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  • Dramaturgie de la tragédie en musique: 1673–1764
  • Michael Hawcroft
Dramaturgie de la tragédie en musique: 1673–1764. By Laura Naudeix . Paris, Champion, 2004. 583 pp. Hb €95.00.

This is a generously informed and solidly structured account of a form of musical and dramatic entertainment, known then as tragédie and now, anachronistically, as opéra, that flourished in France for a hundred years from the 1670s to the 1760s and whose most famous practitioners are its originators, the composer Lully and the librettist Quinault. The book is distinct from recent studies like Camille Guyon-Lecoq's La Vertu des passions (2002) and Jean-Noël Laurenti's Valeurs morales et religieuses sur la scène de l'Académie Royale de Musique (2002), in [End Page 514] that these works offer thematic studies, whereas Naudeix is interested strictly in the formal structures that make up the genre. The remit is, however, broader than that of another predecessor, Cuthbert Girdlestone's La Tragédie en musique considérée comme un genre littéraire (1972), for Naudeix is constantly aware of the genre's hybrid nature. Although she does not seek to write as a musicologist or as a specialist in choreography, she sees the librettist as one link in a chain, though an important one, bringing together the different interests of composers, choreographers and scenic artists. Naudeix's ambition is to do for tragédie en musique what Jacques Scherer did for spoken theatre of the seventeenth century in his La Dramaturgie classique (1950), namely to identify the underlying structural principles that govern the form of a complex spectacle. Whilst she is aware of changes over time, she puts the emphasis on the structural unity of the genre.

The work is made up of six chapters, the first of which deals with the choice of subject, typically mixing pastoral and supernatural with mythological and romanesque and on the passions associated with love rather than politics, such a mixture being thought more susceptible of vraisemblable treatment in music than the choice of subjects typical of spoken tragedy. Chapter 2 focuses on the use of stage space, which is more complex than in spoken tragedy, since the genre relies on striking spectacle and requires changes of set and the use of machinery. The next two chapters dwell on prologues, usually substantial, which relate the genre to the historical circumstances of the composition of individual works and particularly to the royal patronage on which the genre is ultimately dependent, and on the shifting patterns of versification and their relationship to the different forms of communication between characters. Chapter 5 analyses the integration of dance into the whole and the sixth and final chapter engages with the dramaturgical simplification dictated by the needs of a hybrid form. Future work on tragédie en musique will have to engage with this book, which is a rich mine of facts and synthesis.

Michael Hawcroft
Keble College, Oxford
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