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Cherubini and the Revolutionary Sublime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2012

Sarah Hibberd
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Abstract

France receives little attention in narratives about the sublime in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This article will argue that the cataclysmic tableau at the climax of Cherubini's first opera for the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris, Lodoïska (1791), can be understood as part of a coherent and distinctively French discourse of the sublime, rooted in revolutionary experience that can be understood in relation to wider European trends.

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Articles
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Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , November 2012 , pp. 293 - 318
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Comments included: ‘It is very possible that there is an overabundance of effects, and a lack of rest and simplicity’, Mercure de France (8 October 1791); ‘We reproach him however for an excess of beauties’, Mercure de France (6 August 1791); ‘We are even forced to think sometimes that it is too much’, Journal de Paris (20 July 1791). Cited in Charlton, David, ‘Cherubini: A Critical Anthology, 1788–1801’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 26 (1993), 95–127, here 106, 105, 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Critics are anonymous unless otherwise stated. The Feydeau company was founded in 1789 under the patronage of Monsieur, Comte de Provence, the future Louis XVIII, primarily to perform Italian opera and spoken dramas. See Wild, Nicole, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1989)Google Scholar. Over the next ten years, works by Cherubini (resident composer), Devienne, Le Sueur and others rivalled those of the Opéra-Comique at the Salle Favart. The two companies (Feydeau and Favart) finally merged in 1801.

2 See Pencak, William, ‘Cherubini Stages a Revolution’, Opera Quarterly 8/1 (1991), 8–27, here 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The opera was set in Poland, a nation whose aristocracy had during the eighteenth century become symbolic of corruption and degeneracy in Europe, an element of the plot that would not, Pencak suggests, have gone unnoticed by audiences. The libretto was based on an episode from Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai's novel, Les Amours du chevalier de Faublas (1787–90).

3 Ibid., 14. Pencak states that mock Bastilles were built on a grand scale and its destruction re-enacted, and that theatrical puppeteers did the same on a smaller scale, though I have been unable to find any writings (contemporary or modern) to support these claims.

4 Fétis, François-Joseph, ‘Cherubini’, Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique, 2nd edn, 8 vols (Paris: 1866–68), vol. 2, 266Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, Michael Fend, who explains, ‘Cherubini refined his orchestral technique and mixed serious and comic situations in the ensembles. Crudely speaking, he had made striking progress in fusing the traditions of Gluck and Paisiello. Such a synthesis of conflicting styles was probably unprecedented in French opera’, in ‘Cherubini’, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 16 Aug. 2011. The term ‘opéra comique’ appeared in its modern sense only in the nineteenth century. The term ‘comédie mêlée d'ariettes’ was more usual in the eighteenth century, until the 1790s, when librettists and composers borrowed terms from spoken theatre, sometimes modifying with ‘mise en musique’ or ‘lyrique’. ‘Fait historique’, ‘comédie héroïque’, ‘drame lyrique’ and the more neutral ‘opéra’ were commonly used to describe French operas with spoken dialogue (as opposed to recitative), performed primarily at the Feydeau and Favart theatres. ‘Opéra comique’ tended to mean ‘vaudeville’ at this time. M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, ‘Opéra comique’ 1. ‘Terminology’, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 16 Aug. 2011. In this article I use the term opéra comique in its modern sense, to indicate operas with spoken dialogue.

6 See Fend, Michael, Cherubinis Pariser Opern (1788–1803) (Stuttgart, 2007)Google Scholar; ‘Literary Motifs, Musical Form and the Quest for the “Sublime”: Cherubini's Eliza ou le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St Bernard’, Cambridge Opera Journal 5/1 (1993), 17–38Google Scholar.

7 Later in the decade, some even felt that it would lead to anarchy, or to another ‘terrorist’ regime, see Michael McClellan, ‘Battling over the Lyric Muse: Expressions of Revolution and Counterrevolution at the Théâtre Feydeau, 1789–1801’, PhD diss., 2 vols (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994), here vol. 1, 205.

8 Gossec to H.A. Chelard, F-Pn, lettres autographes, vol. 44, no. 305 (no date); cited and translated in ibid., vol. 1, 204.

