lingering mythologies of the grand siècle, lyric

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comedy was humble and true to life, a vehicle for “social criticism,”6 as well as “bourgeois wisdom and good sense.”7 There is nothing wrong with such assessments; indeed, they capture a critical component of dialogue opera’s outlook through the 1750s and 1760s. An issue arises, though, when a rhetorical emphasis on the opposition between opéra comique and tragédie lyrique obscures the affinities that developed between the two genres and the ways in which the former was integrated into the patronage structures of the ancien régime. Consider, for instance, the summary offered in A History of Western Music, by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude Palisca. After discussing the origins of the comic genre (“as a popular entertainment at suburban fairs”),8 the authors describe the late eighteenth century as follows: By the later eighteenth century, librettists and composers of opéra comique were using serious plots, some based on the social issues that agitated France before and during the years of the Revolution. Many such works were produced at the Théâtre de l’OpéraComique in Paris, which became one of the principal competitors of the royally supported Opéra. The leading French opera composer of the time was the Belgian-born André Ernest Modeste Grétry (1741– 1813). His Richard Coeur-de-Lion (Richard the Lion-Hearted, 1784) inaugurated a vogue for “rescue ” operas around the turn of the century . . . in which the hero, in imminent danger of death for two and a half acts, is finally saved through a friend’s devoted heroism. The opéra comique remained extremely popular in France throughout the Revolution and the Napoleonic era and into the nineteenth century.9 All of the claims in this passage are technically accurate, but the extract misleads by omission, deemphasizing Bourbon influence in order to underscore opéra comique’s resonance with revolutionary change. True, the Opéra was “royally supported,” but so too was the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique, even if it is not described as such. Certainly, rescue operas featured imperiled heroes saved by devoted friends. One might add, however, that in Richard Coeur de Lion the protagonist is a king, and his rescue can be read as an

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allegory of fidelity to monarchy. Finally, if Grétry and Sedaine’s opera was unquestionably “popular . . . into the nineteenth century,” the same cannot quite be said of the 1790s, when the royalist appropriation of its music caused it to be banned from the stage. Thus, while Richard Coeur de Lion did engage the “social issues that agitated France before and during the years of Revolution,” this did not operate in precisely the sense that the passage implies. Eighteenth-century spectators interpreted the work as a defense, rather than a critique, of the soon-to-be-toppled regime. Whereas the preceding chapters of The Comedians of the King have focused on the mechanisms of theatrical patronage and production, this epilogue turns to questions of reception. Why has the contemporary historiography of opéra comique effaced much of the political nuance that ancien régime audiences once ascribed to the form? When, and to what ends, did dialogue opera consolidate its reputation as the popular and progressive musical genre of the French Enlightenment? A comprehensive reception history of opéra comique is beyond the scope of this concluding chapter. But we can shed considerable light on our modern musical narratives by tracing even a single representative of this corpus into the Romantic era. The opera highlighted in A History of Western Music and many other textbooks, Richard Coeur de Lion, makes an ideal case study, for it is perhaps the best-known work of opéra comique’s foundational period and a work laden with royalist baggage. Written in the final years of the ancien régime, Richard Coeur de Lion has an unambiguously conservative message. And yet, it easily survived the upheavals of the nineteenth century, maintaining a presence on Parisian stages from the Empire through the Third Republic. At the Opéra-Comique it was mounted more frequently than Bizet’s Carmen; at the Théâtre-Lyrique it was second in performances only to Gounod’s Faust.10 Its most famous arias were spun off in dozens upon dozens of arrangements, by composers both iconic and obscure. (Examples include Beethoven’s piano variations on “Une fièvre brûlante,” WoO72, 1795; and Pierre Clodomir’s transcription of the same romance for ophicleide duet, 1866).11 Critics recognized Richard Coeur de Lion as an icon of ancien régime opera from the first decades of the nineteenth century. The finer points of the work’s character, however, did not fully settle until much later. Only

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in the 1870s and 1880s did a confluence of forces— the growth of French academic musicology, the looming specter of Wagnerism, anxieties over French authority after Prussian defeat— help to solidify opéra comique’s reputation as a popular form, and one that resisted the influence of the Bourbon kings. To trace the reception of Richard Coeur de Lion, then, is to watch the two sides of the genre’s ancien régime identity— its fairground origins and its aristocratically fueled evolution— gradually become decoupled and reweighted in cultural memory. It is to uncover, in essence, the historiographical foundation of a “people’s” art.

Richard Coeur de Lion: The First Fifty Years Richard Coeur de Lion premiered in October of 1784 and was quickly established in the repertory of the Comédie-Italienne, an important expression of the “heroic” style infiltrating the comic genre on the eve of the Revolution. It was also positioned prominently at court: it was presented at Versailles within a month of its first performance in Paris and in 1786 served as a showpiece in the final ancien régime season at Fontainebleau. Musically and dramatically, the opera is among Grétry and Sedaine’s finest. The ancient tale (of the imprisonment and rescue of Richard I during the twelfth-century Crusades) adeptly fulfilled the demands of contemporary fashion, combining “gothic taste, local colour, historical fact, a moral imperative, [and] the spectacle of armed combat.”12 The apex of the authors’ achievement is the romance “Une fièvre brûlante,” composed, as Grétry put it, in an “old style capable of pleasing modern spectators.”13 This diegetic song serves equally as narrative and structural device, appearing nine times throughout the work as a symbol of recollection and recognition between Richard and his faithful servant, the troubadour Blondel (ex. 6.1).14 Beyond its aesthetic significance, Richard Coeur de Lion owed its success to the manner it fulfilled the representational interests of the nation’s elite. The work’s medieval setting and self-consciously archaic music evoked the timeless roots of monarchical rule; its plot was a ready vehicle for royalist sentiment, centering on the relationship between valiant king and devoted subject. These general political overtones were made explicit during the 1790s, when Richard Coeur de Lion was taken up as an emblem of the counter-

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E x a m p l e 6 . 1 Grétry, Richard Coeur de Lion, act 2, scene 4, “Une fièvre brûlante,” (mm. 9– 24). Paris: J. Frey, 1786. One day a burning fever seized me / and drove from my body my languishing soul.

revolutionary cause. The flash point within the opéra comique was an aria for Blondel, a lyric pledge of loyalty to his imprisoned monarch: Ô Richard! ô mon roi! L’univers t’abandonne; Sur la terre, il n’est que moi Qui s’intéresse à ta personne; Moi seul dans l’univers Voudrais briser tes fers, Et tout le reste t’abandonne.15

O Richard, O my king! The universe abandons you; On earth there is but one person Devoted to your well-being; I alone in the universe Wish to break your chains, As everyone else abandons you.

Within its dramatic context, “Ô Richard! ô mon roi” suggests a parallel to the ill-fated Louis XVI. It would become even more incendiary through applications, altered or appropriated to refer to the world outside of the theater. On 1 October 1789 the aria was sung at an infamous dinner honoring the Flanders Regiment at Versailles, an evening during which officers allegedly denounced the tricolor cockade of the Revolution. In the sum-

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mer of 1791 royalists circulated new words to the number in advance of a performance at the Comédie-Italienne, substituting “Ô Louis” for “Ô Richard” and inciting demonstrations so unruly that the police were called to intervene. The disturbance prompted government officials to embargo Richard Coeur de Lion from the public stage. The aria itself, however, remained ubiquitous, functioning as a shorthand for entrenched reaction and a conservative mirror to the revolutionary “Ça ira” and “La Marseillaise.”16 One might surmise that this polarized legacy would pose a threat to the future adaptation of Grétry’s opera. But Richard Coeur de Lion proved exceptionally resilient. Napoleon allowed the work to be revived in 1806,17 and under the Empire, Restoration, and July Monarchy it became a fixture in the French repertory. Several facets of Grétry’s reputation, to be sure, were already established by the early 1800s and would remain stable for the duration of the nineteenth century. Critics and audiences rarely wavered in recognizing the composer’s role in solidifying the conventions of opéra comique, and his significance within the trajectory of national operatic history. This personal veneration of Grétry reached a fever pitch around his death in 1813, which was marked by commemorations at theaters across France, a lavish state funeral, and an outpouring of laudatory prose.18 There was little disagreement, moreover, regarding Grétry’s most important contribution to the French cultural patrimony: an abundance of natural, singable melodies. As the librettist Ange-Étienne-Xavier Poisson de La Chabeaussière noted on the occasion of the composer’s passing, such fertile “invention of melody was the province of genius.”19 While Grétry’s broad achievement and continuing audience appeal were beyond dispute, early Romantic responses to Richard Coeur de Lion— and to opéra comique of the ancien régime, more generally— increasingly betrayed anxieties about how well this corpus was aging. Although the relative simplicity of dialogue opera would later be recuperated as a sign of its Enlightened directness and popular spirit, in the first half of the nineteenth century this feature was often described as a technical deficiency. Relatedly, though Grétry’s output would ultimately be incorporated into a “timeless” tradition of French vocal music, it was initially valued as a snapshot of a specific historical moment: the waning years of the Bourbon regime. As R. J. Arnold has documented, the first postrevolutionary revivals of Grétry’s works were received approvingly, as reassuring markers of stabil-

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ity and order after the turmoil of the previous decade. Such appreciation was tinged, however, with an acute “awareness of how much historical time had passed since [the operas] were last heard.”20 Under the Empire, reviewers often remarked with pride that classic opéras comiques retained their freshness long after their premieres, representing, as the Mercure de France put it, the triumph “of truth and nature over caprice and fashion.”21 By the Restoration years, in contrast, appraisals of such aesthetic and chronological distance gradually became more ambivalent: even ardent admirers of Grétry’s melodic gifts admitted that other aspects of his compositional style had not kept pace with the advances of the new century. Castil-Blaze established an influential vein of criticism in his De l’opéra en France in 1820, juxtaposing the expressive potency of earlier opéra comique with a sense of its technical limitations. As he rather patronizingly explained, the eighteenthcentury genre was “full of spirit . . . and dramatic truth, but demonstrated total incompetence with regard to harmony and composition.”22 Hector Berlioz’s writings, though deeply respectful of his lyric predecessors, likewise contain elements of contradiction and ambiguity.23 In Berlioz’s analysis Grétry was an “uncontestable genius,”24 and his masterpiece, Richard Coeur de Lion, remained a veritable fount of “expression, . . . nuanced shading, and melodic invention.”25 Even as Berlioz lobbied the Opéra-Comique to maintain and resurrect Grétry’s oeuvre,26 however, he admitted that certain features of these works risked being misconstrued by the fickle spectators of post-Rossinian Paris. While Grétry’s orchestrations and harmonic language were perfectly suited to their dramatic subjects, they were “lacking in the brilliance to which [modern audiences] were accustomed.”27 This gap between ancien régime aesthetics and contemporary expectations would soon be “corrected” in the production of Grétry’s score. In 1841 the Opéra-Comique enlisted Adolphe Adam, then fresh off the triumph of his ballet Giselle, to refurbish Richard Coeur de Lion for a new revival. As Adam described it, he had long held an interest in the “charming” music of Grétry, and around this time he began to retool the composer’s “impoverished” accompaniments to match his finely tuned melodies.28 Among other changes, Adam expanded the choral forces in Richard Coeur de Lion and added extra woodwind and brass (including piccolo, trombone, and trumpet) to several of the arias.29 The most acclaimed update came to the famous romance “Une fièvre brûlante.” While Grétry’s original setting maintained

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a consistent accompaniment (of simple horn and string doublings), Adam varied his orchestration between the repeated strophes of text. A sudden shift to string tremolo beneath the third iteration of the famous melody provoked an ecstatic response at its first Parisian performance— “frenetic applause from all corners of the hall” and an immediate encore.30 A handful of critics were alarmed by the alteration of such an established work as Richard Coeur de Lion. In the Revue et gazette musicale, the Parisian periodical most sensitive to concerns of historical performance, Henri Blanchard protested that “to retouch the output of a man of genius or talent . . . was an absurd and barbarous thing.”31 Another reviewer in the same publication, writing under the initials T. L. N., admonished the Opéra-Comique for having sacrificed its pedagogical responsibility to commercial concerns. Even if Richard Coeur de Lion was “too simple for ears habituated to the clamor of contemporary music,”32 the theater should still have presented the opera in its “primitive state ” as an educational exercise for its audience.33 These dissenters, however, were in the minority. Adam’s new adaptation of Richard Coeur de Lion was both an immediate and an enduring success at the box office, with nearly forty performances at the Opéra-Comique in the fall of 1841 alone and more than two hundred before the end of the decade.34 A substantial faction of critics also voiced approval, accepting the changes to Grétry’s work as respectful both of the composer’s reputation and of his consumers’ evolving standards. Léon Escudier praised Adam for having “revitalized the shape [of the opera] without disturbing its essence.”35 A certain J. de C. reasoned, along similar lines, that Adam had “merely supplied what modern ingenuity and invention in instrumentation have furnished; and which, had they existed in the author’s time, he would most certainly have turned to account.”36 Adam was applauded, in sum, for having “blow[n] the dust” from a cherished but antiquated musical relic.37 And, indeed, responses to Richard Coeur de Lion during the July Monarchy were suffused with nostalgia, stressing the advanced age of both the opéra comique and its biggest fans. The Journal des demoiselles noted that the composer’s melodies were “so catchy that your grandfather [and] your grandmother still remember them.”38 La France musicale reported a disruption at the adaptation’s second performance in the capital, mounted by a group of venerable Grétryomanes. Although the evening was set to begin with Frère et Mari, a new opera by

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Antoine Louis Clapisson,39 the audience insisted that Richard Coeur de Lion be played first instead: “An old man of at least 70 years shouted at the top of his lungs: ‘We want Richard, Richard above all else; we’ve had enough of all this modern music.’”40 If elderly spectators had not forgotten the tuneful melodies of Richard Coeur de Lion, they were also well aware of the external meanings the work had accrued in the years since its creation. During the Restoration, Grétry’s opera had once again been performed in conjunction with royal events, celebrating the return of Louis XVI’s brothers to the throne.41 (In 1817, 1818, and 1820, for instance, the opéra comique was presented on the name day of Louis XVIII, the feast of Saint Louis on 24 August.)42 It took on a more poignant significance for legitimists in the 1830s and 1840s, after the July Revolution brought the definitive fall of the Bourbon line. An anonymous reviewer in La mode reflected that, “for men of [his] generation and convictions,” Blondel’s romance was now enough to bring tears to the eyes, a reminder of those who had once been so proud to serve their king.43 “Ô Richard! ô mon roi!,” for its part, signified much more “than a collection of notes and lovely music, for [he] could remember the era when this number was sung like a hymn, when the throne of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was threatened.”44 The essayist emphasized that Richard Coeur de Lion did not belong to all Frenchmen, but to those who ascribed to the Bourbon-royalist message it contained. He took particular offense that the opéra comique had been performed at Compiègne before the Orléanist king, Louis-Philippe. A ruler of competing lineage could not possibly “love Grétry’s work the way we love it,” having participated in the downfall of the Bourbon Crown.45 At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, Richard Coeur de Lion thus remained a contested political object— in certain respects still “about” the vestiges of the ancien régime. And while Grétry’s opera was far more politicized than other works of its era, wider discussions of opéra comique’s foundations might still be grounded in the aesthetic and worldview of the late eighteenth-century establishment. In the 1840s La France musicale defined early dialogue opera in a manner quite foreign to our present-day assessments: as the “favored amusement of the noble classes and the opulently idle, expressing the same gaiety, charming abandon, verve [and] elegant frivolity” as the aristocratic culture that spawned it.46 For other young skeptics, this repertory was simply “rococo” and “perruque ”;47 it

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had been painstakingly restored, but retained the powdered-wig stuffiness of an increasingly distant historical age.

Richard Coeur de Lion: The First One Hundred Years The 1840s performances of Richard Coeur de Lion were the last where a sizable population of spectators had been alive at the work’s premiere. From the mid-century onward, as the ancien régime faded from lived memory to object of history, the reputation of Grétry’s opera began gradually to assume its more familiar, modern form. The first major change in the reception of early opéra comique was a recuperation of the genre’s comparatively modest scale and musical simplicity. This development was in part a reflection of intensifying aesthetic and cultural debates— a backlash against the more complex and “noisy” contributions of foreign artists in Paris. But the reappraisal of Grétry’s sound was also abetted by the pragmatic (and selfserving) projects of composers and impresarios working within France. The corpus of eighteenth-century opéra comique could usefully be framed as the predecessor of the nascent genre of operetta; with its accessible casting requirements and expired copyrights, it was also a valuable resource for companies grappling with the limitations of French theatrical regulation.48 In 1855 Richard Coeur de Lion was mounted in “dueling” revivals at the Opéra-Comique and the Théâtre-Lyrique.49 That same year Jacques Offenbach took the helm of a newly founded competitor to these established institutions, the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens. Offenbach’s theater was hampered by the narrow terms of its operating license, its repertory restricted to single-act operas with four or fewer characters.50 In the press and on the stage, Offenbach validated these small-scale works by linking them to their ancien régime roots, highlighting those older traits that best resonated with his contemporary programming agenda. Shortly after his company’s inauguration, Offenbach opened a competition for emerging authors of opéra bouffe, the publicity for which— as Mark Everist has shown— “constituted not only a partial view of the history of opéra comique up to the present, but also a manifesto for the artistic ambitions both of the Bouffes-Parisiens and of its manager and principal composer.”51 Offenbach’s history of opéra comique, published in the Revue et gazette mu-

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sicale, identified the late eighteenth century as the period when the genre was distilled to its most authentic, and most authentically French, essence. Repudiating the assessments of Castil-Blaze and Adam, Offenbach identified “simplicity in melodic style [and] sobriety in orchestration” as the foundational characteristics of French lyric comedy, these evidenced in the output of Monsigny and Philidor.52 He then praised Richard Coeur de Lion as the apex of the genre’s achievement under the ancien régime, a work whose natural freshness was “applauded today as if it were written yesterday, even though it dates from 1785.”53 Offenbach thus reweighted much of the wisdom that had consolidated around Richard Coeur de Lion in the 1840s. He rebranded the opera’s technical “insufficiency” as admirable clarity and its advanced age as timeless longevity. These themes quickly regained traction in the periodical press. Within months of Offenbach’s essay, Pierre Hédouin published an extended defense of Grétry’s “simple ” musical procedures in a collection of critical writings entitled Mosaique. Hédouin chided his fellow men of letters for following Castil-Blaze’s verdict on Grétry, as the creator “of a few great melodies, [whose impact was] deadened by ignorance ” in other aspects of composition.54 Of course, Hédouin countered, Grétry was not a “learned calculator of notes,” for he had never attempted to be; the composer believed— and the critic concurred— that “erudition was the enemy of the natural” and that “one did not go to the opera for a lesson in algebra.”55 In 1860 and 1861 Léon Méneau would second this denunciation of operatic calculation with a series of thirty articles in Le ménestrel on the “formation, progress, and excessive development” of opéra comique.56 Méneau lavished accolades on ancien régime repertory that exemplified the French ideals of esprit, grace, and melodic facility. He was suspicious of the genre’s revolutionary turn toward robust orchestration and learned counterpoint, which he dismissed as pernicious incursions of the Teutonic.57 In his survey Méneau explicitly referred to the complexities of Gluck and Cherubini. But he implicitly wrote against the specter of Wagner, whose Tannhäuser caused a scandal in Paris in 1861 and was reviewed in the very same issues of Le ménestrel.58 In discussions of French musical identity after 1860, no factor loomed larger than anxieties over German artistic and political supremacy. Nationally tinged rhetoric was already prevalent at the time of Wagner’s advent and

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would be considerably heightened after the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War.59 As Katharine Ellis has outlined, the reception of early music in the late nineteenth century was marked by a search for “sources of Frenchness” that might withstand foreign pressures— and by a near-obsession, in critical and pedagogical writings, with establishing “the authenticity, purity and ‘popular’ character of the musics that were valued most highly.”60 It is not a novel idea to suggest that opéra comique played a role in this politicized reassessment of the nation’s musical history. Ellis, Annegret Fauser, and Jann Pasler have each shown how the genre became a ubiquitous point of reference in narratives of the French cultural heritage, portrayed as deeply grounded in tradition and deeply resonant with the chansons of the folk.61 Critics treated the association of opéra comique and Frenchness as “a wellknown and settled issue.”62 The link was even confirmed in the governmental record: legislative debates over funding of the Opéra-Comique in the 1880s hinged on dialogue opera’s status as an “eminently French” art.63 It is important to underscore, however, that these strains of nationalist discourse represented an exaggerated rebalancing of opéra comique’s reception up to this point and would exert an outsize influence on the future historiography of the genre. Indeed, the foundations (and limitations) of our modern conceptions of opéra comique were solidified during the Third Republic, around the time of the final, nineteenth-century revival of Richard Coeur de Lion in 1873.64 Opéra comique, as I have shown, embodied two distinct philosophies of national achievement that had waxed and waned in importance throughout its reception history. The vaudeville comedies performed at the fairs reflected an inherently Gallic lineage of popular song; the “modern” form established in the 1750s asserted the authority of the French by improving on musical idioms developed abroad. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, writings on opéra comique had frequently emphasized the assimilationist, cosmopolitan nature of the nation’s contributions in this genre. A. Thurner’s Les transformations de l’opéra comique, for example, emphasized dialogue opera’s openness to international artists and indebtedness to the imported repertory of the bouffons. It was no contradiction in terms, in this view, for Grétry— a “sublime inventor” of French music— to have been born in Belgium and trained in Italy. After all, Thurner contended, “it is in blending the qualities of the Italian and German schools, that French

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music has always set forth its originality.”65 By the later decades of the century, in contrast, discussions of the national qualities within lyric comedy, even the repertory modeled after ultramontane sources, were more likely to downplay foreign influences and to emphasize the genre’s rootedness in the songs of the French folk.66 As Méneau contended, opéra comique epitomized French music because it “was born of the alliance between comédie and chanson . . . the two most popular forms of literature and composition,” respectively, that the country had ever produced.67 The assertion that opéra comique was born of the chanson rested upon a selective reading— and a certain rewriting— of the genre’s early history. From the 1860s onward a growing contingent of French critics took pains to minimize those aspects of operatic development that had taken place outside of the nation’s borders. A few authors tempered the significance of the bouffons’ repertory to the evolution of opéra comique. In Le ménestrel Gustave Bertrand refuted the “common prejudice that French comic opera derived from opera buffa”;68 he argued that the most groundbreaking works of the 1750s and 1760s— including Les troqueurs, Tom Jones, and Rose et Colas— owed more to C. S. Favart and to the “little comedies of the Saint-Laurent fair” than to the Italian innovations of La serva padrona.69 A more prominent vein of scholarly discourse pushed back opéra comique’s origins yet further, to the chantefables and musical plays of the thirteenth century. Central here was Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et de Marion. In the 1820s Fétis had claimed the work as the “earliest opéra comique in existence,” pointing to its emblematic mixture of spoken dialogue and song.70 During the Third Republic, as Ellis has expertly delineated, the Jeu de Robin et de Marion was “burdened with an increasing load of cultural-nationalist baggage,”71 discussed at length in the writings of De Coussemaker, Weckerlin, Chouquet, Becker, and Pougin, among others.72 A history of opera that began in the Middle Ages was appealing because it placed French composers in the originating role— a full “three hundred years before the intermèdes-concerts of the Italians,” as Paul Lacome would proudly assert.73 This narrative, moreover, foregrounded the manner in which France’s high-art music had evolved from vibrant popular roots. Critics eagerly debated whether Adam de la Halle had imitated the sound of folk melodies, appropriated existing folk melodies, or generated new folk melodies, his creations folded into broader culture after the moment of performance.74 A parallel process was

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identified in eighteenth-century opéra comique: if the vaudeville was derived from popular song, the arias of Grétry and his peers enjoyed a flourishing afterlife beyond the confines of the theater.75 The affinity between opéra comique and its medieval precursors was not merely structural, as in Fétis’s account, but spiritual— based on a shared commitment to the expression of the peuple. The themes of this general critical validation of opéra comique— its ancient foundations and its debt to the French folk— were heavily inflected in responses to Richard Coeur de Lion in the 1870s and 1880s. It became commonplace, on the one hand, to elide the opera’s medieval setting with the true-to-life achievements of the French Middle Ages. One critic compared the plot of Richard Coeur de Lion to the tales of “our old trouvères,”76 while several others excavated the historical contributions of the work’s protagonists. A review in the Revue et gazette musicale was immediately followed by an essay on the historical Blondel;77 a contributor to the Journal des savants discussed possible manuscript sources for the poetry of Richard I.78 While Grétry’s opéra comique was thought to resonate with the high art of the medieval period, it could also be used to demonstrate the continuing vitality of the nation’s popular culture. In his history of French song, Julien Tiersot singled out Richard Coeur de Lion as proof of the composer’s commitment to “unearthing the accent of the chanson populaire.”79 Even more remarkable were reviews that blurred the trajectory of influence within the opera, claiming that Grétry had reproduced, rather than merely imitated, a corpus of archaic melodies. The Musical World, for example, posited an ancient source for Blondel’s famous romance: Grétry threw his whole heart and soul into the composition of his opera. . . . Only one [melody] he sought in vain, the melody for the pathetic romance. . . . One day as he was taking a walk, pursued by his one fixed idea, he met Dalayrac. “What is the matter with you,” enquired the latter. “What is the meaning of that anxious look of yours?”— “Ah! My dear fellow, I am trying to find a motive, and I can’t. . . . I require an air characteristic of the days of chivalry; something simple, moving, ingenuous, and elevating, at the same time.”— “Wait a moment,” said Dalayrac, “we have in our mountains of Auvergne an old song which the peasants sing; a song so old

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that nobody knows its origin. It has been handed down from one generation to another. It might suit your purpose. Listen.”80 The anecdote is fictional and would have been easily recognizable as such in 1873. Grétry’s own memoirs described the genesis of the romance in detail— as a product of intense and independent effort— and this account had frequently been repeated in biographical sketches of the composer.81 But the brazenness of the fabrication is itself telling. It testifies to the strength with which narratives of popular inspiration had coalesced around the genre, even those examples of the genre with distinctly monarchical lineage. And it shows how a hagiography of opéra comique’s composers might be accompanied by a depersonalization of their accomplishments, a pointed confusion of agency between individual and folk. As Lacome wrote in his Les fondateurs de l’opéra-comique, the genre succeeded as a national art because— in contrast to tragédie lyrique— its authors “remained tangled up with the masses, anonymous agents in that fecund synthesis . . . that forms a people.”82 At a century’s remove from the ancien régime, the themes of an enduring musicological binary were taking shape.

