The word sublime is rarely used in its turn-of-the-nineteenth-century sense, when it evoked the overwhelming, the massive, the immeasurable. Yet that word applies readily to this new history of nineteenth-century French opera, the second volume (and first released) in a planned three-volume set issued by Fayard under the direction of Hervé Lacombe. The scope of this volume alone is immense. Working with a comité scientifique consisting of Joël-Marie Fauquet, Isabelle Moindrot and Jean-Claude Yon, Lacombe presents this history through a relatively complex but well-organized structure: 21 chapters, each consisting of six sections (about eight pages each) are organized into a prologue, three parts, and an epilogue. In total, 58 scholars (including Lacombe, who authored 20 sections) contributed to this 1,250-page project.
Their work has already garnered high-level recognition in France. As of this writing (November 2021), this volume has already earned the Grand Prix du Livre France Musique-Claude Samuel and the Prix René Dumesnil from the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Given the level of expertise of the contributors and the quality of their contributions, I suspect further accolades will follow.
I begin, then, where most book reviews end: I happily affirm that this new history is a must-read, and not just for scholars of nineteenth-century French opera. It would serve little purpose for me to recap and critique each chapter here: not only would the allotted space prove insufficient, but in most instances I would be fact-checking contributors by turning to their previously published work. I would instead like to use this review to elaborate on my claim that this book as a whole merits broader critical attention. Lacombe and his collaborators have created a history that – although it reflects the status quo in its field without controversy – essentially tries something new by foregrounding the agency of systems, institutions, and collective forces on a broad scale. This is decidedly not another Hegelian ‘great man’ history of nineteenth century music. Following the interests of a generation of scholars, it seeks rather to understand why and how events unfolded as they did within a documentable framework of laws and institutions. While there are reasons this works particularly well in relation to nineteenth-century French opera, the approach taken here strikes me as transferable. For specialists working on nineteenth-century Paris, this book offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on the field as a whole. Reading it cover-to-cover reveals by juxtaposition many new avenues for research, along with a handful of ways in which dix-neuviemistes might reimagine our current status quo. For those whose interests lie elsewhere, this volume makes a strong case for refocusing music history on the systemic.
A New Approach to the ‘History of …’ Genre in Musicology
To understand what Lacombe and his collaborators have achieved in this volume, it helps to draw a comparison to the approach normally taken by scholars working in a different field: the history of American cinema. Film history and its textbooks have for decades foregrounded the role of technology, of business practices and of legal frameworks over and above the achievements of its actors, directors and cinematographers. Consider, for example, Jon Lewis's American Film: A History, with chapter headings like ‘The Studio System’ and ‘Censorship: Regulating Film Content’.Footnote 1 When the idea of the genius auteur does figure into these narratives, it is thoroughly contextualized as a by-product of the system in which directors worked and in which their films were distributed.
Such is Lacombe's approach: there is no understanding French opera without first understanding the systems within which it flourished. Thus historical watersheds here are tied less to premieres and famous names, and more to important legal and institutional benchmarks. Crucial dates include 1806–7 and 1864, when Napoleonic theatrical licensing laws went into effect and were subsequently removed. The first few chapters cover the professional training of composers, librettists and singers, and outline the nature of governmental interventions and their motives. Lacombe's introduction, moreover, rejects the idea of an overarching ideological narrative in powerful terms:
Can one identify the period 1800–1899 with a single term? ‘Romantic’ is expected. We have used it in association with art and literature; we avoid it in describing opera, reserving for our epilogue how we care to envision what the expression ‘French romantic opera’ might mean … [‘Romanticism’] loses its efficacy in relation to the composers and music that one hears at the Opéra and Opéra-Comique, in operetta theatres, in salons, and all the more so when considered across an entire century. The diversity of artistic languages brought together in an opera complicates this question … What is needed are not value judgements, but rather a reversal of perspective that permits us to observe and take store of what was performed, appreciated, and debated at the time.
