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Marie Antoinette et la Musique: Habsburg Patronage and French Operatic Culture

2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sec.2017.0009

1938-6133

Julia Doe,

European Political History Analysis

Marie Antoinette et la MusiqueHabsburg Patronage and French Operatic Culture Julia Doe (bio) Few repertories in the history of western music have been more persistently identified with absolutist politics than the tragic operas (tragédies lyriques) of Jean-Baptiste Lully. Composed for Louis XIV and unabashedly devoted to the celebration of his gloire, these works have been described by one prominent historian as veritable “symbol[s] of musical Bourbonism”1—by another, more colloquially, as the “courtiest court operas that ever were.”2 This standard assessment of Lully’s oeuvre is unassailable on a number of fronts. No other body of French lyric theater can match its particular combination of blatant propaganda value, extravagant scale, and longevity in the performing repertory. But there is one metric in which Lully’s operas might be challenged in their “courtiest” title. In terms of frequency of court performance under the ancien régime, these tragédies lyriques do not reign supreme.3 That honor goes instead to the lighter dialogue operas (opérascomiques) of André Grétry—a composer less well known than Lully but associated with the comparably influential royal patron Marie Antoinette. This essay examines Marie Antoinette’s impact on French operatic culture at the end of the eighteenth century. Musicologists have long been familiar with the general outlines of the queen’s artistic training and influence. As William Weber shows, her support of a modernized corpus of tragédies lyriques—and of the compositions of Christoph Willibald Gluck, in [End Page 81] particular—helped to “revolutionize” the nation’s most prestigious musical institution (the Paris Opéra), overturning the traditional hegemony of Lully’s works within its repertory.4 However, new research in the archives of the royal household confirms that Marie Antoinette’s progressive preferences were even more acutely reflected at the Bourbon court theaters than they were on the public stages of the French capital.5 Indeed, the tastes of the Austrian-born queen seem to have cemented an ongoing reorientation of courtly fashion, not only away from the Lullian musique ancienne but away from serious opera altogether—and towards the upstart genre of opéracomique. Marie Antoinette’s patronage of the comic idiom situated her at the vanguard of contemporary musical developments, bringing the aesthetic of Versailles and Fontainebleau more closely in line with the cosmopolitan and popularly-infused musical styles then widely favored in other western-European cultural centers.6 Although the background of this change has been well-documented, its broader significance remains unexamined. In this essay, I will address two related questions: What did it mean for the conservative Bourbon court to be reconfigured as a bastion of musical modernity on the eve of the revolution? And what did it mean for opéra-comique—a genre with humble origins at the seasonal fairs of Paris—to be appropriated as an emblematic courtly art? On the one hand, I argue, this development represented a considerable (and potentially subversive) challenge to the hierarchies of French theaters and theatrical forms. For opponents of the Bourbon regime, Marie Antoinette’s newfangled operatic tastes and disregard for generic conventions marked an affront to dramatic, and by extension, to social propriety; this was one of many examples of what critics considered improper conduct from a frivolous and suspiciously foreign queen. On the other hand, and somewhat paradoxically, this porousness of generic boundaries was a direct consequence of the manner in which opéra-comique was incorporated into existing structures of royal representation and display. Put another way, if the new emphasis on lyric comedy constituted a disruption to the theatrical status quo, this was only because the genre was so successfully adorned with the trappings of traditional courtly spectacle. Marie Antoinette and the Court Repertory If Louis XIV had been an avid connoisseur of lyric theater, succeeding generations of French monarchs did not necessarily share his expansive vision. While Louis XV was personally fond of music, he was far less active as a patron than either his first wife Marie Leszczynska or his maîtresse entitre [End Page 82] Madame de Pompadour (the principal organizers, respectively, of an important series of court concerts and a well known society...