Conclusions: Richard Coeur de Lion and the Revolutionary Centennial By the final decades of the nineteenth century, dialogue opera from the ancien régime had become a relative rarity on Parisian stages. Richard Coeur de Lion was one of only a handful of older works, alongside Le déserteur, that retained a firm place within the repertory.83 The decline in the production of eighteenth-century opéra comique, however, was accompanied by a marked proliferation in scholarly treatments of French operatic history.84 Many of the first key studies of dialogue opera— the archival compilations of Campardon and the biographies of Pougin, for instance— date from this period. I would argue that the gulf between the diminishing performed presence of opéra comique and the intensified processes of its canonization contributed several quirks to the historiography of the genre. We must be aware, in general terms, that the foundational texts of this history are colored by the nationalistic atmosphere of their creation. And we should note, more specifically, that the populist themes that accrued to opéra comique as a whole

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came to be attached rather indiscriminately to the few ancien régime works that survived in the theater. Put another way, the reception of Richard Coeur de Lion— and the Comédie-Italienne, in turn— were assimilated into narratives that better fit the fairground entertainments of the early eighteenth century. As Pasler has detailed, biographical sketches of Grétry from the Third Republic downplayed the composer’s identity as an “elitist royalist” and minimized the link between his music and the rococo refinement of the Bourbon court.85 Histories of the Comédie-Italienne, in a parallel fashion, dissociated this company from its royal patrons: authors underscored not the elite status of the theater, but its subservience to the Opéra and the Comédie-Française. As Pougin described it, the Comédie-Italienne acted as mere “vassal and serf ” to the other Crown institutions, a hardscrabble dependent of overlords rather than a bastion of privilege in its own right.86 The reception of opéra comique in the nineteenth century offers a remarkable case study in musical historiography. Responses to a single opera cannot capture the full complexity of this discursive transformation, but they nonetheless provide a glimpse of its import and scale; in reactions to Richard Coeur de Lion, we see a prising apart and rebalancing of the genre’s late ancien régime identity, from cosmopolitan to national, and Crown supported to folk inspired. In 1789 or even 1848, Parisian spectators seem to have understood early dialogue opera as a politically malleable object, a form that emerged out of popular culture but later joined its tragic counterpart in representing the interests of the Bourbon monarchs. By 1889, one hundred years after the fall of the Bastille, a starker, less sophisticated iteration of French operatic history had emerged— one whose traces remain with us today. As Tiersot argued in his Histoire de la chanson populaire, the tragédie lyrique was “an eminently aristocratic genre, born in the court and in the palace.”87 Opéra comique, by contrast, was an intimate reflection of the common spirit: comedy “owes much to popular song, and has [also] given much back.”88 Tiersot’s survey of French opera and chanson was published to coincide with the revolutionary centennial. Around this same time, critics began to explore the legacy of opéra comique’s popular origins, probing the ties between the folk, the forains, and the eventual ascendancy of the third estate. As Fauser has outlined, the idea that “opéra comique was not simply a popular genre of the people, but also a spectacle adopted throughout the period

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of the Revolution,” was emphasized heavily in the commemorative events of 1889.89 For the World’s Fair in Paris, the Opéra-Comique presented a set of “historical spectacles” on the exposition’s centenary theme with the goal of “linking our second national music theater with the memory of the revolutionary era.”90 The program— under the banner “L’Opéra comique pendant la Révolution, ou La Révolution dans l’opéra-comique ”— featured works fashionable in the capital between 1788 and 1794, beginning with Framery’s adaptation of Paisiello and Giuseppe Petrosellini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and two opéras comiques by Dalayrac (one collaboration with Jean-Baptiste Radet, La soirée orageuese, and another with Monvel, Raoul, sire de Créqui).91 While audiences appear to have found the productions pleasant enough, there was copious hand-wringing in the press: although the selected pieces had been prevalent during the 1790s, they were a poor match for critical preconceptions of what such music “should” be like. Framery’s translation-parody was at odds with a climate of patriotic, republican fervor; it was Italian, rather than French, and had been developed at Versailles for Marie Antoinette.92 Dalayrac’s contributions were no less problematic. La soirée orageuese was a cheerful vaudeville-style comedy, with little obvious connection to the turbulence of contemporary politics.93 The heroic Raoul, sire de Créqui, for its part, bore a striking resemblance to the better-known Richard Coeur de Lion, reflecting a muddy continuity with the ancien régime. (It too, in fact, had been banned during the Terror for its aristocratic sympathies.)94 In his report for Le ménestrel, Pougin noted that, while the idea of the retrospective was an excellent one, the project had been realized in “an imperfect manner”;95 the multiplicity of revolutionary spectacle was difficult to convey in such a brief run of performances, and the chosen operas did not fit easily into a one-dimensional narrative structure. If reviewers struggled to make sense of the revolutionary retrospective at the Opéra-Comique, it was not because the theater’s programming lacked a historical basis. As I have documented throughout this book, such dynamic eclecticism— encompassing cosmopolitan innovation, comic tradition, and heroic affirmation— was emblematic of both the late ancien régime repertory and its aftershocks in the 1790s. Rather, these writers were puzzled because the aesthetics and politics of dialogue opera defied ready categorization— and, indeed, only haphazardly fulfilled the broadly populist claims of Third Republic historiography. To search for the foundations of revolutionary

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spectacle in the chanson and at the fairs was a project doomed to failure, for it glossed over a critical period, perhaps the most critical period, in the genre’s early development. The full story of opéra comique could not be told without a proper account of the years in which the art form had been administered by the Bourbon Crown. The present-day historian of the eighteenth century occasionally finds herself in a predicament resonant with that of these fin-de-siècle critics, armed with an inherited methodological framework that cannot quite match the nuance of the theatrical world it confronts. The aim of The Comedians of the King has been to address this gap: to temper the assumed polarities of opéra comique and tragédie lyrique; to deepen our understanding of these genres’ political functions; and to better capture the musical complexity, diversity, and contradictions of a society in the process of radical change.

A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

It is not unusual for frantic bursts of writing to occur during breaks from the academic term. It is particularly fitting that the last few days of work on this book have fallen over the Thanksgiving holiday. I am delighted to reflect at this juncture on the very many people and institutions who have supported this project, and helped shepherd it to completion. I am fortunate that my corners of French and opera scholarship are populated by a terrific and terrifically welcoming contingent of scholars. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Ellen Rosand, who was the first to hear about this research during my graduate studies at Yale University— and the first to see the final manuscript nearly a decade later. In each of the intervening years, I have come more deeply to appreciate her example, guidance, and friendship. For conversations and advice that have shaped my approach in these pages, I should like to thank Christy Adams, Kelly Christensen, Georgia Cowart, James Davies, Lauren Frankel, Céline Frigau Manning, James Hepokoski, Michel Noiray, Andrei Pesic, Carmel Raz, Jillian Rogers, John Romey, Kamala Schelling, Jacqueline Waeber, Martin Wåhlberg, William Weber, and Craig Wright, among many others. Gundula Kreuzer has prodded me to think critically about the broader implications of my ideas. David Charlton has answered countless questions, saved me from errors, and shared his (seemingly endless) knowledge of the marvelous and complicated development of opéra comique. Annelies Andries and Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden offered welcome company in Paris over the duration

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Acknowledgments

of this project and helpfully read materials near its end. Participants in a workshop and conference (“Music and the Body between Revolutions: Paris, 1789– 1848”) at Columbia University’s Heyman Center, and in colloquia at Case Western Reserve University, Rutgers University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, supplied astute feedback as my arguments were taking form. The music department at Columbia University has proven an immensely inspiring and supportive environment in which to undertake this work. My colleagues in historical musicology— Susan Boynton, Walter Frisch, Giuseppe Gerbino, Ellie Hisama, and George Lewis— have served as generous mentors throughout my time on the tenure track; I extend my particular thanks to Elaine Sisman for her comments on excerpts from the manuscript and her keen insights into the musical and cultural history of the eighteenth century. Graduate students in several seminars have pushed me to interpret my sources from fresh angles and articulate their importance with greater clarity. And I cannot imagine having finished this book without the backing of my junior-faculty cohort: Alessandra Ciucci, Zosha di Castri, Kevin Fellezs, and Benjamin Steege offered cheerful commiseration, while Hannah Farber and Hannah Weaver carved out time with me to write. I have the good luck to occupy an office adjacent to Mariusz Kozak, who has become an invaluable interlocutor and confidant. My work on this book has benefited from financial and logistical assistance from a number of sources. Research in Paris was funded by grants from the Fulbright Program/Commission Franco-Américaine and the M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet Endowment of the American Musicological Society; these trips were facilitated, pragmatically, by the helpful staffs of the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, and the music and opera divisions of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed me to take a year of leave in the last stages of writing. Columbia University offered generous support throughout the production process, in the form of a Hettleman Junior Faculty Summer Research Grant and a Provost’s Grant for Junior Faculty who Contribute to the Diversity Goals of the University. I wish to express appreciation to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. Material in this work was presented to the University Seminar: Eighteenth-Century

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European Culture. Finally, a subvention was provided by the AMS 75 Pays Endowment and James R. Anthony Endowment of the AMS. At the University of Chicago Press, Marta Tonegutti guided my writing with great care, and the final product is all the better for her patience and encouragement. The editorial associates Tristan Bates and Dylan Montanari deftly handled the anxious queries of a first-time author. I am grateful to Matthew Ricketts for his attention to detail on the musical examples, to Callum Blackmore for proofreading, and to Audrey Amsellem for looking over my French transcriptions and translations. Rowland Moseley lent a hand (and meticulous eye) to my final revisions, Barbara Norton provided expert copyediting, and Russell O’Rourke did exacting work on the index. I should also like to thank the National Opera Association, Johns Hopkins University Press, and the University of California Press for granting me permission to reuse writing previously published elsewhere. Brief portions of chapters 2 and 3 were adapted, respectively, from “Recitative for the Peuple: Subversive Speech and Song in Early Opéra-Comique,” Opera Journal 43 (2010): 3– 21; and “Marie-Antoinette et la Musique: Habsburg Patronage and French Operatic Culture,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 46 (2017): 81– 94. An early version of chapter 5 appeared as “OpéraComique on the Eve of Revolution: Dalayrac’s Sargines and the Development of ‘Heroic’ Comedy,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 317– 374. The friends who have contributed to this project since my early days of graduate school have shaped both it and me in more ways than I can count. Alissa Brody, Christopher Brody, Amy Dunagin, Alexandra Kieffer, Megan Kaes Long, Sylvan Long, Joseph Salem, and Christopher White: I am tremendously fortunate to have learned from you. Finally, my incomparable family (Tom, Paula, Emily, Andy, Elliott, and Evelyn) heard all too often how difficult this endeavor was, yet remained unwavering in their support as they cheered it to completion. For this I am especially grateful. Ne w Yor k , Nov e mb e r 2 0 1 9

N OT E S

Introduction 1. William Weber, “La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien Régime,” Journal of Modern History 56, no. 1 (1984): 78. 2. Richard Taruskin, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 86. 3. Graham Sadler, “Tragédie en Musique (Opera),” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article .O003138. 4. See, for example, Don Fader, “The ‘Cabale du Dauphin’, Campra, and Italian Comedy: The Courtly Politics of French Musical Patronage around 1700,” Music & Letters 86, no. 3 (2005): 380– 413. 5. This historiography is outlined in Nathalie Rizzoni, “Inconnaissance de la Foire,” in L’invention des genres lyriques français et leur redécouverte au XIXe siècle, ed. Agnès Terrier and Alexandre Dratwicki (Lyon: Symétrie, 2010), 119– 121. 6. Comédien, of course, is best translated as “actor” (rather than as “comedian”). In the eighteenth century, however, it might also be associated with the performance of comédie, in distinction to that of tragédie. This book’s title plays upon the double meaning. 7. This phrase is a reference to Robert M. Isherwood’s influential monograph, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973). 8. For an overview of these trends in institutional history, see Victoria Johnson, “Introduction: Opera and the Academic Turns,” in Opera and Society in Italy and France

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10.

11.

12.

13.

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from Monteverdi to Bourdieu, ed. Jane F. Fulcher and Thomas Ertman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1– 26. Henri Lagrave, Le théâtre et le public à Paris de 1715 à 1750 (Paris: Klinksieck, 1972), 27. Quoted and translated in David Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3– 4. This graphic is adapted from Michèle Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984), 15. These announcements are not merely alphabetical; when other theaters are added to the mix, the Opéra is still listed first. These government subsidies accounted for roughly a quarter of the Opéra’s nonbox-office funding. Solveig Serre, L’Opéra de Paris (1749– 1790): Politique culturelle au temps des Lumières (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011), 93– 96. These actors also participated in the smaller-scale diversions that accompanied the royal family on its travels to the secondary palaces of Choisy, Marly, and Compiègne. While the various court venues differed in size and scale, the grandest of these spaces— the Salle de la Comédie at Fontainebleau and the Opéra Royal at Versailles— were of high pragmatic and symbolic value to the regime, accommodating roughly 700– 800 and 1300 spectators, respectively. On the Fontainebleau Salle de la Comédie, see Paul F. Rice, Fontainebleau Operas for the Court of Louis XV of France by Jean-Philippe Rameau, 1683– 1764 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 10. On performance venues at Versailles, see Jean-Paul Gousset and Raphaël Masson, Versailles: L’Opéra Royal (Paris: Éditions Artlys, 2010), 59 and 113. As Louis-Sébastien Mercier reported, this same hierarchy applied to the public display of theater advertisements: “The theatre bills are always in color. . . . There will be six or seven of them, one above the other like the steps of a ladder, grand opera coming first in glory, with tight-rope walkers bringing up the rear. But often the announcements of boulevard distractions hold modestly aloof from those of the three [privileged] theatres. See what a sense of order, and proper respect for authority, can do!” Mercier, Selections from “Le Tableau de Paris”: Panorama of Paris, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 89. A company that infringed upon the Opéra’s privilège risked fines and the “confiscation of the theatre, stage machines, scenery, costumes and other effects.” These threats, however, were only sporadically carried out. To cite a representative example: a 1673 edict had limited companies outside of the Opéra to musical forces of two singers and six instrumentalists. Although the Opéra mounted numerous court challenges to violations of this statute, such charges were often dismissed without consequence. The contracts delineating the initial terms of the Opéra’s monopoly are reproduced in Caroline Wood and Graham Sadler, French Baroque Opera: A Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2017), 6– 8; on the enforcement of these terms, see John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650– 1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 191– 197.

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15. Serre, L’Opéra de Paris. 16. Mark Darlow, Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opéra, 1789– 1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Victoria Johnson, Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 17. Darlow, Staging the French Revolution, 13. 18. There are historical sketches of the Comédie-Italienne in Clarence D. Brenner’s classic compendium of its repertory: The Théâtre Italien: Its Repertory, 1716– 1793, University of California Publications in Modern Philology 63 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), as well as in David Charlton’s exemplary study Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Silvia Spanu Fremder has addressed the history of the theater between 1760 and 1779 but focuses on its actors and spoken plays to the exclusion of its singers and musical works. Silvia Spanu Fremder, “Le répertoire et la dramaturgie de la Comédie-Italienne de Paris durant la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle ” (Ph.D. diss., Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010). 19. The first use of the title “Comédie-Italienne” dates from 1680; itinerant commedia dell’arte troupes had appeared at the French court from the sixteenth century onward. 20. Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 5. 21. The title “Opéra-Comique” was first used in reference to a specific troupe in 1714. On the early development of opéra comique, see Maurice Barthélemy, “L’opéracomique des origines à la Querelle des Bouffons,” in L’Opéra-Comique en France au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Liège: Mardaga, 1992), 8– 78. 22. For a foundational assessment of the vaudeville tradition, see Donald J. Grout, “The Origins of the Opéra-Comique” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1939). More recent work includes Bertrand Porot, “Aux origines de l’opéra-comique: Étude musicale du Théâtre de la Foire de Lesage et d’Orneval (1713– 1734),” in The OpéraComique in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Lorenzo Frassà (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 283– 329; and Françoise Rubellin, “Airs populaires et parodies d’opéra: Jeux de sens dans les vaudevilles aux théâtres de la Foire et à la ComédieItalienne,” in L’invention des genres lyriques français et leur redécouverte au XIXe siècle, ed. Agnès Terrier and Alexandre Dratwicki (Lyon: Symétrie, 2010), 163– 176. 23. As Rizzoni has pointed out, the theaters for the Opéra-Comique might be situated adjacent to, rather than directly within, the boundaries of the fairground. Rizzoni, “Inconnaissance de la Foire,” 129– 144. 24. The Opéra underwent a dizzying twenty-nine changes in governance between its founding and the Revolution. This institutional history is outlined in Darlow, Staging the French Revolution, 36– 42. 25. For an historical overview of the theater’s organization, see Jean-Auguste Jullien Desboulmiers, Histoire anecdotique et raisonnée du Théâtre Italien, depuis son rétablissement en France, jusqu’à l’année 1769 (Paris: Lacombe, 1769).

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26. See, for example, a contract signed in 1758: F-Pan, M.C., Étude XXXV, 694. As Downing A. Thomas has observed, “A fraught, though symbiotic, relationship existed between the Académie and the various theatres, for without serious opera the fair theatres would lose the repertory on which their parodies depended. Likewise, the debt-ridden Opéra depended on the contracts the fair theatres negotiated with them to survive financially.” Thomas, “Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Brewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 171. 27. “Bail et concession pour 18 années, à commencer au premier Janvier 1767, du privilège de l’opéra-comique,” F-Pan, AJ13 3. 28. The comédiens’ protests against these restrictions are outlined in F-Pan, O1 848.279. 29. “Arrêt du conseil d’état du Roi, approbatif du bail ou concession du privilège de l’Opéra-Comique, faite par la Ville aux Comédiens, dits, Italiens, pour trente années, à commencer le 1er Janvier 1780,” F-Pan, AJ13 3. 30. For a discussion of these “politics of privilege,” see Robert M. Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 81– 97. 31. Georgia Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), xvii. 32. Christoph Hellmut Mahling, Christian Meyer, and Eugene K. Wolf, General editors’ preface to Musical Education in Europe (1770– 1914): Compositional, Institutional, and Political Challenges, ed. Michael Fend and Michel Noiray (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), vii. 33. Weber, “La musique ancienne.” 34. William Weber, “Domestic versus Foreign Composers at the Opéra and the King’s Theatre in the Eighteenth Century,” in Moving Scenes: The Circulation of Music and Theatre in Europe, 1700– 1815, ed. Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Philippe Bourdin, and Charlotta Wolff (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2018), 21. 35. Duni had been granted the title of music director, along with a pension of one thousand livres per year, in exchange for a contract of exclusivity with the theater and a promise of two new works each season. See Kent Maynard Smith, “Egidio Duni and the Development of the Opéra-Comique from 1753 to 1770” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1980), 190; and Charles-Simon Favart, Mémoires et correspondance littéraires, dramatiques et anecdotiques (Paris: Léopold Collin, 1808), 1:57. 36. On “protectionist” defenses of French musical interests, see Weber, “Domestic versus Foreign Composers,” 19– 22. 37. David Charlton, “Genre and Form in French Opera,” in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera, ed. Anthony R. DelDonna and Pierpaolo Polzonetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 161. 38. “J’appelle Musique Françoise, le nouveau genre adopté depuis quelques années, genre qui sera désormais le domaine de la Nation. . . . Qu’on cesse d’objecter que

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39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

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cette Musique-là ne nous appartient pas, puisque nous l’avons emprunté des Italiens. J’avoue que ce qui fait notre Musique est Musique, non simplement du bruit, est dû à l’étude des Italiens: mais ce qui fait que cette Musique est Françoise, est dû à l’étude de la nature. Nous avons un chant théâtral; les Italiens n’en ont point; c’est sur cette base essentielle qu’est fondée la distinction des deux Musiques.” Laurent Garcin, Traité du mélo-drame, ou Réflexions sur la musique dramatique (Paris: Vallat-LaChappelle, 1772), 189– 190. As David A. Bell has shown, the idea of “constructing the nation” became a reality in France only after the onset of the Revolution. See Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680– 1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Ibid., 95. See also a reading of Bell’s work in R. J. Arnold, Musical Debate and Political Culture in France, 1700– 1830 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017), 102. On the limits (and contemporary reassessment) of this term, see Rahul Markovits, Civiliser l’Europe: Politiques du théâtre français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2014). A complete list of venues where the genre was performed in Germany can be found in Karin Pendle, “Opéra-Comique as Literature: The Spread of French Styles in Europe, ca. 1760 to the Revolution,” in Grétry et l’Europe de l’opéra-comique, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Liège: Mardaga, 1992), 229. See also Bruce Alan Brown, “La diffusion et l’influence de l’opéra-comique en Europe au XVIIIe siècle,” in L’Opéra-comique en France au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Liège: Mardaga, 1992), 288– 302. On opéra comique in translation see Corinne Pré, “Les traductions d’opéras-comiques en langues occidentales, 1741– 1815,” in Grétry et l’Europe de l’opéra-comique, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Liège: Mardaga, 1992), 251– 265. For the genre’s presence in Austria, see Bruce Alan Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and in Scandinavia, see Charlotta Wolff, “Opéra-Comique, Cultural Politics and Identity in Scandinavia, 1760– 1800,” Scandinavian Journal of History 43, no. 3 (2018): 387– 409. In Russia, the troupe of permanent comédiens was sponsored by Catherine the Great, and public theaters in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kouskovo also occasionally presented opéra comique (either in French or in Russian translation); see Pendle, “Opéra-Comique as Literature,” 242. Lauren Clay has documented the spread of the genre in provincial France and in colonial Saint-Domingue in Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). It should come as no surprise that Grétry was particularly popular in his native Belgium; Brown, “La diffusion et l’influence de l’opéra-comique,” confirms thirty-nine performances of Zémire et Azor in Brussels in 1772 and 1773 alone (314). On opéra comique in the United States, see Oscar George Theodore Sonneck, Early Opera in America (New York: G. Schirmer, 1915). Brown, “La diffusion et l’influence de l’opéra-comique,” 324– 328. See also Emilio

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46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

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Sala, “Réécritures italiennes de l’opéra comique français: Le cas du Renaud d’Ast,” in Die Opéra-Comique und ihr Einfluss auf das europäische Musiktheater im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Schneider and Nicole Wild (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1997), 323– 383. “Il vient de passer à Florence une troupe de Comédiens François qui ont joué Lucile, les deux Avares, Zémire & Azor, &c. avec un succès étonnant. Zémire & Azor sur-tout a fait fanatisme, quoique représenté sans décorations & par des Chanteurs médiocres. On vous met ici au-dessus de tous les Maîtres qui ont travaillé dans ce genre. M. Le Marquis de Ligniville . . . m’a dit, étant à diner chez lui, qu’un seul morceau de Zémire & Azor acheteroit tous les opéra comiques italiens qui ont été faits depuis trente ans.” Mercure de France, November 1776, 174– 175. “Un nouveau fonds au Théâtre de la musique nationale.” Ibid., 176. “La musique françoise qui jadis étoit l’objet du mépris ou de l’indifférence des étrangers, est repandue aujourd’hui dans toute l’Europe . . . ils sont parvenus à rendre leur spectacle infiniment agréable à la nation et même aux étrangers.” F-Pan, O1 131. Quoted in Richard Langellier-Bellevue and Roberte Machard, “La musique à Paris et à Versailles d’après les actes du Secrétariat de la Maison du Roi de 1765 à la Révolution,” Recherches sur la musique française classique 19 (1979): 269– 270. See also Daniel Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720– 1780 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 799– 800. Similar movements held forth in literature, spoken theater, and the visual arts, as signaled by the rise of the novel, the ascendance of the drame bourgeois, and the growth of genre painting. Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 54. See also Philippe Bourdin and Gérard Loubinoux, eds., La scène bâtarde: Entre Lumières et romantisme (ClermontFerrand: Presses universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2004). Mark Ledbury, “Sedaine and the Question of Genre,” in Michel-Jean Sedaine (1719– 1797): Theatre, Opera and Art, ed. David Charlton and Mark Ledbury (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 13– 14. Walter E. Rex, The Attraction of the Contrary: Essays on the Literature of the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 183. F. W. J. Hemmings, Theatre and State in France, 1760– 1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 24. Hemmings refers to the influential political pamphlet “Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état?” by the Abbé Joseph Sieyès, which defined the emerging role of the popular classes in the early years of the Revolution. See Mark Ledbury, “The Contested Image: Stage, Canvas, and the Origins of the French Revolution” in The Origins of the French Revolution, ed. Peter R. Campbell (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 191– 217. Philip G. Downs, Classical Music: The Era of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 194. Taruskin, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 443.

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55. This is one important angle in Mark Darlow, Dissonance in the Republic of Letters: The Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinistes (Oxford: Legenda, 2013). 56. Elisabeth Cook, for example, has demonstrated the links between the querelle des bouffons and the parliamentary crisis surrounding Jansenism in “Challenging the Ancien Régime: The Hidden Politics of the Querelle des Bouffons,” in La “Querelle des Bouffons” dans la vie culturelle française du XVIIIe siècle, ed. Andrea Fabiano (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2005), 141– 160. 57. Arnold, Musical Debate and Political Culture in France, 8. 58. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 54. 59. Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680– 1791 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 9. 60. Mark Darlow has made a similar observation in “État Présent: Eighteenth-Century French Musical Theatre,” French Studies 66, no. 1 (2012): 72– 73. 61. Crow, Painters and Public Life, 52. See also Darlow, “État Present,” 72– 73.

Chapter One 1. For an introduction to this bureaucracy, see Pauline Lemaigre-Gaffier, Administrer les menus plaisirs du roi: L’état, la cour et les spectacles dans la France des Lumières (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2016). 2. On this oversight, see Lagrave, Le théâtre et le public, 24– 29. 3. Denis-Pierre Jean Papillon de la Ferté, Journal de Papillon de la Ferté, intendant et contrôleur de l’argenterie, menus-plaisirs, et affaires de la chambre du roi (1756– 1780), ed. Ernest Boysse (Paris: Ollendorf, 1887), 65. 4. These memoranda are preserved in the French national archives, F-Pan, O1 851 (“Comédie-Italienne, année 1761 à 1762”). A selection of documents from the series is reprinted in Émile Campardon, Les spectacles de la foire (Paris: Berger-Levrault et Cie, 1877), 2:197– 202; and Georges Cucuel, “Sources et documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’opéra-comique en France,” Année musicale 3 (1913): 260– 264. 5. “À démontrer la nécessité de soutenir les bons spectacles, non seulement pour l’honneur de la nation et l’amusement du public, mais encore relativement aux vues politiques de l’État.” Papillon de la Ferté, Journal de Papillon de la Ferté, 67. 6. “J’y employai tout mon savoir, mais ils ne furent pas tout à fait du goût de M. le maréchal, qui trouva que je traitais cette affaire trop sérieusement.” Ibid., 67. 7. Papillon de la Ferté alludes to this reasoning in a “Mémoire pour le soutien des spectacles,” F-Pan, O1 851, 54v. This document can also be found in Campardon, Les spectacles de la foire, 2:197– 199. 8. The company had been closed in 1745, after conflicts with the Comédie-Française. Heartz, Music in European Capitals, 706– 707.

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9. The genre is described in Jacques Lacombe, Le spectacle des beaux arts (Paris: Hardy, 1758), 187. See also Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 294. 10. The term “ariette” was itself subject to change; before the 1750s it was used mainly to describe virtuoso arias in the divertissements of tragédie lyrique. Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 295. 11. Ibid., 281– 299. 12. The libretto of Il cinese rimpatriato is anonymous. 13. Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 292– 293. For a complete list of these adaptations, see Andrea Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien en France (1752– 1815): Héros et héroïnes d’un roman théâtral (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2006), 35. 14. A discussion of Les troqueurs is found in Benoît Dratwicki’s biography of the composer: Dratwicki, Antoine Dauvergne (1713– 1797): Une carrière tourmentée dans la France musicale des Lumières (Wavre: Éditions Mardaga, 2011), 35– 47. 15. Jean Monnet, Supplément au roman comique, ou Mémoires pour servir à la vie de Jean Monnet, ci-devant directeur de l’Opèra-Comique à Paris, de l’Opèra de Lyon, & d’une Comédie Françoise à Londres: Écrits par lui-même (London, 1772), 2:69– 73. 16. Charles Burney, Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy, 1770, ed. H. Edmund Poole (London: Eulenburg Books, 1974), 222. 17. These operas were collaborations with Sedaine, Anseaume, and Quétant, respectively. In addition to his work as a composer, Philidor was a noted chess prodigy. See Charles Michael Carroll, “François-André Danican Philidor, His Life and Dramatic Art” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1960). 18. Le maître en droit sets a text by Lemonnier, while On ne s’avise jamais de tout sets a text by Sedaine. For the biography of Monsigny, see Arthur Pougin, Monsigny et son temps (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1908); and Paule Druilhe, Monsigny: Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: La Colombe, 1955). 19. David Charlton, “Sedaine’s Prefaces: Pretexts for a New Musical Drama,” in Michel-Jean Sedaine (1719– 1797): Theatre, Opera and Art, ed. David Charlton and Mark Ledbury (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 196– 272. 20. “Les soins & l’intelligence, constamment soutenus de la part des Dirécteurs de ce Théâtre, soutiennent l’empressement du Public; & les concours y a été pendant cette Foire, très-nombreux, & sans interruption.” Mercure de France, March 1761, 198– 199. Similarly glowing reviews can be found in the issues of February, April, and October of 1760. 21. These letters are also described in Smith, “Egidio Duni and the Development of the Opéra-Comique,” 222. 22. “L’Opéra-Comique a eu un succès si brillant la foire dernière, qu’il a réveillé la jalousie des autres spectacles.” Charles-Simon Favart to Giacomo Durazzo, 8 November 1761, in Favart, Mémoires et correspondance, 1:200. 23. Favart to Durazzo, 11 November 1761, in ibid., 1:203– 204. 24. This work, like Anseaume’s Bertholde à la ville, was based on the libretto by

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29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

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Goldoni. For a detailed history of these adaptations, see Oscar George Theodore Sonneck, “Ciampi’s Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno and Favart’s Ninette à la cour: A Contribution to the History of Pasticcio,” Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 12, no. 4 (1911): 525– 564. Heartz, Music in European Capitals, 735– 736. “Ce spectacle languit faute de nouveautés.” Mercure de France, July 1759, 1:195. See also the issues of June and October (vol. 2) of this same year. Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien en France, 45– 69. At the outset of the 1761 season, the theater’s account books logged a debt of 299,700 livres. “Situation générale de la Comédie Italienne au premier Avril 1761,” F-Po, Th.OC.43, 2v– 3r. This figure has been a point of some dispute. Papillon de la Ferté was responsible for much of the confusion: the intendant erroneously inflated the troupe’s level of precarity in his accounts of the merger (to upward of 700,000 livres), likely to emphasize his own achievements in salvaging the company. (See, for example, F-Pan, O1 849.21.) In 1761, for instance, the summer fair ran between 27 June and 9 October. The door receipts of the Comédie-Italienne immediately reflected the heightened competition from the Opéra-Comique, falling to a dismal 10,966 livres in July. (While the boxoffice receipts of most Parisian theaters suffered in the summer months, this case is particularly extreme.) After the merger, in February of 1762, receipts were six times higher, spiking to 67,078 livres. These financial records can be found in F-Pan, O1 849.162. “Celle [the receipt] du mois de juin est diminuée, il est à craindre que le spectacle de l’opéra-comique ne leur fasse grand tort.” F-Pan, O1 849.124. A discussion of the theater’s finances during this period can be found in Georges Cucuel, “Notes sur la Comédie Italienne de 1717 à 1789,” Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 15, no. 1 (1913): 162– 164. R. W. Harris, Absolutism and Enlightenment, 1660– 1789 (London: Blanford Press, 1967), 39– 54. The legal guidelines for the dyeing of cloth, for instance, contained over three hundred distinct stipulations. Ibid., 51. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King, 151. “Qu’on ne douta point qu’il n’engageast l’Étranger à venir en France, et surtout à Paris, et à y sejourner; En effet il y est venu, il y vient actuellement, y sejourne des années entières, y fait un dépense considerable, qui tourne absolument au profit du commerce, et par consequent à celuy de l’État.” “Mémoire du sieur Thuret,” F-Pan, O1 617.16. This document is transcribed in Pauline Lemaigre-Gaffier, “Du coeur de la Maison du Roi à l’esprit des institutions: L’administration des Menus Plaisirs au XVIIIe siècle ” (Ph.D. diss., Université Paris-1, 2011), 343. “M. de Colbert proposait-il à Louis XIV.” “Mémoire pour prouver la nécessité de soutenir les spectacles,” F-Pan, O1 851, 55r.