Peut-on identifier la période 1800–1899 par un terme? «Romantique» est attendu. Nous l'avons utilisé, associé à l'art et à littérature; nous l’éviterons pour qualifier l'opéra, réservant à notre épilogue le soin d'envisager ce que pourrait signifier l'expression «opéra romantique français» … [«Romantique»] perd de son efficacité pour désigner les compositeurs et la musique que l'on entend à l'Opéra et à l'Opéra-Comique, dans les théâtres d'opérette et les salons, et plus encore le siècle tout entier … La diversité des langages artistique qui se nouent dans un opéra complexifie la questions … Il ne s'agit pas ici d'un jugement de valeur mais d'un renversement de perspective qui permet d'observer et prendre en compte ce qui est joué, apprécié et débattu à l’époque’. (p. 17)
Such a ‘reversal of perspective’ speaks to the goals of this volume. There is no grand narrative, as in the work of previous generations of intellectual historians like Jacques Barzun.Footnote 2 There is, rather, an impossibly broad and variegated nineteenth-century repertory and audience, accessible through archival documentation and best understood through careful consideration of their interactions with traceable systemic forces rather than abstract ideologies. This approach is, to be sure, not new among historians of French opera, and certainly not new within Lacombe's own work. His landmark 1997 study Les voies de l'opéra français au XIXe siècle presages this approach.Footnote 3 This new volume builds on that foundation by drawing dozens of scholars who share these historiographic values into the fold to create not a collection of individual essays but a book that works surprisingly well as a unified whole.
This volume thus stands in contrast to many musicological books from the last two decades purporting to present a ‘history of’ a given phenomenon, some of which similarly adopt a collaborative approach. The Cambridge History series of edited volumes provides an instructive point of comparison. Consider, for example, Jim Samson's 2002 Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, which similarly eschews the ‘grand narrative’ approach, but without providing any unifying historiographic principles that bind its contributions, preferring instead to snapshot then current concerns and approaches.Footnote 4 The resulting volume celebrates a plurality of approaches, with the editor's preface claiming that ‘[s]ingle-author histories of nineteenth-century music are probably no longer tenable in light of today's specialized knowledge’.Footnote 5 Indeed, two subsequent decades of scholarship have demonstrated little interest among musicological specialists in the nineteenth-century in essaying such a volume alone.Footnote 6 Yet Samson's organizational paradigm embraces that plurality and specialization without steering it toward either synthesis or even dialogue: the essays are simply divided into two parts, delineated chronologically as 1800–1850 and 1850–1900.Footnote 7 As brilliant and observant as the contributions in this volume are, they often speak past one another, resulting in a (perhaps accurate) portrait of the field two decades ago as scattered and fragmented.
This is decidedly not the case with Lacombe's book. The organization of this volume will likely remain part of its appeal for some time. After a brief introduction, the first three chapters function as a ‘prologue’, laying out the institutional, legal and professional framework for operatic history in nineteenth-century France. Chapter 1 – with sections written by Jean-Claude Yon, Sylvain Nicolle, Karine Boulanger and Patrick Taïeb – sets the tone admirably by introducing not just the bureaucratic complexities at play, but also the archives within which they might be studied further. The next seven chapters (grouped as ‘Part 1 – Premieres and Repertories’) function as a fairly old-fashioned history of the genre nested within a more ground-breaking frame. The remaining two sections consider ‘production and dissemination’ (Chapters 11–15) and ‘imagination and reception’ (Chapters 16–20), with Chapter 21 serving as an epilogue. In addition to these thematic groupings, Lacombe has thoroughly cross-referenced contributions in the text, resulting in a volume that places its many contributors into dialogue with one another. Combined with an astonishingly thorough index and bibliographies at the end of each chapter, this book not only covers its topic thoroughly, but also makes the process of exploring the literature in a given area of specialization as straightforward as possible. (To aid the effectiveness of these internal references, Fayard would do well to consider putting forth a hyperlinked virtual version, available perhaps via library subscriptions. This would prove beneficial too because this volume's relatively low cost is due in part to it being printed on extraordinarily thin paper; library reference copies may not hold up well over time.Footnote 8)
This history thus offers a fresh take on its own scholarly genre by attempting synoptic coverage in a new way: by stitching together the work of specialists within a purpose-built framework of the laws and institutions that demonstrably shaped the subject at hand. The richness of this volume stems from its faith in the micro-historical: a creed that has animated studies of nineteenth-century music history for nearly two decades, encouraging doctoral students to study a single work or a single year.Footnote 9 In some senses, this book is the first major undertaking that attempts to make good on those methodological promises, demonstrating that our disparate parts might be assembled into a cohesive whole.
