The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century (review)
2002; Music Library Association; Volume: 58; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/not.2002.0075
ISSN1534-150X
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoThe last few years have been good ones for French opera, with the publication of the English translation of Anselm Gerhard's Die Verstädterung der Oper (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1992) as The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Steven Huebner's French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and, most recently, this translation of Hervé Lacombe's Les voies de l'opéra français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1997). Of these three, Les voies occupies a kind of middle ground, focusing as it does on France's Second Empire (1852-70), and with much less overall argumentative gusto than the Gerhard and Huebner studies. (In The Urbanization of Opera, Gerhard seeks to show that 1830s and 1840s grand opera was partly the product of a new urban experience, while in French Opera at the Fin de Siècle, Huebner puts forward a detailed trajectory for French operatic Wagnerism after 1880.) Lacombe's focus is rather on a single work, Georges Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles, first performed at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1863, and on how this "opera by a beginner" (p. 2, Bizet was only 25 at the time) exemplifies the changes taking place in French lyric theater at mid-century. Les pêcheurs was received at its premiere as "a rejection of the traditional categories of opéra-comique and grand opéra" (p. 2) but was at the same time hardly "revolutionary"; and it is this "mildness," this "reconciling" of renewal and tradition (p. 280) that guarantees its place as the central case study.
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