Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism by David Charlton (review)

David Charlton’s Opera in the Age of Rousseau appears on the heels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s tercentenary, in a year that also saw the publication of an insightful colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. In its introduction, Jacqueline Waeber comments on the perpetual historiographical chasm between Rousseau’s intellectual and musical output which, as she claims, inevitably fuels the cliché of Rousseau the “dabbler” (Jacqueline Waeber, convenor, “Rousseau in 2013: Afterthoughts on a Tercentenary,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 1 [Spring 2013]: 253). From André Grétry’s Mémoires through nineteenth-century criticism and into our post-Derridean musicological present, critics have concentrated their evaluations of Rousseau’s musical thought on his individualism and his personality, focusing almost exclusively on his prose writings. Rejecting the “Great Man” model, Charlton offers a thorough reexamination of Rousseau’s musical milieu. His book, then, is not as much about as it is around Rousseau. By examining Rousseau’s famous one-act Le devin du village alongside Eustachio Bambini’s bouffons troupe, as well as little-known contemporaries, Charlton presents a comprehensive study of musical life in and around Paris between the years 1739 and 1774, “roughly between Rameau’s zenith and Gluck’s advent” (p. xi). In short, Opera in the Age of Rousseau is a massive achievement in its comprehensive reexamination of a critical period in French musical history.

Charlton draws on a dizzying array of primary source material, and touches on issues of patronage, comic and tragic conventions, the politics of repertory choice, modes of historical and pastoral representation, discourses of opera reform, and the mobility of operatic works between Parisian theaters. In chapter 1, entitled “Palaces and Patronage: Le Devin and the 1754 Alceste,” Charlton discusses the theater group of Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompa dour, the official chief mistress of Louis XV from 1745 to her death in 1764. Scholars of the period, Charlton argues, have hitherto focused on luxury and image-making as the principles driving Pompadour’s selection of theater works for her court. But published accounts, Charlton writes, “have rarely assessed the musical and operatic achievement of the woman who commissioned twelve new operas, eight of which reached the Paris stage in largely authentic form, many circulating in the public domain through printed scores and librettos; who trained, rehearsed, sang and acted the female (or male) leading role in all of them; and who oversaw the running of a group whose decisions were taken exclusively by women” (p. 15). In support of this claim, Charlton includes a useful table that provides an overview of theater works sponsored by Pompadour (Rousseau’s Devin was performed there in 1752, a year before its public premiere at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal).

Charlton’s discussions of staging, acting, costuming, and singing conventions offer valuable insights into the technologies of operatic production in eighteenth-century France, a severely understudied area of scholarship. Charlton identifies two primary types of comedic movement: haut (high) and bas (low), represented by stylized gesture and realistic movement, respectively. Such distinctions are found in Opéra librettos that record the practices of earlier revivals and also record the stage directions for the use of subsequent generations (p. 36). Two examples of such librettos are M. Favart’s Don Quichotte, set by Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (see table 2.1, p. 37) and Jacques Autreau’s Platée, set by Jean-Philippe Rameau (see table 2.2, p. 30). Charlton then discusses the use of gesture in representing tragedy, and shares useful archival findings that elucidate how actors were expected to move. Yet, at times these sources are presented at face value, when they could have benefitted from a broader philosophical context.

One especially revealing source is Abbé Blanchet’s eighteen-page section on operatic acting...