9 Personnel included the Degotti brothers, Ignace and Ilario, and machinist Boullet. One critic mentioned the ‘terrifying effect’ of the fire (Affiches, annonces et avis divers); another noted how the orchestral accompaniments ‘destroyed the mind, by adding to the horror of the situation’ (Fiévée, Chronique de Paris); another claimed that the fire was ‘one of the most beautiful ever seen at any [theatrical] spectacle’ (Journal de Paris); all published on 20 July 1791, and cited in Charlton, ‘Cherubini’, 102–3. Following the deregulation of theatres (13 January 1791), the Feydeau competed successfully with the many new theatres vying for attention with spectacular visual effects. David Charlton sees it as the cradle of French-Romantic set design and stagecraft, with its achievement of exceptional standards of spectacle, conceived as an integral part of the music-dramatic whole, 95–6.

10 A. C. B., Journal général, par M. Fontenai (25 July 1791), cited in Charlton, ‘Cherubini’, 104. There are eight reviews from the first run of this opera.

11 Affiches, annonces et avis divers (3 August 1791), cited in Charlton, ‘Cherubini’, 105. Kreutzer's Lodoïska was first performed on 1 August 1791 by the Opéra-Comique at the Salle Favart.

12 Almanach general des spectacles de Paris et de province, pour l'Année 1792, 81–3, here 82, cited in Charlton, ‘Cherubini’, 106.

13 Journal de Paris (20 December 1794), cited in Charlton, ‘Cherubini’, 109. There are four reviews of the first run of this opera.

14 Le Miroir (15 March 1797); Dudausoir, Le Miroir (17 March 1797); Le Miroir (19 March 1797), cited in Charlton, ‘Cherubini’, 113, 115, 116. There are fourteen reviews of the first run of this opera.

15 McCallam, David, ‘Exploring Volcanoes in the Late French Enlightenment: The Savant and the Sublime’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29/1 (2006), 47–59, here 52–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Ibid., 54–6.

17 Ibid., 56. McCallam points to a deeper fascination with the volcano that can lead to the Empedocles complex of legend (as repeated via Horace), which proved a resonant metaphor for Burke of the revolution's extreme psychological effect on observers: the ancient Greek philosopher threw himself into the crater of Etna.

18 McCallam, ‘Exploring Volcanoes’, 50–51. There were also, of course, philosophical debates about man's relation to nature, including the famous exchange between Voltaire and Rousseau following the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, summarised in Miller, Mary Ashburn, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794 (Ithaca, NY, 2011), 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 See the editors' preface, ‘Ecrire la catastrophe’, in Mercier-Faivre, Anne-Marie and Thomas, Chantal, eds, L'Invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle: Du châtiment divin au désastre naturel (Geneva, 2008), 7–30, here 8–12Google Scholar.

20 Volaire was renowned for his paintings of Vesuvius at night, in which the light of the lava contrasted with that of the moon; he had studied with Joseph Vernet before moving to Naples in 1769 – the chiaroscuro in this work is characteristic of the Neapolitan style of the period. See Beck-Saiello, Emilie, Le Chevalier Volaire: Un peintre français à Naples au XVIII siècle (Naples, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 These writers and others are cited and discussed in McCallam, ‘Exploring Volcanoes’, 50. Linguet had been a philosophe, but following an argument with Jean de la Rond d'Alembert became a vociferous opponent, writing sensational pamphlets denouncing the modern and the enlightened; his volcano analogy appeared in his Histoire impartiale des Jésuites (1768). Delisle de Sales was best known for his De la Philosophie de la nature (1770), from which this quotation is drawn.

22 McCallam, David, ‘The Volcano: From Enlightenment to Revolution’, Nottingham French Studies: special issue Revolutionary Culture: Continuity and Change, ed. Darlow, Mark, 45/1 (2006), 51–68, here, 63Google Scholar. In Sylvain Maréchal's Le Jugement dernier des rois (1793), as the lava threatens to engulf the crowned heads of Europe in the final moments of the play, the king of Naples exclaims: ‘Mais voilà le volcan qui paraît vouloir nous mettre tous d'accord: une lave brûlante descend du cratère et s'avance vers nous. Dieu!’ To which the king of Spain replies ‘si j'en réchappe, je me fais Sans-Culotte’. Maréchal, Sylvain, Le Jugement dernier des rois (Paris, 1793), 35Google Scholar.

23 Miller, Mary Ashburn, ‘Mountain, Become a Volcano: The Image of the Volcano in the Rhetoric of the French Revolution’, French Historical Studies 32/4 (2009), 555–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 McCallam, ‘The Volcano: From Enlightenment to Revolution’.

