Etienne-Nicolas Mehul and Opera: Source and Archival Studies of Lyric Theatre during the French Revolution, Consulate and Empire (review)

M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet's dissertation on Méhul and opera, completed in 1982 at the University of Chicago, has earned itself the iconic status reserved for the few doctoral theses that are destined to change their chosen field. Its great size and complexity precluded any easy transition into book form; and of course, for a long time, Chicago theses were unavailable in the usual way via UMI. The eventual solution as to publication was to retain the core features, update the work in a limited way where necessary, and avoid any large-scale or conceptual alteration of the project. The present two volumes therefore stand as an indispensable text and as a fundamental work that must form part of any music library or private collection with pretensions to a wide coverage of research materials.

Behind its dry-sounding title, the book deals in detail with most of the issues affecting the composition and mounting of opera (not, however, its execution, or in terms of public reception) during a key period that is egregiously neglected and difficult to research. It unlocks hundreds of secrets regarding the three chief Paris opera theatres of the day, their libraries, archives, procedures, and politics. Since the research covers all this material up to 1817, when Méhul died of tuberculosis, this material must be required reading for any student of nineteenth-century French opera, whose institutional habits were well formed by that year. Not simply is the case of Méhul taken as representative of all composers; the study of it becomes a virtuoso exercise in archival groundwork and interpretation.

It will be as well to explain the book's design, which falls into three different portions. In the opening 160 pages, we have almost a separate book on the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and (to a limited extent) the Théâtre Feydeau. It covers all the things that we tend to think least about during the Revolutionary period: continuity, procedures, formation of archives, the characteristics of music paper. Piece by piece the picture is assembled whereby we can understand the contractual and artistic relations between authors and institutions, things which in many respects did not change greatly between the last years of the old century and the first years of the new. So closely were aspects of the Feydeau comparable with those at the Favart (the home of the Opéra- Comique), that they can be treated in parallel, and their fusion in 1801 taken to be worthy of no great disjunctions in the narrative—especially as there was such happy preservation of some Feydeau material within the Opéra-Comique collections, which themselves (as Bartlet skilfully shows) escaped destruction and became absorbed gradually into various national collections. But this did not occur in any logical or unified manner. The trick is to understand what lies where, and Bartlet's patient excavations on every front lay before us the possibility of many future studies, and are presented with many counsels of perfection. I shall return later to this part of the book, which has, nevertheless, been complemented recently by Alessandro Di Profio's La Révolution des Bouffons: l'opéra italien au Théâtre de Monsieur 1789-1792 (Paris, 2003).

The second principal portion deals work by work with Méhul's operatic oeuvre and adopts a simple chronological trajectory, except for the youthful unpublished music. Works are discussed with reference to origins, performances, sources, versions, and contexts. Different topics are focused on as appropriate, sometimes with general applicability, sometimes with only particular relevance. The level of scrutiny is literally complete, or feels as though it is: every available document relevant to every opera has been researched, scrutinized, and evaluated; especially revealing (here and...