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

Since Hervé Lacombe finished his dissertation on Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles a decade ago, he has established himself as one of the most promising and original French scholars of his generation. In addition to numerous articles, he has completed two significant books for the Paris-based publisher Fayard—the more recent a substantial biography of Georges Bizet (2000) and earlier, Les voies de l'opéra français au XIXe siècle (1997), now translated and published by the University of California Press as The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century (2001). The latter study is substantially revised and expanded from the most original portion of his dissertation. It has won prizes from both the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Française. And it is brimming with perceptive comments on the music and poetry of nineteenth-century French opera, reveals a broad knowledge of literature, and speaks with an authority drawn from numerous nineteenth-century voices (in memoirs, letters, reviews, topical essays, and more) that illuminate the workings of the operatic world and its cultural underpinnings. Lacombe's is not a pre-set structure with evidence placed neatly in pigeonholes; his broad range of topics emerges from within the tradition itself. Because Les pêcheurs de perles (1863) serves as the central case study, his discussion radiates outward from the Second Empire (1852-70). Though earlier historians have judged this a period of stagnation in repertory and of frustration for composers of vision (like Bizet and Gounod), Lacombe introduces it as turbulent and questioning, at the crossroads of numerous influences. He also acknowledges the significance of the exotic in nineteenth-century French opera instead of treating it as a side issue.

The French title of Lacombe's book plays with homonyms (voies, meaning ways, routes, or roads, which sounds like voix, meaning voices). Edward Schneider's translation, sensitive to language levels and poetic where need be, reflects the style and meaning of the original prose; but, of course, the title posed a problem. The "ways of/voices" of the French title he replaced with "keys." The analytical/musical double meaning of the English is indeed clever, but no translation could be as lyrical as Lacombe's evocative jeu de mots.

Lacombe seeks to understand the fusion of elements in midcentury French opera through its "complex set of codes and practices" and "a system of production that intruded on every level of composition, preparation and performance." More virtuosic than a chronological survey, this study gradually approaches what is most difficult to grasp but most essential to understanding this repertory: expressiveness, the limits of genre, and aesthetics. Lacombe makes an excellent case for the strengths of opéra-lyrique as the middle way that reconciled influences of the operatic world in a collaborative entity fashioned by authors, interpreters, public, press, theater directors, publishers, and politicians.

Choosing to concentrate on Bizet's debut opera Pêcheurs over Gounod's masterpiece Faust allows Lacombe to study the plight of the young composer and the central problem of the French repertory at that time, the tensions between "devotion to tradition and a need for renewal." It would be unfair to second guess the author, but it is conceivable that a book that played Gounod's pre-Tannhäuser debut Sapho (1851) against his masterpiece Faust (1859) as well as Bizet's post-Tannhäuser debut Pêcheurs (1863) against his masterpiece Carmen (1875) might have led to a more tightly structured discussion. By utilizing Bizet's trinity—Auber as the representative of talent, Berlioz of genius, and Gounod of the reconciliation that brings about renewal—the discourse leaves Verdi and Italian models to one side and attenuates the centrality of Meyerbeer and grand opera. Indeed, even in a book where most topics concern Bizet in...