La revolution des Bouffons: l'opera italien au Theatre de Monsieur 1789-1792 (review)

As the author clarifies in the introduction, this study does not attempt a historyof a venue but rather that of a genre. Instead of considering the spoken works and opéras comiques that were performed alongside opere buffe at the Théâtre de Monsieur, Di Profio's book focuses on the thirty-three Italian operas performed there between 26 January 1789 and 31 August 1792, when the troupe disbanded. Insofar as the Théâtre de Monsieur was the first French theater to boast an established troupe of Italian singers, it owed its existence to the need for a Parisian venue for the performance of Italian opera. The troupe moved from the Tuileries to an auditorium in the Saint-Germain fair, and finally changed its name to the Théâtre Feydeau after moving into a new building on the rue Feydeau during June 1791.

While Italian opera was performed throughout Europe from Vienna to Saint Petersburg to London, France was loyal to its own form of serious opera—the tragédie lyrique—and, increasingly during the second half of the century, to the opéra comique. The opening of the Théâtre de Monsieur, named for the youngest brother of the king, Monsieur, the comte de Provence, followed two other brief experiments with Italian opera in late-eighteenth-century France. In the first instance, maneuvering against the rival Comédie-Italienne (also known as the Opéra-Comique), the Académie royale de musique (the Paris Opéra) staged Italian operas from 1778 to 1780, the majority of which were composed by Niccolò Piccinni. The second experiment with Italian opera took place when Mademoiselle Montansier, with the support of her friend, Marie-Antoinette, whose preference for Italian opera derived from her childhood in Vienna, brought over the Italian troupe from Haymarket from July through October 1787, while the London theater was closed for the summer.

Di Profio begins with a brief historical introduction, tracing the increasing interest in Italian opera during the decade prior to the opening of the Théâtre de Monsieur. Using archival sources, including the fonds Sageret located in the library of the Comédie-Française and records at the Archives nationales, Di Profio devotes his first chapter to the business affairs of the theater, tying the Théâtre de Monsieur as a business to the complex cultural politics of the ancien régime. The chapter includes architectural plans and images of the theater, as well as detailed lists of administrators (including the enterprising impresario, Giovanni Battista Viotti), instrumentalists, and singers. Unlike French singers, Di Profio explains, Italian singers benefitted from an international market and, as a result, fetched in some cases nearly double the salaries of their French counterparts.

Chapter 2 treats the relationship with rival theaters, in particular the Opéra, which exercised total control over Parisian theatrical production stemming from legal privileges dating from the time of Louis XIV. The Opéra required the Théâtre de Monsieur to pay a large licensing fee and limited its repertory to French-language parodies of Italian operas, one-act spoken comedies, and opere buffe. In practice, though, these restrictions were sometimes ignored. As small theaters proliferated in Paris at the twilight of the ancien régime, particularly after 1791, the old system of privileges was clearly on its last legs. Yet, the official theaters—the Académie royale de musique, the Comédie-Italienne (with which the Théâtre de Monsieur was in most direct competition), and the Comédie-Française—continued to scramble to validate their exclusive claims. The financial impact of the opening of the Théâtre de Monsieur on the rival theaters was immediate. Di Profio exhaustively analyzes the claims, take-over attempts, and legal maneuvering...