Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830-1914 (review)

Writing about French theater and music in nineteenth-century Paris is an enormous task. The multiple and interacting cultural, economic, and aesthetic contexts—each essential to the success of a theatrical or musical work—complicate a historical study. Imagine finding a path among the tangled multitude of theaters, each regulated by specific legal receipts and assigned to a distinct genre; understanding particular administrators and opera directors and their definite aesthetic and political agendas; appreciating the vast number of talented and famous performers and their demands; and, of course, placing the numerous composers and their variety of styles in this multifaceted context. It is not an easy undertaking. In addition, keeping track of the everchanging political and socioeconomic scene from monarchy to republic and the resulting shifts in both taste and administration are the makings of any scholar's torment.

Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer, however, attends to all these concerns with clarity, reliability, and cleverness. A collection of sixteen studies on French opera and ballet, it focuses on Parisian opera institutions and their cultural and administrative contexts to explain the development of music and theater in Paris between 1830 and 1914, and how artistic works (mostly operas) were adapted to the circumstances of that time period. These collected works are the elaborate result of the 2004 international symposium "The Institutions of Opera in Paris from the July Revolution to the Dreyfus Affair," co-organized by Annegret Fauser and the late M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet.

The approach of the book's sixteen renowned contributors is neither formal, since the focus is not predominantly on scores' and librettos' structures; nor purely biographical, since the persons in question are viewed in a broad context. Instead, the history of the institutions is portrayed as a mosaic in which the manifold influences and contexts play a role in the creation and production of operas. The contributing scholars skillfully explain how individuals (composers, performers, critics, administrators, and audience members), as well as the place and time in which they lived and worked, played pivotal roles in the success or failure of theatrical and operatic productions. To do so, they source and refer to original documents (e.g., minutes, annals, and correspondence), nineteenth-century publications (journals and newspapers), unpublished and published scores and librettos, and recent studies on opera and dance. Carefully and knowledgeably edited, the book contains beautiful pictures of theaters, portraits, journal clippings, and useful graphics.

Editors Fauser and Everist cleverly framed the volume in three parts: "Institutions," "Cultural Transfer," and "The Midi and Spain, or Autour de Carmen." Part 1 illustrates the intriguing histories and stories of the most important Parisian opera theaters: the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, the Théâtre-Lyrique, the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, the Théâtre-Italien, and the Théâtre de la Gaîté. These institutions come to life through the actions and opinions of tenor Jean-Baptiste Chollet in Olivier Bara's first chapter; theater director Léon Carvalho in Lesley Wright's fifth chapter; the several theater managers at the time of the Second Empire in Katharine Ellis' third chapter; composers/ administrators Fromental Halévy in Diana R. Hallman's second chapter and Jacques Offenbach in Mark Everist's fourth chapter; and composer-critic Victorin Joncières in David Grayson's sixth chapter.

Part 2 addresses the arguably ambiguous issue of cultural transfer. In the introduction, the editors explain, "cultural transfer deals with the transport of cultural materials from one domain to another" (p. 6). Although the concept of cultural transfer has been used in anthropological, sociological, and cross-cultural criticism, this section of the book—and, in fact, the whole book—presents the issue for the first time in a thorough musicological study by offering compelling and thought-provoking examples. And, although embracing the same theme, each chapter uses the idea of cultural transfer in a unique way—from discussions on the...