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Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France
Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France
Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France
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Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France

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From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique).
 
In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time.
 
By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 1, 2018
ISBN9780226522890
Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France

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    Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France - Olivia Bloechl

    OPERA AND THE POLITICAL IMAGINARY IN OLD REGIME FRANCE

    OPERA AND THE POLITICAL IMAGINARY IN OLD REGIME FRANCE

    OLIVIA BLOECHL

    THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

    CHICAGO AND LONDON

    The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

    The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

    © 2017 by The University of Chicago

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

    Published 2017

    Printed in the United States of America

    26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-52275-3 (cloth)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-52289-0 (e-book)

    DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226522890.001.0001

    This book has been supported by the James R. Anthony Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Bloechl, Olivia Ashley, author.

    Title: Opera and the political imaginary in old regime France / Olivia Bloechl.

    Description: Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2017021805 | ISBN 9780226522753 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226522890 (e-book)

    Subjects: LCSH: Opera—France—18th century. | Opera—France—17th century. | Opera—France—Political aspects—History—18th century. | Opera—France—Political aspects—History—17th century.

    Classification: LCC ML1727.3 .B56 2017 | DDC 782.10944—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017021805

    This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

    CONTENTS

    Editorial Principles

    Preface

    Introduction. Sovereignty and Government in the Tragédie en musique

    1.  The Politics of Glory: Angelic Citizenship and the Contemplative Chorus

    2.  Choral Lament and the Mourning Public

    3.  True Confessions: Opera’s Theater of Guilt and Remorse

    4.  The Tormenting Orchestra

    5.  Spectral Kingdoms: Poetics and Politics of Les Enfers

    6.  Pluto, the Underworld King

    Conclusion. A Theater of Precarity

    Appendix. Operas and Ballets Cited

    Acknowledgments

    Abbreviations

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES

    Foreign-language prose quotations are given in English translation throughout, with the original text provided in an endnote when the source is not readily available. Poetry quotations are in the original language with prose translations beneath. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. When citing early modern French I have modernized the spelling and capitalization and expanded the ampersand.

    The most important sources for the operas discussed here are livrets printed for particular productions, full or reduced scores and parts issued by royal printers, manuscript scores and parts, and set and costume designs. Early livrets are generally the preferred source for cited lyrics, except when there are meaningful discrepancies with the underlaid text of the score. Modern score editions are not available for most of the operas discussed, although I have preferred them when they are. Where they are not, musical examples are based on authoritative early sources, with source details given in the caption to the example.

    I have aimed to provide reliable musical examples that transmit enough original detail for specialist reference while streamlining aspects of the score that would interfere with ease of realization. Choral parts are therefore mainly given in reduced format, and the often vague or contradictory orchestration in early scores has been established as precisely as possible, sometimes through recourse to alternate sources. The notation and bass figuration have also been partly modernized, although original meter signatures are preserved for tempo indications. Finally, I have silently corrected obvious pitch and rhythmic errors.

    PREFACE

    We cannot seem to be rid of kings. Not when we contemplate opera in France under the Bourbons, and certainly not when we consider the political culture of the ancien régime, which ended infamously in the regicide of 1793. No genre of European opera is more closely associated with monarchical sovereignty than the tragédie en musique, which originated as a courtly and public form of musical theater patronized by Louis XIV and produced by his music academy (the Académie Royale de Musique). Real-life monarchs, legendary rulers and gods, and images of kingship recur in histories and revivals of this repertory because they were integral to it, but also because sovereignty continues to spark our political imagination, even those of us who live in liberal democracies that have formally dispensed with kings.

    Opera artists, patrons, and audiences in ancien régime France had their own imaginaries of the political, and these were nourished in part by the tragédies en musique produced at royal chateaus and at the civic opera house in Paris, the Palais Royal. In this book I set out to describe this genre’s imaginary by looking closely at a set of political themes that recur across its long history, from its beginnings in the 1670s through the eve of the Revolution.

