13 - Rewriting history from the losers' point of view: French Grand Opera and modernity

Summary

Theoretical and methodological issues are questions whose least clear feature is sometimes the outcome that is to issue from them. Nonetheless I would like to tackle one of these issues and use the emblematic case of nineteenth-century French opera as a starting point for considering some of the problems raised by the divide between music and society. The very title of the present book applies this divide to the domain of opera: Opera and Society – is there any other way to approach the subject? Yet any study of this topic inevitably raises a more or less explicit and assumed challenge to such a distinct division between two realities which should be considered as a relationship – as if they were not mutually dependent as a result of their very makeup.

MUSIC DOES NOT EXIST …

So how can we approach the relation between opera and society? Or how can we consider opera in social terms, and our collective bodies in lyric terms, to adopt Blacking's way of putting it? One option would be to focus on the complexity and variety of situations in order to nuance our analyses and modulate the way they are expressed. This is not the option I shall adopt. Rather, I support a simple and radical hypothesis: music does not exist. It seems to me that in the current state of music studies, expressing things in these exaggerated terms will clarify the debate.