Tensions, Gaps, and Opportunities
As a whole, the book does not just come together well; it comes together about as well as it possibly could have. That said, tensions and gaps remain, and with them opportunities for further exploration and – perhaps – new explanations. I focus first on three ways in which recurring themes in the book seem to run against the grain of its own underlying unifying premises:
1) The integration of foreign influences. As presented here, French opera is the product of a domestic system of production, governed and guided by domestic laws, institutions and interests. Yet this book also rightly emphasizes the cosmopolitan nature of Paris's opera world, often dominated both by foreign composers and by repertory evocative of other places and cultures. The presence of foreign repertory and subjects in France is the subject of three chapters. Chapter 5 – co-authored by Céline Frigau-Manning and Corinne Schneider – considers the impact of German and Italian opera on French taste in the 1820s and 30s. Chapter 9 continues this thread in the later nineteenth century with contributions from Stella Rollet, Patrick Taïeb, Steven Huebner, Jean-Francois Candoni and Yannick Simon. Lastly, Chapter 17 – by Guillaume Bordry, Joël-Marie Fauquet and Ralph Locke – considers shaping forces from beyond Europe. The presence of these three excellent chapters reveals a tension, and with it an opportunity to answer basic questions about why and how foreign repertories, composers and subjects flourished. Instead, the question of foreign influence remains tantalizingly disconnected from the systemic explanations proffered elsewhere in this volume. Corinne Schneider and Céline Frigau-Manning, for example, acknowledge (p. 255) that the official legal theatrical system explicitly called for works in French at every venue except the Théâtre-Italien, but there is not a broadly conceived consideration of why – systemically – foreign repertory held such sway in Paris. One can imagine a revised look at Wagner and Verdi, at Weber and Rossini, even at the many operatic representations of more distant, colonized lands and peoples that revisits political circumstances – whether networks of post-Napoleonic refugees from southern, central and eastern Europe, cultural exchanges with a weakening Ottoman Empire, exploitative international financial arrangements, and so forth – in ways that illumine why Paris especially functioned as a cosmopolitan nexus, and why cultural wares from beyond France's borders proved desirable.
2) The treatment of taste as an abstraction. As with foreign influence, questions of taste more broadly permeate this history as a metaphysical presence, as something whose explanatory force can be invoked without broaching the mystery of why it existed as it did. Quite understandably, bringing taste into the orbit of things explainable in terms of institutional lines of power may have been beyond the scope of this book. Several chapters come close. Hervé Lacombe's section on the physiognomy of the public in Chapter 12 offers a glimpse into who attended these spectacles, smartly considering the mid-century typographies of Parisian socialites. Yet there is clearly more that could be said. As it stands, the omission of further explanations seems to endorse tacitly (Lacombe's contribution excepted) a more individualistic conception of taste such as that described in the early twentieth century by aesthetic philosopher R.G. Collingwood and others, in which engagement with art is emotional, imaginative and fleeting –and thus largely lost for the historian.Footnote 10 New research might consider collective, traceable alternatives. Sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Antoine Hennion have pursued this – albeit in relation to late twentieth-century tastes – linking artistic preference to a sense of class consciousness and public-facing presentations of the self.Footnote 11 Marxist historiography has proved promising as well: Walter Benjamin took seriously the shaping power of commodification on nineteenth-century Parisian taste, a thread picked up more recently by geographer David Harvey.Footnote 12 It seems possible to find yet more ways to account for taste less as a personalized mystery, and more as a product of a documentable collective consciousness tied to markets and commodities.