25 Huet, Marie-Hélène, Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (Philadelphia, PA, 1997), 64–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 McCallam, ‘The Volcano: From Enlightenment to Revolution’, 54, 63.

27 Huet, Mourning Glory, 3–4.

28 I am indebted in this paragraph to the discussion of Burke's and Kant's approaches in ibid Huet, Mourning Glory, 51–3; and Shaw, Philip, The Sublime (London, 2006), chaps 3 and 4Google Scholar.

29 ‘[T]he idea of the supersensuous emerges from the realisation that reason's attempts to grasp the totality are empirically unrepresentable’, Bowie, Andrew, ‘German Idealism and Early German Romanticism’, in Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester, 1990), 41–57, here 44Google Scholar.

30 Bowie, 63–70.

31 In his Reflections, Burke claimed that the Jacobins (i.e. the radicals) operated from a sense of perfect safety, kept in sublime ignorance of the terrible reality of the revolutionary crowd by the abstracting power of their democratic theories and fancies. He cautioned against this idea of a ‘false’ sublime.

32 Shaw, The Sublime, 86–7.

33 Ibid., 86–7.

34 François Picavet, though, has shown that Grégoire and Sieyès were introducing the philosophy of Kant (to an admittedly small circle of people) in France as early as 1794, as a means of combating the materialism and aestheticism of the Jacobins; François Picavet, La Philosophie de Kant en France de 1773 à 1814 (Paris, 1888). Victor Cousin was the main (not terribly accurate) purveyor of Kant's ideas in France, in his lectures at the Sorbonne in the early years of the Restoration; see Robert Helmreich, ‘La Réception cousinienne de la philosophie esthétique de Kant: Contribution à une histoire de la philosophie française au XIXe siècle’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale (2002), 193–210; and for his influence on the reception of Rossini's music in Paris, see Walton, Benjamin, Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge, 2007), 248–52Google Scholar.

35 Nicholas Cronk has demonstrated how Boileau did not simply translate Longinus, but attempted to create a theory of poetic language, employing the sublime as a new critical term. See The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville, VA, 2003), ii.

36 Notably in clusters of writings around 1720 (Du Bos, Marivaux, Desfontaines) and in the 1730s (Silvain, Prévost, Castel and Rémond de Saint-Mard); Cronk, The Classical Sublime, 159, 172.

37 Influenced directly by Burke, and cited in ibid., 159. Cronk explains the conceptual differences between the classical and romantic sublime thus: although both were grounded in a notion of inspiration, at the level of genre, the classical sublime was exclusively a (French) literary concept, whereas the romantic sublime was a (European) aesthetic concept, as much concerned with painting as with poetry.

38 Cronk, The Classical Sublime, 172–3.

39 Année littéraire (1776, vol. VI, p. 217), cited in Becq, Annie, Genèse de l'esthétique française moderne 1680–1814 (Paris, 1984), 611Google Scholar. James Macpherson published his ‘translations’ of the poems of the supposed ancient Scottish bard Ossian in the 1760s.

40 For more on this idea, and the ways in which such disasters were sometimes viewed as opportunities to start with a clean slate and introduce social reforms, see Christophe Cave, ‘Bienfaisance et discours de presse’, in Mercier-Faivre and Thomas, L'Invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle, 157–82.

41 ‘La catastrophe devient alors davantage un ressenti qu' … un objet de refléxion’, Ibid., 28.

42 For example, sea monsters trigger the denouements of Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) and Dardanus (1739). Tragédie lyrique was, however, stigmatised by its supposed prioritising of spectacle over drama; for more on this idea, see Kintzler, Catherine, Théâtre et opéra à l'âge classique (Paris, 2004)Google Scholar.

43 The plot is detailed in the Gazette de France [Moniteur universel] (20 February 1791). As M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet has revealed, most of the works performed at the Opéra in the early 1790s had been written (and their librettos submitted) before the start of the revolution. In the case of Cora, the libretto was submitted in 1784 and the score heard by the committee in 1788, but it was not formally accepted until June 1789, and significant changes were made before it was performed. It seems that the eruption of the volcano (which earned the machinist Boullet – who was subsequently to work on Lodoïska – the admiration of audiences) was a late addition that might have contributed to the delay. See Bartlet, , Etienne-Nicolas Méhul and Opera: Sources and Archival Studies of Lyric Theatre during the French revolution, Consulate and Empire, 2 vols (Heilbronn, 1999), I, 169–88, esp. 185Google Scholar. See also, Pierre Saby, ‘Cataclysme et exoticisme dans l'opéra français: Les Incas du Pérou (Rameau, 1735) et Cora (Méhul, 1791)’, in Mercier-Faivre and Thomas, L'Invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle, 419–31, here 419–20.

