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‘Poésie lyrique’ and ‘Chorégraphie’ at the Opéra in the July Monarchy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Marian Smith
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Extract

Flanking the legend ‘Académie Nationale de Musique’ over the grand entrance to the Palais Garnier are the words ‘Chorégraphie’ on the left and ‘Poésie lyrique’ on the right, large enough to be legible from some distance. Ballet and opera were represented equally on the Académie's stage as well as on its façade: works of both kinds were created and performed in abundance there for much of the nineteenth century. Moreover, their interaction went beyond simply sharing the stage, and dated back to a time long before the Palais Garnier was built.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , March 1992 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

Research for this study (which is based in pan on a paper given at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society in 1989) was carried out under a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Oregon.

1 Jane Fulcher has pointed out that ‘the exterior message was to be as important as the interior’ for Garnier, who had ‘an intuitive sense of the complex ideological and social functions the Opéra was to serve’. The Nation's Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized An (Cambridge, 1987), 174–5.Google Scholar

2 La Gazette musicale de Paris, 2 11 1834Google Scholar; Dresden, Abendzeitung, letter dated 6 07 1841.Google Scholar The ballet historian Ivor Guest has taken a more ecumenical approach than many; see The Romantic Ballet in Paris, 2nd edn (London, 1980), especially 10–13.Google Scholar Among the very few musicologists interested in nineteenth-century ballet is Wiley, Roland John (Tchaikovsky's Ballets, Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar, who has also helped produce Swan Lake and The Nutcracker for the Royal Ballet.

3 The first ballet d'action performed at the Opéra (on 26 January 1776) was Medée et Jason, staged by Gaetano Vestris. It had been choreographed by Noverre and first performed in Stuttgart in 1763.

The terms ‘ballet d'action’ and ‘ballet-pantomime’ denoted independent ballets with dramatic action and danced divertissements, as opposed to ‘ballet’, a term applied, in its strict sense, only to the danced divertissement within an opera or a ballet-pantomime. In this article, however, I use ‘ballet’ and ‘ballet-pantomime’ interchangeably, as critics, choreographers and theatre-goers did in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

4 I am omitting the nine special performances given by Paganini, in 03 and 04 of 1831Google Scholar; most of these were followed by a ballet-pantomime but not an opera.

5 These figures are based on annual budget reports in the National Archives in Paris, AJ13 228, 229 and 230.

In 1830, dancers' salaries constituted 53 per cent of on-stage performers' salaries; in 1831, 58 per cent; from January to May 1832, 51 per cent; in 1832–3, 49 per cent; in 1833–4, 46 per cent; in 1834–5, 47 per cent; in 1835–6, 44 per cent; in 1836–7, 44 per cent; in 1837–8, 38 per cent, in 1838–9, 35 per cent; in 1839–40, 38 per cent. (The theatrical year was reckoned, beginning in June 1832, to run from 1 June to 31 May.) It was Véron's idea to retain a large corps de ballet but to cut its members' salaries.

The total amount of money allotted to orchestral musicians, who usually numbered from about seventy to eighty, was generally from about a half to two-thirds of what dancers were paid in regular salary.

6 These fees were paid to principal singers and dancers for each performance, in addition to regular salary.

7 La France musicale, 18 07 1841.Google Scholar

8 La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, 26 06 1842.Google Scholar

9 see for example, Le Journal des débats, Le Constitutionnel, La Revue musicale, La France musicale, Le Ménestrel, La Revue et Gazette musicale and La Presse. See also Margaret Miner's forthcoming study of the fantastic in Parisian music criticism of this period.

10 Among the many pieces calling for black characters in minor roles were the ballet-pantomimes Manon Lescaut, La Tempête, La Voli´re and Le Diable amoureux, and the operas Don Giovanni, La Esmeralda, Le Lac des fées and Jérusalem. A well-documented fascination with exotica, the actual presence of soldiers and blacks in Paris during this period, and the influx into the city of new types of poor people, may account for the presence of such characters in works at the Paris Opéra. See Judith Goldstein's forthcoming work on the Physiologies, nineteenth-century publications that described the appearance of the types of people one was likely to encounter on the street.

11 An exchange in Act I scene 5 of La Muette de Portici could, perhaps, be construed as an exception to this rule, because two lines mimed by Fenella fit into the prevailing rhyme scheme: ‘ELVIRE, allant à Fenella: Rendez le calme à mon coeur éperdu: / Alphonse vous est-il connu? FENELLA: (Elle répond oui.) ALPHONSE: Le regret me déchire et le remords m'accable. ELVIRE: Achevez … J'ai frémi! FENELLA: (Elle continue, et dit par ses gestes: Celui qui m'a trompée, celui qui m'a donné cette écharpe, celui qui m'a trahie …) ELVIRE: Eh bien! Ce coupable? FENELLA: (Elle montre Alphonse de la main.) ELVIRE: C'est lui!' [going towards Fenella: Restore peace to my desperate heart: / do you know Alphonse? FENELLA: (She responds yes.) ALPHONSE: Regret rips me apart and remorse overwhelms me. ELVIRE: Out with it … I tremble! FENELLA: (She continues, and says through her gestures: ‘The one who has deceived me, the one who has given me this scarf, the one who has betrayed me … ’) ELVIRE: Well! This guilty man? FENELLA: (She points out Alphonse.) ELVIRE: It is he!]

