French opera
French opera is both the art of opera in France and opera in the French language. It is one of Europe's most important operatic traditions, containing works by composers of the stature of Rameau, Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet, Massenet, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Messiaen. Many foreign-born composers have played a part in the French tradition, including Lully, Gluck, Salieri, Cherubini, Spontini, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi and Offenbach.
French opera began at the court of Louis XIV with Jean-Baptiste Lully's Cadmus et Hermione (1673), although there had been various experiments with the form before that, most notably Pomone by Robert Cambert. Lully and his librettist Quinault created tragédie en musique, a form in which dance music and choral writing were particularly prominent.[1] Lully's most important successor was Rameau. After Rameau's death, Christoph Willibald Gluck was persuaded to produce six operas for the Paris Opera in the 1770s. They show the influence of Rameau, but simplified and with greater focus on the drama. At the same time, by the middle of the 18th century another genre was gaining popularity in France: opéra comique, in which arias alternated with spoken dialogue.[2] By the 1820s, Gluckian influence in France had given way to a taste for the operas of Rossini. Rossini's Guillaume Tell helped found the new genre of Grand opera, a form whose most famous exponent was Giacomo Meyerbeer.[3] Lighter opéra comique also enjoyed tremendous success in the hands of Boieldieu, Auber, Hérold and Adam. In this climate, the operas of Hector Berlioz struggled to gain a hearing. Berlioz's epic masterpiece Les Troyens, the culmination of the Gluckian tradition, was not given a full performance for almost a hundred years after it was written.
In the second half of the 19th century, Jacques Offenbach dominated the new genre of operetta with witty and cynical works such as Orphée aux enfers;[4] Charles Gounod scored a massive success with Faust;[5] and Georges Bizet composed Carmen, probably the most famous French opera of all. At the same time, the influence of Richard Wagner was felt as a challenge to the French tradition. Perhaps the most interesting response to Wagnerian influence was Claude Debussy's only operatic masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande (1902).[6] Other notable 20th-century names include Ravel, Poulenc and Messiaen.
The growth of opéra comique[edit]
Opéra comique began life in the early eighteenth century, not in the prestigious opera houses or aristocratic salons, but in the theatres of the annual Paris fairs. Here plays began to include musical numbers called vaudevilles, which were existing popular tunes refitted with new words. In 1715, the two fair theatres were brought under the aegis of an institution called the Théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique. In spite of fierce opposition from rival theatres, the venture flourished, and composers were gradually brought in to write original music for the plays, which became the French equivalent of the German Singspiel, because they contained a mixture of arias and spoken dialogue. The Querelle des Bouffons (1752–54), mentioned above, was a major turning-point for opéra comique. In 1752, the leading champion of Italian music, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, produced a short opera, Le Devin du village, in an attempt to introduce his ideals of musical simplicity and naturalness to France. Though Rousseau's piece had no spoken dialogue, it provided an ideal model for composers of opéra comique to follow. These included the Italian Egidio Duni (Le peintre amoureux de son modèle, 1757) and the French François-André Danican Philidor (Tom Jones, 1765) and Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (Le déserteur, 1769). All these pieces dealt with ordinary bourgeois characters rather than Classical heroes.