44 Saby, ‘Cataclysme et exoticisme’, 427.

45 Friedland, Paul, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 28Google Scholar.

46 Marie-Hélène Huet, Mourning Glory, 34.

47 McClellan, ‘Battling over the Lyric Muse’, vol. 1, 139.

48 Maslan, Susan, Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (Baltimore, MA, 2005)Google Scholar.

49 See, for example, Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination; Lehning, James R., The Melodramatic Thread: Spectacle and Modern Culture in Modern France (Bloomington, IN, 2007), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Senici, Emanuele, Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (Cambridge, 2005), 155–7Google Scholar; and Nodier, Charles's (1832) Introduction to ‘Le Mélodrame’, Théâtre choisi de Pixérécourt, 4 vols (Paris, 1841–43), vol. 1, p. viiGoogle Scholar.

50 Gerhard, Anselm, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1998), 53–4Google Scholar (he draws the notion, and the phrase ‘unprecedented shocks’ [chocs inopinés], from Grétry's memoirs). Gerhard posits Cherubini's Médée (1797) as ‘a first reflection of those horrors in French opera’ (a reflection that he traces (intermittently) through to the mid-nineteenth century), but Cherubini's earlier operas should also be seen in a similar relationship with recent revolutionary experience, as this article argues.

51 Meyer, Stephen, ‘Terror and Transcendence in the Operatic Prison, 1790–1815’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 55/3 (2002), 477–523, here 478–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the relations between late eighteenth-century prison façades and the architectural rhetoric of the sublime, which sort to convey similar ideas of grandeur and terror, see Böker, Uwe, ‘The Prison and the Penitentiary as Sites of Public Counter-Discourse’, in Böker, Uwe and Hibbard, Julie A., eds, Sites of Discourse – Public and Private Spheres – Legal Culture (Amsterdam, 2002), 211–48, here 234Google Scholar.

52 Pencak, ‘Cherubini Stages a Revolution’, 10.

53 Luigi Cherubini and Claude-François Fillette-Loraux, Lodoïska, comédie héroïque en trois actes [vocal score, including spoken dialogue] (Paris, n.d. [1791], available (with the scores for all Cherubini's French operas) on the accompanying CD to Fend, Cherubinis Opern), Act I, scene 1, p. 51 (spoken dialogue). The full score is also available at http://imslp.org.

54 Cherubini and Fillette-Loraux, Act I, scene 6, pp. 104–5 (duet, with chorus at the end). Although revolutionary songs did not become a widespread tool of propaganda until 1793, there was a vogue for spontaneous songs at club meetings, banquets and reunions, and within theatrical performances, from the earliest days of the revolution. This oath-swearing may well have been seen as an echo of the Serment du jeu du paume [Tennis Court Oath] of June 1789, signed by almost all members of the Third Estate when they believed they had been locked out of a meeting of the Estates General with the king. At the moment of oath swearing, the separate will of the individual became the general will. For more on the significance of oaths in operas during this decade, see Bartlet, M. Elizabeth C., ‘The New Repertory at the Opéra during the reign of Terror: revolutionary rhetoric and operatic consequences’, in Music and the French Revolution, ed. Boyd, Malcolm (Cambridge, 1992), 107–56, here 117Google Scholar.

55 Act III scene 5, p. 382.

56 Act III scene 6, p. 382.

57 ‘Mais que signifie cette alarme … je suis désarmé, que faire, affreuse situation … ô Ciel quels clameurs aux portes de cette galerie’ [But does this alarm mean … I am unarmed, what to do in this dreadful situation … oh Heavens what a noise at the doors of this gallery], Act III scène 6, pp. 382–5.

58 Cherubini and Fillette-Loraux, Act III scenes 5–7, pp. 382–6.

59 Mercure de France (6 August 1791), cited in Charlton, ‘Cherubini’, 105, together with other critics cited in note 1, above.