    With such a broad chronological reach, this study does not attempt to give a comprehensive account of the repertory or its institutional history. In fact, it deliberately emphasizes the height of the tragédie en musique and related serious genres, from the inaugural productions overseen by Jean-Baptiste Lully through the death of fellow composer Jean-Philippe Rameau in 1764. This emphasis recognizes the iconic, foundational stature that the genre’s Lullian form enjoyed for much of the eighteenth century. After all, even when librettists, composers, and arrangers took the tragédie in new directions during the reign of Louis XVI, they preserved the core features of a model that had been established under Louis XIV over a century before. Viewing the late tragédie from the vantage point of its earlier history also affords a fresh perspective on its continuities and especially its conservatism in an era whose artistry is more often celebrated for its consonance with liberal Enlightenment.

    Thus, while my discussion of serious French opera in the 1770s and ’80s is essential to the book’s historiography, a full study of these later works and their politics remains for another time. Instead, the chapters range widely across the tragicomic repertory before 1789 in pursuit of a kind of political phenomenology of the ancien régime, via its elite opera culture. At basis, the phenomenon that I identify and describe is an experience of sacral authority and power that, I find, structured the stories that opera told, pervasively and for a surprisingly long time.

    The book argues, in sum, that the artists who created tragédies en musique imagined the political through theological fantasies of sovereignty and its tactical counterpart, government. In the introductory chapter, I set out a framework for analyzing the repertory’s political thematics in these terms, which expand our sense of the genre’s politicality but also, I hope, bring greater clarity to how it worked. The chapters that follow focus on a number of recurring plot situations involving sovereign and governmental power, including scenes of glorification, mourning, confession, and punishment, as well as the descent to the underworld and the heroic confrontation with death. Such plot situations, which are mostly derived from Greco-Roman epic and tragedy, invited librettists, composers, and visual artists to imaginatively engage many aspects of ancien régime political life. While the chapters do not exhaustively survey examples of each type of scene, they do examine a wide range of operas, spanning the period in question (see the appendix).

    The first two chapters are concerned with opera’s representation of publicness and modes of popular participation in public life, and they focus on contemplative choruses of glorification and mourning, respectively. Each chapter highlights a type of stage encounter between choral groups and figures representing glorious majesty. In the third and fourth chapters, I turn to scenes involving characters’ confessions of guilt and their punishment or pardon, and thus to themes of justice and freedom. The fifth and sixth chapters form another topical unit, as both consider opera’s quasi-pagan underworld as a setting for political theological fantasies of the sovereign power over life. Chapter 5 looks at the theatrical setting of les enfers (Hades) itself and places it within tragédie’s imaginative cosmography, in an adaptation of Edward Said’s classic concept (imaginative geography). The final chapter focuses on a nonideal aspect of absolutist kingship—emergency rule—that librettists associated with the underworld god Pluto. It finds that tragédie artists envisioned hell as an eternal exercise of penal government, countered only by liminal figures like Orpheus who wield sovereign-like powers of love, art, and beauty, as well as brute force. In the book’s conclusion, I reflect onstage encounters like these as fantasies that essay the alternate world-making potential of mundane, human forms of power alongside transcendent ones.

    My analyses in these chapters emphasize thematics of government and in doing so draw especially on Michel Foucault’s political theorizing and its development in more recent work by Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and others. Foucauldian thought has been an influence on critical musicology since the 1980s, so much so that engaging with it in a study of European opera is nothing new. It is unusual, however, for scholars of early European music to work with Foucault’s later thought on governmentality, veridiction, and freedom, as I do here. A historically apropos concept of governmentality in particular runs through this study as a major concern of the tragédie, both as a stage topic and as a rationale for the genre’s production. My analysis thus unearths a layer of political theater in serious French opera—pertaining to government and its imaginary—that has not usually been treated as such, mainly because it has been overshadowed by problematics of kingship and sovereignty.

    Characteristically for early modern courtly theater, the tragédie’s political storytelling was not realist, but had an aesthetic, analogical relation to political reality. It was shaped by an Aristotelian poetics and an aristocratic ethos of politesse, and thus it mostly presents the political as it should be, rather than as it is (or was). The genre’s aestheticizing impulse should warn us against assuming a too-direct mimetic relationship between its fictions and historical politics. We can recover an understanding of past political experience from these operas, but with the caveat that this experience was filtered through their idealist and decorum-governed conventions.

