Opera History, the Travel Edition

This book has been in my bag for a long time and, on reflection, I am glad that I have read it gradually. When the central premise is so simple – Grand Opera Outside Paris is, indeed, about Grand Opera outside Paris – the payback comes in the detail of individual chapters and the slow emergence of a Europe-wide survey of encounter and exchange. The volume's editor, Jens Hesselager, provides an erudite and generous introduction, beginning with the familiar difficulty of defining grand opera and the importance of attending to specific performance contexts. In the first instances, of course, this meant the Paris Opéra, and Hesselager draws our attention to Sarah Hibberd's observation that the coherence of the genre was initially established ‘more through the licensing requirements of [this] institution than by [any] specific dramatic content’ (1). From here, the introduction gently encourages us to look outward.

Operatic Competition

The impact of the café-concert on the activity of residential opera companies was significant in French towns with significant working-class populations. Among stage-music genres, operetta was also a threat because it was staged by secondary theaters (and by café-concerts in breach of their licenses) and because large numbers of bourgeois patrons preferred it to either Grand Opera or opéra-comique. These forms of competition for licensed managers for opera and spoken theater characterize the 1850s onward, resulting in heated exchanges with all layers of local and national government and debates about how to preserve operatic decorum and status in the face of operetta’s popularity. A notable exception is 1870s Strasbourg, where French operetta acts as a vehicle of resistance. The role of touring companies (often from Paris) as a centralist threat to the resident company from the 1880s, especially, is contrasted with their enrichment of smaller towns; the increase in guest artists (often Parisian too) is discussed as a factor in the longer-term shrinking of permanent opera company personnel. A coda examines the often brutal impact of broadcast technology on opera management and audiences in the 1920s and 1930s.

Opera against the Odds

Until 1864, provincial opera operated within a Napoleonic system designed to ensure hierarchically ordered provision for large and smaller towns nationwide and in the colonies. Discussion of how the system worked, how it was funded, how it served indirectly to erase regional difference, and how raw material from Paris (Grand Opera and the voice types it required) became too expensive, helps explain why the system was already at a breaking point by the 1830s, catalyzing heated local and local–national debates. The significance of provincial opera’s travails, its competitors in the entertainment sector from café-concert to radio, and the importance of two regional triumphs—Wagner and open-air opera—become clear in the light of this Paris-generated organizational history. Considerations of decentralization shift at this point to those of the tensions between genre of “national opera” and the centrifugal forces of cultural regionalism (with its attendant identitarian concerns), using the nature and significance of operatic “local color” as a test bed.

«Huguenots» by J. Meyerbeer in the context of spiritual-Christian quests of the era of romanticism

The purpose of the article is to identify the poetical and intonational features of J. Meyerbeer’s «Huguenots» in the context of the spiritual quest of romanticism, the evolution of French musical theater in the first half of the 19th century and its mystery component. The methodology of the work is the intonation concept of music from the perspective of intonation-stylistic analysis inherited from B. Asafiev and his followers. The analytical-musicological, genre-style, interdisciplinary, historical and cultural approaches are also essential for this work, revealing the spiritual and moral specifics of the poetics of the French «grand opera» and its mystery primary sources using the example of J. Meyerbeer's «Huguenots». The scientific novelty of the work is determined by its analytical perspective, focused on the consideration of the «Huguenots» by J. Meyerbeer in the context of the spiritual-Christian quests of the romantic era. Conclusions. The poetics of J. Meyerbeer’s opera «Huguenots», which is one of the exemplary examples of «grand» French opera, was formed at the intersection, on the one hand, of creative discoveries in the field of French musical theater of the first half of the 19th century and its vocal and performing stage practice. On the other hand, the named work demonstrates a deep connection with the mysterious traditions of the French spiritual theater, dating back to the Middle Ages, to the spiritual, religious and stylistic attitudes of the musical theater of French classicism («lyric tragedy» by J. B. Lully) and at the same time consonant with the religious quests of romanticism and the moral and ethical positions of French historicism. The essential role of religious confrontation in the Huguenots, which determinesthe intonational and dramatic specificity of the work, right down to the quotations of the Lutheran chant, ultimately focuses on the «collegiality of the highest order», which overcomes confessional barriers, defining the spiritual and moral pathos of the French «grand opera» and its spiritual attitudes.