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36. “Les intérets du Roy s’y trouvent liés; les spectacles attirent dans la capitale, toutes les années, un grand nombre d’Étrangers, qui en venant y puiser le bon goût, occasionnent une circulation toujours utile pour un État.” “Mémoire pour le soutien des spectacles,” F-Pan, O1 851, 50r– 51r. 37. “Les maintenir dans leur superiorité sur tous les spectacles du monde.” Ibid., 50r– 51r. 38. See, for instance, “Mémoire pour prouver la nécessité de soutenir les spectacles,” F-Pan, O1 851, 55v– 56r. 39. “L’abandon presque général de leur spectacle, l’inutilité des efforts qu’ils ont fait jusqu’à présent pour y ramener le public, leur prouve combien le mauvais goût a gagné sur lui. La musique de ses plus beaux ouvrages ne le flatte plus, et bien des partisans de l’Opéra-Comique trouveroient sans doute les prétentions de Rameau outrées, s’il osoit s’égaler à l’auteur du Maître en droit. La boutique du maréchal fait plus d’effet que n’en feroient le Palais d’Armide et le Temple du Soleil.” “Mémoire pour le soutien des spectacles,” F-Pan, O1 851, 53v– 54r. 40. “Les étrangers, de qui nous étions les maîtres, vont devenir nos modèles, et nous touchons à la barbarie si l’on ne s’occupe très sérieusement à ramener le goût par le sacrifice d’un spectacle tout à fait vide de choses.” Ibid., 54r. 41. Papillon de la Ferté often drew parallels between the political challenges of Louis XIV’s reign and the threats that Louis XV now faced. See, for example, “Mémoire pour prouver la nécessité de soutenir les spectacles,” F-Pan, O1 851, 56r– 56v. 42. “Aimons le théâtre; c’est la seule gloire qui nous reste.” This letter is quoted in Markovits, Civiliser l’Europe, 11– 12. 43. Ibid., 31. 44. Ibid., 18– 23. Clay offers a complementary view of the predominance of regional over centralized politics in Stagestruck: The Business of Theater. 45. Lemaigre-Gaffier, Administrer les menus plaisirs, 75– 104. 46. “Despotisme au milieu de nos spectacles.” Correspondance littéraire, 15 February 1760 (Tourneux, ed.), 4:183. 47. Since it was inconceivable that the same actors who appeared at the foires would take the stage at Versailles, the cast was replaced with actors from the Comédie-Italienne and the Opéra. While the program was generally well received, most agreed that the dissonance of casting actors of noble characters in a popular genre was jarring. Sedaine later claimed that the real reason for the theatrical merger was the king’s desire to see On ne s’avise jamais de tout featuring its original performing forces. This anecdote should at least partially be attributed to the ego of its author; it is probably not coincidental, however, that the work was featured prominently at the premiere of the enlarged troupe, and that the five actors who usually performed it were the members of the Opéra-Comique to make the move to the Comédie-Italienne. See Michel-Jean Sedaine, “Quelques réflexions inédites de Sedaine sur l’opéra comique,” in Théatre choisi de G. de Pixerécourt, ed. G. de Pixerécourt (Nancy, 1841– 1843), 4:506.

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48. “Mémoire pour repondre à différents projets presentés,” F-Pan, O1 851, 66r. 49. “Épuré de tout ce qu’il y a de dangereux pour l’esprit et pour le coeur.” “Mémoire pour le soutien des spectacles,” F-Pan, O1 851, 54r. 50. Carroll, “François-André Danican Philidor,” 41. 51. The actors were MM. Clairval, Laruette, and Audinot and Mlles. Deschamps and Nessel. F-Pan, M.C., Étude XXXV, 711. This document is reproduced in Andrea Fabiano, “Carlo Goldoni a Parigi,” in Carlo Goldoni, 1793– 1993: Atti del convegno del bicentenario (Venezia, 11– 13 aprile 1994), ed. Carmelo Alberti and Gilberto Pizzamiglio (Venice: Regione del Veneto, 1995), 190– 192. See also Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien en France, 61– 64. 52. Andrea Fabiano, “Le théâtre musicale à la Comédie-Italienne,” in L’invention des genres lyriques français et leur rédecouverte au XIXe siècle, ed. Agnès Terrier and Alexandre Dratwicki (Lyon: Symétrie, 2010), 225. 53. The playwright and poet Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret wrote a eulogy for the forains that depicted their takeover in gruesomely violent terms. Nougaret’s poem, an unsubtle critique of theatrical privilege, describes how the popular company was taken by surprise by its jealous rivals, beaten, and dismembered like a helpless animal. See Nougaret, La mort de l’Opéra-Comique: Élégie pour rire et pour pleurer par un jeune homme, âgé de 17 ans (Paris, 1762). 54. The details of the performance and its reception can be found in André-Guillaume Contant d’Orville, Histoire de l’opéra bouffon (Amsterdam and Paris: Grangé, 1768), 1:210. 55. “L’Opéra-Comique se trouve incorporé à la Comédie-Italienne, où il joue depuis quinze jours avec un concours prodigieux. . . . C’est certainement aujourd’hui, pour la vérité, la finesse et l’ensemble du jeu, la meilleure troupe du royaume.” Correspondance littéraire, 15 February 1762 (Tourneux, ed.), 5:44. 56. Receipts in 1758 had tallied 235,999 livres, less than half the total (516,726 livres) generated in the first season after the merger. (See F-Po, Th.OC.40 and Th.OC.44.) 57. These boxes followed the subscription model of the Comédie-Française. See F-Pan, O1 849.21. 58. There were dips in the theater’s receipts between its 1767– 1769 seasons and again in 1771– 1772, but the company rebounded strongly after the opening of its new hall, the Salle Favart, in 1783. These figures are tallied from F-Po, Th.OC.40-Th.OC.73. 59. This repertory is transcribed in Paul F. Rice, The Performing Arts at Fontainebleau from Louis XIV to Louis XVI (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989), 197– 198. 60. “Mémoire pour la réunion de l’Opéra-Comique,” F-Pan, O1 851, 49r. 61. “Mémoire présenté par la Comédie Italienne,” F-Pan, O1 851, 78r. 62. “Cet ouvrage eut sur le théâtre de la foire un succès qu’il n’a jamais eu et ne peut avoir sur le théâtre Italien; la dignité des actrices ne leur permettant pas de jouer comme il le faut les rôles des deux demoiselles.” Sedaine, “Quelques réflexions,” 4:505.

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63. “J’ai été obligé de dénaturer cette folie pour l’accommoder à un théâtre plus noble.” Favart to Durazzo, 29 May 1762, in Mémoires et correspondance, 1:275. 64. “Mémoire pour la réunion de l’Opéra-Comique,” F-Pan, O1 851, 48r. 65. Nicole Wild, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens au XIXe siècle: Les théâtres et la musique (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1989), 258– 260. 66. “Une seule famille.” “Mémoire sur la situation de la Comédie Italienne,” F-Pan, O1 847. This document is also reproduced in Émile Campardon, Les comédiens du roi de la troupe italienne, pendant les deux derniers siècles (Paris: Berger-Levrault et Cie, 1880), 2:311. 67. These daily receipts are reported in Brenner, The Théâtre Italien: Its Repertory. 68. See, for example, the discussions of this decision in F-Pan, O1 848.31 and O1 848.76. 69. “Les acteurs soi-disant lyriques de la Comédie Italienne, après avoir chassé les acteurs Italiens (anciens maîtres de la maison) sous le prétexte apparent d’y rétablir la comédie françoise, comptoient bientôt à force d’intrigues rester seuls maîtres du terrain en se débarrassant encore des acteurs françois.” F-Pan, O1 849.23. The complaints of the non-singing actors against their compatriots are also registered in F-Pan, O1 849.21. 70. “Les maîtres et les despotes.” Mémoires secrets, 16 February 1769. 71. “Assemblée du lundi 9 septembre 1782,” F-Pan, AJ13 1052.17. 72. “Les moeurs des nations policées.” F-Pan, O1 849.52. “Il est important de resserer chaque théâtre dans ses propres limites, et de faire . . . qu’ils se portent à perfectionner avec plus d’ardeur le genre qui les caracterise essentiellement.” Ibid. 73. “Voulant empêcher d’un coté la réunion de la Comédie Italienne avec le spectacle de l’Opéra-Comique, et d’un autre coté qu’on introduise dans le dit spectacle de l’Opéra-Comique aucuns intermèdes ny opéras italiens.” F-Pan, M.C., Étude XXXV, 694. Portions of this agreement are reproduced and discussed in Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien en France, 64– 66. 74. The argument of this memorandum contains a familiar blend of financial pragmatism, protectionist rhetoric, and concern for the prevailing class structure. The Opéra, a “most proper” theater, should be protected because it attracted an audience of “all the people of highest title”; the Opéra-Comique, by contrast, “is only supported by those who surrender themselves to licentiousness” (l’opera est sans contredit le spectacle le plus décent, et où se forme l’assemblage de touttes les personnes les plus titrées; on n’en peut dire autant de l’opéra comique, qui n’est suivy que par ceux qui sont livrés à la licence). F-Pan, O1, 849.30. 75. Louis-Hurtout Dancourt and Jean-Claude Trial, Airs détachés d’Ésope à Cythère (Paris: Le Marchand, 1768), 27. 76. A full account of the fire can be found in Serre, L’Opéra de Paris, 180– 183. 77. Favart recounted the episode in detail in letters to Durazzo on 8 April and 10 April 1763; see Favart, Mémoires et correspondance, 2:87– 96. 78. Letter from the Italian players to the duc de Duras, 13 April 1763, F-Pan, O1 853.

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79.

80.

81. 82.

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Papillon de la Ferté reports that this request in fact provoked a “très mauvaise humeur” at the Comédie-Italienne. Papillon de la Ferté, Journal de Papillon de la Ferté, 112– 113. “Un bon tiers du Palais a été dévoré; s’il n’y avait pas que l’Opéra, on pourrait dire tant pis, tant mieux. On lui avait toujours prédit qu’il mourrait de froid; voilà comme il ne faut point croire aux astrologues, il est mort de chaud.” Favart to Durazzo, 8 April 1763, in Favart, Mémoires et correspondance, 2:87. The abbé Galiani expressed similar surprise that “fire could have taken hold in an ice-box” (le feu avait pu prendre dans une glacière). This latter reaction is transcribed in Serre, L’Opéra de Paris, 183. These comments, of course, play on the double meaning of froidure, referring to both temperature and tedium. “Nous n’aurons plus de ces vieux habits qu’on renouvelait tous les ans, en les surchargeant d’oripeaux; de ces antiques décorations que l’on rebarbouillait périodiquement, ni de ces vieilles machines qui montraient toujours la corde; nous ésperons du neuf. Ah! Si cela pouvait s’étendre jusqu’aux actrices! Plût à Dieu que l’incendie parvenu jusqu’à l’entrepôt de l’Opéra eût encore consumé toute la bibliothèque de notre musique française.” Favart to Durazzo, 8 April 1763, in Favart, Mémoires et correspondance, 2:88. “Mémoire sur la situation de la Comédie Italienne,” F-Pan, O1 851. This document is reprinted in Campardon, Les comédiens du roi de la troupe italienne, 2:306. “Des lettres de naturalité.” Contant d’Orville, Histoire de l’opéra bouffon, 1:206.

Chapter Two 1. For a discussion of this work, see Andrea Fabiano, “Un projet de métissage théâtral franco-italien: La nouvelle Italie de Jean Galli de Bibiena à la Comédie Italienne (1762),” in Voyages des textes de théâtre: Italie-France-Italie, XVIe– XXe siècles, ed. Cécile Berger and Françoise Decroisette (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1998), 167– 188. 2. “L’Opéra-Comique ne puisse avoir, en façon quelconque, la forme de l’Opéra.” “Bail et concession pour 18 années, à commencer au premier Janvier 1767, du privilège du l’Opéra-Comique,” F-Pan, AJ13 3, 2v. 3. “Mémoire pour le soutien des spectacles,” F-Pan, O1 851, 54r. 4. A helpful introduction to these artists’ contributions is found in Heartz, Music in European Capitals, 728– 800. 5. “Une action grande & sérieuse entre des personnes illustres.” Académie française, Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 4th ed. (Paris: Brunet, 1762), 2:861. 6. “On représente quelque action de la vie commune, que l’on suppose s’être passée entre des personnes de condition privée.” Ibid., 1:335. 7. “À des événemens moins importans, & à des personnages moins véhémens & moins

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8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

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élevés.” Bernard Germain Étienne Médard de la Ville-sur-Illon, comte de Lacépède, La poétique de la musique (Paris: 1785; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints), 2:281. See also James Butler Kopp, “The ‘Drame Lyrique’: A Study in the Esthetics of Opéra-Comique, 1762– 1791” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1982), 103. “Les meilleures intrigues sont celles qui se passent entre des Personnages gais; c’est pour cela que les Villagois font plus de plaisir dans ce genre que les gens de la Ville, & que parmi ces derniers, les Artisans réussissent mieux que la Bourgeoisie. Il seroit mal-adroit de prendre un Prince fameux ou un Conquérant illustre pour Sujet d’un Opera-Comique, à moins que ces Personnages n’y soient représentés dans des situations singulières, plaisantes, & opposées, jusqu’à un certain point à leur dignité.” Antoine-François Quétant, Essai sur l’opéra-comique (Paris: Duchesne, 1765), 34. In the preface of this work, the librettist alludes to the resistance it met before its premiere, claiming that “never before had a good or poor work encountered such trouble before it appeared on stage” (jamais bon ou mauvais Ouvrage n’a eu tant de peine que celui-ci à paroître au Théâtre). Michel-Jean Sedaine, Le roi et le fermier: Comédie en 3 actes, mêlée de morceaux de musique (Paris: Hérissant, 1762). “Il n’a pas paru aussi simple apparament aux spectateurs de voir ce Prince sur la Scène de l’Opéra-Comique, en parler le langage & s’énoncer en Ariettes.” Mercure de France, May 1763, 190. “Les Dieux y parlent avec toute la dignité de leur caractére; les Roys, avec toute la Majesté de leur rang, les Bergers & les Bergeres, avec le tendre badinage qui leur convient.” François Raguenet, Parallèle des italiens et des français en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéras (Paris: Chez Jean Moreau, 1702), 6– 7. This literature is discussed in Jane R. Stevens, “Caractère in Eighteenth-Century France,” in French Musical Thought, 1600– 1800, ed. Georgia Cowart (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1989), 23– 29. “Le Musicien doit observer soigneusement ce que la nature prescrit. . . . Il distinguera, par les différens accents, le Roi du Laboureur, le Héros de l’homme ordinaire.” Le Pileur d’Apligny, Traité sur la musique, et sur les moyens d’en perfectionner l’expression (Paris: Demonville, 1779), 115. See also Stefano Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 41. “Un bourgeois peut être assassiné comme Pompée; mais la mort de Pompée fera toujours un tout autre effet que celle d’un bourgeois.” Joseph de La Porte, Dictionnaire dramatique, contenant l’histoire des théâtres, les règles du genre dramatique, les observations des maîtres les plus célèbres et des réflexions nouvelles sur les spectacles (Paris: Lacombe, 1776), 1:283– 284. Lacépède voiced similar sentiments, insisting that “the fury of a shepherd is distinct from that of a King” (la colère d’un berger n’est pas celle d’un Roi). Poétique de la musique, 149– 150. Stevens, “Caractère,” 28. Ibid., 28– 29.

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17. Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera, 45. 18. Journal des théâtres, 15 October 1777, 281. This passage is quoted and translated in R. J. Arnold, Grétry’s Operas and the French Public: From the Old Regime to the Restoration (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 23– 24. 19. This description of properly “natural” music is taken from the writings of NoëlAntoine Pluche and described in Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 138. 20. Daniel Heartz, “Italian by Intention, French of Necessity: Rousseau’s Le devin du village,” in From Garrick to Gluck: Essays on Opera in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. John A. Rice (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2004), 236. 21. Heartz, Music in European Capitals, 713– 717. 22. This opera is available in a modern critical edition. See Marie-Justine-Benoîte Favart and Adolphe Benoît Blaise, Annette et Lubin: Comédie en un acte en vers, mêlée d’ariettes et de vaudevilles, ed. Andreas Münzmay (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2016). 23. The aria in question is Emirena’s “Prigioniera abbandonata” from act 1, scene 9. For attributions of the opera’s borrowed music, see Andreas Münzmay, introduction to Favart and Blaise, Annette et Lubin, lxxxiii– lxxxvi. 24. “Elle ne voudroit pas que l’Ariette Ah! pauvre Annette, fut travaillée dans le goût Italien, qui, à tous égards, n’est pas le ton de la nature.” Contant d’Orville, Histoire de l’opéra bouffon, 1:226. A more detailed discussion of the critical reception of this work can be found in Heinz-Jürgen Winkler, “Zur zeitgenössischen Rezeption von Annette et Lubin, Comédie mêlée d’ariettes et vaudevilles, und zur Verwendung des Timbre Quand la bergère vient des champs,” in Timbre und Vaudeville: zur Geschichte und Problematik einer populären Gattung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Schneider (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1999), 244– 249. 25. “Une jeune fille élevée dans les champs sous une cabane.” This review is cited in Winkler, “Zur zeitgenössischen Rezeption,” 247. 26. “Un Héros, une Princesse, peuvent bien se promener gravement & réflechir un instant, avant d’instruire ceux qui les écoutent des passions qui les agitent.” Jean-Baptiste Nougaret, De l’art du théâtre en général, où il est parlé des spectacles de l’Europe, de ce qui concerne la comédie ancienne et nouvelle, la tragédie, la pastorale dramatique, la parodie, l’opéra-sérieux, l’opéra-bouffon et la comédie mêlée d’ariettes, etc., avec l’histoire philosophique de la musique et des observations sur ses différents genres reçus au théâtre (Paris: Calleau, 1769; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), 2:316– 317. 27. “Ils disent tout de suite ce qui leur vient dans l’idée.” Ibid., 317. 28. “Celle-ci [tragédie lyrique] demande d’être chantée d’un bout à l’autre. C’est de la noblesse du genre que résulte cette obligation. Le débit d’une Scène de Rose & Colas n’a aucun rapport avec celui d’une Scène de Phédre ou de Mérope. Celle-là n’est qu’une conversation villageoise; celle-ci est une déclamation soutenue, fort approchante du chante.” Laurent Garcin, Traité du mélo-drame, ou Réflexions sur la musique dramatique (Paris: Chez Vallat-la-Chapelle, 1772), 258– 259. 29. In practice, the clause governing recitative was subject to recurring cycles of

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31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

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restriction and boundary-pushing between the elite theater and its competitors. Both simple and accompanied recitative had made inroads into dialogue opera after the querelle des bouffons. Les troqueurs is sung throughout, and several other comic hits of the 1750s, based on imported opera buffa, retained original recitative from this corpus. The atmosphere seems to have grown less lenient, however, after 1758. Provoked by the success of recent Italianate comedies, the Opéra renewed its legal agreement with the forains and began to enforce its terms more strictly. This development was of no small inconvenience for the authors of opéra comique, who were obligated in some cases to rewrite entire works, stripping them of their recitative, so that they could remain in the repertory. Monsigny and La Ribardière’s Les aveux indiscrets, for example, was subject to extensive revision between the initial private performances (around 1755) and the public premiere at the Foire Saint-Germain (in 1759). “J’ai appris que par la loi du pays il nous est défendu de parler en prose, et de parler en vers sans les chanter. Et comme j’ai fait tout de suite ma déclaration que je ne sçavois que des Pont neuf, on vient de m’intimer l’ordre de ne me faire entendre qu’en Vaudevilles.” Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, L’isle sonante: Opéra-comique en 3 actes (Paris: Hérissant, 1768), 14. “Il vous est ordonné à vous même, Monsei-gneur, de ne vous exprimer qu’en Ariettes où en récitatif obligé.” Ibid., 14. On the links between opéra comique and drame, see esp. Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera, 63– 86; Pierre Frantz, “Drame et opéra-comique: Une affaire de promiscuité,” in L’invention des genres lyriques français et leur redécouverte au XIXe siècle, ed. Agnès Terrier and Alexandre Dratwicki (Lyon: Symétrie, 2010), 257– 270; and Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 201– 264. Marc Buffat, “Diderot et la naissance du drame,” in Le théâtre français du XVIIIe siècle: Histoire, textes choisis, mises en scène, ed. Pierre Frantz and Sophie Marchand (Paris: Éditions L’avant-scène, 2009), 349. “La nature n’a point de ces couleurs tranchantes, tout y est mélangé et fondu par des passages doux et insensibles.” Louis Sébastien Mercier, Du théâtre, ou Nouvel essai sur l’art dramatique (Amsterdam: Harrevelt, 1773), 108. This passage is also discussed in ibid., 350. Frantz, “Drame et opéra-comique,” 260. “Elle est plus voisine de nous. C’est le tableau des malheurs qui nous environnent. Quoi! vous ne concevez pas l’effet que produiraient sur vous une scène réelle, des habits vrais, des discours proportionnés aux actions, des actions simples, des dangers dont il est impossible que vous n’ayez tremblé pour vos parents, vos amis, pour vous-même?” Denis Diderot, Entretiens sur le fils naturel, in Denis Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 10, Le drame bourgeois, ed. Jacques Chouillet and Anne-Marie Chouillet (Paris: Hermann, 1980), 140. The translation of this passage is adapted from Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera, 65– 66.

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37. On the ambiguities of drame as a generic label, see Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera, 90– 94. 38. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 208. 39. M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Drame Lyrique,” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2001), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.08137. 40. “Au doux plaisir de rire / le plaisir plus doux de pleurer.” Mercure de France, April 1769, 155. The text is taken from an occasional work composed by Anseaume to mark the end of the theatrical season. 41. As the librettist Jean-François Marmontel described it, “The passions spread their devastating effects on every station in life” (les passions étendent leurs ravages dans tous les états de la vie). See Marmontel, Éléments de littérature (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, 1846), 1:482. 42. “Nous allons rire avec le bon nourricier de Lucile.” André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Mémoires, ou Essais sur la musique (nouvelle édition), ed. J. H. Mees (Brussels: Académie de Musique, 1829), 1:149. For a discussion of Lucile and the new culture of sensibilité at the Comédie Italienne, see Arnold, Grétry’s Operas and the French Public, 11– 26. 43. “La simple vertu tient lieu de la naissance.” Jean-François Marmontel, Silvain: Comédie en un acte mêlée d’ariettes (Paris: Merlin, 1770), 42. For an analysis of this opera, see Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 55– 62. 44. Correspondance littéraire, 1 March 1770, 361. This passage is also translated and discussed in Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 56– 57. For an assessment of the links between opéra comique and the ideals of the philosophes, see Karin Pendle, “Les philosophes and opéra-comique: The Case of Grétry’s Lucile,” Music Review 38 (1977): 177– 191. 45. Buffat, “Diderot et la naissance du drame,” 365. 46. “Sous un vêtement surchargé de dorure, je ne vois jamais qu’un homme riche, et c’est un homme que je cherche.” Diderot, Discours sur la poésie dramatique, in Oeuvres complètes, 10:406. 47. “Elle n’épargnait et ne négligeait rien pour augmenter le prestige de l’illusion théâtrale.” Favart, Mémoires et correspondance, 1:lxxviii. 48. “Extrême vérité.” Correspondance littéraire, 15 January 1769, 123. See also Julia Doe, “Two Hunters, a Milkmaid, and the French ‘Revolutionary’ Canon,” EighteenthCentury Music 15, no. 2 (2018): 186– 194. 49. Emblematic here is the famed “scene-within-a-scene” in Grétry and Marmontel’s Zémire et Azor (1771). In this reworking of the classic tale of Beauty and the Beast, the captured heroine is shown an enchanted painting of her grieving family. Zémire, and the theater audience, in turn, are moved by a heartrending display that remains tantalizingly out of reach. On this tableau magique see Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera, 249– 262. 50. As Jacqueline Waeber has described, French lyric comedy had a rich history of

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52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

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gesture and pantomime, dating back to the bas comique of the fairs and Rousseau’s Le devin du village, among other influences. See her “‘Le devin de la foire’? Revaluating the Pantomime in Rousseau’s Devin du village,” in Musique et Geste en France de Lully à la Révolution: Études sur la musique, le théâtre et la danse, ed. Jacqueline Waeber (Berne: Peter Lang, 2009), 150– 161; and Waeber, En musique dans le texte: Le mélodrame de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005), 190– 198. Louis Anseaume, L’école de la jeunesse, ou Le Barnevelt françois: Comédie en trois actes et en vers mêlée d’ariettes (Paris: Duchesne, 1770), 62– 63. Charlton has recently discussed the attention paid by the librettists of the Comédie-Italienne to the instruction of its actors; see his “La comédie lyrique au temps de Diderot,” in Musique et Pantomime dans le Neveu de Rameau, ed. Franck Salaün and Patrick Taïeb (Paris: Hermann, 2016), 72– 73. Diderot, Lettre à Madame Riccoboni, in Oeuvres complètes, 10:442. Thomas Betzwieser, “Verisimilitude,” in The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen M. Greenwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 305. Mercure de France, April 1769, 152. “Une des plus plaisantes inventions du contrepoint appliqué à l’effet dramatique.” This review is quoted at length in Pougin, Monsigny et son temps, 155. On the musical construction of ensembles within opéra comique, more broadly, see Elisabeth Cook, Duet and Ensemble in the Early Opéra-Comique (New York: Garland, 1995), 149– 209. The development of the romance has been expertly traced in Daniel Heartz, “The Beginnings of the Operatic Romance: Rousseau, Sedaine, Monsigny,” EighteenthCentury Studies 15, no. 2 (1981– 1982): 149– 178; and David Charlton, “The Romance and Its Cognates: Narrative, Irony and Vraisemblance in Early Opéra Comique,” in French Opera, 1730– 1830: Meaning and Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1976), 43– 92. Thomas Bauman and Julian Budden, “Romance (Opera),” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630 .article.O005644; see also David Charlton, “Sight Meets Sound: Fifty Years of Musical Scenography at the Opéra-Comique,” in The Opéra-Comique in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Lorenzo Frassà (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 54– 55. Bauman and Budden, “Romance (Opera).” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: Duchesne, 1768), 420. For a discussion of “Dans ma cabane obscure,” see Heartz, “The Beginnings of the Operatic Romance,” 150– 160. Charlton, “The Romance and Its Cognates,” 83. Ibid., 83. Mary Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 147. “Dans quel trouble te plonge” is not labeled as a romance in the original libretto and score but was generally identified as such by the nineteenth century— evidence of

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67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

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75. 76.

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the ambiguity engendered by the form’s evolution. See, for example, versions of Le déserteur published in the Magasin théâtral (1843), Chefs d’oeuvre du théâtre d’autrefois (vol. 2, 1846), and Théâtre de Sedaine (1878). The aria does seem to have been detachable in the literal sense: in a first edition score held at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, the pages in question have been sliced out and reattached by the volume’s early owner (see F-Pn, MUS-151). Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa, 146. Jacqueline Waeber, “Grétry héritier de Rousseau: L’intégration du récitatif dans l’opéra-comique,” in L’amant jaloux d’André-E.-M. Grétry et Thomas d’Hèle: Livret, études et commentaires, ed. Jean Duron (Wavre: Éditions Mardaga, 2009), 231– 262. Francois-André Danican Philidor, Le soldat magicien: Opéra-comique en un acte (Paris: de la Chevardière, 1760), 80– 83. Francois-André Danican Philidor, Le bûcheron, ou Les trois souhaits: Comédie en un acte mêlée d’ariettes (Paris: Le Clerc, 1763), 13. This parody is grounded mainly in the performance style of the singer; the score does not specify the mixed time signatures or basso continuo accompaniment of traditional Lullian recitative. On “false magic” in ancien régime opera, see David J. Buch, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 138– 142. “Comme il n’avoit jamais été en Enfer pour sçavoir précisiment le goût de la Musique de ce pays-là, il ne vit rien de mieux que de lui faire entonner le grand Récitatif français.” Garcin, Traité du mélo-drame, 257. For an overview of Rousseau and Diderot’s contributions to the development of récitatif obligé, see Jacqueline Waeber, “L’invention du récitatif obligé français, ou comment relire la Lettre sur la musique française,” in La “Querelle des Bouffons” dans la vie culturelle française du XVIIIe siècle, ed. Andrea Fabiano (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2005), 187– 203. “Cette extravagante criaillerie.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique française (Paris, 1753), 72– 73. “Mais ce qui émeut toujours, ce sont des cris, des mots inarticulés, des voix rompues, quelques monosyllabes qui échappent par intervals, je ne sais quel murmure dans la gorge entre les dents.” Diderot, Entretiens sur le fils naturel, 10:102. “Le beau sujet pour un récitatif obligé, que les premiers vers! Comme on peut en couper les différentes phrases par une ritournelle plaintive! . . . O ciel! . . . ô mère infortunée! . . . premier jour pour la ritournelle . . . De festons odieux ma fille couronnée . . . second jour . . . Tend la gorge aux couteaux par son père apprêtés . . . troisième jour . . . Par son père! . . . quatrième jour . . . Calchas va dans son sang . . . cinquième jour . . . Quels caractères ne peut-on pas donner à cette symphonie . . . Il me semble que je l’entends . . . elle me peint la plainte . . . la douleur . . . l’effroi . . . l’horreur . . . la fureur. . . .” Ibid., 10:169– 170.

