The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century (review)

The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century. By Hervé Lacombe. Translated by Edward Schneider. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. [xv, 415 p. ISBN 0-520-21719-5. $40.]

The last few years have been good ones for French opera, with the publication of the English translation of Anselm Gerhard's Die Verstädterung der Oper (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1992) as The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Steven Huebner's French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and, most recently, this translation of Hervé Lacombe's Les voies de l'opéra français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1997). Of these three, Les voies occupies a kind of middle ground, focusing as it does on France's Second Empire (1852-70), and with much less overall argumentative gusto than the Gerhard and Huebner studies. (In The Urbanization of Opera, Gerhard seeks to show that 1830s and 1840s grand opera was partly the product of a new urban experience, while in French Opera at the Fin de Siècle, Huebner puts forward a detailed trajectory for French operatic Wagnerism after 1880.) Lacombe's focus is rather on a single work, Georges Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles, first performed at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1863, and on how this "opera by a beginner" (p. 2, Bizet was only 25 at the time) exemplifies the changes taking place in French lyric theater at mid-century. Les pêcheurs was received at its premiere as "a rejection of the traditional categories of opéra-comique and grand opéra" (p. 2) but was at the same time hardly "revolutionary"; and it is this "mildness," this "reconciling" of renewal and tradition (p. 280) that guarantees its place as the central case study.

The genesis, dramatic construction, early performance, and reception of Les pêcheurs are dealt with not only as the book unfolds, but also in a series of appendices detailing surviving sources: Théâtre Lyrique box-office receipts; changes made during and after the 1863 run; etc. In the English edition, this material (rather specific and not always well integrated) is offset by new sections on other works and themes so that the volume is as much a general history as a history of one operatic lineage in particular, that leading back from Bizet to Charles Gounod and, before him, to Daniel Auber. These composers, Lacombe argues, together guided French opera away from the "effect[s] and overwrought dramatics" of Giacomo Meyerbeer (p. 154), and towards a style of opéra lyrique that, while not without theatricality, at the same time responded to a certain French need for naturalness and intimacy. Embodied most influentially in the works of Gounod, this new, more "poetic" opera was distinctive for its overall "tone of simplicity and truthfulness" (p. 155), its more naturalistic lyricism, a denser and more coloristic orchestration, and a tendency towards stylistic eclecticism. (One of the most interesting new subsections of The Keys discusses the ways in which composers from Meyerbeer to Camille Saint-Saëns exploited past musical styles to evoke a sense of history.)

Lacombe's attempt to impart a distinctive identity to 1850s and 1860s French opera—and indeed to nineteenth-century French opera as a whole—is impressive. His attempt to do so without recourse to some imposing extra-musical Other (a frequent strategy in French opera studies) is equally so, and results in one of the thickest descriptions of the music-theatrical world of the period and of contemporary music-theatrical criticism and opinion as well. The study's emphasis on the achievements of opéra lyrique restores a sense both of Gounod's innovativeness and of the generic context with which works like Carmen would later engage. It also makes a high-point of what is too often dismissed as a...