Eighteenth-Century French Musical Theatre

One of the methodological challenges for eighteenth-century French studies is the reconstruction of a literary culture which, while seemingly so familiar to a modern reader, nevertheless combined objects that our own disciplinary and institutional culture casts asunder. However overused the term ‘interdisciplinarity’ may be, the phenomenon was so much a part of the early modern cultural landscape that any narrow literary study of the canonical authors of the period risks obscuring and falsifying that landscape by excluding whatever material, according to our own criteria, looks marginal or minor, despite the influence of that material in its own period. Charles Collé spoke for many when he asked rhetorically, ‘Quelle importance peut-on attacher à des chansons?’¹ Yet, as scholars have shown in recent decades, song was so integral to eighteenth-century French culture that theatre in which speech and music were mixed threatened to outstrip regular theatre and through-composed opera in terms of public approval; Bricaire de La Dixmérie famously defended the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique by calling on the Opéra to ‘légitimer un bâtard devenu plus riche que lui’.² Gustave Attinger stated trenchantly in 1950 that the site of genuine theatrical experimentation in the eighteenth century was the Foires and the Comédie-Italienne.³ Although the legitimation Dixmérie called for has been slow to arrive, renewed interest has been shown in the variety of theatrical practice that developed during the eighteenth century; it seems appropriate, therefore, to take stock, not least because of the different institutional contexts in which this work continues to be carried out, and because the very diversity of forms concerned defies easy definition and generalization. My discussion will focus on the field of spoken theatre incorporating musical elements, whether sung, instrumental, or incidental. This in itself constitutes a huge range of material, from Beaumarchais’s and Marivaux’s comedies, which, like most of their contemporaries’ works, included terminal songs (divertissements and vaudevilles), through the various types of opéra-comique that proliferated, to the late eighteenth-century mélodrame of Pixérécourt and others, which combined spoken drama and instrumental music. I shall not consider ‘through-composed’ opera with recitative, which is too broad a field and more suited to review in musicological journals; nor shall I discuss the comédie-ballet, which, though a spoken drama with moments of music and dance, does not pose the same kinds of problem of word–music integration.

The question of word–music integration is itself a fascinating field that reaches far beyond theatre studies. The pioneering works of John Neubauer (1986) and Downing Thomas (1995) reveal that language was a conceptual matrix for the ways in which eighteenth-century thinkers conceived of aesthetics, anthropology, or history writing, among other disciplines.⁴ Rooting their discussions in a conjectural history that posited an ideal origin of human culture, Enlightenment theorists were led to the tantalizing and ultimately paradoxical relation of writing, speech, and vocality. Claude Dauphin’s recent edited volume Musique et langage chez Rousseau demonstrates how central these elements were for that particular philosophe; similarly, Andrew Clark has made a case for the pervasive importance of music for Diderot.⁵ Neubauer’s study focuses on ‘problems’ with, or tensions inherent in, the eighteenth-century theory of imitation: as is well known, until mid-century at least music was annexed to other arts of representation via ut pictura poesis, which received renewed discussion in abbé Batteux’s Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe of 1746.⁶ Yet a debate soon emerged and intensified, involving most of the philosophes, concerning the question of music’s potential to ‘signify’ independently of verbal language; it culminated in texts by Chabanon and Boyé, the former asserting the absolute autonomy of music as signifying practice, and the latter reducing musical expression to a mere chimera.⁷ Downing Thomas, in his Music and the Origins of Language, examines the role of music as ‘missing link’ in the ‘eighteenth-century attempt to trace semiosis to its origin, to pinpoint the semiotic moment which separates culture from nature, men from animals’.⁸ This...