60 Michael Fend has analysed the translation of the sublime spectacle of an avalanche into music in Cherubini's next opera, Eliza, noting how the harmonic structure is too simple to reflect the action while the motivic development is insufficient to create musical coherence in itself. Rather, Fend concludes, the vocal lines capture the extreme feelings of the participants and observers, while the orchestra and chorus commentary paint the power and violence of the avalanche itself. Fend demonstrates persuasively that Eliza's authors were thus striving for a sublime effect equivalent to that reportedly experienced by alpinists. Fend, ‘Literary motifs, musical form and the quest for the “Sublime”’, esp. 33–4.

61 See Will, Richard, Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge, 2002), esp. ‘Silver: Drama as Tableau’, 46–59, here 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He discusses Dittersdorf in this context.

62 ‘[F]orm follows a series of anywhere from three to ten horn signals heard in the order they would be in an actual hunt, while the music in between consists chiefly of galloping orchestral passages’; forward impulse is balanced by formal closure. Ibid., 59.

63 For more on Chabanon's aesthetic, see Ora Frishberg Saloman, ‘French Revolutionary Perspectives on Chabanon's De la musique of 1785’, in Music and the French Revolution, 212–13.

64 Charles Perrault was commissioned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert to translate Vitruvius's treatise De architectura (1 BCE) in 1673, to aid with the building of the new Observatory of Paris and the design for the eastern façade of the Louvre. Perrault combines Vitruvius's three distinct architectural terms – proportion, eurythmy and symmetry – into a single concept of proportion. A document written in 1668 already makes specific connections between architectural and musical harmony through the concept of eurythmy: visual pleasure ‘when symmetry is well maintained and brought together in all of its proportions’ is compared to that provided for the ears by ‘the harmony of beautiful music’. (François Le Vau, ‘Avis de M. le Vau le jeune sur le nouveau dessin du Louvre’ (F-Pan O1 1669), cited in Berger, Robert, The Palace of the Sun: The Louvre of Louis XIV (Philadelphia, 1993), 128Google Scholar.

65 Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet published a four-volume supplement to the Encyclopédie in 1776–77 with Panckoucke, Charles-Joseph: Nouveau dictionnaire pour servir de supplement aux dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et des metiers, vol. 2 (Paris: Panckoucke, 1776), 908–9Google Scholar [original article from Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schöne Künste, 1771]. I am grateful to Nick Baragwanath for drawing my attention to eurythmy and its relevance in this context.

66 Edward Rothstein, ‘Contemplating the Sublime’, American Scholar (22 Sept 2007) [no page numbers], http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Contemplating+the+sublime.-a020158539 [accessed 18 April 2012].

67 Webster, James, ‘The Creation, Haydn's Late Vocal Music, and the Musical Sublime’, in Haydn and his World, ed. Sisman, Elaine (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 57–102, here 58–60Google Scholar. See also Webster, , ‘Between Enlightenment and Romanticism in Music History: “First Viennese Modernism” and the Delayed Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 25 (2001–2), 108–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar (here Webster calls the period ‘the age of Haydn's sublime’, 97).

68 Cited and translated in Huray, Peter le and Day, James, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1981), 207–8Google Scholar.

69 Ibid., 64.

70 Ibid., 113–14. Though Sulzer was unconvinced by attempts in Paris: ‘The French try to alternate trifles with sublime thoughts in opéra-comique symphonies. But all their sublimity soon degenerates into bombast’, trans. and ed. by Christiansen, Thomas in Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch (Cambridge, 1995), 107Google Scholar (from his General Theory of the Fine Arts (1771–74): ‘Symphony’).

71 Cited in Le Huray and Day, Music and Aesthetics, 202–4.

72 Ibid., 202–3; discussed in Webster, ‘The Creation’, 61–2.

73 Webster, ‘The Creation’, 61–2.

74 Mathew, Nicholas, ‘Heroic Haydn, the Occasional Work and “Modern” Political Music’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 4/1 (2007), 7–25, here 20–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Ibid., 20–21. For Mathew, Haydn had an important mediating role between ‘the tub-thumping of the French’ and Beethoven's sublimation of ‘the explicit ideological and ethical function of revolutionary music with symphonic technique’, 8. I am grateful to him for sending me a pre-publication copy of a chapter from his forthcoming book, The Sounds of Power: The Political Sublime and Musical Subjection. See also Head, Matthew, ‘Music with “no past”? Archaeologies of Joseph Haydn and The Creation’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 23/3 (2000), 191–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Cherubini became a member of the music band of the Garde nationale in 1794, and was employed as a teaching inspector at the Conservatoire. Between 1794 and 1799 he composed hymns and marches for political festivals, and he conducted a corps de musique at an anniversary celebration of the beheading of Louis XVI in 1796; see Fend ‘Cherubini’.

