The life of the Liégeois composer André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741–1813) is an intriguing (if disconcerting) testament to the fragility of celebrity. As David Charlton has pointed out, Grétry is ‘hardly a household name’,Footnote ¹ and yet during his lifetime he enjoyed fame across Europe as the pre-eminent composer of opéra-comique. Grétry composed (or collaborated upon) 69 operas, of which many played a foundational role in redefining the style and reputation of opéra-comique during the eighteenth century. R.J. Arnold contends in this six-chapter study that Grétry’s extravagant public funeral indicated not only his great success as a composer of this genre of opera, but also how profoundly he connected with the French public on a personal and emotional level. According to Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, the composer’s funeral cortege was watched by three hundred thousand people (or half of the population of Paris) mourning the loss of their hero.Footnote ² Even allowing for an inevitable degree of exaggeration, Grétry evidently enjoyed a status of huge popular esteem, a status which, as Arnold aptly demonstrates, continued in the years following his death only to dissipate rapidly from the late 1820s onwards (pp. 209–12).

Whilst several important modern studies have attempted to extricate Grétry from a state of relative obscurity, it seems fair to say that Grétry is no more a ‘household name’ today than he was when David Charlton penned these words in 1986. R.J. Arnold’s study is a significant step not only towards remedying this problem, but also toward understanding how it came to be in the first instance. Employing a methodology which skilfully mixes thematic analysis with biographical examination, Arnold teases out important threads running through the composer’s life, his works, and his relationship with the French public, with the goal of discovering why the public so idolized him, and how he was able to connect with his audiences on a deeply personal level. The author’s argument centres around the idea that Grétry’s unique ‘sentimental’ style of composition – elsewhere termed ‘melodic’ or galant, rooted in the mastery of distinctive, direct and memorable song (p. 211) – helped to generate a ‘unique alchemy between creator, players and audience in the moment of performance’ (p. 4), which is outlined in impressive breadth.

Such breadth also ensures that this study is of great interest not only to Grétry scholars, but also to anyone interested in eighteenth and nineteenth century opéra-comique, the historical positioning of the composer in relation to his public, and the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism which Grétry’s life and work so conveniently straddled.

The author commences his study at the end, so to speak, with the story of Grétry’s funeral. He focuses on two issues: why did Grétry’s death attract so much grief, and how could so popular a reputation come to be eclipsed dramatically after his death (p. 2)? In order to begin answering these questions, Arnold returns to the beginning of Grétry’s career and his early works, which proved immensely popular amongst contemporary French audiences and abroad. These provide the initial framework by which the author introduces the first outgrowths of Grétry’s sentimental style, contending that even early opéras-comiques such as Lucile (1769) established a precedent for Grétry’s lifelong practice of seeking not only to profoundly move the emotions of the audience, but also to engage them relationally. Arnold writes: ‘a leading role was to be played by the sensitive imagination; indeed, it presupposed a distinctive mode of listening, where the spectator became an acute and receptive partner in the unfolding creation of the music drama’ (p.11).

This argument is sensitively drawn out, and it is interesting to note that the author does not shy away from grappling with issues of performance and performativity, which are here outlined in terms of an ‘alchemical reaction’ occurring between composers, performers, and their audiences (p 34). Such a consideration complicates any kind of simple binary we are apt to imagine between Composer and Audience, but this complication is necessary for said binary is an illusory, albeit tempting, prospect for the musicologist.

Chapter 1 also sets a high-but-considerate standard for musical analysis continuing throughout the study, presented in a manner which will satisfy the musicologist without intimidating a less technically minded reader. Throughout, the author carefully elucidates his argument for Grétry’s unique, affective style with close readings of sections of the score, most commonly of individual arias or orchestral interludes. Whilst the analyses are incisive, overly complex musical terminology is avoided, and this helps to preserve a sense of clarity which becomes invaluable as the study progresses. Arnold supports these analyses with a judicious use of musical examples, taken from the original scores where possible.

The second chapter turns toward Grétry’s writings on music, and it is a pleasure to see the composer’s Mémoires here receiving some degree of the attention they deserve. A remarkable text, they cover a broad range of subjects from aesthetics to psychology, which clearly indicate that Grétry had greater ambitions for his Mémoires than did many of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, much of the scholarship on Grétry refers only critically to the composer’s apparent conservative adherence to outdated aesthetic principles (a criticism which, it should be noted, is largely unfounded). Students of musical aesthetics will therefore find Arnold’s discussion stimulating, and it may even prove a gateway to other contemporary writers and practitioners (colleagues of Grétry’s) whose texts deserve wider discussion. These include, but are not limited to the theorist and librettist Nicolas-Étienne Framery (1745–1810), and the composer Jean-François Lesueur (1760–1837). Moreover, the author’s close attention to Grétry’s text provides fruitful evidence in support of his thesis that the composer’s unique sentimental ‘song’ style was deliberately cultivated by the composer.

Having sought to demonstrate in these opening chapters that Grétry’s remarkable appeal was at least in part contingent on the ‘subjectivity of the listener … [founded in] doctrines of compositional restraint, clarity of expression, and primacy of melody’ (p. 75), the third chapter provides some useful contextualisation of Grétry’s work against a tumultuous background of musical strife between the Gluckists and the Piccinnists. The author manages to employ this background to delineate the reception of Grétry’s works by contemporary commentators. La caravane du Caire (1783), an opéra-ballet in three acts (written with the Paris Opéra in mind, where the revised version premiered in 1784) affords a useful case-study in this regard. Although, as Katharine Ellis has argued, serious music journalism was not established sensu stricto in France until 1827,Footnote ³ it is important to recognise that incisive journalism on music occurred well before this date, and probing the reception of Grétry’s Caravane affords us an insight into another dimension of the composer’s relationship with his public.

