Le Livret d’opéra au XVIIIe siècle by Béatrice Didier (review)

As an honest and substantial book, this study disappoints as much as it enlightens, for it is, ultimately, too self-indulgent. As, apparently, the first serious book devoted to French opera librettos in the period of which Béatrice Didier has long experience, we have nothing like a full survey (whether of theory, opéra-comique, facts or figures), but a coverage that comes into its own only at the point where the author simply writes what she likes: when she feels free to include music and to dilate on cultural themes. Thus we end with sections on myth in relation to opera: Orpheus, Don Juan, Faust. The indulgence here is to focus on a non-opera, Berlioz’s Huit scènes de Faust; Didier redeems herself by ending with ‘Pharamond, héros national?’, preceded by a sensitive account of uses of the merveilleux. The first two-thirds of the book provide a rather rough guide: to the job and status of librettists; to practitioners (Fontenelle, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau); some economics and practical history; statements in prefaces (mistakenly excluding opérascomiques); typical literary sources; then ‘Les Genres lyriques’ (where ‘La période révolutionnaire’ gets its own section). ‘Langages et mise en scène’ includes the topic of didascalies. Consciously admitting to an incomplete coverage, Didier alternates general discussion with more particular cases, often concerning Rameau’s operas. This works smoothly and unobtrusively. Nevertheless, things should and could have achieved a higher level of authority if only Didier had admitted the useful work (whether French, English, or German) that recent specialists have achieved in relevant areas of history and aesthetics. Herbert Schneider is missing (on canevas, translation, genre, etc.); so is Laura Naudeix’s Dramaturgie de la tragédie-lyrique (Paris: Champion, 2004); Corinne Pré’s magisterial doctoral thesis on opéra-comique (1981) is listed but never used. If they are sometimes mentioned in her bibliography, Didier never actually footnotes any studies in English, whether Mark Darlow on Framery, or Mark Ledbury and the undersigned on Sedaine, or Michael O’Dea on Rousseau; Grove’s Dictionary might as well not exist, but a simple glance there at Julian Rushton’s work on Marmontel would have supplied essential information on that author’s rewriting of Quinault’s librettos in three-act form for Piccinni and Philidor. Essential work by Nicole Wild, Raphaëlle Legrand, Françoise Rubellin, and Jacqueline Waeber is absent. Didier is insufficiently clear about the double lines of official supervision required for libretto publication (as performance and as printed text); also about how Louis XIV’s 1714 Règlements ordered the way that librettists should operate. Egregiously absent is any discussion of composers writing their own librettos: Didier clearly has problems with Rousseau’s Le Devin du village and ignores Mondonville, an excellent composer who adapted La Fontaine for Daphnis et Alcimadure. La Fontaine could have played an interesting part had opéra-comique adaptations had their due. The index lacks almost all titles of operas and — equally seriously — any terms or concepts needed for ready consultation. The mind boggles.