12 On Mallarmé and the ballet, see Gould, Evlyn, ‘Why Go to the Theater?’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 2 (1987), 69–86.Google Scholar

13 Noverre, Jean-Georges, Lettres sur la Danse et les Ballets (1760), trans. Beaumont, Cyril (London, 1930; rpt. New York, 1975), 52–3.Google Scholar

14 La Gazette musicale de Paris, 21 09 1834.Google Scholar

15 La France musicale, 3 02 1839.Google Scholar

16 Kisselgóff, Anna, ‘The Virtues and Pitfalls of Telling No Stories’ The New York Times, 7 07 1991.Google Scholar

17 Le Courrier français, 27 02 1835Google Scholar, translated and quoted by Crosten, William F., French Grand Opera, an An and a Business (New York, 1948), 65.Google Scholar

18 This effect is ably described by Crosten who, however, does not mention that La Belle was a ballet-pantomime (60). (This ballet-pantomime is not to be confused with the opéra féerie of the same name by Planard, Carafa and Gardel, first performed at the Opéra on 2 March 1825.)

19 La France musicale, 25 08 1830.Google Scholar

20 National Archives, Paris, AJ13 215.

21 Wrote one critic, ‘if music doesn't express the feelings of players, what else is there to express them? Arm movements are a poor language’. Le Siècle, 23 09 1836.Google Scholar

22 Lichtenthal, Peter, Dictionnaire de musique, trans. (into French) Mondo, Dominique (Paris, 1839), I, 116.Google Scholar

23 The only ballet that ends bloodily is La Gipsy; Stenio is mortally wounded by Mab's gypsy gunman just before the final curtain.

24 On politics and opera, see Fulcher (n. 1), especially Chapter Two.

25 Characters based on real people occur in only two ballets from this era: King Alfred in Alfred le Grand (1822)Google Scholar, which depicts the struggle between the Saxons and Danes, and Prince Charles (later Charles II of England), who was a central character in the ballet Betty (1846)Google Scholar, the light subject matter of which is actually based on the play La Jeunesse d'Henri V by Alexandre Duval, and has nothing to do with the execution of Charles' father, the Civil War, or any of the other events from the king's life.

26 Translated and quoted by Beaumont, Cyril, The Complete Book of Ballets (New York, 1941), 82.Google Scholar

27 Véron, Louis, Mémoires d'un bourgeois de Paris (Paris, 1857), III, 157–8.Google Scholar

28 Chouquet, Gustave, Histoire de la Musique dramatique en France (Paris, 1873), 169–71.Google Scholar

29 Lettres et Entretiens sur la danse (Paris, 1824), 282.Google Scholar Salvatore Viganò (1769–1821), who created ballets about Richard Coeur de Lion, Joan of Arc and Othello, was one of many choreographers who aligned himself with Noverre in this regard.

30 Giselle ou les Wilis (Paris, 1841).Google Scholar

31 Giselle.

32 Gautier, Théophile in La Presse, 25 07 1843Google Scholar, La Fille du Danube (Paris, 1836)Google Scholar, La Sylphide (Paris, 1832), all translated and quoted by Beaumont, (see n. 26), 142, 101, 79.Google Scholar

33 His accounts of his journeys from opera house to opera house in Italy are fascinating. Of Pisaroni he wrote, ‘my god, is she ugly! [ … but] La Pisaroni enchanted me. A magnificent voice’. Quoted by Jouvin, Benoit in Hérold, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1868), 126.Google Scholar

34 Castil-Blaze (François Henri Joseph Blaze), L'Académie Impériale de Musique de 1645 à 1855 (Paris, 1855), II, 175.Google Scholar

35 These include Le Comte Ory and Benvenuto Cellini. See Gossett's, Philip introduction to the Garland reprint of Le Comte Ory (New York, 1978).Google Scholar These operas were performed, in keeping with the law, with recitatives and not spoken dialogue. See also Janet Johnson's discussion of the ways in which opera at the Théâtre Italien was altered to conform to French tastes in â ‘The Théâtre Italien and Opera and Theatrical Life in Restoration Paris 1818–1827’, Ph. D. diss. (University of Chicago, 1988).Google Scholar

36 Anecdotes about ballet spectators reading their librettos may be found in contemporary writings, for example, in a review in La Presse, 26 09 1836.Google Scholar

37 Berlioz and the Romantic Century, 3rd edn (New York, 1969), I, 162.Google Scholar As Barzun points out, Berlioz later decided that distributing the programme of the Fantastic Symphony to the audience was inappropriate unless Lélio were included in the performance as well. But this does not support the argument that Berlioz ever meant the programme to be a mere promotional aid.

38 Lichtenthal (see n. 22).

39 On the correspondence between music and motion and its laughability, see Abbate, Carolyn and Parker, Roger, ‘Dismembering Mozart’, this journal, 2 (1990), 187–95.Google Scholar

40 For more examples of the use of words in performances of early ballet-pantomimes, see my forthcoming work on Giselle. Of the explicador, Luis Bunuel writes, ‘In addition to the traditional piano player, each theatre in Saragossa was equipped with its explicador, or narrator, who stood next to the screen and ‘explained’ the action …. It's hard to imagine today, but when the cinema was in its infancy, it was such a new and unusual narrative form that most spectators had difficulty understanding what was happening. Now we're so used to film language, to the elements of montage, to both simultaneous and successive action, to flashbacks, that our comprehension is automatic; but in the early years, the public had a hard time deciphering this new pictorial grammar. They needed an explicador to guide them from scene to scene.’ My Last Sigh, trans. Israel, Abigail (New York, 1983), 32.Google Scholar

41 Emphases added. Lichenthal, (see n. 22) I, 115Google Scholar; Castil-Blaze, , Dictionnaire de Musique moderne (Brussels, 1828), I, 121–2.Google Scholar

42 Groos, Arthur, introduction to Reading Opera (Princeton, 1988), 5.Google Scholar