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  • Théâtre et opéra à l’âge classique: Une familière étrangeté
  • Jacqueline Waeber
Théâtre et opéra à l’âge classique: Une familière étrangeté. By Catherine Kintzler. pp. 335. Les Chemins de la musique. (Fayard, Paris, 2004. €20. ISBN 2-213-62125-X.)

For many readers whose education in French musical aesthetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth [End Page 639] centuries is greatly indebted to the philosopher Catherine Kintzler's two monographs, Jean Philippe Rameau: Splendeur et naufrage de l'esthétique du plaisir à l'âge classique (Paris, 1983, 2nd edn. 1988) and Poétique de l'opéra français de Corneille à Rousseau (Paris, 1991), this new publication in what remains her preferred field of study will be more than just a return visit, considering that since 1991 she has not published a book-length study on musical aesthetics.

In many ways, Poétique de l'opéra français was an implicit second volume of her Jean Philippe Rameau, since it pursues the exploration of the aesthetic système (to use one of the author's most cherished words) that defines classical French opera. A comparison of Théâtre et opéra à l'âge classique with the two previous books seems inevitable, as is a confrontation with other, more recent publications, notably Downing A. Thomas's Aesthetics of the Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785 (Cambridge, 2002). Furthermore Kintzler's book appears in a fertile period for studies on French opera of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—as already stressed by Buford Norman in his review of Thomas's book in this journal (Vol. 86 (2005), 626–9). These studies, however, concentrate on the tragédie en musique. The 1750s watershed, as epitomized by the Querelle des Bouffons, is still a problematic topic to deal with for any study primarily concerned with French classical aesthetics of opera, perfectly adapted to seventeenth-century metaphysical rationalism, but far less comfortable when perceived through the prism of the Enlightenment. (As for the other recent publications that Norman mentions in his review, it should be stressed that their chronological limit does not go beyond the 1730s, except for Thomas's, which takes us to the 1780s).

Here Kintzler remains largely on the same track as in her first book, perceiving the 'Siècle éclairé' as a debased version of the previous century. Opera itself has turned into a 'softened' theatre where the 'merveilleux' has lost its priority, notably at the expense of moral edification (p. 192; this point is, essentially, discussed through the conclusion of the 'Entrée des Incas' from Fuzelier's Les Indes galantes, where the librettist painstakingly justified the 'vraisemblance' of the volcanic eruption as a strictly natural phenomenon, and Huascar's punishment as its 'morally correct' consequence).

Kintzler has limited her approach to the post-1750s period to Gluck and Mozart (whose presence here is puzzling), and the way she integrates these two in the final chapter is one of the main weaknesses of her book. Nowhere has she tried to link the decline of the tragédie en musique to the rise of theatrical 'sensibilité' and its most direct musical consequence, the opéra comique—at least Thomas integrated the opéra comique even if he left open the question of the displacement of the 'merveilleux'.

Since her book is a collection of fourteen essays (including the introduction), most of which have been published before and are presented here in expanded versions, a justification for such a volume would have been a general cohesiveness, and not just a line of defence that can be summarized by the title of her introduction, 'L'Opéra, un théâtre déplacé'. And however clearly this cohesiveness is presented in the opening pages, the threefold structure of the book does nothing to disguise the fact that several of the chapters have been gathered together in a rather contrived manner.

Part I, 'Le Partage des deux scènes (1)', is theatre-oriented, while Part II, 'Le Partage des deux scènes (2)', focuses on opera and more specifically on the question of the 'merveilleux' and the 'spectaculaire'. The dialectic contrast is well justified by these...

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