3) An unrealized institutionalization of musical style. Those who turn to this book expecting a history of French opera's musical style might be able to find some leads for further reading and listening, but may well come away frustrated. This book does not seek to present a history of style. This is, to be sure, a peculiarly old-fashioned Anglo-American obsession: our textbooks and anthologies still maintain an interest in accounting for the historical development of the music itself. Lacombe and his team have set their sights elsewhere. There are some brilliant stylistic explorations here. Matthias Brzoska's thorough account of the workings of Meyerbeer's musical dramaturgy (pp. 347–61) convincingly counters the old, often anti-Semitic arguments levelled against grand opera. Ralph Locke's careful account and critique of the musical features of exoticism (pp. 955–63) neatly synthesizes many of the insights found in his earlier writings. More generally, Lacombe's extended meditation on the nature of French operatic spectacle (pp. 303–16) could productively frame much future interpretive work. Yet in considering the institutionalized education of composers and regulation of their work, this book opens up a possible avenue for research that it does not pursue rigorously: namely the institutionalization of musical style. This topic has been taken up by those working on the history of theory and pedagogy. This is most evident in scholarship by Frank Heidlberger, Fabio Morabito, Louise Bernard de Raymond and Michael Masci, among others, who have considered in detail the pedagogical practices of the Conservatoire, and especially the contributions of figures like Antoine Reicha.Footnote 13 Such research affords the possibility of a more thorough understanding of the relationship between Paris's institutionalized musical training and the musical style of the operas that graced the city's stages.
There are numerous other ways in which this volume illuminates new paths toward original research. Once again, Lacombe's organization helps: in many instances, the final section of each chapter features a newer or less well established field of study. Examples include Joël-Marie Fauquet's section on the activities and practices of music publishers (pp. 628–37), Jann Pasler's on the presence of French opera throughout its colonial empire (pp. 802–11), and Romain Piana's on operatic parodies (pp. 1066–72), all of which remarkably provide not just an overview of relevant activities, but also insight into why events unfolded as they did by considering broader legal and political framing.
Pasler's contribution, moreover, is one of several that takes this volume far beyond Paris in Chapters 13, 14, 15, and 17. These sections, insightful as they are, offer mere glimpses into the ongoing globalization of research into nineteenth-century music history. There is much still to be uncovered and parsed in the years ahead, making it easy to imagine subsequent volumes that could transform these snapshots into a more thorough overview of opera's international presence and impact. As it stands, however, this volume remains focused primarily on Paris as a cultural centre, treating everywhere else to varying degrees as a periphery. I look forward to seeing how ongoing research on opera as a global phenomenon might nuance that perspective.
There are, lastly, several prominent approaches to the study of nineteenth-century opera that are either absent from or less integrated into the structure of this volume. Two of the most prominent include the related scholarly genres of hermeneutic or interpretive studies of operas and the so-called ‘quirk historicism’ described recently by Nicholas Mathew and Mary Ann Smart.Footnote 14 That these approaches do not form part of the main body of the text is understandable given the attachment such studies have to close readings of archival and musical details. That such work is largely absent from the bibliographies found throughout this volume, however, demonstrates a more palpable scholarly bias. Similarly, while this volume does include short, expertly crafted statements on famous singers sprinkled between chapters, these scholarly miniatures feel supplementary given the lack of accompanying bibliographies. Pierre Girod and Kimberly White's section on the careers of singers (pp. 116–23) counteracts this, though it seems that much excellent recent work on singers remains underrepresented here, especially given how active that field has become recently.Footnote 15 Taken as a whole, however, this book should not be faulted for what it omits, especially not when such omissions do not detract from the project's stated goals.
An Archival Orthodoxy?
To close, I would like to consider how this book has been shaped by the extraordinary condition of Paris's archives, and what the implications of this close relationship might be. Since the nineteenth century, the study of the history of French opera has been rooted institutionally in Paris. More specifically, a handful of state-sponsored, curated collections – notably those of the Bibliothèque-musée de l'Opéra and the Département de la musique (both divisions of the Bibliothèque nationale), as well as certain series held by the Archives nationale – have proven indispensable for researchers.
This state of affairs confers many benefits. Foremost among these is the concentration of resources. If one can get to Paris and spend a day or two navigating some institutional bureaucracy, one has gained access to more than enough materials to develop a scholarly career. For those living in and around the city (as many of the collaborators on this collection do), this becomes an annual rite. These collections, moreover, have been carefully curated to bring together both official institutional records, as well as items deemed to be of national significance. While the perspective offered by Lacombe and his collaborators might have been achieved by consulting more scattered, fragmented collections (as is the case for historians of Italian opera), it seems clear that the state of Parisian archives lends itself particularly well to fostering a study of this nature – especially as concerns documenting institutional and legal forces – and doubtless shaped its contents and methodology. The depth and concentration of Paris's archives has, in short, made this kind of work possible.
