- L’Opéra de Paris, la Comédie-Française et l’Opéra-Comique: Approches comparées (1669–2010) ed. by Sabine Chaouche, Denis Herlin, and Solveig Serre
The essays in this collection are the proceedings of an intriguing conference: a comparative study of the Paris Opéra, the Comédie-Française, and the Opéra-Comique from the [End Page 684] establishment of the Académie Royale de Musique in the seventeenth century up to the present. It is intriguing simply because a study of these three organizations slightly shifts the centre of gravity away from the Académie Royale de Musique, Opéra-Comique (and the various institutions that supported stage works mixing music and spoken dialogue) and the Théâtre Italien, and towards a set of comparisons that involve the Comédie-Francaiseça theatre whose musical engagement is rarely given the attention it deserves. Sadly, this collection of essays, driven more by the concerns of its contributors than the laudable aims of the organizers and editors—rarely engages with this question at all. Any attempt to pull together Charpentier’s music for the Comédie-Française in the 1670s and 1680s and Offenbach’s work at the same institution in the 1850s—to choose two examples entirely at random—is missing, and this sets the tone for the content of the volume.
The result is a series of essays on the various theatrical organizations operating in Paris in the period in question. Some range from the relatively simple—Jean-Christophe Branger’s analysis of the use of spoken dialogue at the Opéra in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (‘Quand on déclame sur la scène de l’Opéra: Du Freischütz (1841) de Weber et Berlioz à Bacchus (1909) de Massenet’, 175–84)—to the sophisticated: Mark Darlow’s account of the continuity between practices of the ancien régime and those post-1789 (‘L’Effritement du privilège théâtral: Les débats de 1789–1790’, 61–74). Darlow examines what he calls the effritement of the system of theatrical licences after the Revolution but before the Le Chapelier law of 13–19 January 1791, which effectively produced collapse in the system. Via two institutional case studies—of the Théâtre des Variétés-Amusantes and of the Théâtre des Mareux—Darlow shows how the immediate pressures of the years either side of 1790 had their origins in issues that had been in play for at least a decade. Imaginative, clever work.
Branger’s initial focus is on the late 1880s and 1890s and an account of the routine sparring between the Opéra and Opéra-Comique over the former’s appropriation of Méhul’s opéra comique entitled Joseph (premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1807). This lacks context: such generic power struggles had been going on regularly since the Napoleonic legislation of 1806–7, involving not only all the established theatres but all those who managed to fight their way through the thicket of state regulation for their day in the sun before ritual bankruptcy. Furthermore, Branger’s account of the spoken dialogue in the Paris version of Weber’s Der Freischütz of 1841 leans dangerously on the published (1841) vocal score whereas the surviving performance material in the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra reveals so much more, and the critical edition (not cited by Branger: Arrangements of Works by Other Composers (II), ed. Ian Rumbold (Hector Berlioz: New Edition of the Complete Works, 22b; Kassel, 2004), 128–9) clearly shows a much wider range of discourse in Berlioz’s arrangement of this part of the score than in Weber’s original. Evoking the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’ Opéra is made that much easier by Agathe Sanjuan’s...