Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Review: Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism

2014; University of California Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jams.2014.67.2.598

1547-3848

Georgia Cowart,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Like David Charlton's earlier study of André Grétry's opéras-comiques,1 his latest book reveals a profound knowledge of a repertoire that has until recently attracted little musicological attention. In Opera in the Age of Rousseau, the author surveys French opera from 1739 to 1774 (between "Rameau's zenith and Gluck's advent" [p. xi]). Within this frame, he traces a series of clashes between old and new, French and Italian, comedy and tragedy, convention and experiment. The central focus is a reassessment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's one-act opera Le Devin du village (1752) in the wider context of courtly opera, pastoral, opera-ballet, and opera buffa. Charlton analyzes Rousseau's opera, not as an exception or even an aberration, but rather as the hub of an intricate web of genres and individual works, all embodying an era of confrontation, assimilation, and change. The overarching argument is that Le Devin du village reflects a nascent spirit of opera reform at midcentury, and that many of the reforms associated with the period of Gluck were already in place, or in development, during "the Age of Rousseau."Part I, "Princely Theatre," looks at operatic cycles, seasons, and performances at Versailles and Fontainebleau, autumn home of Louis XV's court, and at the Académie Royale de Musique (the Opéra) in Paris. It brings forward evidence that the king embraced a new style of opera (partly because he could sing its tunes) and that taste at court was more progressive than we have thought. The chamber concerts sponsored by the queen between 1742 and 1752 featured new operas by young composers like Jean-Baptiste Cardonne (b. 1730) and Jean-Baptiste Chrétien (b. 1728), and Mme. de Pompadour's theatrical troupe favored the metatheatrical "song-opera," which, along with the mid-century pastoral, offered a model for integrating popular song styles into princely opera. At the Opéra, an interest in the reforms of David Garrick and a systematic and surprisingly comprehensive approach to acting, gesture, and costume (even among chorus members) reveals the existence of reforms in these areas well before the period of "reform opera."Part II, "Opinion," skims over the deeper critical and aesthetic issues to focus on questions of context and reception. Charlton's discussion of audience behavior and listening practice builds on and engages with recent studies, notably James H. Johnson's Listening in Paris: A Cultural History.2 Challenging the extent to which Johnson pushes his claims, the author nonetheless acknowledges that the popularity of Rameau in the 1740s and of the Bouffons in the 1750s may have been due to an increase in the kind of "musical" listening Johnson describes, as opposed to a more social orientation in the earlier part of the century. The section closes with a chapter entitled "Visions of Reform," showing how reformist attitudes were voiced by theorists and practitioners in advance of Gluck. Jean-Georges Noverre's treatise Lettres sur la danse, et sur les ballets,3 for example, called not only for a more natural approach to dance and costuming, but for more collaboration among the operatic arts, a vision Charlton considers to have been largely realized in the Opéra's staging of Antoine Dauvergne's Polixène in 1763.Part III, "Italian Opera for Paris," considers Eustachio Bambini's traveling opera troupe, known as les bouffons, whose performances provided Parisian audiences with "a kick in the backside" (the expression was Diderot's) during their Parisian residency from 1752 to 1754 (p. 251). More complex than simple farce, their operas emphasized realistic plots and language (filled with words new to the operatic literature, such as "turnips" and "hoe"); gesture, laughter, and the body; and the expression of sentiments in real time. Charlton's research supplements and extends that of Andrea Fabiano in describing this repertoire on its own terms, removed from politicized polemics and posterity's narrow focus on Pergolesi's La serva padrona.4 The final chapter of Part III explores the assimilation of the Italian buffa style into French opera, a process that had already begun by the time the bouffons left Paris in 1754, and that further coalesced in the comédie en ariettes of the 1760s. Part IV, "Towards European Integration," explores the culmination of this process in a cosmopolitan, "European" idiom anticipating the operas of Gluck. This idiom is traced through a series of progressive, three-act operas beginning with Pancrace Royer's Zaïde (1739) and ending with Rameau's Les Paladins (1760), a work that brings together French comic trends and newer elements under the influence of Pergolesi and the Italians.Charlton's treatment of the Bambini repertoire grapples with the formidable