One problem, however, is that this fruitful avenue of enquiry does not seem to reach its full potential. Whilst the author’s tangential examination of the opinions and writing of Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard (1732–1817) is certainly interesting, one does feel that so much attention is devoted to this single critic that the more general issue of Grétry’s broader reception is left tantalisingly under-cooked. A lack of evidential breadth perhaps also undermines this chapter’s strikingly bold conclusion: that in these years preceding the Revolution, ‘Grétry’s music became cherished as a rallying point against discord, intolerance, and the hardening of ideology’ (p. 108). Nevertheless, the passages of this chapter which do focus more intently upon Grétry’s troubled relationship with journalists are a refreshing vision of his reception amongst the literary elite.

Given the chronological nature of Arnold’s methodology thus far, in Chapters 4 and 5 the author is required to grapple with an event which not only transformed Grétry’s life and career, but also the very fabric of the society he worked and lived in: the French Revolution. The delineation of the French Revolution’s dates is a contentious issue, but Arnold seems to settle quickly on 1789–1794 (pp. 109–40). Although this adheres to one accepted interpretation of the Revolution’s chronology, some justification for why 1795–1799 should be considered ‘post-revolutionary’ would be helpful. After all, such an interpretation colours our perception of the four operas composed by Grétry during this period, requiring us to regard them through a post-revolutionary lens with which we may not be entirely comfortable.Footnote ⁴

The narrative of Grétry’s career in the Revolution has traditionally portrayed the image of a man past his prime, and leans on his declining performance statistics to present him as a composer unable to cope with the disintegration of the status quo. Arnold’s study takes important steps to challenging this dated narrative, and the author rightly points out that Grétry was actually strikingly productive between 1789 and his unofficial retirement in 1803, producing 21 new works in this period. The most successful, Pierre le Grand (1790) and Guillaume Tell (1791), received 52 and 62 performances respectively, and we might also add that the latter was on the stage as late as 1829.

Undoubtedly, he did not enjoy the same sort of success as he did under the ancien régime. However, this study offers convincing evidence that suggests that the changes experienced were by no means as destructive to Grétry’s career as we have traditionally imagined. In Chapter 5, the author also outlines Grétry’s resurgent popularity and appeal post-1795 as a composer of romances for the domestic and personal sphere, which were largely enjoyed ‘apolitically’ (p. 159).

However, the author sets out to resolve a very complex problem across these two chapters: ‘Did the Revolution bring about some fundamental alteration in [Grétry’s] ability to understand and communicate with his public – perhaps by … effecting a decisive shift in popular taste?’ (p. 110). Whilst the case he presents is compelling, it seems a shame that the composer’s Mémoires are given little attention in this section after their close analysis in Chapter 2. The bulk of the analysis in this study thus treats the Mémoires as if they were a pre-Revolutionary text, despite the fact that the first volume was published in the year the Bastille fell (1789) and the concluding two as late as 1797. Several interesting passages from the later volumes would seem to indicate that these have a great deal to show about how Grétry himself perceived his revolutionary position in relation to his new government and public, and yet they are not taken into consideration. For example, Grétry wrote of music’s socio-didactic utility in the second volume, raising important questions about how the practice of composition might be directed by the state: ‘France busies itself with regeneration, and instruction will be the work of the legislator. What art is better than music for influencing morals? Its well-directed influence gives nations the energy or the cordiality which it needs’.Footnote ⁵ Had Grétry come to conceive of the composer’s role as primarily serving the political regime? Did he perceive that aesthetic edification had become secondary to moral instruction? Such passages could provide fruitful evidence to further illuminate the author’s argument in Chapter 5.

The final chapter of Arnold’s study examines the cementation of Grétry’s posthumous identity as an arbiter of national sentiment and demonstrates how ongoing legal and personal disputes over the final resting place of the composer’s heart reflected profounder sentiments concerning his emotional significance for an entire nation. Issues of sentiment are aptly entwined together with those of national identity, and an extended discussion of the continued success of the composer’s early works after his death amply demonstrates that Grétry’s short-term sentimental appeal and long-term disappearance from the canon was deeply contingent upon his nostalgic, biographical appeal to the audience of his day (p. 209). Arnold’s conclusion – that Grétry’s mourners were testament not only to his sentimental style, but also to the effects of a cultural revolution preceding the political one, and to the persistence of human nature in the face of tumult (pp. 211–12) – is persuasive and well-made.

The study profiled here should have a wide appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines. Particularly impressive is the author’s skilful use of primary materials to enlighten his discussion of Grétry, including over 50 contemporary periodicals and extensive archival sources (which are not always easy to locate). Performance statistics, always contentious for this period, are sensitively handled and thoroughly researched. Attractive prints pertaining to relevant subjects of enquiry are judiciously scattered throughout the monograph, whilst the mixture of biographical and thematic investigation ensure that this study is not only stimulating, but also absorbing. The only significant problem is the price, which at £95 seems rather costly for such a compact book.

Nevertheless, this monograph is an important contribution to musicological scholarship, illuminating a rich but often-neglected tradition of opera in France during the long nineteenth century. We have gained a valuable study not only of Grétry and his work, but also of the striking changes such a turbulent period in history produced in the relationship between the Composer and his Public.