    Conventions are social arrangements, and the mediated, social experience of the political that I pursue cannot be attributed finally to a particular composer, poet, singer, censor, or patron. Individual people were, of course, responsible for opera productions, and empirical studies of these individuals and their institutions are very valuable. Yet they only give us access to certain kinds of truth about creative action, mainly those that are rationally verifiable. Past societies’ political experience and imaginaries are of a different order: we can describe them, as they are attested in the archive, but we cannot verify them. This is particularly so when they deal in the sacred or the nonrational.

    In the tragédie’s make-believe worlds, characters experience the political most saliently in revelation and sacrifice. Such a vision of politics speaks the language of the sacred, as Paul Kahn puts it, and is not easily reconciled with the liberal political reason that French thinkers and artists helped to develop in the later eighteenth century.¹ Enlightenment reformers of opera recognized this incompatibility when they critiqued the tragédie’s reliance on the marvelous, or the merveilleux. It is tempting to join them in dismissing the genre’s political merveilleux as ideological fantasy, as indeed it was in part. But the eighteenth century did not only belong to the philosophes, and their critique of ideology, which we have inherited, has only a partial ability to explain the power and evident appeal of the tragédie’s storytelling, not to mention its longevity in the Opéra’s programming.

    I tell another story, one that notes the Opéra’s longstanding hospitality to political theologies and to a contemplative modality of song and music that I theorize as inoperativity. Many scholars have discerned a political theology of kingship in French courtly theater under the Bourbons, but I note too how ambiguous are the tragédie’s thematics of charismatic kingship, encompassing what Georges Bataille would have labeled left- and right-sacred forms.² I also find that the repertory’s creators dispersed sovereign-like charisma and powers well beyond onstage rulers or gods, to lovers, magicians, and artists. And they persistently theologized government and its rationalities, so that by the later eighteenth century, stage figures could experience political economy itself as something sacral, not unlike opera’s gods and kings. The late tragédie did not prepare the way for revolution, but its theologies of law, morality, gender, and the family did accommodate the revolutionary state and its society.

    My work in this book, then, is to theorize this repertory as the product of an adaptive political theology that lived and breathed via convention and its limits. This aesthetic imaginary of the political belongs unambiguously to the past. Indeed, the primary sources that I have consulted fall squarely within the opera historical archive, especially original print and manuscript scores, early livrets, costume designs, décors, and historical journalism. But my investigation of them and the imaginary they attest responds as well to the present. This is partly the familiar situation of opera historians who write about past productions with recent revivals in their ears. By responsivity, though, I mainly mean something else: a mode of critical historical research on opera that is guided, but not overly limited by historicism. I have written extensively elsewhere about the limits of historicism in its stronger iterations. Here I will just repeat that I am aware of the risks involved in transhistorical critique but that, in this case, I find its benefits justify taking those risks.

    This is not, then, a presentist effort to erase historical difference or to claim ancien régime opera for late modernity. Rather, it pursues a recognition that if we care about past societies’ art forms, this is often because they call to us in some way: because we sense some affinity between their way of worlding the world and our own. We may have something to learn from artists working creatively in an authoritarian, Christian imperialist regime and its arts institutions—in particular, the nonliberal forms of freedom and the human potential, beyond utility, that their operas sometimes envisioned. This book is partly an effort to work critically with that tenuous affinity with our own times, whose exigencies liberalism seems less and less able to address. If, in the process, it brings the tragédie en musique and its history into closer conversation with critical musicology and the wider humanities, so much the better.

