Romantic Empowerment at the Paris Opera in the 1770s and 1780s

This article responds to recent criticisms of the historiography of musical epochs. Instead of associating the rise of romanticism with the otherworldliness of instrumental music, as embraced by some German writers around 1800, this article focuses on the Romantics’ rebellion against monarchical norms as evidenced at the Paris Opéra, where in the 1770s and 1780s artists sought to appropriate values that, if enacted, could replace existing political realities. Opera librettos by Metastasio, Calzabigi, and some Parisian authors reveal the gradual rise of a bourgeois subject, who increasingly revolted against social attitudes based on honour and instead embraced attitudes based on ethical and political virtue, a distinction described by Montesquieu as representing that between monarchical and republican government. Reinhart Koselleck’s thesis of a cleavage between a ‘space of experience’ and a ‘horizon of expectation’ in the late eighteenth century serves to conceptualize the cultural dynamic of a near absolute independence of artistic spirit, which came most notably to fruition in Beaumarchais and Salieri’s Tarare (1787). Here the politically revolutionary and unbounded Romantic turns intertwined. Art seemed sovereign, offering a utopian future. This history of late eighteenth-century Parisian opera contributes to a study of romanticism that does not take an autonomous aesthetic space of operations for granted, but realizes that such a space has always to be appropriated afresh through a return to the political realities.