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78. “Ce qu’il y a de plus touchant, de plus ravissant, de plus énergique dans toute la Musique moderne.” Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique, 404. 79. Waeber, “L’invention du récitatif obligé français.” 80. Ibid., 199. 81. After criticisms of Poinsinet’s contributions, Sedaine revised the libretto of Tom Jones in 1766. 82. This resolution is then affirmed, in appropriately Italianate fashion, in the sonatainfluenced da capo aria that follows. 83. “Qui convient le mieux à notre langue, à notre Théâtre, à l’accent de la passion dans des bouches Françoises.” Garcin, Traité du mélo-drame, 225. 84. In the latter opera, the rhetoric of the heroine closely parallels that of Clytemnestra, though now transferred to the more familiar setting of contemporary Brittany. At the outset of Le Huron’s second act, Mlle de St. Yves voices her fear for the safety of the title character, who has volunteered to defend their village from an English attack. Just as the tragic queen forecast a horrifying fate for the princess, Iphigenia, so too does Mlle de St. Yves describe the hypothetical worst-case scenario for her companion. She envisions that her beloved has been injured and left among the dead; and she imagines his weakened voice calling out to her from the battlefield, an effect poignantly captured in an exchange with the obbligato oboe. The accompaniment serves as a proxy for the character’s absent interlocuter as well as a symbol of her divided psyche. 85. “On se pâme, on s’extase, en entendant chanter une petite Paysanne, un Manant, un Soldat, avec les tons & les accens que le bon sens réservoit autrefois aux Armides, aux Castors & Pollux.” Dancourt and Trial, Airs détachés d’Ésope à Cythère, 5. 86. “La paysanne et la femme de cour font entendre le même cri d’horreur ou d’amour: quel que soit l’individu, tout préjugé d’éducation cesse quand l’ame est fortement agitée, et dans ce cas l’artiste peut n’avoir qu’une manière de peindre.” Grétry, Mémoires, 2:30. 87. Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 365– 390. 88. Michael Fend, “An Instinct for Parody and a Spirit for Revolution: Parisian Opera, 1752– 1800,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 313. 89. For background on the fable, see Thomas M. Kavanagh, “Boufflers’s La reine de Golconde and the Conte Philosophique as an Enlightenment Form,” French Forum 23, no. 1 (1998): 11. 90. As Manuel Couvreur has discussed, the subject of the ballet was likely shaped by the music-loving foreign minister, the duc de Choiseul, and the libretto is a transparent allegory of a monarchy sustained by its people. Much is made of Aline’s revered standing and the happiness she sows among her devoted citizens— an established component of Bourbon self-fashioning that seems to have made the ballet a favorite at court. See Couvreur, “Aline, reine de Golconde: Une bergère d’opéra-comique à

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l’Académie Royale de Musique,” in Michel-Jean Sedaine (1719– 1797): Theatre, Opera and Art, ed. David Charlton and Mark Ledbury (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 71– 96. 91. The ballet does contain display pieces, though in keeping with conventions of the Opéra, these are largely reserved for secondary characters or sequestered into the divertissements. Here we might cite the dal segno aria “Sur les bords charmants de la Seine,” sung at the entry of the French troops in act 1; the number is so incidental to the plot that it can be sung by either an anonymous inhabitant of Golconda or by Aline’s lady-in-waiting, Zélis. 92. Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 376. 93. Indeed, contemporary critics frequently referred to the tone of individual numbers as romance-like, even if they were not designated as such in the score. The Mercure de France described Aline’s “Toi, qu’avec des traits” of act 1 as “quatre couplets de romance ” (though the poetic couplets of the libretto are not set strophically); the same review remarked that the third-act love duet, “Si l’éclat du diadême,” began with the lovers each singing a couplet “sur un chant de romance.” Mercure de France, May 1766, 171– 180. 94. St. Phar also contributes a set of couplets in gavotte rhythm to the general festivities of shepherds and peasants that conclude the act. 95. See Lise’s well-known romance, “On dit, pour nous faire peur,” in Le maître en droit, or (a different) Lise’s “Jusques dans la moindre chose” from On ne s’avise jamais de tout. At the Opéra, a clear precursor is the musette en gavotte, “Votre coeur aimable Aurore,” from Mondonville’s Titon et l’Aurore (1752). St. Phar’s pastoral episode is also supported by stage lighting that depicts the break of day, a scenic effect often linked with this aria type at the Comédie-Italienne. See Charlton, “Sight Meets Sound,” 54– 57. 96. There are no fewer than nine numbers in Aline, reine de Golconde, including roughly two-thirds of the musical excerpts for the title character, with this descriptive marking. See Michel Noiray, “Aline, reine de Golconde,” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article .O900091. 97. Charlton has linked the key of A major with “mood[s] of moral optimism” in contemporaneous opéra comique, more broadly. Charlton, “Sight Meets Sound,” 56– 57. 98. “Ma bouche n’a qu’un langage / l’expression de mon coeur.” Michel-Jean Sedaine, Aline, reine de Golconde: Ballet héroïque en trois actes (Paris: Lormel, 1766), 27. 99. “Le nouveau genre de musique que l’on tente aujourd’hui d’étendre de l’Opéra bouffon à l’Opéra héroïque.” Mercure de France, May 1766, 182. 100.The opera was substantially altered for revivals in 1769, 1773, and 1777. 101. Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 378. 102.Ibid., 383– 386. 103. Manuel Couvreur, “Diderot et Philidor: Le philosophe au chevet d’Ernelinde,” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 11 (1991): 83– 107.

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104.Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 381. 105. Mercure de France, January 1768, 231. 106.See Julian Rushton, “Philidor and the Tragédie Lyrique,” Musical Times 117 (1976): 734; and Daniel Heartz, “Diderot et le Théâtre lyrique: ‘Le nouveau stile’ proposé par Le Neveu de Rameau,” Revue de Musicologie 64 (1978): 248– 251. 107. In each scene, for instance, the prominent phrase “Où suis-je ” is set to a descending fifth, D– G. 108.This review is quoted and translated in Rushton, “Philidor and the Tragédie Lyrique,” 734. 109.“Des ports de voix, des cadences, des coulés, des notes en dessous, des éclats, de toute ces ordures.” Nicolas-Étienne Framery, Journal de Musique historique, théorique et pratique (1770– 1771; Geneva: Éditions Minkoff, 1972), 1:588. 110. “C’est un nom [Philidor] qui ne peut être omis dans l’Histoire de la musique. C’est le fondateur de la musique Italienne en France . . . un mérite qu’on ne lui disputera pas, c’est d’avoir appliquer l’art a la tragédie, dans son opera d’Ernelinde.” Denis Diderot to Charles Burney, 15 May 1777. This letter is housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, OSB MSS 3 (Box 9). See also Heartz, “Diderot et le Théâtre lyrique,” 247. 111. David Charlton, “‘L’art dramatico-musical’: An Essay,” in Music and Theatre: Essays in Honor of Winton Dean, ed. Nigel Fortune (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 230. 112. “Cet ouvrage . . . a commencé la révolution musicale en France.” André-JosephHélène Danican Philidor, “Biographie de Philidor par son fils aîné,” Le palamède, 2nd ser., 7 (1847): 7– 8. 113. Olivia Bloechl, Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 3.

Chapter Three 1. Philippe Vendrix, “La notion de révolution dans les écrits théoriques concernant la musique avant 1789,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 21, no. 1 (1990): 75. 2. Voltaire’s letter is quoted and translated in Patricia Howard, Gluck: An EighteenthCentury Portrait in Letters and Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 122. 3. “En parlant d’une révolution musicale, j’ai désigné l’époque la plus brillante & la plus orageuse de l’histoire de la musique en France. . . . On y verroit de grands mouvemens & des grandes intrigues, depuis la cour jusqu’au parterre, & depuis les foyers jusqu’aux académies, pour des objets qui nous paroissent aujourd’hui un peu futiles. L’activité françoise, alors enchaînée par le despotism, avoit besoin d’aliment;

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4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

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elle en trouva un dans cette guerre lyrique.” Pierre-Louis Ginguené, “France,” in Encyclopédie méthodique: Musique, ed. Nicolas-Étienne Framery, Jérôme Joseph Momigny, and Pierre-Louis Ginguené (Paris: Panckoucke, 1791– 1818), 1:622. “Antoinette, cédant à l’orgeuil national, attira en France le célèbre Allemand qui créa chez nous la musique dramatique; en cela elle fit une imprudence. Ce n’est point une erreur de dire que la révolution opérée par Gluck dans la musique auroit dû faire trembler le gouvernement: ses accords vigoureux réveillèrent la générosité françoise; les ames se retrempèrent, et firent voir une énergie qui éclata bientôt après: le trône fut ébranlé.” Jean-Baptiste Leclerc, Essai sur la propagation de la musique en France, sa conservation, et ses rapports avec le gouvernement (Paris: Jansen, 1796), 12. James H. Johnson, “Musical Experience and the Formation of a French Musical Public,” Journal of Modern History 64, no. 2 (1992): 191– 226. Weber, “La musique ancienne,” 58– 88. Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden has underscored resonances between Leclerc’s sentiments and the patriotic discourses surrounding the newly formed Paris Conservatoire, which aimed to “eradicate foreign influence from French music.” See Geoffroy-Schwinden, “A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account of Marie Antoinette’s Musical Politics: Women, Music, and the French Revolution,” Women & Music 21 (2017): 80. Fend, “An Instinct for Parody and a Spirit for Revolution,” 323. “On faisait des essais heureux pour amener la révolution.” Jean-François Marmontel, Essai sur les révolutions de la musique en France (Paris: Le Noir, 1777), 9. On the queen’s concerts, see Benoît Dratwicki, Les concerts de la reine, Cahiers Philidor 39 (Versailles: Éditions du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, 2012). On the theater of Madame de Pompadour, see Thomas E. Kaiser, “Madame de Pompadour and the Theaters of Power,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 4 (1996): 1025– 1044. Correspondance littéraire, 18 December 1783, 500. See Florimond Claude, comte de Mercy-Argenteau, to Maria Theresa, letter of 20 October 1770, reprinted in Correspondance secrète entre Marie Thérèse et le cte de Mercy-Argenteau avec les lettres de Marie-Thérèse et Marie-Antoinette, ed. Alfred d’Arneth and M. A. Geffroy (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, Fils et Cie, 1874), 1:66. For a description of the royal wedding, see Philippe Beaussant, Les plaisirs de Versailles: Théâtre & musique (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 198– 209; and Benoît Dratwicki, Le “Persée” des fêtes de 1770: Un collectif d’artistes à la gloire du “goût françois,” Cahiers Philidor 36 (Versailles: Éditions du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, 2009). By the mid-eighteenth century, it had become standard practice at the Opéra to edit and modernize older repertory for revival. On these changes, see Benoît Dratwicki, “Lully, d’un siècle à l’autre: du modèle au mythe (1754– 1774),” in L’invention des genres lyriques français et leur redécouverte au XIXe siècle, ed. Agnès Terrier and

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16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

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Alexandre Dratwicki (Lyon: Symétrie, 2010), 322– 344; and Lois Rosow, “From Destouches to Berton: Editorial Responsibilities at the Paris Opéra,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 40, no. 2 (1987): 285– 309. “Il a paru singulier que pour le début on assome Madame la dauphine, dont l’oreille n’a entendu jusqu’ici que les meilleurs ouvrages des grands maîtres d’Italie, d’un récitatif français que l’on sait insupportable pour ceux qui n’y sont pas familiers.” This assessment is quoted in Beaussant, Les plaisirs de Versailles, 202. These events, and Papillon de la Ferté’s description of them, are also detailed in M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Grétry, Marie-Antoinette and La rosière de Salency,” Proceedings of the Royal Musicological Association 111 (1984– 1985): 92. Thomas E. Kaiser, “From the Austrian Committee to the Foreign Plot: MarieAntoinette, Austrophobia, and the Terror,” French Historical Studies 26, no. 4 (2003): 586. These Austrian hostilities are discussed more broadly in the same author’s “Who’s Afraid of Marie Antoinette? Diplomacy, Austrophobia and the Queen,” French History 14, no. 3 (2000): 241– 271. Daniel Heartz, “A Keyboard Concerto by Marie Antoinette?,” in Essays in Musicology: A Tribute to Alvin Johnson, ed. Lewis Lockwood and Edward Roesner (Philadelphia: American Musicological Society, 1990), 211. Darlow, Dissonance in the Republic of Letters, 38. Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna, 30– 34. Adolphe Jullien, La cour et la ville au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Édouard Rouveyre, 1881), 62. The repertory of French works is collected in Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna, 479– 493. Ibid., 211. See Bartlet, “Grétry, Marie-Antoinette and La rosière,” 92. See, for example, the dauphine’s description of her daily schedule. Marie Antoinette to Maria Theresa, letter of 12 July 1770, reprinted in Arneth and Geffroy, Correspondance secrète, 1:19. In 1788, for example, she hosted more than 150 petits concerts, either in her own apartments or in those of the comtesse d’Artois. She or one of her acquaintances might occasionally perform at these events, but more often the entertainment was provided by a professional singer or small ensemble. The documentation for these events is found in F-Pan, O1 3082.359– 3082.362. See, for instance, the music copying expenses of April 1784, which feature requests for arias from Philidor’s Tom Jones, Grétry’s Zémire et Azor and L’ami de la maison, and Martini’s Le droit du seigneur, among other works. F-Pan, O1 3066.271. This periodical, published by Bailleux between 1779 and 1795, was dedicated to the queen. See, for instance, a “Mémoire des fournitures de Musique faites pour le service de la Reine par Bailleux, quartier d’octobre 1780,” F-Pan, O1 3058.191. Papillon de la Ferté, Journal de Papillon de la Ferté, 424.

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30. This troupe has been described in Adolphe Jullien, La comédie à la cour de Louis XVI: Le théâtre de la reine à Trianon (Paris: J. Baur, 1875). 31. “Mémoire de Duvergé et Bellocq, pour les voyages de Paris et autres pendant le quartier de Juillet 1780,” F-Pan, O1 3058.188. 32. Comte de Mercy-Argenteau to Maria Theresa, letter of 16 September 1780, reprinted in Arneth and Geffroy, Correspondance secrète, 3:464. 33. This review is quoted and translated in Bartlet, “Grétry, Marie-Antoinette and La rosière,” 93. 34. “On lui a suggéré que cela serait agréable à Mme la dauphine.” Comte de MercyArgenteau to Maria Theresa, letter of 23 January 1771, reprinted in Arneth and Geffroy, Correspondance secrète, 1:120– 121. 35. See, for example, Beaussant, Les plaisirs de Versailles, 233– 235; and F-Pan, O1 3060.126. 36. Papillon de la Ferté, Journal de Papillon de la Ferté, 389– 390. 37. “Le voyage de Fontainebleau aura lieu. Sa Majesté a choisi les spectacles qu’elle désire.” Ibid., 400. 38. Throughout, court performance statistics are compiled from Annegret Gierich, “Theater am Hof von Versailles zur Zeit der Marie Antoinette, 1770– 1789” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Wien, 1968); Rice, The Performing Arts at Fontainebleau; and F-Pan, O1 3026– 3086. 39. As Benoît Dratwicki has discussed, the Opéra invested considerable energy in reviving and updating la musique ancienne after the querelle des bouffons but retired this repertory only in the wake of Gluck’s success. The final ancien régime performance of Lully’s tragédies lyriques in Paris was Thésée, in 1779 (followed by the retirement of the lighter pastorale héroïque, Acis et Galatée in 1780); at court, it was Bellérophon (substantially reworked by Pierre-Montan Berton) in 1773. See Dratwicki, “Lully d’un siècle à l’autre,” 310– 311. 40. Darlow, Dissonance in the Republic of Letters, 74. Or, as Arnold puts it, “The effect of . . . political factors was to complicate the polarities of public discourse by comparison with earlier periods of the [Franco-Italian] querelle.” Arnold, Musical Debate and Political Culture in France, 121. 41. The first sponsorship for Piccinni at the Opéra came from the latter figure, as a counterbalance to Marie Antoinette’s emerging influence. 42. Darlow, Dissonance in the Republic of Letters, 73– 79. 43. Those in Marie Antoinette’s inner circle sponsored composers of opéra comique in order to secure her favor. See David Hennebelle, De Lully à Mozart: Aristocratie, musique et musiciens à Paris (XVIIe– XVIIIe siècles) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2009), 156. 44. Julian Rushton, “The Theory and Practice of Piccinnisme,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 98 (1971– 1972): 32. 45. On the development of operatic parody, see Pauline Beaucé, Parodies d’opéra au siècle des Lumières: Évolution d’un genre comique (Rennes: Presses universitaires de

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48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

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54.

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Rennes, 2013); and Susan Louise Harvey, “Opera Parody in Eighteenth-Century France: Genesis, Genre, and Critical Function” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2003). On the mixed public of the fair theaters, see Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy; and Rizzoni, “Inconnaissance de la Foire,” 119– 151. “Vous sçavez, Madame, que ce Poëme est un des plus beaux du gracieux Quinault, si vous l’aviez vû défiguré, travesti, qu’il vous auroit paru hydeux! Ah, Madame, la mauvaise chose qu’une Parodie! . . . Devroit-on souffrir ce pitoyable genre d’écrire dans la République des Lettres?” Anne-Marie du Boccage, Lettre de Madame *** à une de ses amies sur les spectacles, et principalement sur l’Opéra Comique (Paris, 1745), 18– 19. There was, however, a burst of activity in the 1750s, in reaction to the querelle des bouffons. For a listing of these performances, see Rice, The Performing Arts at Fontainebleau, 182– 192. From a pragmatic standpoint, there was simply not a lot of promising material to parody in the 1760s, as the Opéra produced only a handful of new tragedies during these years. These statistics and the corresponding figure represent a bare minimum of performances and are based on Beaucé, Parodies d’opéra, 370– 371; Gierich, “Theater am Hof,” Annex, 119– 133; and Rice, The Performing Arts at Fontainebleau, 182– 240. Despréaux’s memoirs detail his close association with Marie Antoinette. He was regularly summoned to court to read his works to the queen, and he also received a royal pension at her request. See A. Firmin-Didot, “Souvenirs de Jean-Étienne Despréaux, danseur de l’Opéra et poète-chansonnier, 1748– 1820 (d’après ses notes manuscrites),” Revue d’art dramatique 29 (15 March 1893): 341– 351. An invoice paid to Despréaux in 1780 (F-Pan, O1 3058.194) indicates that preparations for his parody Christophe et Pierre-Luc included a trip to Versailles to preview the play before the monarch. In 1786 artists granted special financial compensation from the court included Despréaux alongside Sacchini and Salieri. See “Bordereau de la dépense contenüe en état des comédies, concerts, spectacles et bals à la Cour, pour l’année mil sept cent quatre vingt six,” F-Pan, O1 3074. Pauline Beaucé, “Parodies dramatiques d’opéras et théâtres privés: Du ‘petit genre’ au grand spectacle? Le cas du parodiste Jean-Étienne Despréaux,” in De la conversation au conservatoire: Scénographies des genres mineurs, 1680– 1780, ed. Kim Gladu and Aurélie Zygel-Basso (Paris: Hermann, 2014), 194– 195. Despréaux would later claim that the court had seen Berlingue roughly a dozen times. Firmin-Didot, “Souvenirs de Jean-Étienne Despréaux,” 342. The work was written by Pierre-Yves Barré, Augustin de Piis, Jean-Baptiste-Denis Desprès, and Louis-Pierre-Pantaléon Resnier. See Barré, de Piis, Desprès, and Res-

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57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

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64. 65. 66.

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nier, La bonne femme, ou Le phénix: Parodie d’Alceste mêlée de vaudevilles et de dances (Paris: Ruault, 1776). “Le roi a été si content de la parodie d’Alceste le jour où la reine l’a fait jouer devant sa majesté à Trianon, qu’il a chargé le sieur de Laferté, intendant des Menus, d’en témoigner sa satisfaction aux trois auteurs, les sieurs Auguste, Desprès et Resnier, et de les inviter à continuer de s’occuper d’un pareil genre. Ce qui contrarie les comédies Italiens, qui, au contraire, avaient déterminé de ne plus donner d’ouvrages semblables.” Quoted in Beaucé, Parodies d’opéra, 66. Ibid., 380. These costuming choices are also indicated in the libretto of the parody. See Jean-Étienne Despréaux, Syncope, reine de Mic-Mac: Parodie de Pénélope (Paris: Ballard, 1786). Jean-Étienne Despréaux, Christophe et Pierre Luc: Parodie de Castor et Pollux en cinq actes, en prose et en vaudevilles (Paris: Ballard, 1780). On the scale of these court parodies, see Beaucé, “Parodies dramatiques d’opéras et théâtres privés,” 198. “Arrêt du conseil d’état du Roi,” F-Pan, AJ13 3. See, in addition, the receipts contained in F-Pan, O1 3031.96; O1 3066.467; and O1 3075.707. The notes describing the queen’s attendance at the Comédie-Italienne in Paris may be found in its daily financial records. See, for instance, the entries of 23 and 31 July 1776 in F-Po, Th.OC.59. An overview of these alterations and their reception is found in Howard, An Eighteenth-Century Portrait, 155– 159. The conclusion to Alceste has also elicited criticism from modern scholars. F. W. Sternfeld, for instance, quips that the second version of the opera ended up featuring “two fairly sudden and unconvincing acts of salvation instead of one, and this abundance is not an improvement.” See Sternfeld, “Expression and Revision in Gluck’s Orfeo and Alceste,” in Essays Presented to Egon Wellesz, ed. Jack Westrup (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 123. Barré, de Piis, Desprès, and Resnier, La bonne femme, 31. Ibid., 34. The Mémoires secrets reported that Gluck asked the Comédie-Italienne to cease performances of L’opéra de province. On these anecdotes see Arnold, Musical Debate and Political Culture in France, 145. This is reported in the Journal de Paris of 27 June 1779, as well as in Beaucé, Parodies d’opéra, 69. Beaucé, Parodies d’opéra, 226– 228. Pauline Beaucé, “Faire ‘rire de l’original’ ou le ‘rendre plus comique’? Analyse de parodies dramatiques d’opéra en opéra-comique à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” in Rire et sourire dans l’opéra-comique en France aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, ed. Charlotte Loriot (Paris: Symétrie, 2015), 53– 68.

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70. Gluck to Anna von Fries, letter of 16 November 1777. Quoted and translated in Howard, An Eighteenth-Century Portrait, 181. 71. Here Gluck used the original libretto of Quinault, first set by Lully in 1686. 72. Hiradot is a stand-in for the king of Damascus, Hidraot, in the original. 73. Pierre-Yves Barré, Augustin de Piis, Jean-Baptiste-Denis Desprès, and LouisPierre-Pantaléon Resnier, L’opéra de province: Nouvelle parodie d’Armide, en deux actes, en vers, mêlés de vaudevilles (Paris: Vente, 1777), 8. 74. L’opéra de Province was also presented at Versailles on 19 December 1777, just two days after its Parisian premiere. This kind of close coordination between court and capital was not unusual. Dorvigny’s La rage d’amour (after Piccinni’s Roland ), for example, had its first performance at Versailles on 20 March 1778, only one day after it opened at the Comédie-Italienne in Paris. 75. Moline is not entirely isolated in this regard. In 1714 Louis Fuzelier wrote a parody of his own tragic opera, Arion. In the earlier case, however, the royal censors were so concerned by the comic work that they insisted on editing out all of the attacks the author made on himself. See Harvey, “Opera Parody,” 167. 76. La Porte, Dictionnaire dramatique, 3:499. 77. “Les deux ouvrages sont absolument calqués sur le même plan, et il n’est même pas aisé de voir si la parodie a été imaginée pour l’opéra ou l’opéra pour la parodie.” Correspondance littéraire, May 1775 (Tourneux, ed.), 11:81. 78. This performance took place on 24 January 1777. 79. I adapt this terminology from Andrea Fabiano, “Nicolas-Étienne Framery, théoricien de la parodie de l’opéra italien,” in La scène bâtarde: Entre Lumières et romantisme, ed. Philippe Bourdin and Gérard Loubinoux (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Clermont-Ferrand, 2004), 131– 134. 80. On these broad developments, see Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau. 81. Piccinni’s was the second setting of a libretto by Goldoni (the first having been made by Duni for Parma in 1757). 82. Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien en France, 239. 83. Mark Darlow, Nicolas-Étienne Framery and Lyric Theater in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003), 135. 84. James Webster, “Aria as Drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera, ed. Anthony R. DelDonna and Pierpaolo Polzonetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 45– 49. 85. On the opera’s relation to the conventions of opera buffa, see Mary Hunter, “‘Pamela’: The Offspring of Richardson’s Heroine in Eighteenth-Century Opera,” in Essays on Opera, 1750– 1800, ed. John A. Rice (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 170– 171. 86. For an overview of the changes made to the libretto of La bonne fille, see Mary Ann Parker, “Cecchina à la française: La buona figliuola at the Théâtre Italien,” in Goldoni and the Musical Theatre, ed. Domenico Pietropaolo (Brooklyn: LEGAS, 1995), 26– 29.

