The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century (review)

The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century. By Anselm Gerhard (trans. Mary Whittall) (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998) 503 pp. $50.00.

Richard Wagner's jealous rage against Giacomo Meyerbeer, a Jew, in 1850, marks the starting point of a marginalization of French grand opéra still perpetuated in German and American musicology, long after the aesthetic criteria of Wagner's attack have been relaxed in other areas of musical judgment. Gerhard's The Urbanization of Opera, first published in German in 1992, is an ambitious corrective that will remain a foundation for developing a cultural history of grand opéra for years to come, alongside its inestimable service to music historians and opera goers. The translation into English is eminently readable, with only rare infelicities, and Gerhard's lively analysis will be accessible to those with only a basic technical vocabulary in music.

The peculiarities of grand opéra are evocative of urban dangers--to begin with, its spectacular theatrical effects, gruesome violence, and uncanny mix of noble and crude characters. But the crux of Gerhard's argument is aesthetic. He posits the plausible but ultimately elusive thesis that "it was only under the extreme pressure exerted by new modes of perception, and the expectations springing from them, that the operas composed for Paris in the middle decades of the nineteenth century developed new forms and conventions that have nothing to do with the historical predecessors of grand opéra" (6).

Some readers will be disappointed that the reasons for these novel perceptual modes do not much interest Gerhard. A preliminary chapter on the institution of the opera house in Paris ("Realities of a Metropolis") offers little guidance, focusing instead on grand opéra as a business enterprise, and throughout the book there are few explicit references to urban experience. Are cultural and social phenomena "urban" merely by virtue of their geographical location within a city, even one as unique historically and artistically as Paris, or might the predominant influence at times be historical memory of the Revolution (the destructive mobs in some grand opéras) and despair about the modern condition (the indecisive hero who populates so many operas of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even outside Paris)? Gerhard's method is "to identify and analyze" within grand opéra the "constantly recurring stereotypes" of city life (10). But why should opera, or any art form for that matter, merely duplicate the outer world, rather than responding to it in more complicated ways? The paired fascination and repulsion with the city, prevalent throughout nineteenth-century Europe and relatively unexplored in musicology, might offer a more dynamic model: Audiences, like artists, perhaps sought escape from the pressures and problems of city life as well as comfort in the re-enactment of urban experience on stage.

Following the introductory chapters, the book's focal points plot out grand opéra from its prehistory to its demise. The historical background emerges in a chapter on Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy (b. 1764), the librettist, whose work exemplifies the primacy of text over music in tragédie lyrique, the dominant genre before grand opéra, as well as a chapter about the (Gioacchino Antonio) Rossini "revolution" that ushered in the new genre--covering his first work premiered at the Paris Opéra, Le Siège de Corinthe (1826), and his first composed for Parisian audiences, Guillaume Tell (1829). The four central chapters are devoted to canonic grand operas: Daniel-François-Esprit Auber's La Muette de Portici (1828), Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots (1836) and Le Prophète (1848), and Giuseppi Verdi's Les Vêpres siciliennes (1855). Gerhard inserts a welcome chapter on Victor Hugo as librettist, focusing on a little-known adaptation of Notre-Dame de Paris, 1482 for the young composer Louise-Angélique Bertin, who despite her age and gender...