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La Vraisemblance du merveilleux: Operatic Aesthetics in Cazotte's Fantastic Fiction TILI BOON CUILLE On sait que sans sorciers il n'est point d'opéra Et que le merveilleux n'y paraît vraisemblable Que parce qu'au besoin on fait agir le diable. —Pierre Villiers, Poèmes et autres poésies; Il 12 For the eighteenth-century Parisian social and intellectual elite, opera was a source of nightly entertainment. From its inception in 1672, the Académie Royale de Musique featured three to four performances per week, including frequent stagings of the tragédies en musique of Lully and Rameau, their still more popular opéras-ballets, and the occasional Italian intermezzo} Timed to enable a diverse group of merchants, military officers, servants, students and devotees of the Parisian salons to congregate in the parterre beneath the boxes of the nobility, the opera afforded an ideal venue for its public to pass judgment on the performance and on one another. The most aristocratic of the Parisian theaters, the Opéra was also the most heavily policed, particularly towards mid-century.2 This display of force was necessary to maintain some semblance of public order, for the audience considered itself entitled to comment audibly upon everything from the accuracy of the poet's and singers' interpretations to the behavior of their fellow spectators. James Johnson and Jeffrey Ravel depict an opera-going public who—their vision of the stage obscured and comprehension of the music approximate—opted to follow the sight-lines of their boxes and observe their neighbors instead of the performance.3 And yet, this purportedly inattentive audience produced the multiple volumes of inflammatory letters that constituted the three major opera debates that 173 174 / CUILL É erupted in the course of the century: the querelle des Lullistes et des Ramistes (1733-52), the querelle des Bouffons (1752-54), and the querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes (1774-83). This degree of investment in an operatic performance is difficult to imagine now that music criticism has become a profession and spectating a hobby. In the eighteenth century, however, familiarity with the codes that governed the sung theater was not only a social but a civic duty, for the Opera provided an arena in which spectators could exhibit their political as well as their artistic convictions. One such engaged spectator was Jacques Cazotte. Cazotte had dabbled in songwriting as a youth and arrived in Paris at the time of the querelle des Bouffons, the debate that divided public sentiment into proponents of French or Italian opera in the years 1752-54. Though the debate raged primarily in the Parisian journals, spectators at the Opéra manifested their loyalties by symbolically seating themselves on the side of the French king or of the foreign queen. Cazotte aptly summed up the situation with the following humorous song lyrics: "Lully n'est plus à l'Opéra / Le favori de Polymnie / Bientôt Rameau s'éclipsera / Malgré sa savante harmonie. / Jéliotte n'a rien de surprenant, / Vive les bouffons d'Italie! /Aujourd'hui tout Français galant / Ne se montre qu'en fredonnant / Et trin, trin, trin, et sou et giou / C'est à qui sera le plus fou."4 Not content with parodying the querelle, however, Cazotte contributed to it directly by proffering an objective summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the French and Italian traditions in his letter "La Guerre de l'opéra: lettre à une dame de Province" of February 1753.5 Acknowledging that opera originated in Italy, he stipulated that the French tradition had distinguished itself from the Italian in response to a specific national sensibility.6 Cazotte's tone was equitable and the nature of his sympathies difficult to detect, but he changed his tune in response to the notorious "Lettre sur la musique française" that Jean-Jacques Rousseau circulated later that year. With the declaration that the French "n'ont point de Musique et n'en peuvent avoir" Rousseau threw down the gauntlet, a challenge that Cazotte eagerly accepted in his second contribution to the querelle.1 With much insight and wit, Cazotte took up the defense of French national opera in his "Observations sur...

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