Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 1647-1785 (review)

The continued exploration of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French opera by early-music ensembles such as Les Arts Florissants, the Collegium Vocale, and Les Musiciens du Louvre, both in live performance and on discs, was bound sooner or later to generate a major ideological study of the first century and a half of opera in France, a period that gave rise to both the tragédies lyriques of Lully, Charpentier, and Rameau, as well as the opéras comiques of Philidor, Grétry, Dauvergne, and others. Downing A. Thomas's Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime is apparently the first book to meet that goal. It goes beyond strict musical analysis and examines these oeuvres and their contexts from a broad cultural perspective, drawing on the writings of contemporary philosophers and commentators. Borrowing a quote from Fontenelle about "the image of opera as a world and the world as opera" (p. 1) as a springboard for his discussion, Thomas bases his study on two main assumptions: that operas "display traces of the aesthetic and ideological circumstances of their creation [and] engage productively in those circumstances"; and that the genre eventually became "a touchstone for understanding the mechanisms behind human feeling and for reflecting upon how emotion impacts social relations" (p. 4).

The first half of the book deals with the critical discourse born of the controversy surrounding seventeenth-century opera's relationship to spoken tragedy: the view that opera was essentially a tragedy set to music that was necessarily subservient to the text (Lecerf de la Viéville, Furetière), or that too much emphasis on the musical aspect threatened to reduce the drama to a level of mere sensual pleasure, thereby threatening to destroy its moral basis (Boileau, the abbé Pierre de Villiers). Thomas traces the influence of this line of thought and shows how it tainted the opinions of later generations of French critics and literary historians—such as Gustave Lanson, Paul Brunetière, Etienne Gros, and Antoine Adam, who, Thomas says, believed that "by the end of the eighteenth century the separation between literature and opera was fortunately complete. . . . Opera was no longer considered a form of tragedy; and with opera out of the way, the world was [once again] safe for serious literature" (p. 39). However, in his book Thomas draws on a primary source, hitherto widely neglected, in order to present evidence of another school of thought that defended opera against the well-known attacks by polemicists Boileau, Bossuet, and others. Thomas demonstrates that, in the wake of the late-seventeenth-century literary querelles, the abbé Jean Terrasson, in a critical essay on Homer's Iliad, presented "the first positively compelling case against the position of the anciens on opera, arguing that opera was not tragedy set to music" along with "a definition of opera that went beyond the usual nomenclature and conceptual apparatus that subsumed opera to regular tragedy" (p. 40). Identifying Boileau's moral condemnation of tragedy in music as mere sanctimonious piety, Terrasson in turn proposed that "all the fine arts . . . seem to converge in opera so as to develop the mind of the spectator" (pp. 44-45). Thomas also points out Terrasson's "exceptionally modern" argument against the popular view of the superiority of ancient tragedy by citing the abbé's belief that opera could not have existed among the Greeks, for "their music was not capable of supporting an autonomous spectacle" (p. 47). ¹ Terrasson's striking assertion that music was the central feature of modern opera, an idea that went against all contemporary French thought, provides the basis for Thomas's method throughout his book, justifying his study of "the ways in which individual works can be understood to participate in a shift in the status of opera within French culture, from an uneasy absolutist vehicle and foil...