77 Mercier-Faivre and Thomas, L'Invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle, 25–7.

78 McCallam, ‘The Volcano: From Enlightenment to Revolution’, 59–60.

79 Jean-Louis Jam has examined the texts of Chénier's revolutionary hymns, and identified a similar evolution in vocabulary through the period, ‘Marie-Joseph Chénier and François-Joseph Gossec: Two Artists in the Service of Revolutionary Propaganda’, in Boyd, Music and the French Revolution, 221–35.

80 Denby, David, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 1994), 147–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See, for example, Dernier discours de M. Robespierre sur la fuite du roi (Paris, 1791); this was written when the king and his family were brought back to Paris under guard, after their attempted escape to Varennes in June 1791.

81 Denby, Sentimental Narrative, 139–40.

82 Ibid., 152–62, esp. 160.

83 Shaw, The Sublime, 73–4.

84 Guéniffey, Patrice, ‘Robespierre’, Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. Furet, François and Ozouf, Monica, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 298–312, here 304Google Scholar.

85 See, for example, Dernier discours de M. Robespierre. Moreover, nineteenth-century reports (by Lamartine, Michelet and Nodier, among others) emphasise his monstrous appearance and strange voice, which made the performances still more arresting, see Huet, 153–9.

86 Guéniffey, 305.

87 Hobson, Marian, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1982), 143–4Google Scholar. She cites L. Riccoboni and Cahusac as contemporary critics who took this stance, in contrast to the view that reality should not intrude, as awareness of the artifice would destroy the illusion, represented by (among others) Diderot, Grim, Lessing.

88 Ibid., 141–3.

89 As illustrated for Diderot in the works of François Boucher (1703–70), in contrast with Jean-Baptiste Greuze's (1725–1805) ‘tableaux of virtue’. See Bryson, Scott, ‘Strategies of Happiness: Painting and Stage in Diderot’, French Forum 29/1 (2004), 21–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90 The distinction is a morally charged one: papillotage engenders moral vice, as the viewer is seduced and led astray, while the imposing of coherence, order and hierarchy on a pictorial composition is a sign of aesthetic virtue. Ibid., 28.

91 Darlow, Mark, ‘History and (Meta-)Theatricality: The French Revolution's Paranoid Aesthetics’, Modern Languages Review 105 (2010), 384–400Google Scholar. Darlow identifies three issues to consider: multi-voicing and citation which sometimes call for meta-referential interpretation; an explicitly open-ended and audience-directed form of musical theatricality; and the work's referentiality.

92 Pièces de circonstances became much more common during the Terror, when theatres were expected to support the government's aim of creating a virtuous republic, and repertory became more overtly political. Darlow's study therefore focuses on this slightly later period.

93 Review of La Liberté conquise, Mercure de France (22 January 1791), cited in Darlow, 395.

94 Risi, Clemens, ‘Opera in Performance – In Search of New Analytical Approaches’, Opera Quarterly, 27/2–3 (2012), 283–95, here 283, 285CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 Darlow on pièces de circonstances in ‘History and (Meta-)Theatricality’, 399.

96 See notes 1 and 9, above.

97 Mercure de France (8 October 1791), cited in Charlton, ‘Cherubini’, 106.

98 On leaving Lodoïska a young woman, much moved, exclaimed ‘il y a du pathétique dans cet opéra: j'ai senti’, but then someone else retorted, ‘ma foi … moi, je n'ai senti que la fumée’. Les spectacles de Paris (Paris, 1792), 150. Cited in Marchand, Sophie, ‘La mise en scène est-elle nécessaire? L'éclairage anecdotique (XVIIIe siècle)’, in La Fabrique du théâtre: avant la mise en scène (1650–1880), ed. Fazio, Mara and Frantz, Pierre (Paris, 2010), 40–50, here 46Google Scholar.

99 Cherubini and Fillette-Loraux, 414–26.

100 Cited and developed in Denby, Sentimental Narrative, 161–5.

101 Ibid., 162.