    INTRODUCTION

    Sovereignty and Government in the Tragédie en musique

    Spectacular, grandiose, and punctiliously deferent to the crown, the tragédie en musique was, without doubt, a kingly form of opera.¹ Indeed, it is often taken to be the consummate artistic expression of Bourbon absolutism and the values of an aristocracy that Louis XIV succeeded in bringing to heel, partly by bringing them to court and occupying them with lavish entertainments like the tragédie. And lavish it was.² Performances began with an extended prologue and proceeded through five fully sung, orchestrally accompanied acts, each with its own embedded choral and dance fête (the divertissement). Singers, choruses, and dancers were exquisitely costumed, and they worked their magic on sets and machines that had been crafted by the finest designers in Europe. As a lengthy and inordinately expensive kind of musical theater, tragédie en musique performances—and the Opéra³ more generally—embodied an ethos of uncalculated excess that served as a constant reminder of their origins and their royal patronage.⁴ This ethos extended to the select audiences that attended court performances and frequented the boxes lining the Palais Royal theater. Of them, the Opéra and its premiere productions demanded, above all, time, leisure, and enjoyment, those most sovereign of human capacities.⁵

    A considerable literature has grown up around a view of the tragédie en musique as a courtly entertainment whose basic purpose was to mythologize absolutist kingship in order to shore up the reigns of Louis XIV and his descendants. At this point, most opera historians take for granted the genre’s institutional and symbolic subservience to the French monarchy, whether as outright propaganda or as a subtler, subjective form of domination through the arts. Below I take a closer look at these approaches to the form’s politics, but, for now, it is simply worth noting the long shadow cast by the king and absolute sovereignty, even where scholars have sought to loosen the bonds between the tragédie and its monarchical past.

    This monarchical past loomed large in Michel Foucault’s political thought as well, nowhere more so than in his mandate that, when it comes to thinking the political, We need to cut off the King’s head.⁷ Foucault’s characteristically theatrical pronouncement invoked the revolutionary fervor behind the French regicide of 1793, but, speaking in the mid-1970s, he claimed this regicidal passion for a critical philosophy that would challenge the dominance of statist theories of power, especially Marxian ones.⁸ He saw power as working most pervasively through what he eventually came to call governmentality, rather than through the juridical-sovereign model of domination and right that, he claimed, pervaded both Marxian and liberal thought. Indeed, his sustained critique of state-centered conceptions of the political was so influential that it is justified to speak of theories of power as being before or after Foucault.⁹

    Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France recurred in Foucault’s analyses as a milieu in which a Renaissance art of government concerned with the preservation of the prince and his realm proliferated into a broad field of rational techniques for managing the conduct of individuals and populations. In one of his most cogent statements on this topic, the 1977–78 lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault argued that Louis XIV’s regime was pivotal to the emergence of a distinct domain of calculative political action within a framework of monarchic sovereignty. Here I pursue this insight into the political organization of the regime that gave rise to French opera, as offering a compelling framework for analyzing the repertory’s political fictions.

    Specifically, I propose that the tragédie en musique’s artists installed a subjective experience of sovereign government at the heart of its storytelling, which characteristically imagines power both theologically, as being, and economically, as efficacy. Certain recurring dramatic situations thematize one over the other form of power, but a historically interesting feature of this repertory is its tendency to conflate glorious authority and effective power in a single, miraculous source (typically a prince or god). This conflation is entirely in keeping with political thought under Louis XIV and XV; even those who sought political reform normally attributed responsibility for good government to the sovereign, as transcendent power made immanent. It is not surprising, then, to find that France’s most prestigious form of opera would dramatize this central mystery of absolutism. What is striking is how often the tragédie’s creators returned to this problem and how extensively they explored the economic-governmental axis of power, which has not been recognized in this repertory.

    In this introductory chapter I give an overview of the treatment of themes of sovereignty and government in the tragédie en musique and other serious Francophone opera through the end of the eighteenth century. After a historiographic account of the literature on the politics of French opera in the ancien régime, I explore some of the more prevalent themes pertaining to sovereignty and government in the repertory, taking as a case study an iconic early opera, Thomas Corneille and Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Bellérophon (1679), which nicely illustrates the bilateral framework that I want to flesh out. The discussion then turns to later trajectories of these thematics, particularly the emergence of properly political economic themes in the 1770s and ’80s.