problems presented by its pastiche-based format, for which composer names "are simply a convenience, to be accompanied by a mental question-mark plus the phrase et alii" (p. 236). His methodology, paralleling a trend in twenty-first-century opera productions, inverts the old hierarchy privileging the tragédie en musique and reminds us that in the decades following Dardanus (1739), Rameau composed only two pieces in that venerable genre out of over two dozen operatic works. Another category he highlights is the "sacrifice" opera in the vein of Fidelio, popular in its time for political as well as artistic reasons. A watercolor by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, depicting one of the most popular works in this category, Antoine Dauvergne's Ernelinde, is reproduced on the book's cover.Some readers might question the title, Opera in the Age of Rousseau. Why the Age of Rousseau and not the Age of Rameau? After all, all but four of Rameau's operatic works, and all of the most forward-looking ones (not to mention a long series of operatic revisions), appeared during the period encompassed by Charlton's chronological boundaries. Platée and Les Paladins, discussed in chapter 13 (not to mention a number of Rameau's opera-ballets, pastorals, and one-act ballets), synthesized French and Italian influences in a manner that, like Le Devin, anticipated the future. The defense Charlton makes in the Introduction is not entirely satisfying; for one thing, it is not true (as he claims [p. xiii], following Piero Weiss5) that Rameau left no writings on opera, and even if it were, his operatic output still motivated two of the century's greatest querelles. The title also leads to the expectation that Rousseau will be treated not merely as the composer of Le Devin du village, but also as a philosophe who shaped Enlightenment musical thought and, more specifically, opera criticism—through his Dictionnaire de la musique and other writings, his quarrels with Rameau, his theory of music and language, and his melodrama Pygmalion, so rife with aesthetic meaning and generic significance. But these would be (and are) other books;6 the present one might be more aptly entitled Rousseau's Le Devin du village and Its Operatic Contexts.While frequent reference to Le Devin provides a useful point of orientation, it also introduces a dangerously teleological methodology. For example, writings on opera from the 1740s, discussed in the chapter "Opera as a Subject of Debate," seem to have been chosen for the ways in which they anticipate Rousseau's theories: Charlton's narrative would find Rousseau's linguistic emphasis anticipated in Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (pp. 171–74), and his "music"-based approach in Mably and Rémond de Saint-Mard (p. 163). (It should be noted here that this criterion of emphasis on "music" is too vague to be of much use. Rameau and others also subscribed to a music-based approach; the principal argument between Rousseau and Rameau was not over the primacy of music or text, as in the earlier querelle between Lullists and Ramists, but whether melody or harmony should take precedence, and which languages were most appropriate for musical setting.) In the same way that stylistic and generic elements point to Rousseau in the first half of the book, they point to Gluck in the second. The buildup to Gluck leaves the reader hanging at the end, without any summary of Gluck's reforms themselves, or any mention of the approximately forty operatic works he composed in the period before 1774—Charlton's demarcation point between the "Age of Rousseau" and the "advent of Gluck." In this way Opera in the Age of Rousseau is like a binary form, building to cadences on Rousseau and Gluck, but lacking resolution in a satisfying conclusion.Finally, despite the book's richness in information and analysis, certain lapses in organization and clarity will challenge readers. Some sections require more than one reading to reveal their meaning; others (especially aesthetic analyses such as the discussion of "galant metaphysics," pp. 118–23) never do quite add up to a cogent position. Chapters are introduced by a summary of their contents, but they lack conclusions revealing their significance within the larger context (and sometimes, the meaning of their cryptic chapter titles). Similarly, the book as a whole ends abruptly, with a description of Ernelinde and the ways in which that work looks forward to yet another endpoint, the operas of Cherubini and the Revolution. Overall, one is struck by the awkward fitting of the book's timely discoveries and concerns into the stodgy structure of an old-fashioned opera survey.Despite these flaws, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, with its valuable descriptions, analyses, illustrations, and generous musical examples, will be an indispensable addition to any dix-huitièmiste's library. Beautifully produced, with a thorough index and bibliography, it stands as a distinctive complement to other titles in the series Cambridge Studies in Opera.