Introduction

Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-82938-0 — The Empire at the Opéra Mark Everist Excerpt More Information The Empire at the Opéra 1 Introduction Theatre, power and music are impossible to separate, and attempts to under- stand creative acts on the musical stage without taking their relationship into account are doomed to failure at worst, to incompleteness at best. Whether active in the seventeenth-century court, the eighteenth-century public theatre, the nineteenth-century café-concert, the twentieth-century music hall or the twenty-first-century digital world, creative artists were enmeshed in networks of practice that were subject to what Foucault called technologies of power, and the immediate and more recent success of their works was a direct result of how such power circulated and how individuals negotiated the structures, constraints and opportunities these technologies presented.1 Exactly how the elements of theatre, music and power play off one another differs according to time and place. Technologies of power vary, for example, between the Drury Lane theatre in the 1690s, the court of Ludwig II of Bavaria in the 1860s and the Reichskulturkammer in the 1930s; their interpretation depends on administra- tive structures, institutional rivalries and the ways in which creative and recre- ative artists interact with them. Furthermore, the documentary record left by different cultures means that modern abilities to negotiate them are also highly varied. Nineteenth-century France, with Paris at its heart, stands at the centre of understanding the relationship between music, theatre and power because of its worldwide influence, its creative élan and the sophistication of theatrical organisation, as well as the exhaustive physical record of the culture that survives.2 The city is central to any understanding of music in the European theatre since it not only exported works to all corners of the globe – opéras, opéras comiques and comédies-vaudevilles that could be heard from Manchester to Melbourne 1 For an outline of how power, politics and genre interact across the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, largely derived from Foucauldian theories of power, see Mark Everist, ‘The Music of Power: Parisian Opera and the Politics of Genre, 1806–1864’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (2014), 685–734, especially 686–9. This theoretical analysis underpins commentaries on power in the current Element. 2 The fundamental text outlining questions of institution, agency and repertory in the nineteenth- century Parisian theatre is Nicole Wild, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens au xixe siècle: les théâtres et la musique (Paris: Amateurs des Livres, 1989), 306–7; see also Wild, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens (1807–1914), Collection Perpetuum mobile (Lyon: Symétrie, 2012). Outlines of the repertory of the four major opera houses in the Second Empire are contained in four works by Albert Soubies: Soixante-sept ans à l’Opéra en une page du ‘Siège de Corinthe’ à ‘La Walkyrie’ (1826–1893) (Paris: Fischbacher, 1893); Soixante-neuf ans à l’Opéra-Comique en deux pages de la première de ‘La dame blanche’ à la millième de ‘Mignon’ (1825–1894) (Paris: Fischbacher, 1894); Histoire du Théâtre-Lyrique (1851–1870) (Paris: Fischbacher, 1899); Le Théâtre-Italien de 1801 à 1913 (Paris: Fischbacher, 1913). The four works are integrated into a single online resource: Sarah Gutsche-Miller and Mark Everist, ‘List of French Music Drama Performances’ (www.fmc.ac.uk/collections/bibliographical-resources-and-work-in-progress/). © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-82938-0 — The Empire at the Opéra Mark Everist Excerpt More Information 2 Elements in Musical Theatre and from Seville to Shanghai – but it was also a magnet for every foreign composer from Mozart to Wagner with ambitions beyond the immediately local.3 The city’s cultural institutions were a focus for European cultural exchange as well as centres of worldwide diplomacy.4 Paris was also the hub for the projection of its own cultural memory and that of nations who shared its aesthetic products. At the core of Parisian theatrical and operatic culture stood the Opéra on the rue Le Peletier: a physical embodiment of sophisticated creative impulse and worldwide influence, as well as of domestic theatrical memory and diplomatic initiative. The Paris Opéra functioned within a complex ecosystem of institution, individual and genre governed by a citywide system of licences; this dominated the theatrical and musical landscape from 1807 to 1864, when the so-called liberty of the theatres was declared. Each theatrical organisation in Paris was responsible for a particular mix of musical, theatrical and choreographic genres, and every licence protected the holder against trespass from other institutions. So while the Théâtre Italien, for example, held the monopoly on the perform- ance of Italian opera in its original language, the Paris Opéra matched this