Le Théâtre de la Monnaie au XVIIIe siècle, and: La Monnaie wagnérienne, and: Le Théâtre de la Monnaie au XIXe siècle: Contraintes d'exploitation d'un théâtre lyrique, 1830-1914, and: La Monnaie symboliste, and: La Monnaie entre-deux-guerres (review)

In the 1990s Manuel Couvreur, musicologist and professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), undertook the ambitious project of creating a series of books that would chronicle activity at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie over the course of three centuries. Opera culture began to take root in Brussels under Spanish rule during the late seventeenth century, and the Théâtre de la Monnaie has served as the city's primary venue for opera performance since 1700. "La Monnaie," as it is familiarly known, holds a special place in Belgian history: it was there, during a performance of Auber's La muette de Portici on August 25, 1830, that the events of the Belgian Revolution were triggered, leading Belgium to declare its independence from the Kingdom of the Netherlands. What resulted, however, was a country riven by an ever-shifting but ever-present conflict between Flemish and Walloon communities. Although many of its employees and musicians over the past three hundred years have been Flemish, the Monnaie was historically, a Francophone institution, and it is rare to find Flemish documents in the archives. No surprise, then, that most of the nearly two thousand pages of articles in these books are in French. Yet the series includes a number of important articles and summaries in Dutch, an editorial decision that reflects a contemporary Belgium in which scholarship from both cultures is carefully represented, and in which the Monnaie has evolved into a thoroughly bicultural institution.

To date, five volumes written by over forty contributors and covering a period roughly spanning the period of 1700 to 1945 have been published under the aegis of the ULB. The studies in Couvreur's series are based on new archival research and are focused on the material, technical, and aesthetic aspects of the production and reception of opera, often concentrating on the important composers, theater directors, and productions that have marked the Monnaie's history. Although previous publications have attempted more general and less scholarly syntheses of the theater's history, and although there remain a certain number of historical gaps (inevitable in a project that casts its nets so broadly), no other study of the Monnaie offers such comprehensive and encyclopedic detail. Couvreur and his collaborators chose to take a chronological approach, breaking up the centuries into individual volumes by considering important dates in Belgian history, the different theaters that have been known as "la Monnaie," and the artistic movements that have had a particular impact on opera in Brussels.

Tempting though it might be to shadow the chronological organization of the collection, it ultimately seems more fruitful to center a review on the themes and concerns that are common to the series as a whole. (Due to the sheer volume of the five books, I am not able to discuss all of the contributions here.) Couvreur and Dufour's division of the fifth book, Le Théâtre de la Monnaie entre-deux-guerres, into three sections—contextes, créations, and personnes—aptly sums up the approaches adopted by contributors across the series. I will address each perspective as a means of teasing out the main concerns of the project as whole. First, though, allow me...