With such a close connection in mind, it is worth noting the critical perspectives on centralized, nationalized archives offered by modern historians and philosophers. These range from the theoretical (Jacques Derrida) to the polemical and critical (Craig Robertson, Francis Blouin, William Rosenberg).Footnote 16 As Craig Robertson explains, the ‘historicization of state archives can make explicit how archives create national narratives and, more importantly, national characters, prioritizing and privileging specific stories and peoples’.Footnote 17 This idea – that curation imparts its own discretion – is readily apparent in the history of nineteenth-century French opera. State-sponsored institutions like the Paris Opéra and the Opéra-Comique could preserve their own history in a way that few other institutions could at the time. Yet it is clear that what was saved reflected prevailing yet fungible notions of what counted as material of ‘national significance’. This becomes apparent not just in what was preserved, but even more so in what was not. The historical reach of opera extended far beyond the control of these institutions, finding its way into domestic music making, popular theatrical parodies, the songs of organ grinders and street peddlers, among others. Yet even the study of genres as prominent as operetta or féerie that existed just beyond the bounds of official venues whose documents were preserved de rigueur present challenges to modern researchers.Footnote 18
As a result, the archives that convey so much of the history of nineteenth-century French opera remain imprinted with old biases that reveal certain threads quite readily while concealing others. Lacombe and his collaborators have, for the most part, presented a narrative that follows paths built into the structures of the archives themselves. They do so expertly, to be sure, and not at the strict exclusion of other points of view. I would nevertheless like to consider the possibility that this volume – the work, after all, of nearly 60 collaborators whose research considers the same collections and who are largely attuned to the same goals – may ultimately evince an archival orthodoxy in our field. By this, I mean a shared vision or set of assumptions about how a research project should look and what it should achieve: in other words, an ideology, or at least an unusually stable status quo.
Our status quo has its professional advantages. The study of nineteenth-century French opera remains enviably collegial. Organizations like France: Musique, Cultures and the Palazzetto Bru Zane have fostered international networks of scholars readily sharing information, doing favours, hosting conferences, and even publishing conference proceedings and edited collections. Such collaborative efforts are crucial; I hope that such work continues.
Yet – after reading Lacombe's excellent collection – I am compelled to consider that it reflects not just the state of the archives themselves, but also a kind of archival privilege that impacts not just how existing and emerging scholarship is judged, but also who is included and excluded from academic conversations. To be clear, I do not wish to place blame on Lacombe or any of my colleagues for this; I see this instead as a structural concern, albeit one that became visible with particular clarity while considering this book. In privileging archives as a precondition for determining originality and value, we quietly push to the side those who cannot access such resources due to disability, funds or distance, and we thus inadvertently create an increasingly homogeneous, wealthy, privileged, abled and white norm for scholars in our field. This has likely biased our field, but it can be overcome. It helps, for example, that massive digitization projects like Bibliothèque nationale's Gallica have made an ever-growing number of sources from Paris available remotely.Footnote 19 Such projects, however, continue to prioritize better-known materials whose scholarly value is readily apparent rather than materials whose potential may yet be unrecognized. This is especially true of material that remains uncatalogued. Thus – for now, at least – scholars able to consult materials in situ hold an advantage within a discipline that favours such archival work. Projects that embrace the globalization and creolization of archival work will also help: Jann Pasler's current European Research Council project could prove a crucial litmus test here, just as Claire Rowden and Richard Langham Smith's Carmen Abroad has already created an excellent model for how a project with worldwide aspirations might look.Footnote 20 Beyond this, crafting scholarly space for critical rereadings and reconsiderations of pieces, practices and evidence (as happens constantly in the study of literature) could bring critical minds from more diverse backgrounds into the fold without demanding archival access as a precondition for academic value.
Thus this collection does more than just highlight and celebrate the exemplary work on nineteenth-century French opera that has been conducted so far. Looking ahead, it also indicates both implicitly and explicitly the innovative work that remains. May it serve as a firm foundation for new scholars whose work will explore horizons we can barely see.