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87. Ibid., 29. 88. “Un goût exquis & la plus parfaite connoissance des bienséances théatrales parurent avoir dirigé les changemens considerables qu’il fut obligé d’y faire, afin d’en rendre l’intrigue plus réguliere & les situations plus vraisemblables.” Antoine-JeanBaptiste-Abraham d’Origny, Annales du Théatre Italien depuis son origine jusqu’à ce jour (Paris: Duchesne, 1788), 2:72. 89. Marmontel, Essai sur les révolutions, 45– 46. 90. The most common assumption that the French had about Italian music, wrote Marmontel, was that it was akin to “the warbling of birds; and [that] there was nothing more contrary to the expression of sentiments and strong passions than those arias where the brilliant voice merely flutters around the pitch” (mais la Musique Italienne, nous dit-on, n’est autre chose qu’un ramage d’oiseaux; & rien de plus contraire à l’expression des sentimens, & surtout des passions fortes, que ces airs où une voix brillante semble voltiger sur un son). Ibid., 45. 91. Although the Théâtre de Montansier was ostensibly an independent, public institution, it operated as a de facto extension of the court entertainments; Marie Antoinette was known to finance and occasionally mandate attendance by her attendants and courtiers at these spectacles. Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien en France, 109. 92. The involvement of the Comédie-Italienne and Marie Antoinette in the proliferation of translation-parodies is outlined in ibid., 71– 87; and Alessandro Di Profio, La révolution des Bouffons: L’opéra italien au Théâtre de Monsieur, 1789– 1792 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2003), 21– 31. 93. This address from the director is quoted in Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of OpéraComique, 201. 94. The only surviving source for this parody is a libretto with selected arias: PierreLouis Moline, L’inconnue persécutée: Comédie, en trois actes et en vers, mêlée d’ariettes (Paris: Jean-François Bastien, 1781). 95. This event is described in the preface to Moline’s libretto, ibid., 3– 4. Bachaumont also took note of the sudden cancellation in the Mémoires secrets of 28 July 1778. 96. Barnabé Farmian Durosoy, L’inconnue persécutée: Comédie opéra en 3 actes (Paris: Lormel, 1781). The music department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France holds several manuscript copies of the Italian score (labeled “La Gianetta”), on which the translation was presumably based. See F-Pn, MS. 1975 (I– II) and X. 1108. 97. Moline, L’inconnue persécutée, 11. 98. Durosoy, L’inconnue persécutée, 27. 99. “Il seroit absurde de se tourmenter pour saisir d’autres tournures de phrases.” Ibid., 6. 100.Moline, L’inconnue persécutée, 4. 101. Adolphe Jullien, La cour et l’Opéra sous Louis XVI (Paris: Didier & Cie, 1878), 19. 102.See J. Kenneth Wilson, “L’Olimpiade: Selected Eighteenth-Century Settings of Metastasio’s Libretto” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1982), 394– 407. The legal

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notice demanding that the Comédie-Italienne cease performances of L’Olympiade is dated 6 October 1777 and conserved in F-Pan, AJ13 3.1. 103. “Quatre représentations qui ont attiré tout Paris, ont fait souvenir l’Académie Royale de Musique qu’elle avoit un privilège exclusif de jouer les Pièces à grand choeurs.” Journal de politique et de littérature 32 (15 November 1777): 341. 104.“Arrêt du conseil d’état du Roi, approbatif du bail ou concession du privilège de l’Opéra-Comique, faite par la Ville aux Comédiens, dits, Italiens, pour trente années, à commencer le 1er Janvier 1780,” F-Pan, AJ13 3. 105. Darlow, Nicolas-Étienne Framery, 177– 183. 106.“Promettant non seulement de ne jamais jouer de pareilles Parodies, autres que celles . . . dont ils sont en possession; mais aussi de ne faire à l’avenir, aucun usage de Musique Italienne ou autre parodié & accomodé sur des paroles Françoises; ladite Concession n’ayant pour objet que d’accorder auxdits Comédiens Italiens le Privilége & le droit de jouer des Opéra-Comiques dont la Musique soit originairement composée sur des paroles Françoises.” “Arrêt du conseil,” F-Pan, AJ13 3. 107. Framery, “Observations à Messeigneurs les premiers Gentils-hommes de la Chambre,” F-Pan, O1 849.63. 108.Weber, “La musique ancienne,” 60. 109.Beaussant, for instance, describes Marie Antoinette’s interest in music as one based almost entirely in the pursuit of pleasure, with little regard for its symbolic potential. Beaussant, Les plaisirs de Versailles, 211– 212. 110. Geoffroy-Schwinden, “A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account,” 76. 111. Kaiser, “Who’s Afraid of Marie Antoinette?,” 253. 112. See Chantal Thomas, La reine scélérate: Marie-Antoinette dans les pamphlets (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989). 113. L’autrichienne en goguettes is described as an “opéra proverbe,” while Le branle des Capucins is termed a “petit opéra aristocratico-comico-risible.” 114. The character sings a tune based on the vaudeville finale of Philidor’s Le sorcier, which Marie Antoinette’s society troupe had performed in September of 1780. 115. Mémoires secrets, 13 June 1779. 116. On the contributions of de Vismes, see Dratwicki, Antoine Dauvergne, 320– 324. 117. This managerial change was instated over the objections of the queen. See the Mémoires secrets of 23 March 1780. 118. Mercure de France, 3 March 1787, 42– 43. 119. See Michael F. Robinson, “Opera Buffa into Opéra-Comique, 1771– 90,” in Music and the French Revolution, ed. Malcolm Boyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 42. Strictly speaking, these performances were not illegal, for Versailles had been granted an exemption from the reorganization of 1780. It was the exemption itself that became a locus of criticism. 120.“Un nombre de privilèges aussi extrordinaires qu’absurdes.” Comte de Mercy-

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Argenteau to Maria Theresa, letter of 19 January 1775, in Arneth and Geffroy, Correspondance secrète, 2:285. 121. “Lorsque le bail fut passé entre l’Académie Royale de Musique & les Comédiens Italiens, il fut imposé à ces derniers de ne plus à l’avenir représenter aucun Ouvrage revêtu de musique étrangère. . . . Ce fut pour correspondre à cette clause que les Comédiens exigèrent que leurs Pièces ne seroient plus mises en Ballets. Qui a été dupe de ces conventions mutuelles? Le Public. . . . Combien de chef-d’oeuvres de musique pouvoient être heureuesement transportés sur nos Théâtres? On a couru en foule à Fontainebleau, à Versailles, pour entendre la délicieuse musique . . . & la Capitale n’en peut jouir! On en permettra l’exécution à de mauvais Batteleurs à vingt pas au-delà des barrières; mais les productions divines des Paësiello, des Sarti, des Anfossi, des Cimarosa seront arrêtées aux murs de Paris comme de la contrebande!” Mercure de France, 3 March 1787, 41– 42. 122. Paisiello’s work was eventually staged at the Opéra in Paris, where it received mixed reviews. The Correspondance littéraire complained of the mismatch between the light music of the opera and the ways the translator had refined its text to suit the elite stage. Correspondance littéraire, October 1787, 453. 123. “[Et] entre les arts comme entre les hommes, la plus heureuse société est celle où chacun perd le moins qu’il est possible de ses avantages & de sa liberté.” Marmontel, Essai sur les révolutions, 23. 124. “Les privilèges exclusifs, qui font la mort de l’industrie, font aussi la mort des talents & du génie dans les beaux arts. Nous ne serons pas assez ennemis de nous-mêmes pour adopter ce fanatisme intolerant qui veut condemner la Musique à ne jamais sortir du cercle qu’un Artiste lui aura tracé. La liberté, mère de l’émulation, regnera sur la scene lyrique.” Ibid., 60. Darlow underscores the importance of this change in his recent appraisal of the Gluck–Piccinni debates: “What is at stake is a transformed model of nationally significant culture that increasingly eschews privilège in favour of competition.” Darlow, Dissonance in the Republic of Letters, 195.

Chapter Four 1. Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Coudard [Desforges], L’épreuve villageoise: Opéra bouffon en 2 actes (Paris: Prault, 1784), 39– 41. 2. See, for instance, Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 131– 163; and Meredith Martin, Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to MarieAntoinette (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 158– 213. 3. Throughout this book I use “pastoral” in the contemporary sense (i.e., as pertaining to or set in the countryside) and not in the more limited literary sense (i.e., in the neoclassical tradition of the eclogue). In defining the limits of country-themed opéra

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

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comique, the problems of terminology are considerable. There were no set labels for these common subtypes of the genre in the eighteenth century; my own distinctions are based on trends identified in the common practice and aesthetic discourse of the time but should not be taken as fixed absolutes. On these discourses of “moral hygiene,” see Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 182– 224. On the links between the arts and the economic school of physiocracy, see Emma Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 57– 62. Weber, Queen of Fashion, 131. This description of the Petit Trianon is drawn from ibid., 131– 133. Ibid., 133. So exacting was the queen when it came to having her vision realized that fourteen different models of the garden were made before she expressed satisfaction with the design. See Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2001), 164– 165. Martin, Dairy Queens, 160. Ibid., 29– 31. Ibid., 22– 23. Weber, Queen of Fashion, 132– 133. Fiscal and social reformers, for example, touted the spiritual benefits of an existence spent tilling the soil, and a number of physicians emphasized the negative bodily and moral effects of urban dwelling in general and the diversions of the beau monde in particular. For Samuel Tissot, the healthiest French citizens were peasants, because their habits were most closely in keeping with a romanticized natural model; as the author posited, a subject “altered his health in distancing himself from the simple manners of the countryside. Since [these manners] are dictated by nature, they are the ones most analogous to the proper state of our constitutions” (altérent encore leur santé en s’éloignant de la simplicité des moeurs de la campagne, qui, dictées par la nature même, sont celles qui sont les plus analogues à notre constitution). Tissot, Essai sur les maladies des gens du monde (Amsterdam: Barthelemi Vlam, 1771), 11. Amy S. Wyngaard, From Savage to Citizen: The Invention of the Peasant in the French Enlightenment (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 71– 81. Scholars have identified more than twenty pleasure dairies built by Parisian noblemen and financiers in the late eighteenth century. Marie Antoinette modeled her hamlet after similar villages constructed by the marquis de Girardin and the prince de Condé. Martin, Dairy Queens, 162– 164. Ibid., 161. See, for instance, Weber, Queen of Fashion, 134. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 184.

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19. Martin, Dairy Queens, 209. 20. Weber, Queen of Fashion, 134. 21. Ibid., 135. See also Gustave Desjardins, Le Petit-Trianon: Histoire et description (Versailles: L. Bernard, 1885), 248; and Stefan Zweig, Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (New York: Grove Press, 2002), 109– 110. 22. The libelle press most likely originated among segments of the French nobility, in particular those court families who felt detached from their traditional positions within the queen’s inner circle. See Munro Price, The Fall of the French Monarchy: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the Baron de Breteuil (London: MacMillan, 2002), 15. 23. Quoted and translated in Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims, 185. 24. As Pierre de Nolhac recounts, during the morning hours the Petit Trianon “presented the appearance of a country house inhabited by private persons,” and the queen’s company was restricted to the duchesse de Polignac and a few servants. In the afternoon Marie Antoinette was often joined by other members of the royal family and ladies of the palace. See Nolhac, The Trianon of Marie-Antoinette, trans. F. Mabel Robinson (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1925), 148. 25. Jacques Revel cites this famous phrase in “Marie Antoinette,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 259. The precise quotation is: “Il n’y avait pour les reines ni cabinets, ni boudoirs, ni correspondance secrète.” See Jeanne-LouiseHenriette Campan, Correspondance inédite de Mme Campan avec la reine Hortense (Paris: Alphonse Levasseur, 1835), 1:328. 26. Weber, Queen of Fashion, 139– 140. 27. See Price, The Fall of the French Monarchy, 16. 28. As the Mémoires secrets scolded, the queen’s “new style of private life was incompatible with the manners of a great and noble court” (un genre de vie privée qui est incompatible avec la tenue d’une Grande cour). Quoted in Beaussant, Les plaisirs de Versailles, 230. 29. Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims, 186. 30. Mary D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 143– 147. 31. Ibid., 146. 32. Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims, 186. 33. Martin, Dairy Queens, 162. 34. Zweig, Marie Antoinette, 112. And, indeed, it is fitting that the palace at the Petit Trianon was designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the architect who had designed the royal opera house at Versailles. 35. Planned by Richard Mique to the queen’s specifications, the venue could house an audience of roughly one hundred spectators. For a description of the theater, see Nolhac, The Trianon of Marie-Antoinette, 180– 183.

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36. “On ne doutait pas que Louis XV n’eût défendu de pareils amusemens, s’il en avait eu connaissance.” Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan, Mémoires de la vie privée de Marie Antoinette, reine de France et de Navarre (Paris: Baudouin Frères, 1823), 1:71. 37. On the theatrical patronage of these associates, see Corinne Pré, “L’opéra-comique à la cour de Louis XVI,” Dix-huitième siècle 17 (1985): 222. 38. There are preliminary assessments of this repertory in Jullien, La comédie à la cour de Louis XVI; and Nolhac, The Trianon of Marie-Antoinette, 189– 199. 39. Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval, Le théâtre de société: Un autre théâtre? (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003). On the private musical practices of the French aristocracy, more broadly, see Hennebelle, De Lully à Mozart. 40. “J’ai encore à vous parler d’une troisième pièce de ma maison de campagne: c’est une salle de Spectacle très-agréable. . . . Je pretends en faire un grand usage, & y jouer la Comédie, avec une troupe que je formerai d’une partie de ma société de Paris, qui viendra sûrement passer quelque temps chez moi à la campagne, & de quelques personnes de mon nouveau voisinage, avec qui je compte me lier.” AndréGuillaume Contant d’Orville, Manuel des châteaux, ou Lettres contenant des conseils pour former une bibliotheque romanesque, pour diriger une Comédie de Société, & pour diversifier les plaisirs d’un salon (Paris: Moutard, 1779), xi– xii. 41. The works rehearsed or performed by the queen and suggested in the manual are On ne s’avise jamais de tout, Les deux chasseurs et la laitière, Rose et Colas, Le sorcier, Les sabots, and L’amant jaloux. The evidence that the queen was familiar with this volume, while not definitive, is strong. The handbook was published by Marie Antoinette’s official imprimeur-libraire just one year before the formation of her acting troupe; and its general editor, Marc Antoine René de Voyer, was a close associate of the company’s star performer, the comte de Vaudreuil. The Petit Trianon library contained several similar works on theatrical practice, including Charles Collé ’s Théâtre de société, ou Recueil de différentes pièces tant en vers qu’en prose, qui peuvent se jouer sur un théâtre de société, 3 vols. (Paris: La Haye, 1777), and Louis-Carrogis de Carmontelle’s Théâtre de campagne. See Paul Lacroix, Bibliothèque de la reine MarieAntoinette au Petit Trianon (Paris: Jules Gay, 1863). 42. Bartlet, “Grétry, Marie-Antoinette and La rosière,” 101. 43. “Les détails sont d’un grand naturel et d’un naïf qui fait Plaisir.” Correspondance littéraire, 15 March 1764, 431. 44. Contant d’Orville, Manuel des châteaux, 249. One of the work’s tuneful hits, “Il étoit un oiseau,” would remain popular among amateur performers well into the nineteenth century. In 1862 one periodical would note that the strophic song had “circulated throughout the nation for a century, with legendary appeal” (le vaudeville charmant qui depuis un siècle circule dans la nation à l’état de légende). See Revue des deux mondes 39 (1862): 755. 45. “Je sais . . . que les représentations s’y sont faites avec beaucoup d’agrément, de grâce et de gaieté, et que le roi en marque une satisfaction qui se manifeste par des

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49. 50.

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applaudissements continuels, particulièrement quand la reine exécute les morceaux de son rôle.” Comte de Mercy-Argenteau to Maria Theresa, letter of 16 September 1780, reprinted in Arneth and Geffroy, Correspondance secrète, 3:465. Here Marie Antoinette seemed momentarily to heed the advice of her mother, who had often urged her to ingratiate herself with her husband and the women of the royal family. The empress was, however, less than thrilled with the means Marie Antoinette had chosen to achieve this end. See, for instance, Maria Theresa to Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, letter of 31 August 1780, reprinted in ibid., 3:462. “La reine est jusqu’à présent fort décidée à n’admettre à ces amusements d’autres spectateurs que le roi, les princes et princesses royales, sans aucune personne de leur suite. Les dames du palais, pas même les grandes charges chez la reine, ne seront exceptées de cette exclusion.” Comte de Mercy-Argenteau to Maria Theresa, letter of 16 August 1780, reprinted in ibid., 3:456. “Un indice d’autant plus marqué de faveur pour ceux qui y sont admis.” Comte de Mercy-Argenteau to Maria Theresa, letter of 16 September 1780, reprinted in ibid., 3:465. Revel, “Marie Antoinette,” 259. On this repertory and its influence beyond Versailles, see Winston Haverland Kaehler, “The Operatic Repertoire of Madame de Pompadour’s Théâtre des Petits Cabinets (1747– 1753)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1971); and Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 14– 20. This troupe, accompanied by an orchestra comprised of both amateur and professional players, performed before an audience of roughly one hundred courtiers. Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 15. Michel-Jean Sedaine, On ne s’avise jamais de tout: Opéra comique en un acte (Paris: Hérissant, 1761), 26. Michel-Jean Sedaine, Les sabots: Opéra-comique en 1 acte, mêlé d’ariettes (Paris: Hérissant, 1768), 12– 23. Michel Noiray, “Roi et le fermier, le (‘The King and the Farmer’),” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo /9781561592630.article.O002542. See also the same author’s “Quatre rois à la chasse: Dodsley, Collé, Sedaine, Goldoni,” in Michel-Jean Sedaine (1719– 1797): Theatre, Opera and Art, ed. David Charlton and Mark Ledbury (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1988), 106– 107. “Je ne conçois pas moi, comment un Roi peut être bon. . . . C’est qu’il y a des gens qui ont quelquefois intérêt qu’il ne le soit pas.” Sedaine, Le roi et le fermier, 52– 53. See also the discussion of this passage in Wyngaard, From Savage to Citizen, 93– 96. “Je souhaite à tout souverain de s’égarer une fois de sa vie chez un meunier.” Correspondance littéraire, 1 March 1766, 31. Wyngaard, From Savage to Citizen, 96. The activity of performance, rather than the thematic concerns of repertory, had

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65. 66. 67.

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also formed the crux of critiques of Pompadour’s theatrical activities. As Thomas Kaiser has argued, the theater generated “an abiding representation of Pompadour as a seductive “actress mistress” that was used by her political rivals and the public to explain and condemn her imputed emasculation of the king.” See Kaiser, “Madame de Pompadour and the Theaters of Power,” 1026. On the problems of the queen’s musical exclusivity, see Geoffroy-Schwinden, “A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account,” 80– 82. Comte de Mercy-Argenteau to Maria Theresa, letter of 16 September 1780, reprinted in Arneth and Geffroy, Correspondance secrète, 3:465. Nolhac, The Trianon of Marie-Antoinette, 197. Campan, Mémoires de la vie privée de Marie Antoinette, 1:231. Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims, 189. Monvel’s personal politics betray a number of incongruities. He was deeply embedded within systems of court patronage under the ancien régime, seems to have embraced the ideals of the Revolution (writing several patriotic pamphlets in 1793– 1794), and then spent the rest of his life attempting to suppress these radical works. Roselyne Laplace analyzes the issues involved in Monvel: Un aventurier du théâtre au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998), 173– 244, and introduces Monvel’s writings in Théâtre, discours politiques et réflexions divers (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001). “L’espoir d’amuser vos loisirs.” Jacques-Marie Boutet [Monvel], L’amant bourru: Comédie en 3 actes et en vers libres (Paris: Duchesne, 1777), 3. The invoices for Grétry’s visits to the queen may be found in F-Pan, O1 3058, “Dépenses de la reine.” Martini’s given name was Johann-Paul Martin. See M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Martini, Jean-Paul-Gilles,” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2001), https:// doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.17926. See, for example, the receipts in F-Pan, O1 3053.51. Gierich, “Theater am Hof,” 181. Martini earned a special gratification from Marie Antoinette for Le droit du seigneur (F-Pan, O1 3069.224). His other commissions for the royal family and associates of the queen included Le nouveau-né (1772), on a libretto by Laujon, for the birth of the duc d’Enghien; and a new setting of Annette et Lubin, with text reworked by Lourdet de Santerre, performed privately at the estate of the comte de Vaudreuil (1785) and later presented at court. Desforges, L’épreuve villageoise, 9– 10. The approach in the team’s L’erreur d’un moment is similar, self-consciously reinforcing the village setting through a succession of chansonettes, brunettes, and allemandes. On Dezède’s musical style, see Karin Pendle, “L’opéra-comique de 1762 à 1789,” in L’opéra-comique en France au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Liège: Mardaga, 1992), 158– 161.

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72. Michael Fend, “Trois Fermiers, Les,” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.O905006. 73. Jean-Paul-Gilles Martini, Le droit du seigneur: Comédie en 3 actes et en prose (Paris: Brunet, 1783), 1– 36. Martini broke into the court establishment as a composer of military-band music, a fact that is often reflected in the originality of his orchestration. 74. See, for instance, a romance en rondeau for the young farmer, Louis, in Les trois fermiers (act 1, scene 3). Here, an Italianate lyricism and deft interplay between voice, bassoon, and horn belie the simplicity of the generic descriptor. 75. Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment, 177. 76. On the cult of bienfaisance and the idealization of the benevolent seigneur, see ibid., 183– 190; and Wyngaard, From Savage to Citizen, 90– 93. 77. Campan, Mémoires de la vie privée de Marie Antoinette, 1:58– 59. 78. See Fraser, Marie Antoinette, 213. 79. This passage is quoted and translated in Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment, 186. 80. Wyngaard, From Savage to Citizen, 26. 81. Ibid., 13– 30, 71– 110. 82. Martin, Dairy Queens, 170– 171. 83. The object was “l’imitation des moeurs champêtres dans leur plus belle simplicité.” Jean-François Marmontel, “Réflexions sur la poésie pastorale,” in 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 2016 ed.), ed. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, http://encyclopedie .uchicago.edu/), 5:428. The larger article on the “Éclogue,” in which this essay is inserted, was prepared by Louis de Jaucourt. 84. “Bonté morale.” Ibid., 5:430. 85. These operas enjoyed great popularity both at court and in Paris. Les trois fermiers was performed 137 times at the Comédie-Italienne in the first decade after its premiere; Blaise et Babet was performed 145 times, making it the most successful opéra comique of the 1780s. See Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 223. 86. When the seigneur attempts to reward the community leaders with extra interest, they refuse the offer, insisting that he direct the funds elsewhere— toward “those who don’t have the good fortune of serving as [Belval’s] vassals” (il y en a tant dans le monde qui n’ont pas le Bonheur d’être vos vassaux). Jacques-Marie Boutet [Monvel], Blaise et Babet: Comédie en 2 actes, mêlée d’ariettes (Paris: Broulhiet, 1783), 29. 87. On the fashion for rose festivals, see Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 68– 111; and Wyngaard, From Savage to Citizen, 96. 88. “Tous les habitans de ce Village . . . sont doux, honnêtes, sobres, laborieux . . . On

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m’assure qu’il n’y a pas un seul exemple, pas un seul, dans toute la rigueur du terme, je ne dis pas d’un crime commis à Salency par un naturel du lieu, mais même d’un vice grossier, encore moins d’une foiblesse de la part du Sexe, tandis que les Paysans des environs sont aussi brutaux, aussi vicieux qu’ailleurs. Quel bien produit un seul établissement sage!” Edme-Louis Billardon de Sauvigny, La rose, ou La feste de Salency (Paris: Gauguery, 1770), xv. 89. Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs, 76. 90. Marie Antoinette and the comte and comtesse de Provence also ventured to the capital to support the Parisian premiere of the work at the Comédie-Italienne on 28 February 1774. See Brenner, The Théâtre Italien: Its Repertory, 352. 91. Bartlet, “Grétry, Marie-Antoinette and La rosière,” 99. 92. Ibid., 100. 93. Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment, 196. Claude-François Adrien de LezayMarnésia, for example, suggested that village inhabitants be shown Les trois fermiers and Les moissoneurs. See Lezay-Marnésia, Le bonheur dans les campagnes (Neufchatel and Paris: Prault, 1785), 200– 201. 94. This extract is quoted and translated in Bartlet, “Grétry, Marie-Antoinette and La rosière,” 100. The passage is not present in the printed score, but was added specifically for performance at court. The Fontainebleau version of the opera was in four acts; it was subsequently reworked into three. 95. Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment, 189. 96. On the dissemination of Favart’s work, see Alfred Iacuzzi, The European Vogue of Favart: The Diffusion of the Opéra-Comique (New York: Publications of the Institute of French Studies, 1932). 97. Ninette à la cour was one of several French adaptations of an Italian intermezzo, Bertoldo in corte, that had been produced by Bambini’s bouffons in the fall of 1753. Predating Favart’s pasticcio for the Comédie-Italienne was Anseaume’s vaudeville-inspired work on the same subject, Bertholde à la ville, presented at the Opéra-Comique in 1754. See Sonneck, “Ciampi’s Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno”; and Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 241. 98. This duet is a resetting of “Io sono una donzella,” from Sellitto’s Il cinese rimpatriato. For a discussion of the musical sources of Favart’s pasticcio, see Sonneck, “Ciampi’s Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno,” 562. 99. Charles-Simon Favart, Ninette à la cour, ou Le caprice amoureux: Comédie en trois actes, mêlée d’ariettes (Paris: J. J. Boucherie, 1756), 59. 100.In the late 1750s it was presented at court in a condensed, two-act version that tempered some of the harshest elements of social commentary from the original. See Charles-Simon Favart, Ninette à la cour, ou Le caprice amoureux: Comédie en deux actes, mêlée d’ariettes (Amsterdam: Hupkes, 1761). The two-act version is also reproduced in the printed score, published in Paris by de la Chevardière. 101. On the ballet d’action, see M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Ballet d’Action,” in Grove

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Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo /9781561592630.article.O900410; and Ivor Guest, The Ballet of the Enlightenment: The Establishment of the Ballet d’Action in France, 1770– 1793 (London: Cecil Court, 1996). 102.For a complete list of ballets produced by the Opéra during this period, see Guest, Ballet of the Enlightenment, 418– 420. 103. These are preserved in a printed scenario and in a set of manuscript orchestral parts, respectively. See Maximilien Gardel, Ninette à la cour: Ballet en action (Paris: Ballard, 1777); and F-Po, MAT-180, 1– 68. These parts bear a number of changes related to revivals of the ballet in the early nineteenth century. 104.Favart, Ninette à la cour (1756), 30– 31. 105. Gardel, Ninette à la cour, 12. 106.“Si la Dlle. Guimard a paru étonnante par la manière spirituelle dont elle a rendu les attitudes bêtes de Nicette dans La chercheuse d’esprit, elle ne paroît pas moins prodigieuse dans Ninette, par la gaucherie de sa démarche & la stupidité avec laquelle elle regarde les objets nouveaux qui l’entourent.” Journal de Paris, 19 August 1778. 107. Papillon de la Ferté documented these concerns in detailed memoranda responding to Necker’s demands for transparency and reduced spending from the royal household. See, for example, an undated “Précis et réflexions sur l’administration des Menus avant et depuis l’établissement du Bureau Général de la Maison du Roi” (F-Pan, O1 2809). The intendant discussed the queen’s insistence on continued extravagance in a draft letter of 7 July 1787 (F-Pan, O1 2810, Folder 14). 108.“Il y a eu, depuis le 12 octobre jusqu’à ce jour, quatorze spectacles, tant à Marly qu’à Versailles et chez la Reine, en comédies, actes d’opéra, bouffons, ballets, ce qui ne diminue pas les dépenses, tant pour le fond de la chose, que par les petits théâtres qu’il a fallu faire, soit à Versailles, soit à Marly. Tout cela ne plaît pas beaucoup à la Finance, et m’amuse encore moins, car le public se plaît à augmenter énormément ces sortes de dépenses.” Papillon de la Ferté, Journal de Papillon de la Ferté, 420. 109.“Une des grandes plaies financières de la nation.” Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet, Annales politiques, civiles et littéraires du dix-huitième siècle, vol. 8 (1780), 243. 110. “Il se récria contre l’injustice de l’accusation, & offrit de prouver que cette partie n’avoit coûté depuis trois mois que dix-huit-cents mille francs d’extraordinaire.” Ibid. 111. Even beyond its subject and Bourbon-favored composer, Colinette à la cour had a clear tie to the Petit Trianon: it was dedicated to the star society actor, the comte de Vaudreuil. On the importance of artistic patronage within Marie Antoinette’s inner circle, including that of the comte de Vaudreuil, see David Hennebelle, “Un observatoire du patronage musical au XVIIIe siècle: Les épîtres dédicatoires,” Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine 56, no. 2 (2009): 47– 49. 112. The other works in this set were L’embarras des richesses (1782), La caravane du Caire (1783), and Panurge dans l’isle des lanternes (1785). On Grétry’s commissions for the Opéra, see Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 200– 204.

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113. Dratwicki, Antoine Dauvergne, 368. 114. “Peu jaloux de la gloire de l’invention.” Jean-Baptiste Lourdet de Santerre, La double épreuve, ou Colinette à la cour: Comédie lyrique en trois actes (Paris: Roullet, 1810), 3. 115. “Le charmant prince! Et comme il est honnête!” Ibid., 18. 116. Colinette and Julien sing together: “Avec transport nous jouissons, / Du bien que vous nous faites.” The chorus responds: “Du vrai bonheur nous jouissons: / Il se trouve où vous êtes.” Ibid., 70– 71. 117. “Pour en faire un Drame sans intérêt, décousu, écrit avec une negligence impardonnable, & chargé d’accessoires qui en arrêtoient & en prolongeoient la marche à chaque instant.” Mercure de France, January 1782, 90. This review is discussed in Arnold, Grétry’s Operas and the French Public, 101– 103. 118. Arnold, Grétry’s Operas and the French Public, 85– 108. 119. “Vous me demanderez peut-être si je crois le Comique bouffon propre à être porté sur la Scène Lyrique? Je ne le crois pas. La Comédie est du ressort de ce Théâtre, sans doute; mais elle doit y avoir un caractère relevé. Si elle ne l’a pas, elle forcera les Acteurs de ce Spectacle à descendre à l’habitude d’un jeu comique capable de détruire chez eux celle du jeu noble, & qui convient au grand genre. . . . Doublez-les, vous la ruinez sans resource.” Mercure de France, 5 January 1782, 94. 120.These figures are drawn from the Chronopéra database (www.chronopera3.free.fr). 121. Dratwicki, Antoine Dauvergne, 397.

Chapter Five 1. This description of the ceremonies is adapted from Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3. 2. Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 410– 412. 3. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 3. 4. This repertory was almost certainly dictated by the menus plaisirs and closely mirrored contemporary court taste. A few of the works performed (including opéras comiques by Grétry and Monsigny) were not outwardly political in nature. The series of events as a whole, however, was clearly meant to function as a display of royal power and magnanimity; a number of deputies in attendance marveled at the extraordinary expenses undertaken by the king on their behalf. For accounts of these performances, see Jean-Pierre Boullé, “Ouverture des États-Généraux de 1789,” in Revue de la Révolution: Documents inédits, ed. Albert Macé, vol. 11 (1888), letters of 22 and 25 May; Antoine-François Delandine, Mémorial historique des États généraux, pendant le mois de mai 1789 (N.p., 1789), 105; and Charles-Elie Ferrières-Marçay, Correspondance inédite: 1789, 1790, 1791, ed. Henri Carré (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1932), letter of 15 May. On the theatergoing habits of the deputies, see

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6.

7. 8. 9.

