The Cosmopolitan Realism of Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne
Writing the City: The Cosmopolitan Realism of Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne Jacek Blaszkiewicz As the curtain of Paris’s Théâtre du Palais Royal rose on October 31, 1866, spectators saw before them a mise-en-scène unprecedented in the city’s operatic history: a railway station—specifically the Gare de l’Ouest, one of Paris’s newest and busiest. A chorus marches onto the stage, announc- ing that they are the employees of the Ligne de l’Ouest rail company. Against an aggressive triple-meter orchestral accompaniment, the workers list off the names of the French cities and towns served by the company: Conflans, Triel, Poissy, Barentin, Pavilly, Vernon, Bolbec, etc. This list is doubly humorous. First, it captures the mechanical repetitiveness of the ever-expanding French railway system, rendered musically through an eleven-measure dominant prolongation in Bb major. Second, it pokes fun at mass-produced travel literature aimed specifically at tourists; the chorus, in essence, sings a version of the itineraries found in Lehaguez’s Le Nouveau paris: guide à l’étranger, a popular guidebook series that contained endless pages of station names in miniscule typescript. The workersfollow this list with a second: an account of various professional tasks, such as selling tickets and newspapers, opening and closing gates, and signaling incom- ing and outgoing rail traffic. These two lists are repeated twice, before the employees march off the stage, presumably back to work. The employees’ exit concludes the first vocal number of La Vie parisi- enne, an opéra-bouffe by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy with music by Jacques Offenbach.
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