But the most important and popular composer of opéra comique in the late eighteenth century was André Grétry. Grétry successfully blended Italian tunefulness with a careful setting of the French language. He was a versatile composer who expanded the range of opéra comique to cover a wide variety of subjects from the Oriental fairy tale Zémire et Azor (1772) to the musical satire of Le jugement de Midas (1778) and the domestic farce of L'amant jaloux (also 1778). His most famous work was the historical "rescue opera", Richard Coeur-de-lion (1784), which achieved international popularity, reaching London in 1786 and Boston in 1797.[28]
From the Revolution to Rossini[edit]
The French Revolution of 1789 was a cultural watershed. What was left of the old tradition of Lully and Rameau was finally swept away, to be rediscovered only in the twentieth century. The Gluckian school and opéra comique survived, but they immediately began to reflect the turbulent events around them. Established composers such as Grétry and Nicolas Dalayrac were drafted in to write patriotic propaganda pieces for the new regime.[39] A typical example is François-Joseph Gossec's Le triomphe de la République (1793) which celebrated the crucial Battle of Valmy the previous year.[40] A new generation of composers appeared, led by Étienne Méhul and the Italian-born Luigi Cherubini. They applied Gluck's principles to opéra comique, giving the genre a new dramatic seriousness and musical sophistication. The stormy passions of Méhul's operas of the 1790s, such as Stratonice and Ariodant, earned their composer the title of the first musical Romantic.[41] Cherubini's works too held a mirror to the times. Lodoïska was a "rescue opera" set in Poland, in which the imprisoned heroine is freed and her oppressor overthrown. Cherubini's masterpiece, Médée (1797), reflected the bloodshed of the Revolution only too successfully: it was always more popular abroad than in France. The lighter Les deux journées of 1800 was part of a new mood of reconciliation in the country.[42]
Theatres had proliferated during the 1790s, but when Napoleon took power, he simplified matters by effectively reducing the number of Parisian opera houses to three.[43] These were the Opéra (for serious operas with recitative not dialogue); the Opéra-Comique (for works with spoken dialogue in French); and the Théâtre-Italien (for imported Italian operas). All three would play a leading role over the next half-century or so. At the Opéra, Gaspare Spontini upheld the serious Gluckian tradition with La vestale (1807) and Fernand Cortez (1809). Nevertheless, the lighter new opéra-comiques of Boieldieu and Nicolas Isouard were a bigger hit with French audiences, who also flocked to the Théâtre-Italien to see traditional opera buffa and works in the newly fashionable bel canto style, especially those by Rossini, whose fame was sweeping across Europe. Rossini's influence began to pervade French opéra comique. Its presence is felt in Boieldieu's greatest success, La dame blanche (1825) as well as later works by Daniel Auber (Fra Diavolo, 1830; Le domino noir, 1837), Ferdinand Hérold (Zampa, 1831) and Adolphe Adam (Le postillon de Lonjumeau, 1836).[44] In 1823, the Théâtre-Italien scored an immense coup when it persuaded Rossini himself to come to Paris and take up the post of manager of the opera house. Rossini arrived to welcome worthy of a modern media celebrity. Not only did he revive the flagging fortunes of the Théâtre-Italien, but he also turned his attention to the Opéra, giving it French versions of his Italian operas and a new piece, Guillaume Tell (1829). This proved to be Rossini's final work for the stage. Disillusioned by the failure of this work and ground down the excessive workload of running a theatre, Rossini retired as an opera composer.[45]
Berlioz[edit]
While Meyerbeer's popularity has faded, the fortunes of another French composer of the era have risen steeply over the past few decades. Yet the operas of Hector Berlioz were failures in their day. Berlioz was a unique mixture of an innovative modernist and a backward-looking conservative. His taste in opera had been formed in the 1820s, when the works of Gluck and his followers were being pushed aside in favour of Rossinian bel canto. Though Berlioz grudgingly admired some works by Rossini, he despised what he saw as the showy effects of the Italian style and longed to return opera to the dramatic truth of Gluck. He was also a fully-fledged Romantic, keen to find new ways of musical expression. His first and only work for the Paris Opéra, Benvenuto Cellini (1838), was a notorious failure. Audiences could not understand the opera's originality and musicians found its unconventional rhythms impossible to play.
Twenty years later, Berlioz began writing his operatic masterpiece Les Troyens with himself rather than audiences of the day in mind.[48] Les Troyens was to be the culmination of the French Classical tradition of Gluck and Spontini. Predictably, it failed to make the stage, at least in its complete, four-hour form. For that, it would have to wait until the second half of the twentieth century, fulfilling the composer's prophecy, "If only I could live till I am a hundred and forty, my life would become decidedly interesting".[49] Berlioz's third and final opera, the Shakespearean comedy Béatrice et Bénédict (1862), was written for a theatre in Germany, where audiences were far more appreciative of his musical innovation.