How Reliable Are Nineteenth-Century Reviews of Concerts and Operas?: Félicien David's Le Désert and His Grand Opéra Herculanum

The vast quantity of French-language music journalism and reportage in the nineteenth century can tempt us into citing one or another review that reflects our own view of the topic or work. We sometimes state or imply that a review stands for the attitudes and opinions of most musicians and music lovers of the day. The idiosyncratic career of Félicien David was reported with great interest and vivacity by dozens of critics. Selected reviews reveal patterns that apply not just to David's works, but to nineteenth-century music generally. These patterns include: 1) the greater reliability of reviews by critics who were musically trained (e.g., Berlioz, Reyer, Gounod and Saint-Saëns), despite the possibility of bias; 2) critics sometimes conferring with each other before they wrote their review, or echoing each other's written opinions; 3) a willingness on the part of some critics to carry out a near-vendetta against a composer or work, whether for personal reasons (e.g., conflict of interest) or because of a deep-seated intolerance for any aesthetic and musical approaches that were at variance with the critic's own; 4) the sense of a positive mission, in writings by critics who were themselves prominent creative artists (see point 1); and 5) the power of a review to help determine the success or failure of a work, composer, or performer. A recently published letter by Berlioz (translated here for the first time) reveals how conscious this remarkable composer-critic was of his own biases and aesthetic commitments, and how willingly he allowed them to shape his reaction to a new work by a younger, lesser-known composer. The responses of Berlioz and others to two works of David, Le Désert and Herculanum, provide the primary material for discussion. These responses include an insightful and previously undiscussed review (of Herculanum) by Ernest Reyer.

The 1890s

Arthur Sullivan’s final decade was overshadowed by increasing and debilitating ill health and growing criticism of the light-weight nature of his work by critics associated with the English Musical Renaissance centred around two younger composers, C.H. Parry and C.V. Stanford. Sullivan did at last produce the grand opera, Ivanhoe (1891), which he had wanted to write for so long. He also continued to write comic operas for the Savoy Theatre, most of them with librettists other than Gilbert. He wrote a ballet and a hymn tune for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, set a patriotic song by Rudyard Kipling to raise funds for the families of troops serving in the Boer War, and wrote a Te Deum to be used when that war ended. He died in 1900, mourned and remembered as much as a church musician and for his sacred works as for his comic operas.

The Evolution of French Opera Repertories in Provincial Theaters

Which operas did people most often watch in France—all over France, that is—in 1780, 1820, 1860, and 1890? How did provincial theaters compare with those in Paris, where the great majority of operas originated? This chapter aims to correct the unduly narrow focus on Paris traditionally followed in histories of French opera. The chapter shows how old, indeed canonic, repertories were created in Paris, which then were performed in such cities as Rouen, Bordeaux, and Lyon. It traces how repertories emerged, focusing variously on works by Gluck, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Verdi, and Wagner. The most important respect in which provincial theaters differed from those in Paris was the close intermingling in a single theater of pieces in different genres—opéra comique, grand opéra, and opérette. This chapter is paired with Yannick Simon’s “The mingling of opera genres: Canonic opera at the Théâtre des Arts in Rouen, 1882–1897.”

Grand Illusion

Grand Illusion is a new history of grand opera as an art of illusion facilitated by the introduction of gaslight illumination at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) in the 1820s. It contends that gas lighting and the technologies of illusion used in the theater after the 1820s spurred the development of a new lyrical art, attentive to the conditions of darkness and radiance, and inspired by the model of phantasmagoria. Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno have used the concept of phantasmagoria to arrive at a philosophical understanding of modern life as total spectacle, in which the appearance of things supplants their reality. The book argues that the Académie became an early laboratory for this historical process of commodification, for the transformation of opera into an audio-visual spectacle delivering dream-like images. It shows that this transformation began in Paris and then defined opera after the mid-century. In the hands of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Robert le diable, L’Africaine), Richard Wagner (Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde), and Giuseppe Verdi (Aida), opera became an expanded form of phantasmagoria.

Aida, Egyptomania, and the After-life of Grand Opera

This chapter explores three related themes present in Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida: the nexus between the imaginative display of the flute and the wider nineteenth-century fascination with ancient Egypt; Verdi’s turn to the affective poetics of phantasmagoria—its focus on loss, mourning and consolation—as he mobilized grand opera for the project of empire in the 1870s; and finally, his timely consideration of the lyrical voice of Aida, which calls attention to the role of memory in listening to opera and comments on the spectral nature of grand opera, suggesting that it survives in operatic modernity as a musical after-image, that is, a trace of a past musicality that potentiates the critical awareness of opera today.