    Despite my emphasis on government, sovereignty and the transcendent plane of power more generally are not neglected here either, because they are fundamental to the genre’s political content, as well as its past production and reception. Foucault will not take us very far in thinking this aspect of the political. His conception of sovereignty as repressive power is patently idiosyncratic.¹⁰ He also was dismissive of nonsecular political dimensions—especially the coarticulation of Catholic theology and politics in this period—as well as nonrational ones, such as affect and psychic experience more broadly—all prominent components of the tragédie en musique’s political theater. In order to elucidate these features, I have turned to post-Foucauldian and other writings on sovereignty and political theology, as well as on political emotion and the psychic life of power.¹¹

    So I will neither cut off the king’s head, as Foucault urged, nor try to restore sovereignty as the exclusive political concern of the tragédie en musique and related spectacle and ballet forms. The former would fail to respond to the complex, evolving treatment of sovereignty in the repertory’s storytelling, while the latter would neglect what I find is a deep entanglement with government and its fictions. Instead, I develop an ecumenical conception of the tragédie’s political imaginary as encompassing both sovereign and governmental forms of power.

    Opera’s Imaginary of Sovereignty and Government

    With the idea of the tragédie en musique’s political imaginary, I am referring to the background understanding that structured the field of intelligibility for its political theater.¹² This interest in the imaginary dimension of politics is concordant with a number of studies coming out of the humanities in the last few decades, many of which turn to cultural production as a source for gleaning an understanding of past political theologies.¹³

    In the broadest terms, the historical imaginary I address here mythologized power as supreme and indivisible yet internally articulated along axes that Mitchell Dean labels sovereignty-reign and economy-government.¹⁴ The first of these, sovereignty, had the character of a gift or, in theological terms, a miracle, and represented power in its glorious, transcendent form. Its aim was the distinctly circular one of preserving the dignity and safety of the prince and his realm. In contrast, the second axis of this imaginary designated a rational, instrumental form of power that typically operated on an immanent plane, organizing people, territories, and resources in order to achieve a desired order. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its characteristic aim was enabling the perpetuation and well-being of a princely domain, especially through the stewardship of its resources and the pacification and formation of its populace.

    This imaginary appeared in ancien régime political commentary, including official rhetoric, jurists’ writings, philosophy, and the press, and it also structured opera’s stage fictions, if differently than in contemporaneous writings about politics or even in spoken tragedy.¹⁵ Librettists did sometimes have characters or choruses voice vernacular concepts of sovereignty, justice, freedom, law, and public order; and prefatory matter in early printed livrets and scores is a rich source of political ideas attached to particular works or productions. Yet rational discoursing about politics is not what opera does best, as both critics and proponents of the tragédie en musique recognized at the time.¹⁶ Rather, it is good at dramatizing political relations, subjectivity, and experience in compelling ways. The tragédie particularly excelled at communicating strongly felt passions, including what we would call political emotions, and its affective and relational mode of engaging political themes was a signature of the genre. Further, the form’s much-remarked orientation toward spectacle lent itself to stage displays of sovereign dignity, splendor, and authority; shows of absolutist publicity and obligation; and staged tableaus of ordered and disordered societies.

    These dramatic and spectacular processes unfolded in the course of characters’ declamatory and lyrical exchanges in dialogue scenes, in the musically elaborate monologues that began many acts, and in the choral and choreographic sequences that characterized prologues and intra-act divertissements. Political thematics were most salient in the scripted interaction and reflection of singing actors in their roles as characters, as well as the instrumental music that accompanied them and the chorus and dance corps. Also important for these productions’ political imagination was the dimension of movement, in singers’ stylized expressions and gestures and in dancers’ choreographies, and the visual splendor of sumptuous costumes and décors, including the stage machines for which the Opéra was alternately praised and ridiculed.¹⁷

    For the most part, the artists who collaborated to create these multimedia extravaganzas did not set out to represent actual political life in the France they knew, although a number of scholars have identified contemporary allegorical references embedded in their prologues and tragédies.¹⁸ Rather, librettists in particular endeavored to present the classical and Romanesque stories that they adapted for the lyric stage in ways that conformed to the neo-Aristotelian principle of plausibility (vraisemblance) that governed serious theatrical works in France. As Catherine Kintzler has argued, they fulfilled this expectation with plots whose settings and action were analogous with real, or in the case of the merveilleux, possible, experience, conforming to an elite, literate commonsense view of how the world worked.¹⁹ Kintzler’s theory emphasizes the natural world, but this shared sense of what was plausible or possible also delimited opera’s fictive social worlds, as their imaginary horizon.