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Edna Hindle Lemay, La vie quotidienne des députés aux États généraux: 1789 (Paris: Hachette, 1987), 151– 164. The performance took place on 26 April and is described in Delandine, Mémorial historique, 10– 11. Although Sargines belonged to the repertory of the ComédieItalienne, on this occasion it was presented by the Versailles-based troupe of Montansier, because the actors of the former company had not yet arrived from Paris. For a discussion of the historical circumstances on which the opera is based, see Georges Duby, The Legend of Bouvines: War, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). These connections seem to have been obvious to the deputies in attendance, as recounted in Delandine, Mémorial historique, 11– 12. Duby, The Legend of Bouvines, 164– 165. These are the arguments set forth in Winton Dean, “Opera under the French Revolution,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 94 (1967– 1968): 77– 96; and Edward J. Dent, The Rise of Romantic Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), as outlined in further detail below. The Comédie-Italienne was the only Parisian company that presented opéra comique in the final decades of the ancien régime, but this monopoly did not survive the Revolution. In early 1789 the troupe gained a new rival in the Théâtre de Monsieur (later renamed the Théâtre Feydeau), a thorough examination of which is beyond the scope of the present chapter. While the institutional questions discussed here are specific to the Comédie-Italienne, the general aesthetic issues in play are relevant to the composers of the Théâtre de Monsieur/Feydeau, who were deeply indebted to earlier opéra comique. On this latter theater, see Di Profio, La révolution des Bouffons, and Michael E. McClellan, “Battling over the Lyric Muse: Expressions of Revolution and Counterrevolution at the Théâtre Feydeau, 1789-1801” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004). On the relationship between musical change and social stability during this period, see Michel Noiray, “Inertie sociale et dynamique de la musique de 1740 à 1770,” in La musique: Du théorique au politique, ed. Joël-Marie Fauquet (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1991), 211– 218; and Patrick Taïeb, “La reunion des théâtres Favart et Feydeau en 1801 et l’opéra-comique révolutionnaire,” in Les arts de la scène et la Révolution française, ed. Philippe Bourdin and Gérard Loubinoux (ClermontFerrand: Presses universitaires Blaise Pascal), 340– 341. These works were based on librettos by Claude-François Fillette and Jean-Élie Bédéno Dejaure, respectively. Ariodant and Kreutzer’s Lodoïska were produced at the Comédie-Italienne; Léonore and Cherubini’s Lodoïska, at the competing Théâtre Feydeau. Dean’s assertion that “all the important French operas of the period saw the light at one or the other” of these two venues is an overstatement, but it does capture, in general terms, the role played by the secondary lyric theaters of Paris during the revolutionary years; see

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18. 19.

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21. 22.

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Winton Dean, “French Opera,” in The Age of Beethoven, 1790– 1830, ed. Gerald Abraham, vol. 8, The New Oxford History of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 31. The present discussion of opéra comique thus intersects with a much larger discourse concerning aspects of continuity and rupture in revolutionary art and theater. This historiographical issue has been treated in Mark Darlow, “Introduction,” Nottingham French Studies 45, no. 1 (2006): 1– 4; and Michael Fend, “The Problem of the French Revolution in Music Historiography and History,” in Musicology and Sister Disciplines: Past, Present, Future (Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the IMS, London, 1997), ed. David Greer (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 239– 244. See Dean, “Opera under the French Revolution”; and Dent, Rise of Romantic Opera, chaps. 4– 6. See M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, introduction to Stratonice, by Étienne-Nicolas Méhul, vol. 72b of French Opera in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997), ix; and the expansion of these ideas in the same author’s Étienne-Nicolas Méhul and Opera: Source and Archival Studies of Lyric Theatre during the French Revolution, Consulate and Empire (Heilbronn: Edition Lucie Galland, 1999). Jean Mongrédien, French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 1789– 1830, trans. Sylvain Frémaux (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1996), 90. A similar emphasis on novelty can be found in Sarah Hibberd’s work on Cherubini, which portrays the composer’s catastrophic musical tableaux as intimately related to the political events of 1789. Hibberd, “Cherubini and the Revolutionary Sublime,” Cambridge Opera Journal 24, no. 3 (2012): 293– 295. David Charlton, “On Redefinitions of Rescue Opera,” in Music and the French Revolution, ed. Malcolm Boyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 161– 190. Michel Noiray, “The Pre-Revolutionary Origins of ‘Terrorisme Musical,’” in Music as Social and Cultural Practice: Essays in Honor of Reinhard Strohm, ed. Melania Bucciarelli and Berta Joncus (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), 294– 311. Mark Darlow, “The Role of the Listener in the Musical Aesthetics of the Revolution,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 6 (2007): 143– 149; Johnson, Listening in Paris, 99– 115. An important corrective has been offered by Root-Bernstein in Boulevard Theater and Revolution, 197– 214. Dean, “Opera under the French Revolution,” 81– 82. This idea is mirrored in Emmet Kennedy’s contention that the preeminence of comedy during the 1790s was a reflection of the taste of a “less educated” and “less refined” audience. Kennedy, Marie-Laurence Netter, James P. McGregor, and Mark V. Olsen, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris: Analysis and Repertory (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 75. David Gilbert, Introduction to Lodoïska, by Luigi Cherubini (Munich: Musikproduktion Höflich, 2006), i– ii.

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24. As Benoît Dratwicki has noted, the tragic repertory of the 1780s was marked by both “eclecticism and audacity,” encompassing the extension of Gluckian austerity, novel historical and exotic topics, and new settings of classic librettos of Quinault. Dratwicki, Antoine Dauvergne, 386. 25. Mark Darlow, “Repertory Reforms at the Paris Opéra on the Eve of the Revolution,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (2009): 564. 26. See especially Darlow, Staging the French Revolution; and Johnson, Backstage at the Revolution. 27. “La salle actuelle semble menacer d’ensevelir sous ses ruines la foule qui va y chercher le plaisir.” Journal des sciences et des beaux-arts 2 (1 April 1777): 561. On the state of this venue in the mid-eighteenth century, see John Golder, “The Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1760: Some Previously Unpublished Drawings by Louis-Alexandre Girault,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (2009): 455– 491. 28. In a sign of the company’s rising prestige, the concours drew submissions from a number of the capital’s most prominent architects. The sociétaires rejected work from François-Joseph Bélanger and Claude Jean-Baptiste Jallier de Savault, a team that had figured prominently in the construction of the royal opera house at Versailles, as well as from Samson-Nicolas Lenoir le Romain, designer of the Opéra’s Porte SaintMartin theater in Paris; see Michel Gallet, Les architectes parisiens du XVIIIe siècle: Dictionnaire biographique et critique (Paris: Éditions Mengès, 1995), 266. 29. Four copies of this document are preserved in the registres of the Opéra-Comique (F-Po, Th.OC.1– 4), and one is held at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (F-Pbh, CP 4435). The complete records on which the manuscript is based are housed in the Archives Nationales (F-Pan, AJ13 1052 and O1 849). Brenner provides a survey of the material in the registres in The Théâtre Italien: Its Repertory, 17– 20. 30. See Golder, “Hôtel de Bourgogne,” 483, and F-Pbh, CP 4435 (2). 31. F-Pan, O1 849.83. 32. “Vente par Monseigneur le Duc et Madame la Duchesse de Choiseul aux Comédiens italiens,” 20 December 1781, F-Pan, AJ13 1062. 33. “Outre les avantages d’une salle vaste et commode par son emplacement, des loges richement décorées et commodément placées et disposées pour recevoir la cour.” F-Pan, O1 849.85. 34. Golder, “Hôtel de Bourgogne,” 485. 35. F-Pan, O1 849.82. See also Brenner, The Théâtre Italien: Its Repertory, 14– 15. 36. “Fréquentés par le petit peuple, dont la Comédie ne peut tirer aucun profit et dont l’affluence . . . formeroit un embarras continuel.” Assembly Minutes, 20 August 1780, F-Pbh, CP 4435 (5). 37. “Acceptation définitive des propositions et de la soumission de M. Heurtier,” 16 December 1780, F-Pbh, CP 4435 (9). 38. The royal household loaned the comédiens a sum of 300,000 livres to purchase the land from Choiseul, as outlined in F-Pan, AJ13 1062. The construction costs (which,

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40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

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if we are to follow provisional estimates, likely exceeded one million livres) were to be covered by an outside investor (a certain Rebout de Villenueve) in exchange for one hundred “lifelong” entries to the completed theater. These conditions are discussed in F-Pan, AJ13 1052.7. Most contentious was the fact that Heurtier refused to give the comédiens as much space as he had initially promised, making the interior seem cramped. See Heurtier to the comédiens, 28 August 1781, F-Pan AJ13 1052.10, and the testy response from the troupe, 30 August 1781, F-Pan, AJ13 1052.11. If there were complaints that the Salle Favart was too narrow, however, this should be kept in perspective: at sixteen toises (approximately thirty-one meters), its façade was more than double the width of that of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. “Choix de la personne de M. de Wailly, Architecte du Roy, pour les changemens à faire dans la salle,” 26 December 1783, F-Pbh, CP 4435 (46). A summary of the changes implemented by Wailly can be found in Luc-Vincent Thiéry, Guide des amateurs et des étrangers voyageurs à Paris (Paris: Hardouin, 1787), 1:182– 185. For the dimensions of the latter venue, see Golder, “Hôtel de Bourgogne,” 469. I have calculated the measurements of the Salle Favart directly from the architectural renderings, F-Pbh, Réserve B 1504 (5). Marc Marie, marquis de Bombelles, Journal du marquis de Bombelles, ed. Frans Durif, Jean Grassion, et al. (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1977– 2008), 1:216. Journal de Paris, 30 April 1783, 501. “Elle a moins d’imposant et d’auguste que celle des Comédiens François, mais elle est plus brillante, et présente l’idée d’un lieu décoré pour une fête.” Ibid., 501. For a description of the Porte Saint-Martin theater, see Serre, L’Opéra de Paris, 210– 216. Comédiens to M. Lenoir, Lieutenant General de Police, F-Pan, AJ13 1052.18. Pricing at the Salle Favart is also discussed in Raphaëlle Legrand, “La scène et le public de l’Opéra-Comique de 1762 à 1789,” in L’opéra-comique en France au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Liège: Mardaga, 1992), 200. Figures 5.2 and 5.3 are compiled from F-Po, Th.OC.55– 78. They do not contain financial information from 1784 and 1790. The registers containing these accounting statistics have unfortunately been misplaced or destroyed. For a general overview of the Opéra’s accounts during this period, see Serre, L’Opéra de Paris, 97– 102. Precise figures are recorded in Joseph-Balthazar Bonet de Treiches, De l’Opéra en l’an XII (Paris: Ballard, 1803), 3. Brenner, The Théâtre Italien: Its Repertory, 31– 32. I do agree, however, with Brenner’s assertion that the troupe’s finances suffered greatly during the harsh winter of 1788– 1789 and into the 1789 season. Brenner relates that the sociétaires of the Comédie-Italienne shared their highest levels of sommes partagées in 1785, but he fails to note (somewhat puzzlingly) that this “most profitable season” is at odds with his overall description of the troupe’s

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51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56.

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58. 59.

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trajectory in the 1780s: ibid., 25. I would surmise that his impressions are directed by his focus on the daily logs of the theater, which do not include its most important source of income, yearly box rentals. He may also have been influenced by Pougin, who begins his study precisely at the point of the massive plunge seen in figure 5.3 (the harsh winter of 1788– 1789) and thus takes an overly pessimistic view of the broader state of economic affairs; see Arthur Pougin, L’Opéra-Comique pendant la Révolution de 1788– 1801 d’après des documents inédits et les sources les plus authentiques (Paris: Albert Savine, 1891), 12– 15. This represented a fivefold increase from the 1760s. The financial records for these years are in F-Po, Th.OC.42– 51. F-Po, Th.OC.151. Christian Morrison and Wayne Snyder, “The Income Inequality of France in Historical Perspective,” European Review of Economic History 4 (2000): 66. The invoices for the queen’s theater subscriptions can be found in the records of the menus plaisirs, F-Pan, O1 3070.425– 3070.431. Ravel, The Contested Parterre, 8– 11. This estimation of seating capacity is taken from Bachaumont’s description of the hall in the Mémoires secrets, entry of 27 April 1783. There were, of course, other sections of the theater that fell between these poles of relative exclusivity: a spectator might purchase door tickets for the orchestra, amphitheater, or balcony. During this period the Comédie-Italienne had three general categories of expenditure. Frais fixes (fixed costs) included the salaries of the actors, dancers, and musicians, as well as the wages of ticket sellers and other theater employees. Mandements et mémoires (work orders) covered costumes, sets, lighting, machinists, supplemental musicians, and music copying. Finally, frais courants (ordinary costs) comprised royalties paid to authors for performances of their works. Of these, only the final category remained steady after the move to the new theater. Although inflation was a significant concern at this time, many of the expenses of the Comédie-Italienne do not seem to have been markedly affected by these broader monetary trends before 1795. The salaries of actors and musicians, for example, did not fluctuate extensively, and the rent paid on the café within the theater held constant (at 1,200 livres per year) for a two-decade span between 1762 and 1783. David Charlton, “Orchestra and Chorus at the Comédie-Italienne (OpéraComique), 1755– 99,” in French Opera, 1730– 1830: Meaning and Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 88. “D’améliorer l’orchestre et de l’augmenter.” Assembly Minutes, 22 April 1783, F-Po, Th.OC.116. The Comédie-Italienne employed roughly fifteen to seventeen string players in the 1770s and between twenty-three and twenty-six in the seasons after 1783; see Charlton, “Orchestra and Chorus,” 97– 100. Operas that required supplemental performing forces included Grétry’s Zémire

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64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

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et Azor, Aucassin et Nicolette, and Richard Coeur de Lion; Martini’s Henri IV; and Dalayrac’s Sargines and Raoul, sire de Créqui. Fig. 5.3: F-Po, Th.OC.55– 78. Charlton, “Orchestra and Chorus,” 102. The rehearsal hall for the chorus is clearly labeled as such in the architect’s drawings for the theater; see “Calques du plan du Théâtre des Italiens,” F-Pbh, B 214 (e). In 1785 the chorus leader was given the authority to call as many rehearsals as he wished in order to perfect the ensemble’s execution (Assembly Minutes, 25 May 1785, F-Po, Th.OC.116). Two years later these powers were extended, and the director was instructed to schedule individual rehearsals with members of the chorus in order to ensure that each knew his or her part (Assembly Minutes, 8 February 1787, F-Po, Th.OC.120). The legal document specifies that ensemble singing is allowed only when the featured characters within a work have been drawn together “naturally and necessarily by an incident of some kind” (naturellement et nécessairement en scène par quelqu’incident). “Arrêt du conseil d’état du Roi, approbatif du bail ou concession du privilège de l’Opéra-Comique, faite par la Ville aux Comédiens, dits, Italiens, pour trente années, à commencer le 1er Janvier 1780,” F-Pan, AJ13 3. This contract is also discussed in Darlow, Nicolas-Étienne Framery, 177– 183. On the general development of choral music within opéra comique, see Cook, Duet and Ensemble. For costume and other expenses, see, for example, the list of expenditures for June 1783, F-Po, Th.OC.116. For the hiring of the technician, see Assembly Minutes, 19 April 1783, F-Po, Th.OC.116. The comédiens outlined their requests for machinery and stage design at the Salle Favart in the contract they signed upon purchasing the site from the duc de Choiseul (F-Pan, AJ13 1062). Architectural drawings of the theater provide further details; see F-Pbh, B 214 (a– f ); F-Pbh, Réserve B 1504 (1– 6); and F-Po, S.Th.Opéra-Comique. “Convenu d’établir l’illumination du théâtre à la Nouvelle salle . . . en se servant d’huile pure et clarifié[e], comme celle de l’opéra; le tout pour établir le luminaire, comme il est a l’opéra.” Assembly Minutes, 17 February 1783, F-Po, Th.OC.116. The cost increase was roughly 50 percent per performance. F-Pan, AJ13 1062. It is likely that these oil lamps were soon replaced with cylindricalwick Argand lamps. A major innovation of the early 1780s, the Argand lamp burned many times brighter than a traditional oil lamp while producing less smoke; see Gösta M. Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1977), 198– 201. Journal de Paris, 30 April 1783, 501. Hibberd, “Cherubini and the Revolutionary Sublime,” 303. See Dean, “Opera under the French Revolution,” 80. Hibberd, “Cherubini and the Revolutionary Sublime,” 303– 304. The first page of the score, issued by Brunet in Paris, states that “l’ouverture peint le

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74.

75.

76.

77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83.

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réveil de la nature.” For a thorough examination of lighting effects in opéra comique, see Charlton, “Sight Meets Sound,” 37– 79. The destruction of the castle involved the manipulation of prop stones filled with lightweight wicker frames. This effect (also in use at the Opéra) is described in the Hivart– Sheremetev correspondence, a source of valuable information regarding the staging practices of the ancien régime; see John A. Rice, “The Staging of Salieri’s Les Danaïdes as Seen by a Cellist in the Orchestra,” Cambridge Opera Journal 26 (2014): 78. François-Benoît Hoffman traced this trend to the librettos of Sedaine, beginning as early as the 1780s; see Hoffman, Oeuvres de F.-B. Hoffman (Paris: LeFebvre, 1831), 9:536, and the discussion of Hoffman in Charlton, “On Redefinitions,” 170– 173. Specific studies of audience composition under the ancien régime (John Lough, Paris Theatre Audiences in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries [London: Oxford University Press, 1957], and Ravel, The Contested Parterre) have not unearthed significant evidence in support of Hoffman’s anecdotal conclusions. In their programming records, the comédiens positively reference six works under this “heroic” rubric, while rejecting at least three others. A number of contemporaneous and slightly earlier opéras comiques (not mentioned by the committee) seem to reflect similar stylistic ideals. Very closely related, for instance, are operas that Durosoy categorizes as “historical” or “chivalric” drames lyriques, including his own Henri IV, ou La Bataille d’Ivry (set by Martini in 1774), La réduction de Paris (set by Bianchi in 1775), and Les mariages samnites (set by Grétry in 1776). The last of these was initially published as a drame lyrique but was tellingly renamed a comédie héroïque upon its revival in 1782. “Arrêt du conseil du 20 Juillet 1781 pour l’institution du comité à la Comédie Italienne,” F-Po, Th.OC.116. Currently held in F-Po, Th.OC.115– 122, spanning the years 1781– 1791. “Cet ouvrage ne peut convenir au Théâtre Italien. La marche, le comique, et l’intrigue de cette pièce semblent absolument appartenir au Théâtre des Variétés.” Committee of 9 April 1788, F-Po, Th.OC.120. Another note rejected the “forced humor” of a proposed play, which made it “more appropriate for the petits spectacles than for this one ” (le Comité a trouvé cet ouvrage d’un comique forcé et plus propre aux petits spectacles qu’à celuy ci). Committee of 22 June 1789, F-Po, Th.OC.122. Operatic parody was subject to its own rapid development at the end of the eighteenth century, as discussed in chap. 3. It is suggestive of opéra comique’s newfound esteem that examples of this genre were themselves subject to parody. One of the works mentioned below, Grétry and Sedaine’s Aucassin et Nicolette, was parodied as Marcassin et Tourlourette in 1780. “Qu’il y a eu beaucoup de parodies de cette pièce données aux théâtres des Boulevards.” Committee of 18 July 1784, F-Po, Th.OC.117. See Darlow, Staging the French Revolution, 308.

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84. This was, to be sure, a matter of audience expectation and legal necessity. As outlined in chapter 3, the Opéra continued to enforce limits on the structure of works performed at the Comédie-Italienne, which the troupe treated with a sort of grudging respect. The committee rejected a new version of Médée, for instance, deeming that its dark ending and elevated musical style conflicted with “the statutes and regulations of our theater” (d’après les statu[t]s et règlements de notre théâtre, il est impossible de recevoir cet opéra). Committee of 30 September 1790, F-Po, Th.OC.122. 85. See, for example, the rejections of 31 October 1786 (F-Po, Th.OC.118), 11 September 1788 (F-Po, Th.OC.121), and 17 October 1789 (F-Po, Th.OC.122). 86. “Lecture faitte d’une pièce intitulée Le chevalier de l’étoile . . . opéra en trois actes. Le Comité a trouvé cet ouvrage foible d’intrigue et de fond mais susceptible de ce grand appareil qui ne convient qu’à l’Opéra dont la pompe du spectacle pourroit faire oublier le peu d’intérêt dont cette pièce est pourvue.” Committee of 22 January 1788, F-Po, Th.OC.120. 87. “Fait lecture de Zimée ou le Prince Nègre, opéra en 3 actes: le Comité n’a point trouvé cet ouvrage d’un genre qui puisse luy convenir. L’intérêt en est forcé . . . tout est d’une teinte uniforme et monotone, et dans les ouvrages d’intérêt et d’un stile relevé le Public desire un mélange de comique tel que dans Aucassin, Richard etc. Le peu de succès des pièces totalement sérieuses est un arrêt prononcé de sa part: arrêt d’autant plus juste que le genre de l’opéra ne pouvant permettre des développemens assez grands, dans un sujet relevé il faut au moins suppléer un spectacle varié en adjoignant à la principale intrigue des scènes d’un comique doux.” Committee of 25 March 1788, F-Po, Th.OC.121. 88. The Opéra had made several experiments with comedy and mixed genres in the late 1770s and 1780s, culminating in the commissions from Grétry discussed in chap. 4. For further detail on these developments, see René Guiet, “L’évolution d’un genre: Le livret d’opéra en France de Gluck à la Révolution (1774– 1793)” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris, 1936), 159– 171. 89. Committee of 9 July 1790, F-Po, Th.OC.122. Each of these operas by Grétry was set to a libretto by Sedaine, with the exception of Pierre le Grand (written by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly). Raoul, sire de Créqui, like Sargines, was a collaboration with Monvel. 90. The actors’ terminology is maddeningly imprecise: works to which they referred as “heroic” were not necessarily labeled comédies héroïques by their authors. Richard Coeur de Lion, for example, is described simply as a comédie, while Le comte d’Albert is called a drame. As Michael Fend has noted, the phrase was used more formally in the 1790s, as in the cases of Cherubini’s Lodoïska and Méhul’s Stratonice. See Fend, Cherubinis Pariser Opern (1788– 1803) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2007), 173. 91. As defined in the 1762 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1:873: “héroïque se dit aussi d’une poésie noble et elevée.”

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92. Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, Encyclopédie méthodique: Architecture (Paris: Panckoucke, 1788– 1825), 1:501. 93. Aucassin et Nicolette, Richard Coeur de Lion, Le comte d’Albert, and Raoul, sire de Créqui feature prison escapes, while Sargines and Pierre le Grand include battle scenes. 94. The label dated back to Pierre Corneille’s Don Sanche d’Aragon, which premiered at the Comédie-Française in 1650. The “heroic” modifier had also appeared sporadically (and somewhat loosely) at the Opéra, referring to examples of the traditionally lighter genre of opéra-ballet that adapted either the “violent episodes” or the “heroes” (“divinities, spirits, mythological characters, or sometimes even historical figures”) of neoclassical tragedy. See Paul-Marie Masson, “Le ballet héroïque,” La revue musicale 9, no. 8 (1928): 134– 135; extracts from this passage are translated and discussed in Rebecca Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 301– 311. 95. “La première qualité de l’action tragique est . . . qu’elle soit héroïque.” Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 16:513. 96. “L’héroïsme est un courage, une valeur . . . qui est au-dessus des âmes vulgaires.” Ibid. Corneille, for his part, claimed to have invented the label to describe works that featured members of the high nobility without otherwise conforming to the characteristics of tragédie; see Fend, Cherubinis Pariser Opern, 172. 97. Aucassin et Nicolette, Richard Coeur de lion, Sargines, and Raoul, sire de Créqui are set in the Middle Ages. Pierre le Grand takes place in seventeenth-century Russia (though the titular monarch clearly evokes Louis XVI). The only opera in this group without a plot drawn from the distant past is Le comte d’Albert, which seems to foreshadow the fait historique in its emphasis on realistic, contemporary events. 98. The reception of Richard Coeur de Lion will be discussed in detail in the following chapter. 99. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France, 107– 113. 100.On the historical theater of the ancien régime, see Clarence D. Brenner, L’histoire nationale dans la tragédie française du XVIIIe siècle, University of California Publications in Modern Philology 14, no. 3 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1929); Anne Boës, La lanterne magique de l’histoire: Essai sur le théâtre historique en France de 1750 à 1789, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 213 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1982); and Kopp, “The ‘Drame Lyrique,’” 108– 111. On the ways such subject matter carried into the revolutionary era, see Mark Darlow, “History and (Meta)-Theatricality: The French Revolution’s Paranoid Aesthetics,” Modern Language Review 105, no. 2 (2010): 385– 400, and Staging the French Revolution, 218– 221. 101. Bell has persuasively chronicled this resurgence of patriotism in The Cult of the Nation in France. 102.On the elevation of French history within the visual arts, see Crow, Painters and Public Life, 186– 198.

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103. Dratwicki, Antoine Dauvergne, 397. 104.Each of these works sets versions of a libretto by Jean-Paul-André des Rasins de Saint-Marc. 105. Guiet has traced the development of historical subject matter at the Opéra in “L’évolution d’un genre,” 148– 159. 106.Edme-Louis Billardon de Sauvigny, Péronne sauvée, avec une préface historique de Billardon de Sauvigny, ed. Alfred Danicourt (Péronne: Trépant, 1879). The work was noteworthy, within the repertory of the Opéra, for both its historic themes and its working-class heroine, Marie Fouré. 107. Ibid., xxx. 108.See Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 140– 141. 109.Barnabé Farmian Durosoy, Dissertation sur le drame lyrique (Paris: Duchesne, 1775), 39. 110. See, for instance, the criticisms of the librettist Quétant, detailed in his “Essai sur l’opéra-comique,” 44. 111. The Mercure de France had leveled just such a complaint against the “heroic” L’Olympiade (1780) of Sacchini, as described in Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 190. 112. “Lorsqu’un Acteur répresenta, ou Néron, ou Antenor, ne deviez-vous pas frémir de le voir le lendemain jouer le rôle d’un des Héros de votre nation? Le rôle du Scélérat devroit avoir un caractère plus révoltant pour vous, que celui d’un bon Jardinier vertueux.” Durosoy, Dissertation sur le drame lyrique, 24. 113. Ibid., 12– 13. 114. The Mercure de France described this practice as akin to setting history in madrigals, a presumably frivolous endeavor satirized in Molière’s Les précieuses ridicules. The source here is a review of Durosoy’s Le jugement de Paris (Mercure de France, October 1775, 169– 170). 115. This passage is translated and discussed in Darlow, Staging the French Revolution, 219– 220 (though Darlow engages with Durosoy’s ideas especially as they pertain to tragédie lyrique). 116. Ibid., 220. 117. On this point, see Barnabé Farmian Durosoy, “Discours préliminaire ” to Les deux amis (Paris: Ballard, n.d), vi– ix, and the discussion of Durosoy in Kopp, “The ‘Drame Lyrique,’” 112– 118. The comédiens were concerned that their name was misleading, since they no longer had any connection with Italian comedy or Italian actors. They contemplated changing the name upon the move to the Salle Favart (Assembly of 9 September 1782, F-Pan, AJ13 1052.17), but stuck to convention to avoid confusing their audiences. 118. “Viendroient s’instruire, en voyant mis en action tous les évènemens qui ont illustré ou flétri la gloire de leur nation.” Durosoy, Dissertation sur le drame lyrique, 37. This

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passage is also treated in Kopp, “The ‘Drame Lyrique,’” 115– 116, and Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 140– 141. 119. Duby, The Legend of Bouvines, 13– 36. 120.This setting does not, however, seem to have inspired the kinds of gothic musical effects employed by Grétry in Aucassin et Nicolette or Richard Coeur de Lion: nondirectional harmonies and archaic-sounding melodies in the former case, the structural repetition of the romance in the latter. (On these effects, see Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 193, 236– 248.) 121. Accounts of April 1788, F-Po, Th.OC.72. 122. Noiray, “Pre-Revolutionary Origins,” 301– 303. 123. Accounts of April 1788, F-Po, Th.OC.72. These fireworks makers, the Ruggieri brothers, were in high demand, producing shows for the city of Paris and the court at Versailles. 124. These are volumes 7, 8, and 13 of 1788. 125. See, for instance, the review in Costumes et annales des grands théâtres de Paris 3, no. 13 (1788): 100– 101. Such stylistic variety was, of course, recognized as a defining trait of the 1790s. “The most remarkable aspect of [Cherubini’s] Eliza,” writes Taiëb, “is the shocking juxtaposition of the simple bonhomie of a Savoyard and Florindo’s suicide against a sublime Alpine backdrop.” The modernity of Le Sueur’s La caverne, remarks Mongrédien, lies in the way it “breaks with the then sacrosanct principle whereby the stylistic features of different genres were kept separate: in the middle of a sombre and violent drama there are several ariettes in the purest opéra-comique tradition.” See Patrick Taïeb, “Dix scènes d’opéra-comique sous la Révolution: Quelques éléments pour une histoire culturelle du théâtre lyrique français,” Histoire, économie et société 22, no. 2 (2003): 243; and Jean Mongrédien, “Le Sueur, JeanFrançois,” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2001), https://doi.org /10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.16489. 126.François-Thomas-Marie de Baculard d’Arnaud, Sargines (Paris: LeJay, 1772). On Baculard d’Arnaud’s novel, see Katherine Astbury, “Masculinity and Medievalism in the Tales of Baculard d’Arnaud,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 5 (2006): 37– 51. 127. Astbury, “Masculinity and Medievalism,” 44– 47. On the broader implications of these debates, see Jay M. Smith, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), esp. chaps. 4 and 5. 128. On Dalayrac’s lyrical style, see Charlton, “Dalayrac, Nicolas-Marie,” in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2001), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo /9781561592630.article.07060. 129. The crucial borrowing is the speech from Philip Augustus to his knights, described at the beginning of this essay and transcribed in example 5.1. The passage can be

