Marvelous Machines: Revitalizing Enlightenment Opera

As soon as Music had learned to portray and to speak, the charms of feeling soon caused those of the wand to be neglected, the Theater was purged of the jargon of Mythology, interest was substituted for merveilleux, the machines of the Poets and of the Carpenters were destroyed and lyric Drama took a more noble and less gigantic form. All that could move the heart was employed in it with success, there was no longer need to impress upon it with beings of reason or rather of folly, and the Gods were chased from the Stage when they learned how to represent men.

—Rousseau, "Opéra," Dictionary of Music, 1768¹

In his musical dictionary of 1768, Jean-Jacques Rousseau provides a brief history of the relationship between music and machines on the operatic stage, describing the visual spectacle as a necessary evil, a provisional stand-in for the music until such time as composers learn to touch rather than dazzle the spectator. His account of the gradual elimination of the merveilleux from opera in the course of the eighteenth century has since become a critical commonplace.² And yet Rousseau was referring specifically to Italian opera, implicitly holding it up as a model for French operatic reform. This essay investigates the reform of French opera in the wake of Rousseau's remarks, focusing on the five-act tragic operas that Christoph Willibald Gluck composed for Paris in the years 1774-79, including Armide and the two Iphigénies.

My essay broadens the investigation of the relationship between music and machines—the subject of this issue of Opera Quarterly—by considering the relationship between machines and the marvelous, terms that were traditionally associated on the French operatic stage and that became interchangeable in the pages of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers. My reading of Gluck's Parisian reform operas in conjunction with eighteenth-century theory and criticism leads me to question the notion that composers and librettists gradually eliminated the marvelous, understood as both supernatural and spectacle, in order to make way for meaningful music. I thus build upon the dissenting opinion or minority view once expressed by Aubrey S. Garlington, Jr. in "'Le Merveilleux' and Operatic Reform in 18th-Century French Opera." I then bring to bear recent studies of the shift from mechanism to vitalism in eighteenth-century France in order to suggest that the perpetuation of the marvelous on the operatic stage is less at odds with Enlightenment philosophy than it may seem.

The term "merveilleux" traditionally referred to interventions of the supernatural in the everyday, which were common and to be expected in epics, fairy tales, and operas. In opera, however, the term also came to designate the stage machinery that rendered such interventions possible. This dual definition is apparent in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie. The anonymous author of the article "Merveilleux" provides an example drawn from classical antiquity: "the intervention of Pagan gods in the poems of Homer and Virgil." He then remarks: "The decadence of mythology necessarily entails the exclusion of this sort of marvelous from modern poems. But . . . is it not permitted to introduce angels, saints, and demons in its stead?"³ Here the term "marvelous" clearly refers to interventions of the supernatural, whether of a pagan or a Christian turn. Yet the author then proposes the synonym "Machines," under which we find: "Among the ancients, these machines included the gods, good or bad genies, the shades. . . . They derived their name from the machines or inventions that were used to enable them to appear or disappear onstage in a manner that resembled the marvelous."⁴ Not only did the term "marvelous" that originally referred to deities come to refer to machines, therefore, but the term "machines" eventually came to refer to deities. Machines and the marvelous are thus so inextricably linked in the history of French opera that by midcentury the term "machines" could be used to refer to gods and demons and the term "marvelous" to the machinery that...