Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism by David Charlton (review)

David Charlton’s most recent book focuses on opera in Paris during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, beginning with high Rameau and concluding with Gluck’s arrival on the French operatic scene. The volume comes as close as possible to describing what French ‘musical Enlightenment’ might be (if this is an appropriate term, which is certainly debatable), even though the author makes no such claim for his study. Charlton traces the subtleties of musical innovation, the shifts of public opinion, and the institutional, financial, and aesthetic pressures that pushed opera in new directions. The tables themselves are a standout resource, offering synthetic information on the repertory, as, for example, in Table 13.2, which includes the performance history and literary and musical sources of three-act operatic comedies during the period. The first chapter opens with an excellent overview of ‘princely’ opera, in particular the operatic activities in which the Marquise de Pompadour had an active hand at court. Charlton is more sympathetic than many scholars to Rousseau’s Le Devin du village, and his extremely useful contextual analysis demonstrates the work’s (often contested) relevance to contemporary French operatic practice. While it is easy to see a face-off between the French and Italian styles in eighteenth-century operatic debates, Charlton offers the kind of nuanced analysis of the ‘creative emulation’ (p. 281) and ‘cross-pollination’ (p. 286) that only a detailed historical reading permits. He emphasizes the importance of acting style and visceral effect to these repertories, indeed to the music itself. His analysis, in Chapter 8, of the various journals’ engagement in opera will be of particular interest to scholars of theatre and its reception. Despite its formal status as official publication (although it was less closely monitored than some may assume during the period), Charlton argues that the Mercure de France ‘became an agent’ (p. 223) in the reform process through which French opera adopted new modes of expression. The status that he assigns to Jean-Georges Noverre remains somewhat ambiguous in this chapter: on the one hand, he acknowledges the importance of Noverre to the history of dance and performance; on the other, he appears to be making the case that the criticisms that Noverre levels at eighteenth-century theatrical practice were facile because operatic reforms had been under way for some time. The final chapters focus on the texts and contexts surrounding the success of comédies mêlées d’ariettes. Exploring works by Rameau, Boismortier, and Mondonville, Charlton leads up to a final section on Philidor’s Ernelinde, which he considers ‘the most serious rupture in subject-matter at the Opéra’ since the first decades of the century (p. 378). While Charlton offers no argument from start to finish, the chapters form a whole that breaks new ground and certainly adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Given that parodies at the Comédie-Italienne have not received the attention they deserve in the scholarly record, readers will be eager to see the companion study on the subject that Charlton announces as forthcoming (p. 133 n. 5).