    This subjected the tragédie’s treatment of political matters to an aesthetic filtration and evaluation that freed librettists by granting them a distance from the actualities of political life while at the same time constraining their librettos by insisting on their conformity with a socially intelligible horizon. Paradoxically, it was this capacity to engage in plausible fantasy, beyond its limited ability to transmit ideas about matters of state, that disposed France’s most prestigious form of opera to function as a special kind of political theater, well suited to ancien régime society. From the outset, the tragédie en musique was devoted to the pleasurable experience of an aestheticized royal res publica, but its aesthetic formalization removed it far enough from familiar public life that its dramas could unfold with relative impunity.²⁰

    Experiencing the State

    In an influential article on the persistence of the tragédie en musique in the later ancien régime, William Weber surmises, "One might say that at the Opéra more than anywhere else the ruling classes experienced the state, living within its traditions and reinforcing its authority."²¹ Weber’s incisive observation pertains most immediately to the eighteenth century, when the iconically louis-quatorziens operas of Lully and Quinault were revived for successive generations. But even in the 1670s and ’80s, opera productions at the Palais Royal and in the theaters of the royal chateaus involved audiences in an experience of the state, in multiple respects.²² The crown’s designation of the Académie de Musique as Royale in 1672 brought opera production nominally under royal patronage, with the exclusive license (privilège) granted to Lully as the surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roi.²³ Before the mid-1680s Louis XIV himself regularly attended performances of his academy’s productions in Paris and at court, and his presence associated the proceedings with the mystique of personal sovereignty.²⁴ Members of the royal family also sometimes attended performances at the Palais Royal, which had originated as a court theater.²⁵ Printing of the académie’s librettos and scores was entrusted by license to the Ballard family, who had served as music printers to the king since the sixteenth century. And the royal dedications that normally appeared as front matter in Ballard prints evoked the king as a virtual presiding presence.

    Most importantly for my purposes, polite society experienced the state via the content of the académie’s productions, whether through reading a livret, attending a performance, playing transcriptions at the keyboard, or engaging in conversation about the latest performance. Theatrical experience is the best understood, and we know that opera spectatorship, and particularly listening, tended to be fashionably intermittent and sociable before the 1760s and ’70s, although that varied by venue and social class.²⁶ Nevertheless, the distinctively French practice of reviving older repertory meant that audiences at court and more habitual attendees in Paris would already know a number of the operas in production each season. At the Palais Royal, the company’s directors also repeated both new and revived operas during the season. Among other things, this manner of programming meant that by the end of a season box holders in particular would be very familiar with the content of programmed productions, having gotten to know them through extended, sociable immersion.²⁷

    The subject and rhetoric of librettos was generally vetted by the Petite Académie (later the Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles), a body that Jean-Baptiste Colbert charged with overseeing the other academies and imposing regularity on mediated representations of Louis XIV and his reign.²⁸ As a result, the royal and heroic imagery of tragédies en musique is remarkably consistent with that found in other representational arts patronized by the crown, such as painting, sculpture, engraving, literature, and design.²⁹ Such imagery was most overt in the prologue, an elegant mini-drama that preceded the main dramatic action through the 1740s. Prologues typically introduced and framed the subject matter of the following tragédie, but they also functioned socially as elaborate compliments to the Opéra’s royal patron, whom they normally celebrated in the guise of an abstract héros. Deciphering the prologue’s royal imagery and allusions (and evaluating their manner of paying compliments to the king) would have been routine for courtiers and members of Parisian mondain society accustomed to social contests involving witty interpretation à clef.³⁰ Courtiers also often interpreted the plots of the tragédies themselves as alluding allegorically to court intrigues and other contemporary events, such as military victories or treaties. The most infamous case was the scandal that erupted over Philippe Quinault’s libretto for Isis, which was interpreted as alluding unflatteringly to Madame de Montespan’s jealousy toward her rival for Louis XIV’s affections, Madame de Ludres. Quinault was disgraced and did not provide Lully with librettos for the next two years.³¹

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