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found in Paul-François Velly, Histoire de France, depuis l’établissement de la monarchie jusqu’au règne de Louis XIV (Paris: Desaint et Saillant, 1756), 3:472. 130. The fait historique was, however, most likely to draw its subject from the recent rather than the distant past. On this point, see Mark Darlow, “Staging the Revolution: The Fait Historique,” Nottingham French Studies 45, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 78. 131. Costumes et annales des grands théâtres de Paris 3, no. 7 (1788): 55. 132. This transition anticipates one of the hallmarks of Méhul’s style in the 1790s; the composer gives weight to fewer but more expansive numbers in which the ensemble is prioritized; see M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “The New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary Rhetoric and Operatic Consequences,” in Music and the French Revolution, ed. Malcolm Boyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 137. 133. Sargines proceeds one step further than earlier opéras comiques featuring battle scenes, including Martini’s Henri IV and Grétry’s Richard Coeur de Lion, by illustrating not merely the valor of the combatants but also the abject terror of the civilians in their wake. 134. “Le Théâtre représente une campagne terminée sur un des côtés et dans l’éloignement par un village. On entend le bruit des armes, le Tambour, les Trompettes, les Timballes; on voit de moment en moment passer des pelotons de soldats tantôt vaincus, tantôt vainqueurs; on apperçoit dans le lointain des Troupes qui sortent en désordre du Village poursuivans des Paysans, Hommes, Femmes, qui fuyent devant eux. Bientôt la flamme s’élance des toits de plusieurs Maisons. Des Femmes, des Vieillards, des Enfans s’arrachent avec peine aux feux qui les environnent. On découvre des Mères qui tiennent leurs Enfans renversés sur leur sein, des Fils portant leur Père, des Pères entrainant hors des Chaumières enflamées leurs Femmes et leurs Mères expirantes. Le fond du Théâtre doit peindre toute l’horreur d’un pillage et d’un incendie.” Dalayrac, Sargines, 202. 135. The term terrorisme musical is taken from a review of Cherubini’s Médée (1797), as noted in Noiray, “Pre-Revolutionary Origins,” 294. For a more nuanced discussion of these musical traits in context, see Michael Fend, “Literary Motifs, Musical Form and the Quest for the ‘Sublime’: Cherubini’s Eliza ou le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St Bernard,” Cambridge Opera Journal 5 (1993): 17– 38; and Hibberd, “Cherubini and the Revolutionary Sublime.” 136. Costumes et annales des grands théâtres de Paris 3, no. 6 (1788): 42. 137. Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 286. 138. See esp. the quartets of the opera’s opening two acts and its second-act finale. 139. Bartlet, “The New Repertory,” 137. Johnson has tied this kind of choral idiom explicitly to the ideology of the Terror, referring to it as “musical Jacobinism.” Johnson, Listening in Paris, 150– 154. 140.The first printing of the anthem’s text in Marseille was given the inscription “Chant

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de guerre aux armées des frontières, sur l’air de Sargines”; see Arthur Loth, Le chant de la Marseillaise: Son véritable auteur (Paris: Victor Palmé, 1886), 47. 141. “Qui ne croit à l’incendie qu’au moment où elle se sent brûler.” G. Touchard Lafosse, Chroniques de l’oeil-de-boeuf des petits appartements de la cour et des salons de Paris, sous Louis XIV, la Régence, Louis XV, et Louis XVI, nouvelle éd. (Paris: Gustave Barba, 1860), 309. 142. Bloechl, Opera and the Political Imaginary, 3. 143. Michael Fend, “Romantic Empowerment at the Paris Opéra in the 1770s and 1780s,” Music and Letters 94 (2013): 294. Parallel reform tendencies in the administration of the theater are described in Darlow, “Repertory Reforms.” 144. Kennedy, Netter, McGregor, and Olsen, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences. 145. Performance statistics from the revolutionary years are compiled from the nowdefunct César database (Calendrier électronique des spectacles sous l’ancien régime et sous la révolution). Sargines was performed quite frequently until the summer of 1792 and then reappeared in the autumn of 1796. Even when it simply could not be presented— directly after the fall of the monarchy and through the height of the Terror— it does seem that the material traces of its staging remained. A note on the manuscript libretto of Grétry’s Roger et Olivier, a chivalric work composed around 1792, relates that the production might simply recycle the costumes that had been made for Sargines: Saint-Marc, Roger et Olivier (manuscript libretto), F-Pan, F18 609. And an inventory of the theater’s sets drawn up in 1801 suggests that the opera’s painted backdrops were in constant rotation into the early nineteenth century: “État général et estimation des décorations, machines, et agrégat en tous genres qui composent le service du Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique,” F-Pan, AJ13 1062. 146. Sedaine edited the libretto for Raoul barbe-bleue in 1794, excising feudal rhetoric. (See Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 298.) Bartlet provides a number of further examples in Étienne-Nicolas Méhul. 147. The timing is not surprising, given this period’s reaction against the excesses of the Terror and its toleration of more moderate cultural values. (Indeed, the Directory witnessed the return of many operas that had been suppressed in 1793– 1794.) The changes to the work are reflected in a manuscript libretto dating from the mid- to late 1790s (F-Pan, AJ13 1101). A contemporary print, with slightly different alterations, is also extant (Paris: Barba, 1797). 148. On operatic settings of these subjects, which were gradually abandoned after the Terror, see M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Grétry and the Revolution,” in Grétry et l’Europe de l’opéra-comique, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Liège: Mardaga, 1992), 68– 81. 149. The revival occurred in the very midst of the Battle of Arcola, one of the key moments in the development of Napoleonic propaganda. On this myth making, see Philip G. Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769– 1799 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 1– 8. Another Italian battle of 1796 inspired a more

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orthodox fait historique at the Théâtre Feydeau, Méhul and Étienne-Joseph-Bernard Delrieu’s Le pont de Lody (1797). 150. Jacques-Marie Boutet [Monvel], Sargines, ou L’élève d’amour: Comédie en quatre actes, mêlée de musique (Lyon: Chez Mlle Olyer, 1789). 151. In the printed libretto of 1797 the instrument is described as a bâton de commandement, a symbolic staff associated with chivalric military authority. 152. Dwyer, Napoleon, 6. 153. “S’ils veulent mutiler les ouvrages, le public fera bien de se contenter de les lire chez lui, puisque Robespierre n’a pas réalisé le projet qu’on lui prêtoit, de brûler les bibliothèques.” Courrier des spectacles, 2 July 1797, 3. The journal is complaining about the general practice of rewriting classic works to strip them of their aristocratic characters. 154. Darlow has made a similar point about the dangers of limiting our analyses of revolutionary works to textual concerns. Darlow, Staging the French Revolution, 392.

Chapter Six 1. Brenner, The Théâtre Italien: Its Repertory, 35. 2. See, for instance, Marvin A. Carlson, The Theatre of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 184. 3. Ibid., 289– 291. 4. On the reception of opéra comique as “national” genre, see David Charlton, “OpéraComique, Identity and Manipulation,” in Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848, ed. Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 23– 26. 5. Ibid., 26– 27. 6. Downs, Classical Music, 193. 7. Jean Mongrédien, “Paris: The End of the Ancien Régime,” in The Classical Era: From the 1740s to the end of the 18th Century, ed. Neal Zaslaw (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), 93. 8. J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 10th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 481. 9. Ibid., 482– 483. 10. Charlton counts over one thousand performances at the Comédie-Italienne/ Opéra-Comique between 1784 and 1893. More than three hundred were tallied at the Théâtre Lyrique between 1856 and 1868. See Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 251. For further repertory statistics, see Raphaëlle Legrand and Patrick Taïeb, “L’Opéra-Comique sous le Consulat et l’Empire,” in Le théâtre lyrique en France au XIXe siècle, ed. Paul Prévost (Metz: Éditions Serpenoise, 1995), 45– 61; Olivier Bara, Le théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique sous la Restauration: Enquête autour

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18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

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d’un genre moyen (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2001), 121– 138; Sabine Teulon Lardic, “Du lieu à la programmation: une remémoration concertée de l’ancien opéra-comique sur les scènes parisiennes (1840– 1870),” in L’invention des genres lyriques français et leur redécouverte au XIXe siècle, ed. Agnès Terrier and Alexandre Dratwicki (Lyon: Symétrie, 2010), 379– 385; and William Weber, “The Opéra and Opéra-Comique in the Nineteenth Century: Tracing the Age of Repertoire,” in L’Opéra de Paris, la Comédie-Française et l’Opéra-Comique: Approches comparées (1669– 2010), ed. Sabine Chaouche, Denis Herlin, and Solveig Serre (Paris: Publications de l’École nationale des chartes, 2012), 145– 158. Pierre François Clodomir, Méthode elementaire pour ophicléïde (Paris: Chez Alphonse Leduc, 1866), 30. Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 231. “Le vieux style capable de plaire aux modernes.” Grétry, Mémoires, 1:289. The definitive discussion of the romance is found in Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique, 231– 245. Michel-Jean Sedaine, Richard Coeur de Lion: Comédie en trois actes en prose et en vers, mis en musique (Paris: Chez Didot, 1786), 6. Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787– 1799 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 46– 52. The critic Pierre Hédouin would later claim that Napoleon’s support for Richard Coeur de Lion was a calculated political act, meant to demonstrate that he had no fear of the “Bourbon cult.” See Hédouin, Mosaique: Peintres, musiciens, littérateurs, artistes dramatiques (Paris: Heugel, 1856), 342. In one obituary, the librettist Jean-Nicolas Bouilly urged “the whole of France . . . [to] repeat his divine tones” and its theaters to “be enriched and sustained by his numerous masterpieces.” This obituary is quoted and translated in Arnold, Grétry’s Operas and the French Public, 181. Grétry’s funeral is discussed in the same monograph (179– 182). “Mais qu’inventer des chants n’appartient qu’au génie.” Mercure de France, 6 November 1813, 247. Arnold, Grétry’s Operas and the French Public, 145. Mercure de France, 27 January 1810, 238. This review is quoted and translated in ibid., 146. “Pleins d’esprit . . . et de verité dramatique, mais d’une nullité absolue, sous le rapport de l’harmonie et de la composition.” Castil-Blaze, De l’opéra en France (Paris: Janet & Cotelle, 1820), 1:177. See also the discussion of this passage in Teulon Lardic, “Du lieu à la programmation,” 363. David Charlton, “Berlioz, Dalayrac and Song,” in Berlioz and Debussy: Sources, Contexts and Legacies, ed. Barbara L. Kelly and Kerry Murphy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 5– 8. On Berlioz’s opinions of eighteenth-century opéra comique, see Kerry Murphy, Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Ann Arbor,

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25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

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MI: UMI Research Press, 1988), 91– 112. On his opinions of early music, more generally, see Catherine Massip, “Berlioz and Early Music,” in Berlioz: Past, Present, Future, ed. Peter Bloom (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 19– 33. “Un génie incontestable.” Hector Berlioz, La critique musicale d’Hector Berlioz, ed. H. Robert Cohen and Yves Gérard (Paris: Buchet/Castel, 1996–), 2:553. Berlioz made a similarly conflicted case for Dalayrac’s achievement, arguing that inspiration in melodic sentiment and expression “might largely compensate for the lack of harmonic facility and naivety in instrumentation” (compensent largement le peu d’habilité de l’harmoniste et sa naïve instrumentation). Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, 11 August 1841, 1. This passage is also mentioned in Teulon Lardic, “Du lieu à la programmation,” 373. “C’est délicieux d’expression . . . de coloris, d’invention mélodique.” La critique musicale, 3:30. Berlioz presented several extracts from Richard Coeur de Lion in a concert performance of 6 February 1840, preparing the fully staged revival at the Opéra-Comique the following year. Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 26 January 1840, 61. “Si dénué de l’éclat qu’on recherche aujourd’hui.” La critique musicale, 3:30. Adolphe Adam, Lettres sur la musique française (1836– 1850), ed. Joël-Marie Fouquet (Geneva: Éditions Minkoff, 1996), 163. See also Arthur Pougin, Adolphe Adam: Sa vie, sa carrière, ses mémoires artistiques (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1877), 167– 168. Adam’s manuscript is held in the music division of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (F-Pn, MS-2673). “De frénétiques applaudissements, partis de tous les points de la salle, ont suivi la romance qu’on a forcé les acteurs de recommencer.” La France musicale, 3 October 1841, 338. The reviewer went on to note that “no words could truly describe the effect” of the moment in performance. “Retoucher les ouvrages d’un homme de génie ou de talent . . . c’est faire tout simplement une chose barbare, absurde.” Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 5 September 1841, 404. A similar attitude toward adaptation is expressed in Jules Lardin, “Zémire et Azor par Grétry: Quelques questions à propos de la nouvelle falsification de cet Opéra” (Paris: Imprimerie d’Ad, 1846). “Trop simple pour ses oreilles endurcies par le bruit de la musique actuelle.” Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 5 June 1841, 296. He continued: “In addition to its absolute merit, every artistic work has a historical merit, which can only be established through comparison with the productions that preceded and followed it. How can these points of comparison be made, if one changes the work by adding arbitrary modifications?” (Tout oeuvre d’art, à côté de son mérite absolu, a un mérite historique, qui ne peut s’établir qu’en la comparant avec les productions qui l’ont précédée et qui l’ont suivie. Comment établir ces points de comparaison, si vous changez cette oeuvre en y apportant des modifica-

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35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

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42. 43. 44.

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tions arbitraries?). Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 5 June 1841, 296. This passage is also discussed in Katharine Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: “La revue et gazette musicale de Paris,” 1834– 80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 69– 70. Adam’s arrangement became the standard version of Grétry’s opéra comique through the end of the century and was followed by several other new orchestrations of older works, including Le déserteur, Zémire et Azor, and Félix. On the reception of these revivals, see Hervé Lacombe, The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Edward Schneider (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 30– 32. “Rajeunir la forme sans jamais altérer le fond.” La France musicale, 3 October 1841, 339. The Musical World, 3 March 1849, 138. “Pour enlever la poussière qui les recouvre.” This review is quoted in Teulon Lardic, “Du lieu à la programmation,” 372. “Si facile à retenir, que votre grand’père, que votre grand’mère s’en souviennent encore.” Journal des demoiselles, neuvième année (1841), 310. The article is signed by J.-J. Fouqueau de Pussy. This opéra comique set a text by Auguste Humbert and Th. Polak. “Un vieillard de 70 ans au moins, qui criait de toute force de ses poumons: ‘Nous voulons Richard, Richard avant tout; laissez-nous tranquilles avec toute votre musique moderne.’” La France musicale, 3 October 1841, 343. As one critic recounted: “The first months of the Restoration granted new luster to the opera of Sedaine and Grétry. The eminently monarchical themes of this work earned it unanimous applause at all the theaters” (Les premiers mois de la Restauration donnèrent un nouveau lustre à l’opéra de Sedaine et de Grétry. La pensée si éminemment monarchique de cette oeuvre lui valut alors sur tous les théâtres, des applaudissments unanimes). Hédouin, Mosaique, 345. Another reviewer would later claim that “Louis dix-huit” was substituted for “O Richard” in provincial performances during the Restoration years. Chronique musicale, 1 November 1873, 139. On the conservative orientation of medieval-themed theater under the Restoration, see Bara, Le théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique sous la Restauration, 212– 233. “De mon âge et de ma couleur.” La mode: Revue des modes, 2 October 1841, 27. “Dans cet air, il y a pour moi . . . bien mieux que des notes et que de la belle musique, car je me souviens du temps où cet air était chanté comme un hymne, quand le trône de Louis XVI et de Marie-Antoinette était entouré.” Ibid., 26. “Ne peut pas aimer l’opéra de Grétry autant que nous l’aimons.” Ibid., 28. “Délassement favori des classes aristocratiques et de l’oisiveté opulente, il avait tout l’entrain, toute la gaieté, toute la verve, le charmant abandon, l’élégante frivolité . . . qui caractérisaient la haute société de ce temps-là.” La France musicale, 13 June 1841, 211– 212.

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47. See Hédouin, Mosaique, 32. 48. As Mark Everist has shown, such pragmatic considerations turned the Odéon into a major producer of older opéra comique in the 1820s. Grétry’s works entered the public domain in 1823 (ten years after his death), and the theater began to stage them shortly thereafter. Everist, Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824– 1828 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 199– 200. The 1864 deregulation of the French theatrical industry was also followed by revivals of the older comic repertory— a production of Le sorcier, for example, at the new Théâtre des Fantaisies-Parisiennes. See Teulon Lardic, “Du lieu à la programmation,” 383. 49. The work was revived at the Opéra-Comique on 19 May, and at the Théâtre-Lyrique four days later. These performances are discussed in Charles Malherbe and Albert Soubies, Histoire de l’Opéra-Comique: La seconde salle Favart, 1840– 1880 (Paris: Flammarion, 1892– 1893), 1:280– 281. 50. Mark Everist, “Jacques Offenbach: The Music of the Past and the Image of the Present,” in Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830– 1914, ed. Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 72. 51. Ibid., 75. 52. “Simplicité dans la forme mélodique, sobriété dans l’instrumentation.” Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 20 July 1856, 230. It is important to note, however, that Adam’s orchestration of the opera was performed through the end of the century; any analyses of Grétry’s style were based on the updated, rather than the original, iterations of his works. 53. “Que nous applaudissons tous les jours, comme s’il était d’hier, bien qu’il date de 1785.” Ibid., 230. (Offenbach’s date for the premiere of Richard Coeur de Lion was incorrect.) 54. “Quelques belles mélodies, étouffées par son ignorance.” Hédouin, Mosaique, 245. The critic was equally derisive toward women of fashion who had been seduced by the extroverted effects of Rossini and his followers— who only appreciated music à coups de canon. 55. Ibid: “un savant calculateur de notes,” 325– 326; “la science étouffe le naturel,” 328; “quand nous allons entendre un opéra, ce n’est point pour assister à une leçon d’algèbre,” 363. 56. These articles appeared between 19 August 1860 and 14 April of 1861 under the title “L’Opéra Comique: Sa naissance, ses progrès, sa trop grande extension.” 57. Le ménestrel, 16 December 1860, 19. 58. Indeed, Grétry would soon be situated as an unlikely foil for Wagner, having anticipated the dramatic innovations of the German composer while avoiding his excesses. Numerous critics, for example, identified the recurring romance of Richard Coeur de Lion as a precursor to the leitmotif. See Malherbe and Soubies, Histoire de l’OpéraComique, 1:68.

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59. In 1871 the one thousandth performance of Hérold and Planard’s Le pré aux clercs was acknowledged with the solemn reflection that “at this moment more than ever we need French art to affirm strongly all its legitimate glories in order to console and brace us.” This review, from Le ménestrel, is quoted and translated in Annegret Fauser, “Gendering the Nations: The Ideologies of French Discourse in Music (1870– 1914),” in Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture, 1800– 1945, ed. Harry White and Michael Murray (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 72. 60. Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 147. 61. See Fauser, “Gendering the Nations,” 72– 103; and Jann Pasler, “Une nouvelle écoute de la Révolution au début de la Troisième République,” in Musique, esthétique et société au XIXe siècle, ed. Damien Colas, Florence Gétreau, and Malou Haine (Wavre: Mardaga, 2007), 199– 216. 62. Le rappel, 12 September 1889, 1. This extract is quoted and translated in Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 80. 63. “Éminemment français.” Annales de la Chambre des députés, 4e Législature, Débats parlementaires (Paris: Imprimerie des journaux officiels, 1889), 168. 64. This production held the stage for two decades, until 1893. As Pasler has noted, the timing of these revivals may have been linked to political events, including the election of the royalist Patrice de MacMahon to the presidency, and legitimist attempts to reinstate Henry V, comte de Chambord, in 1873. Pasler, “Une nouvelle écoute de la Révolution,” 209. 65. “Nous entendons dire que la musique française, proprement dite, est un mythe . . . puisque les plus belles oeuvres que nous qualifions comme nôtres, sont dues, la plupart, à des compositeurs étrangers. . . . Mais il en est autrement; tout en s’assimilant les qualités des écoles italienne et allemande, la musique française a toujours su dégager son originalité.” A. Thurner, Les transformations de l’opéra comique (Paris: Librairie Castel, 1865), 36– 37. 66. The reputation of Monsigny benefited markedly from this shift; the composer was prized over Duni (and even Grétry) because he had not trained in Italy. See Le ménestrel, 13 October 1867, 363. 67. “Né de l’alliance de la comédie et de la chanson, c’est à dire des deux formes les plus populaires de la littérature et de la musique dans notre pays.” Le ménestrel, 19 August 1860, 298. By the turn of the century, this idea would be entrenched in the pedagogy of the Paris Conservatoire. The history published by this institution asserted that opéra comique had been “baptized as a national genre because the corpus of vaudevilles was indisputably French” (ces vaudevilles sont bien français, et voilà sans doute pourquoi on a baptisé l’opéra-comique un genre national). Albert Lavignac,

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74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

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Encyclopédie de la musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1914), 1:1456. “Ce préjugé généralement admis que l’opéra-comique français est sorti de l’operabuffa.” Le ménestrel, 13 October 1867, 363. “Petites comédies de la foire Saint-Laurent.” Ibid., 363. “Du plus ancien opéra-comique qui existe.” Revue musicale, February 1827, 9. Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 167. Ibid., 166. “Trois cent ans avant les intermèdes-concerts des Italiens.” Paul Lacome’s history began with the anonymous Aucassin et Nicolette, which predated even the Jeu de Robin et de Marion. See Lacome, Les fondateurs de l’opéra-comique (Paris: Enoch Père & Fils, 1878), i. Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 168– 170. Julien Tiersot, Histoire de la chanson populaire en France (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1889), 527. “De nos vieux trouvères.” Le ménestrel, 7 December 1873, 5– 6. Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 26 October 1873, 339– 341. See Michel Brenet, Grétry: Sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1884), 183. “De rétrouver l’accent de la chanson populaire.” Tiersot, Histoire de la chanson populaire, 525. The Musical World, 16 August 1873, 558. Grétry, Mémoires, 1:289. Grétry’s description is repeated, for example, in Malherbe and Soubies, Histoire de l’Opéra-Comique, 1:67. “Ils sont restés confondus avec la masse, ils sont partie anonyme de cette synthèse féconde . . . qui forme un peuple.” Lacome, Les fondateurs de l’opéra-comique, v. See an assessment of this situation in Le ménestrel, 13 October 1867, 362. Fauser, “Gendering the Nations,” 88. Pasler, “Une nouvelle écoute de la Révolution,” 210– 212. On the latter claim, Pasler cites Édouard Schuré, who emphasized that “there is nothing false or pretentious within this [Grétry’s] music. Everything is wholesome and natural” (dans cette musique, rien de faux ni de prétentieux, tout est naturel et sain). Schuré, Le drame musicale (Paris: Sandoz & Fischbacher, 1875), 1:322. “En vassal et en serf.” Arthur Pougin, Figures d’opéra-comique: Mme Dugazon, Elleviou, les Gavaudan (Paris: Tresse, 1875), 5. This passage is discussed in Teulon Lardic, “Du lieu à la programmation,” 350. “Ce genre, éminemment aristocratique, est né dans les cours et dans les palais.” Tiersot, Histoire de la chanson populaire, 502. “Si ce genre doit beaucoup à la chanson populaire, il le lui a largement rendu.” Ibid., 527. Gustave Chouquet offered a similarly binary conception of French lyric institutions: if the Opéra was “a meeting place for the aristocracy” (lieu de rendez-vous de l’aristocratie), the producers of opéra comique constituted “the popular lyric theater,

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91. 92.

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one renowned for the creation of a genre that showcases our national genius” (populaire théâtre lyrique qui s’est illustré par la création d’un genre où brille notre génie national). Chouquet, Histoire de la musique dramatique en France (Paris: Librairie Firmin Didot Frères, Fils & Cie, 1873), 143. Fauser, Musical Encounters, 80. “Associer notre second théâtre national de musique au souvenir de la période révolutionnaire.” Le matin, 28 June 1889, 3. This review is also quoted in Fauser, Musical Encounters, 82. Fauser’s notes contain an overview of the most important critical responses to these performances, including Écho de Paris (7 July 1889), Gil Blas (7 July 1889), Le ménestrel 55 (1889), Le moniteur universel (1 July, 7 July, and 12 August 1889), and Le temps (8 July 1889). The proposed programming was outlined in The Musical World 69 (1889): 241. As Charles Darcours pointed out, it was a quizzical choice to inaugurate the series with the work “of an Italian composer who never once wrote anything for France.” Fauser, Musical Encounters, 87. The charming opera, wrote the critic Edyp, left “the spirit in a state of rest” (l’esprit beaucoup plus reposé) and “the mind calmed” (la tête beaucoup plus calme). Le moniteur universel, 7 July 1889, 3. Reviews in Gil Blas (7 July 1889), Le moniteur universel (7 July 1889), and Le temps (8 July 1889) all commented on the similarities between the operas of Grétry and Dalayrac. The anecdote about the banning of Raoul, sire de Créqui is reported by Pougin in Le ménestrel 55 (1889): 220. “Répondre que d’une façon imparfaite à l’excellente idée qui lui a donné naissance.” Le ménestrel 55 (1889), 102.