with the exclusive right to five-act grands opéras on historical themes that made use of orchestral recitative and danced divertissements, ballets-pantomimes and shorter operas – petits opéras – designed to accompany the ballet. The Théâtre du Vaudeville was restricted to comédie-vaudeville (which rejected the use of original music in favour of timbres taken from La clé du caveau, and melodies from opéra comique and elsewhere) while the Opéra Comique was the home of the genre that gave it its name: opéra comique – the ‘eminently 3 Still the most exhaustive source for understanding the dissemination of music in the theatre worldwide is Alfred Loewenberg, Annals of Opera: 1597–1940, 3rd ed. revised and corrected (London: Calder, 1978). For a theoretical position which argues for a fundamentally Franco- Italian musical culture in the nineteenth-century European theatre based on contemporary case studies, see Mark Everist, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Music for the Theatre: Europe and Beyond, 1800–1870’, Music History and Cosmopolitanism, ed. Anastasia Belina, Kaarina Kilpio and Derek Scott (London: Routledge, 2019), 13–32. 4 The term ‘diplomacy’ is here used in the sense articulated by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht as a way ‘to conduct relationships for gain while avoiding conflict’ (Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 4). Studies of diplomacy and music abound, but are polarised around superpower relations after 1945 and the early modern period; see for example the collection of essays edited by Rebekah Arendt, Mark Ferraguto and Damien Mahiet, Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Studies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cultural diplomacy are a more appropriate context for those of the nineteenth. See among others the special issue of Early Music, ‘Music and Diplomacy’ 40 (2012) and such studies of diplomacy and other art forms in the early modern period as Maija Jansson, Art and Diplomacy: Seventeenth-Century English Decorated Royal Letters to Russia and the Far East (Leiden: Brill, 2015) and Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia, ed. Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello. Studies in Contemporary World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-82938-0 — The Empire at the Opéra Mark Everist Excerpt More Information The Empire at the Opéra 3 national genre’, as it was regularly called – which presented works that subtly balanced traditions of prose drama and music composed by the nation’s leading artists. Relationships between creativity, politics and memory were focussed most strongly during the Second Empire (1852–70), when Emperor Napoléon III brought the Paris Opéra under the direct control of the imperial household. As a consequence, some of the most powerful statesmen in the country were allowed to regulate the artistic policy of the institution. Such power was expressed through control of a repertory dominated by various forms of memory – national, foreign, artistic – as well as by the priorities of diplomacy and politics. Despite frequent appeals to their own experience, none of the members of the governing body of the Opéra had any previous involvement in theatrical management, and the consequences for the repertorial design not only of the Opéra, but also for all forms of music in the Parisian theatre in the second half of the nineteenth century were far reaching. This Element shows that the politicians responsible for this aesthetic coup d’état took their control over the routine management of the Opéra as a pretext for comprehensive change. Senior members of Napoléon III’s government assumed power over the Opéra’s repertory, and over all aspects of its artistic management, in ways unknown since the ancien régime; they did this both for their own benefit and for the profit of the state as it used the Opéra for public demonstrations of power.5 In doing so, this network of senior politicians developed a conservative artistic policy that emphasised military and diplomatic imperatives, accelerated the process of canon formation and promoted an operatic and aesthetic memory of the past. The consequences were felt across all parts of theatrical culture in France, the rest of the continent and the globe. Technologies of Power The changes to the administration of the imperial theatres in the early years of the Second Empire threw the special status of the Opéra into relief: it was no longer run by a directeur-entrepreneur, but was brought back directly under the financial control of the state, a return to the pre-1831 situation that would not be reversed until 1866.6 The Opéra was placed under the supervision of 5 This is a radically different proposition to that made in Jane Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera As Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), where the nation’s image of the title is claimed to be embodied in a handful of well-known grands opéras.

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