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INDEX

The letter t following a page number denotes a table, while the letter f following a page number denotes a figure. absolutism, 1, 14, 16– 17, 87, 121 Académie Royale de Musique (Opéra): competition with forains, 28, 39, 224n26; government subsidies for, 5, 222n11; modernization of repertory, 20, 94– 96, 154, 193; organizational structure of, 9, 223n24; and pastoral opera, 150– 58; rivalry with ComédieItalienne, 25, 39– 42, 107– 8, 114– 17, 119; theaters for, 40– 42, 75, 168; and theatrical monopoly, 3, 6, 9, 45, 116– 17. See also tragédie lyrique Adam, Adolphe: Richard Coeur de Lion (1841 revival), 205– 6 Adam de la Halle: Jeu de Robin et de Marion, 211 alexandrine (verse), 142, 176 Anfossi, Pasquale, 120; L’incognita perseguitata, 109t, 114– 15 Anseaume, Louis, 27, 28; Bertholde à la ville, 27; Le chinois poli en France, 27; Les deux chasseurs et la laitière, 133t;

L’école de la jeunesse, 59, 62; La nouvelle troupe, 43; Le peintre amoureux de son modèle, 102t; Le soldat magicien, 27, 68– 69 Archambault, Louis-François (Dorvigny): La rage d’amour, 101t; Roger Bontems et Javotte, 100t, 107 ariette, 26, 27, 36; and bienséance, 52– 54, 55 Ariosto, Ludovico: Orlando furioso, 127 Arnold, R. J., 95, 156– 57, 204– 5 Audinot, Nicolas-Médard: Le tonnelier, 49, 133t autrichienne en goguettes, L’, 118 Baccelli, Domenico: La bonne fille, 108, 109t, 110– 13, 120 Bach, Johann Christian, 109t Bachaumont, Louis Petit de, 92– 93; and the Mémoires secrets, 102, 118, 247n66, 253n28 Baculard d’Arnaud, François-ThomasMarie de: Sargines, 182– 84, 186

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ballet d’action, 118, 151– 55, 193 ballet héroïque, 35, 75– 77 Bambini, Eustachio, 11, 26 Barré, Pierre-Yves: La bonne femme, 100, 100t, 104– 5, 107; Constance, 101t; La matinée et la veillée villageoises, 133t; L’opéra de province, 100t, 106– 7, 247n66 Barry, Jeanne Bécu, comtesse du, 95 Bartlet, M. Elizabeth C., 132, 145, 163, 189 Baurans, Pierre: La servante maîtresse, 29, 120 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 55– 56; Eugénie, 56; Tarare, 193 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 201 Berlioz, Hector, 61, 205 Bernard, Pierre-Joseph-Justin: Castor et Pollux, 40, 88, 95, 100t, 101t, 103; Les surprises de l’amour, 102t Berton, Pierre: Adèle de Ponthieu, 177 Bertrand, Gustave, 211 bienfaisance (benevolence/charity), 143– 47 bienséance (theatrical decorum), 45– 55, 72, 74, 111, 156– 58 Billardon de Sauvigny, Edme-Louis: Péronne sauvée, 177; La rose, ou La fête de Salency, 144– 45 Blaise, Adolphe Benoît, 97f; Annette et Lubin, 52– 54; Isabelle et Gertrude, 133t Blanchard, Henri, 206 Bombelles, Marc Marie, marquis de, 129 Boufflers, Stanislas Jean, chevalier de, 75 Bouilly, Jean-Nicolas, 275n18; Léonore, 163; Pierre le Grand, 176 Boutet, Jacques-Marie (Monvel), 139, 256n64; Alexis et Justine, 140t; L’amant bourru, 139; Blaise et Babet, 140t, 144; L’erreur d’un moment, 140t, 256n71; Julie, 140t; Raoul, sire de Créqui, 176, 215; Sargines, 22, 159– 61, 176,

Index 179– 92, 181f, 194– 96, 195f; Les trois fermiers, 140t, 142, 144 branle des Capucins, Le, 118 Brenner, Clarence D., 169, 177, 264n50 Brunet, Marguerite (Mademoiselle Montansier), 113, 119, 249n91, 261n5 Buirette de Belloy, Pierre-Laurent: Le siège de Calais, 177 Burney, Charles, 27 Cailhava de l’Estandoux, François: La bonne fille, 108, 109t, 110– 13, 120 Caillot, Joseph, 58, 69 “Ça ira” (song), 204 Campan, Jeanne-Louise-Henriette, 129, 131 Campistron, Jean Galbert de: Acis et Galatée, 135, 157 Campra, André, 27 Casti, Giovanni Battista: Il re Teodoro in Venezia, 119; Lo sposo burlato, 109t Castil-Blaze (François-Henri-Joseph Blaze), 209; De l’opéra en France, 205 castrato, 110– 11 Catherine de’ Medici, 127 Charlemagne, 160, 161, 195 Charles Philippe, comte d’Artois (Charles X), 117, 131 Charlton, David, 11, 27, 65, 75– 76, 140t, 163, 170, 188 Cherubini, Luigi, 187, 209; Lodoïska, 163, 164, 172 Choiseul, Étienne François, duc de, 166, 240n90, 266n66 Choisy, 92, 93, 102, 150, 151, 222n12 Ciampi, Vincenzo, 149; Bertoldo in corte, 27, 258n97 Cimarosa, Domenico, 120 Clapisson, Antoine Louis: Frère et Mari, 206– 7 Clodomir, Pierre, 201

Index Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 4, 23– 26, 30; and Colbertism, 19, 24, 26, 30– 34, 38– 39, 153 Collé, Charles: L’isle sonante, 54 comédie (spoken), 7, 32, 37– 38, 48, 55, 91, 93, 176, 223n18 Comédie-Française, 2, 38, 56, 99, 131, 165, 167, 177, 179, 197, 214; competition with forains, 28; court performances of, 23, 32, 91; organization of, 5, 32 comédie héroïque. See opéra comique: “heroic” comedy Comédie-Italienne: branding strategies of, 172– 77; and court repertory, 35, 93, 96– 98, 140t; competition with OpéraComique, 28– 29, 229n28; costuming in, 58, 103; early history of, 7; finances of, 35, 168– 72; internal tensions, 37– 38; merger with Opéra-Comique, 2, 8, 19, 24– 25, 33– 38, 46– 47; nineteenthcentury historiography of, 214; organizational structure of, 5, 9, 37; and the Revolution, 193– 96, 197, 199f; rivalry with Opéra, 25, 39– 42, 103, 113– 16, 162, 171, 192; theaters for, 7, 35, 165– 68, 170. See also opéra comique; Salle Favart commedia dell’arte, 7, 37, 38, 118, 223n19 Contant d’Orville, André-Guillaume, 54; Manuel des châteaux, 132, 134, 254n41 Correspondance littéraire, 33, 34, 107, 132, 137 cosmopolitanism, 2, 4, 10– 15, 26, 34, 41, 47, 52, 68, 79, 86, 95, 107– 8, 118– 19, 154, 199, 210 Costumes et annales des grands théâtres de Paris, 180, 271n125 Coudard, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste (Desforges): L’épreuve villageoise, 123– 24, 140t, 141 Dalayrac, Nicolas-Marie, 11, 14, 96f, 212– 13; Raoul, sire de Créqui, 176, 215;

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Sargines, 22, 159– 61, 176, 179– 92, 194– 96, 195f; La soirée orageuese, 215 Dancourt, Louis-Hurtaut, 74; Ésope à Cythere, 40 Darlow, Mark, 7, 95, 108, 163, 164 Dauvergne, Antoine: La coquette trompée, 33; Les troqueurs, 27, 211 decorum (theatrical). See bienséance de Piis, Augustin: La bonne femme, 100t, 104– 5, 106; Constance, 101t; La matinée et la veillée villageoises, 133t; L’opéra de province, 100t, 106– 7, 247n66 Deshayes, François-Georges Fouques (Desfontaines): Le droit du seigneur, 140t, 141, 142, 172 Despréaux, Jean-Étienne, 99, 246n51; Berlingue, 100t; Christophe et Pierre Luc, 101t, 103; Momie, 101t; Romans, 101t; Syncope, reine de Mic-Mac, 101t, 103 Desprès, Jean-Baptiste-Denis: La bonne femme, 100t, 104– 5, 106; L’opéra de province, 100t, 106– 7, 247n66 de Vismes, Anne-Pierre-Jacques, 113, 116, 118, 154 de Wailly, Charles, 167 Dezède, Nicolas, 96f, 125, 139, 141; Alexis et Justine, 140t; Blaise et Babet, 140t, 144; L’erreur d’un moment, 140t, 256n71; Julie, 140t; Péronne sauvée, 177; Les trois fermiers, 140t, 142, 144 d’Hèle, Thomas (Thomas Hales): L’amant jaloux, ou Les fausses apparences, 92t, 133t dialogue opera. See opéra comique di Capua, Rinaldo: La zingara, 29 Diderot, Denis, 55– 56, 60, 70, 78; Discours sur la poésie dramatique, 58; Entretiens sur le fils naturel, 71, 78; Le fils naturel, 56; Le père de famille, 56. See also drame

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Directory, 194 drame (spoken), 12, 47– 48, 55– 60, 70– 71, 74, 137. See also Diderot, Denis Duni, Egidio, 11, 29, 47, 61, 86, 97f, 224n35; Les deux chasseurs et la laitière, 133t; L’école de la jeunesse, 59, 62; Les moissonneurs, 49; Le peintre amoureux de son modèle, 102t; Les sabots, 133t, 135– 36; Thémire, 92 Durazzo, Giacomo, 28, 40 Durosoy, Barnabé Farmian, 173, 182, 267n76; Les deux amis, ou Le faux vieillard, 109t; Dissertation sur le drame lyrique, 178– 79; Henri IV, 177; L’inconnue persécutée, 114– 15, 116 du Roullet, François-Louis Gand Le Bland: Alceste, 83, 100t, 103– 4, 108, 193; Iphigénie en Aulide, 71, 95, 101t Enlightenment, 1, 4, 10, 13, 18, 143, 199, 201 Escudier, Léon, 206 Estates-General, 159– 60, 192, 194 fantoccini français, Les, 118 Favart, Charles-Simon, 8, 28, 36, 40– 41, 211; L’amitié à l’épreuve, 56, 66, 92; L’anglais à Bordeaux, 92t; La bohémienne, 29; La coquette trompée, 33; Les ensorcelés, ou Jeannot et Jeannette, 102t; Isabelle et Gertrude, 133t; Les moissonneurs, 49; Ninette à la cour, 29, 119, 147– 58; La nouvelle troupe, 43; Raton et Rosette, 33, 101t; Les rêveries renouvelées des Grecs, 101t, 105 Favart, Marie-Justine-Benoîte, 58; Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne, 33, 58, 102t; Annette et Lubin, 52– 54; Les ensorcelés, ou Jeannot et Jeannette, 102t Fend, Michael, 86, 142, 193

Index fête de la rose (rose festival), 144– 45 Fétis, François-Joseph, 211 Fielding, Henry, 56 First French Empire, 22, 201, 204– 5 Floquet, Étienne-Joseph, 13, 94f Foire Saint-Germain, 7, 8f, 36. See also Opéra-Comique Foire Saint-Laurent, 7, 26, 36, 166, 211. See also Opéra-Comique Fontainebleau, 5, 14, 15, 20, 23, 25, 26, 33, 35, 86, 91– 92, 94, 97, 99, 109t, 114, 119, 125, 127, 138– 39, 140t, 141, 143, 145, 150, 151, 202, 222n12 forains (fair players). See Opéra-Comique Framery, Nicolas-Étienne, 79, 116, 215; La colonie, 109t, 120; L’Olympiade, ou Le triomphe de l’amitié, 109t, 115– 16 France musicale, La, 206, 207 Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, 90 Francoeur, François, 39 French Revolution: Comédie-Italienne during, 193– 96, 197, 199f; continuity and rupture, 4, 163, 192– 96, 215, 262n14; and faits historiques, 186, 194; historiography of, 22, 161, 163– 65, 200– 201, 214– 15; and musical aesthetics, 116, 160, 168, 170– 73, 182, 186– 88, 192, 203, 209; Opéra during, 7, 197; origins of, 16– 18, 84– 87, 96, 121 Galli de Bibiena, Jean: La nouvelle Italie, 43 Garcin, Laurent: Traité du mélo-drame, 12, 54, 72 Gardel, Maximilien, 157; La chercheuse d’esprit, 193; Le déserteur, 193; Ninette à la cour (1777 ballet d’action), 150– 54 Gaveaux, Pierre: Léonore, 163 Gilbert, Paul-César: Apelle et Campaspe, 49 Ginguené, Pierre-Louis, 79, 84; Les deux amis, ou Le faux vieillard, 110t; Pomponin, ou L’auteur mystifié, 110t

Index Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 11, 76, 94f, 94– 95, 115, 209, 247n66; Alceste, 83, 100t, 104– 5, 108, 193; Armide, 100t, 106– 7, 193; arrival in Paris, 40, 83– 87; Écho et Narcisse, 157; Iphigénie en Aulide, 71, 95, 101t; Iphigénie en Tauride, 101t, 105, 157, 193; and Marie Antoinette, 14– 15, 82, 89, 95, 96f; and musical “revolution,” 20, 83– 87, 95, 97, 117, 120; Orfeo ed Euridice, 107; Orphée et Eurydice, 100t, 107– 8, 109. See also querelles of Gluckistes and Piccinnistes Goldoni, Carlo, 27, 29, 149; La buona figliuola, 108, 109t, 110– 12 Gondot, Pierre-Thomas: Les gémeaux, 100t; Nanine, soeur de lait de la reine de Golconde, 100t Gossec, François-Joseph: Le tonnelier, 49, 133t Grétry, André-Ernest-Modeste, 11, 13, 14, 20, 47, 60, 64, 68, 74, 86, 94f, 125, 139, 163; L’amant jaloux, ou Les fausses apparences, 92t, 133t; L’amitié à l’épreuve, 56, 66, 92; Aucassin et Nicolette, 175, 176; La caravane du Caire, 193; Colinette à la cour, 154– 58; Le comte d’Albert, 176; Les deux avares, 13, 92; L’épreuve villageoise, 123– 24, 140t, 141; Le Huron, 56, 74, 79, 240n84; Lucile, 13, 56– 58; nineteenth-century veneration of, 204; Panurge dans l’isle des lanternes, 193; Pierre le Grand, 176; popularity at court, 95, 96f; Richard Coeur de Lion, 172, 175– 77, 200– 216; La rosière de Salency, 139, 140t, 145– 46; Silvain, 58; Zémire et Azor, 13, 237n49 Guerin de Frémicourt, Jean-Nicolas: Les ensorcelés, ou Jeannot et Jeannette, 102t; Les rêveries renouvelées des Grecs, 101t, 105

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Guillard, Nicolas-François: Iphigénie en Tauride, 101t, 105, 157, 193; Oedipe à Colone, 95, 193 Guimard, Marie-Madeleine (dancer), 152 Hasse, Johann Adolph, 89; Adriano in Siria, 53 Hédouin, Pierre: Mosaique, 209 “heroic” comedy. See under opéra comique Heurtier, Jean-François (architect), 166– 67 Hinner, Philipp Joseph, 90 historicism, 173, 176– 79, 180, 186, 202. See also opéra comique: “heroic” comedy Hoffman, François-Benoît, 172, 267n75; Ariodant, 163 Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, baron de: La morale universelle, 143 Hôtel de Bourgogne (theater), 7, 35, 165– 67, 170 Jaucourt, Louis de, 176 Johnson, James H., 17, 85, 163 Jommelli, Niccolò, 149 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, 94 Journal d’ariettes italiennes, 91 Journal des demoiselles, 206 Journal de Paris, 5, 6f, 106, 152, 167– 68, 171 Journal de politique et de littérature, 115– 16 Journal des savants, 212 Journal des spectacles, 88 Journal des théâtres, 52 July Monarchy, 204, 206 Kohaut, Josef: La closière, 92; Le serrurier, 49 Kreutzer, Rodolphe: Lodoïska, 163, 164, 171– 72

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La Borde, Jean-Benjamin de: Adèle de Ponthieu, 177; Gilles, garçon peintre, z’amoureux-t-et-rival, 102t Lacépède, Bernard Germain Étienne Médard de la Ville-sur-Illon, comte de, 51; Poétique de la musique, 49 La Chabeaussière, Ange-Étienne-Xavier Poisson de, 204 Lacome, Paul: Les fondateurs de l’opéracomique, 211, 213 La Garde, Pierre de: Aeglé, 135 Lagrave, Henri, 5 La Porte, Joseph de, 51 Laujon, Pierre: Aeglé, 135; L’amoureux de quinze ans, 140t, 141 Leclerc, Jean-Baptiste, 84– 85 Lefroid de Méreaux, Nicolas-Jean: Le duel comique, 109t; L’inconnue persécutée, 109t, 114– 15 Le Pileur d’Apligny, 51 Le Vacher de Charnois, Jean Charles, 188 Linguet, Simon-Nicholas Henri, 154 Lorenzi, Giovanni Battista: Il duello, 109t Louis XIV, king of France, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 30– 31, 86, 121, 157, 164 Louis XV, king of France, 26, 33, 83, 88, 93, 95, 99, 131 Louis XVI, king of France, 14, 26, 83– 85, 91, 126, 134, 139, 143, 159– 60, 177, 193, 196, 197, 203, 207; attitude toward lyric theater, 88, 102– 3 Louis-Philippe, king of the French, 207 Louis Stanislas Xavier, comte de Provence (Louis XVIII), 207 Lourdet de Santerre, Jean-Baptiste: Colinette à la cour, 154– 58 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 1, 4, 10– 11, 14, 20, 85– 86, 94f, 94– 95, 121, 245n39; Acis et

Index Galatée, 135, 157; Alceste, 104; Isis, 69; Persée, 88, 94; Thésée, 99 lyric drame. See under opéra comique Maria Theresa, empress of Austria, 89, 91, 134 Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, 127 Marie Antoinette, queen of France, 35, 169; artistic education of, 89– 91; charitable activities of, 143, 145– 47; criticisms of, 21, 87, 88– 89, 96, 97, 117, 128– 30, 135– 38, 146– 47; establishment of Petit Trianon, 126– 30; and Gluck, 14– 15, 82, 89, 95, 96f; musical progressivism of, 14, 18, 20– 21, 86– 87, 91– 97; patronage of translation-parody, 108, 113, 119– 20; patronage of vaudeville parody, 100– 107; and “society” theater, 132– 38; and theatrical hierarchy, 87, 97– 99, 118– 21; wedding of, 88. See also Petit Trianon; troupe des seigneurs Marie-Josèphe de Saxe, dauphine of France, 91 Marie Leszczyńska, queen consort of France, 88, 91 Marie Thérèse of France (Madame Royale), 143 Marmontel, Jean-François, 47, 143– 44; Didon, 88, 174, 193; Essai sur les révolutions de la musique en France, 83, 86, 111, 121, 249n90; Le Huron, 56, 74, 79, 240n84; Lucile, 13, 56– 58; Pénélope, 95, 101t, 103; Roland, 101t; Silvain, 58; Zémire et Azor, 13, 237n49 “Marseillaise, La” (song), 190, 204 Martini, Jean-Paul-Gilles, 14, 96f, 125, 139, 141; L’amoureux de quinze ans, 140t, 141; Le droit du seigneur, 140t, 141, 142, 172; Henri IV, 177

Index Masquelier, Louis Joseph (engraver): Les sabots, 136f Masson de Pezay, Alexandre: La rosière de Salency, 139, 140t, 145– 46 Méhul, Étienne-Nicolas, 171, 187, 272n132; Ariodant, 163 Mémoires secrets, 92– 93, 102, 118, 247n66, 253n28 Méneau, Léon, 209, 211 ménestrel, Le, 209, 211, 215 menus plaisirs du Roi (administrative bureaucracy), 5, 8– 9, 20, 23, 25, 32, 34, 35– 37, 39, 40, 86, 90, 91, 93, 97, 102, 141, 153– 54, 165, 260n4 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 55– 56, 222n13 Mercure de France, 13, 28, 29, 49, 54, 61, 76, 119, 155– 56, 157, 205 Mercy-Argenteau, Florimond Claude, comte de, 91, 93, 134 Metastasio, Pietro, 44; Adriano in Siria, 53; L’Olimpiade, 109t, 115– 16 mode, La, 207 Moline, Pierre-Louis: Le duel comique, 109t; L’inconnue persécutée, 109t, 114– 15, 116; Orphée et Eurydice, 100t, 107; Roger Bontems et Javotte, 100t, 108; Le roi Théodore, 119 Mondonville, Jean-Joseph de: Daphnis et Alcimadure, 102t; Les festes de Paphos, 35; Titon et l’Aurore, 101t Monnet, Jean, 26, 27, 61 Monsigny, Pierre-Alexandre, 11, 20, 47, 96f, 209, 279n66; Aline, reine de Golconde, 75– 77, 100t; Le déserteur, 57, 57f, 61– 63, 62f, 66– 67, 74, 76, 79, 213; L’isle sonante, 54; Le maître en droit, 28, 31, 76; On ne s’avise jamais de tout, 28, 33, 76, 92t, 133t, 135; Le roi et le fermier, 49, 62, 64– 65, 76, 92t, 133t, 137; Rose et Colas, 92t, 132, 133t, 134, 211

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Montansier, Mademoiselle. See Brunet, Marguerite Monvel. See Boutet, Jacques-Marie Musical World, The, 212 musique ancienne, 4, 11, 14– 15, 75, 85, 87, 90, 95, 117 Napoleon Bonaparte, 194, 196, 200, 204 nationalism, 13, 116, 192– 93, 199, 209– 13 Necker, Jacques, 143, 153, 259n107 Nougaret, Jean-Baptiste, 231n53; De l’art du théâtre, 54 Odéon (theater), 167, 278n48 Offenbach, Jacques, 208– 9 Opéra. See Académie Royale de Musique opera buffa, 4, 7, 9, 13, 28, 66, 91, 119, 149, 198, 211; in translation, 20, 87, 107– 16 opéra comique: blending of styles within, 4, 11– 13, 26– 27, 39, 43– 44, 47, 52– 54, 66, 68, 72, 107– 16, 183, 185, 188– 89, 198, 210– 11; and court repertory, 35, 93, 96– 98, 140t; defined, 7; dramatic conventions of, 48– 55; ensemble numbers within, 61– 63, 115, 142, 155, 171, 188– 89, 266n64; as global export, 13– 14, 32– 33, 225n42; “heroic” comedy, 21– 22, 172– 96, 267n76; lyric drame, 19– 20, 55– 74, 142, 183; nineteenthcentury reception of, 202– 16; orchestration within, 27, 65, 66, 72– 73, 78– 79, 183, 187– 89, 240n84, 257n73; and pastoralism, 21, 123– 26, 138– 47; and patriotism, 12– 14, 173, 177– 79, 180, 186, 188, 199, 210– 12; stage directions in, 59– 60; translation-parody, 107– 16, 118– 19, 215; vaudeville parody, 33, 98– 107, 174; “villageois” comedy, 132– 38. See also Comédie-Italienne; Marie Antoinette

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Opéra-Comique (fairground troupe), 7– 9, 16, 99; commercial success of, 26– 29, 33; costuming in, 58; historiography of, 32, 202, 214– 215; merger with Comédie-Italienne, 2, 8, 24– 26, 31– 38, 43– 47; restrictions against, 9, 52– 55; rivalry with Crown theaters, 2, 9, 19, 28– 29, 39– 41. See also Foire Saint-Germain; Foire SaintLaurent opera seria, 44, 71, 74, 89 operetta, 208 Paisiello, Giovanni, 109t, 114, 120, 183; Il barbiere di Siviglia, 215; Il duello, 109t; Il re Teodoro in Venezia, 119 Palais Royal, 166; fire at, 40, 75, 168 Papillon de la Ferté, Denis-Pierre-Jean, 23– 25, 29– 35, 36– 37, 39, 88, 93– 94, 103, 153– 54, 229n28 Paris World’s Fair (1889), 215 pastoralism: in literature, 124, 130; and opéra comique, 21, 123– 26, 138– 47; and Rousseau, 127– 28, 157; theories of, 143– 44. See also opéra comique; Petit Trianon Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 27, 52 Petit Trianon, 21, 91, 100, 103, 124– 25, 126– 30, 137, 146; théâtre de la reine, 131, 137 Petrosellini, Giuseppe: Il barbiere di Siviglia, 215; L’incognita perseguitata, 109t, 114– 15 Philidor, François-André Danican, 47, 68, 94f, 96f, 209; Blaise le savetier, 27, 49; Le bûcheron, 49, 69; Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège, 77– 82, 100t; Les fausses infidélités, 92t; Le jardinier et son seigneur, 36; Le maréchal ferrant, 27, 31, 33, 49, 50f; Sancho Pança dans son île, 43– 46, 79; Le soldat magicien,

Index 27, 68– 69; Le sorcier, 69– 70, 72, 92t, 133t, 278n48; Tom Jones, 56, 62, 72– 74, 78, 211 Philip Augustus of France, 160– 61, 180 physiocracy, 127– 28 Piccinelli, Maria Anna, 29 Piccinni, Niccolò, 83– 87, 94f, 95, 96f; Adèle de Ponthieu, 177; La buona figliuola, 108, 109t, 110– 12; Didon, 88, 174, 193; Pénélope, 95, 101t, 104; Phaon, 95; Roland, 101t; Lo sposo burlato, 109t Poinsinet, Antoine-Alexandre-Henri, 47; Apelle et Campaspe, 49; Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège, 77– 82, 100t; Sancho Pança dans son île, 43– 46, 79; Le sorcier, 69– 70, 72, 92t, 133t, 278n48; Tom Jones, 56, 62, 72– 74, 78, 211 Polignac, Yolande-Martine-Gabrielle de Polastron, duchesse de, 131 Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson d’Étoilles, marquise de, 88, 127, 135, 255n58 Pougin, Arthur, 211, 213– 15, 265n50 premiers gentilshommes, 24, 25, 29, 33, 34– 35, 37 privilège, 3, 5– 6, 9– 10, 45– 46, 97, 98, 115, 116– 21, 171, 222n14, 268n84; restrictions of, 9, 54– 55, 103, 235n29 public opinion, 17, 85, 106 querelle des bouffons, 8, 16– 17, 26, 69, 86, 108, 227n56 querelles of Gluckistes and Piccinnistes, 83– 87, 95– 96, 106– 7, 111, 251n124 Quétant, Antoine-François, 28, 49; Le maréchal ferrant, 27, 31, 33, 49, 50f; Le serrurier, 49 Quinault, Philippe: Alceste, 104; Armide, 100t, 105– 6, 193; Isis, 69; Persée, 88, 94; Thésée, 99

Index Racine, Jean: Iphigénie, 71 Radet, Jean-Baptiste: Constance, 101t; La soirée orageuese, 215 Raguenet, François: Parallèle des Italiens et des Français, 51 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 1, 4, 10, 14, 31, 40, 76, 85– 86, 94f; Castor et Pollux, 40, 88, 94, 100t, 101t, 103; Les surprises de l’amour, 102t Rebel, François, 39 recitative: in the lyric drame, 68– 74; récitatif obligé (obbligato recitative), 12, 44, 55, 68, 70– 74, 78– 81; regulations against, 9, 54– 55, 60, 235n29 Resnier, Louis-Pierre-Pantaléon: La bonne femme, 100t, 104– 5, 106; L’opéra de province, 100t, 106– 7, 247n66 Restoration, Bourbon, 204– 5, 207 revue et gazette musicale de Paris, La, 206, 208– 9, 212 Richardson, Samuel: Pamela, 110 Rigel, Henri-Joseph: Les deux amis, ou Le faux vieillard, 109t Robespierre, Maximilien, 196 roi soleil (sun king). See Louis XIV romance (aria form), 12, 60, 63– 68, 76, 142, 199, 241n93; “Une fièvre brûlante,” 201, 202, 205, 207, 212– 13 Ronsard, Pierre de, 127 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 26, 86, 94f, 127; Le devin du village, 11, 26, 33, 52, 63– 64, 92t, 102t, 133t, 157; Dictionnaire de musique, 63, 71; Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse, 127; Lettre sur la musique française, 69 Sacchini, Antonio, 94f, 95, 96f, 113, 183; Arvire et Évelina, 193; Chimène, 95; Il Cid, 109t; L’isola d’amore, 109t; Lucio Vero, 109t; Montezuma, 109t; Oedipe

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à Colone, 95, 193; L’Olimpiade, 109t, 115– 16; Tamerlano, 109t Saint-Laurent, Jean-François de, 143 Salieri, Antonio, 95; Les Horaces, 95; Tarare, 193 Salle Favart (theater), 22, 162, 163– 72, 173, 175– 76, 180, 193, 197, 231n58, 264n39, 266n66 Sarti, Giuseppe, 120 Sedaine, Michel-Jean, 28, 36, 47, 230n47; Aline, reine de Golconde, 75– 77, 100t; Aucassin et Nicolette, 175, 176; Blaise le savetier, 27, 49; Le comte d’Albert, 176; Le déserteur, 57, 61– 63, 62f, 66– 67, 74, 76, 79, 213; Les fausses infidélités, 92t; On ne s’avise jamais de tout, 28, 33, 76, 92t, 133t, 135, 230n47; Richard Coeur de Lion, 172, 175, 176, 200– 216; Le roi et le fermier, 49, 62, 64– 65, 76, 92t, 133t, 137; Rose et Colas, 92t, 132, 133t, 134, 211; Les sabots, 133t, 135– 36 Sellitto, Giuseppe: Il cinese rimpatriato, 27 sensibilité, 57, 61, 66, 68, 74, 76 Seven Years’ War, 19, 32, 91, 177 style entrecoupé. See recitative tableau (dramatic), 59, 171, 176 terrorisme musical (musical style), 187– 88 Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, 208 Théâtre Feydeau, 163, 261n10 Théâtre-Lyrique, 201, 208 Théâtre de Monsieur. See Théâtre Feydeau théâtre de la reine. See under Petit Trianon Théâtre des Variétés, 174 Third Republic, 22, 201, 210– 11, 214– 15 Thurner, A.: Les transformations de l’opéra comique, 210, 218 Tiersot, Julien: Histoire de la chanson populaire en France, 212, 214 tragédie (spoken), 48, 52, 55, 93, 176– 78

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tragédie lyrique: and absolutism, 1– 2, 14, 16; controversies over, 8, 16– 17, 26, 69, 83– 87, 96, 106– 8, 111, 227n56, 251n124; dramatic conventions of, 46, 48– 52; Gluckian “revolution” in, 11, 20, 83– 87, 94, 98, 117, 121; influence of lyric drame, 77– 82; as object of satire, 7, 20, 68– 69, 79, 99– 108; performance practice in, 59– 60, 69; waning influence of, 4, 12, 35, 96– 98. See also Académie Royale de Musique; musique ancienne translation-parody. See Marie Antoinette; opéra comique troupe des seigneurs, 21, 91, 92t, 117, 124, 130– 38, 147, 149; exclusivity of, 134, 138; repertory of, 125, 132, 133t, 135– 36, 139 Tschudi, Louis-Théodore de: Écho et Narcisse, 157 Vadé, Jean-Joseph: Jerôme et Fanchonette, 102t; Les troqueurs, 27, 211 vaudeville (popular tune), 1, 7, 26, 27, 36, 40, 43, 44– 45, 61, 90, 98, 99, 142, 223n22 vaudeville parody (theatrical genre). See under opéra comique Vaudreuil, Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, comte de, 131, 259n111 Velly, Paul-François: Histoire de France, 186

Index verisimilitude. See vraisemblance Versailles, 1, 4, 90, 91, 203; city theater, 114, 120; and court ceremony, 34, 86, 115, 118, 124, 137– 38, 159, 162; Musique du Roi, 32; Royal Opera (theater), 88, 89f, 125; theatrical programming at, 6, 14– 15, 20, 21, 23, 25, 33, 87, 91, 93, 94– 95, 99, 100– 102, 107– 8, 120, 123– 24, 133t, 139, 140t, 150– 51, 153, 202, 215. See also Petit Trianon Vigée Le Brun, Élisabeth Louise: Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress, 130, 138; Marie Antoinette with a Rose, 138 “villageois” comedy. See under opéra comique Vinci, Leonardo, 149 Voisenon, Claude-Henri de Fusée de: L’amitié à l’épreuve, 56, 66, 92; Daphnis et Alcimadure, 102t; La nouvelle troupe, 43; Titon et l’Aurore, 101t Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 32, 56, 83– 84 vraisemblance (verisimilitude), 51, 58, 60– 63, 76, 106, 175; of ensembles, 78; of gesture, 59– 60 Wagenseil, Georg Christoph, 89 Wagner, Richard: Tannhäuser, 209; and Wagnerism, 202 Weber, William, 11, 85, 117– 18