Dance was a defining element of French baroque opera. In scenes ranging from festive gatherings to enchanted moments of slumber, dance asserted its presence in opera by means of solo and group choreographies, as well as vocal pieces set to dance rhythms. Dance also established a continuity between the theatre and the aristocratic world outside it, with the steps and rhythms that spectators encountered at the opera echoing those performed in ballrooms or at court. Louis XIV himself cultivated his talents as a dancer during his youth, appearing famously as Apollon in the Ballet de la nuit (1653) at the age of 15. If one of his courtiers failed to dance with the appropriate steps and requisite grace in public, she or he might be shamed into exile, like the unfortunate Montbron, whose disgrace was famously recounted in the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon.Footnote ¹

In recent decades, historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dance have produced studies on choreography and dance notation, dance rhythms and gestures, and the histories of individual dances such as the sarabande or La Mariée.Footnote ² Scholars have also noted dance’s sociopolitical relevance at court and onstage: Mark Franko’s seminal Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (1993), for example, considers French baroque dance as the aesthetic embodiment of court and politics. Recent high-profile productions of French baroque operas leave no doubt that the genre would lack its unique lustre without dance: the dances that fill the opening of William Christie’s 1987 and 2011 productions of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Philippe Quinault’s Atys (1672), for instance, elegantly expand the prologue in a way that never occurred in contemporary Italian operas. Until now, however, no book-length study has considered the dramatic centrality of dance to French baroque opera. How might a divertissement reflect the overarching themes of an opera’s narrative? In what ways did the dances in an opera give insight into the characters who sang before, after and in between them? How did varying stylistic approaches to dance at the Paris Opéra contribute to the plot development of operas? Rebecca Harris-Warrick confronts this historiographic silence in Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History. In this subject-defining study, the author demonstrates how dance activated dramatic meaning in French baroque opera, and elucidates the enormous variety of dance styles used at the Paris Opéra from its founding in 1672 to 1735; she also promises that a forthcoming volume will address French opera of the mid-eighteenth century, beginning with the works of Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Harris-Warrick, a leading scholar of the music of the French baroque, demonstrates an encyclopaedic command of the vast repertoire of the Académie Royale de Musique, drawing on the libretti and scores of well over 100 operas and related genres, including the opéra-ballet, the pastorale héroïque and the little-studied genre of ‘fragments’. These she mobilises in the service of a central argument: that French baroque dance and French baroque opera have been studied too much in isolation from one another, with the result that both strains of scholarship have failed to recognise the centrality of dance to the drama of opera. For Harris-Warrick, ‘the time seems ripe for an integrative model for French opera that includes the dancing instead of marginalizing it’ (1). Indeed, her study invites reflection on the history of French baroque opera tout court, for many of the fascinating examples that Harris-Warrick brings to light serve to remind readers of the generic fluidity of French baroque opera during the period. The Paris Opéra filled its seasons with familiar and novel works alike, presenting works of contrasting styles and aims: while spectators in the 1690s encountered André Campra’s musical forays into Venetian culture and Italianesque dances, for instance, they also enjoyed revivals of Lully’s more conventional French tragédies en musique. Through meticulous research, broadly applicable methodologies and eloquent writing, Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera offers not only a history of dance in French baroque opera, but also a fresh vision of French baroque opera as a whole.

In the first of the book’s two parts, Harris-Warrick explores the dramatic centrality of dance to Lully’s operas, opera prologues and lighter genres, taking care to introduce the basic technical principles of baroque dance, and shedding light on the individual talents of the personnel in Lully’s dance troupe. The second half of the book focuses on the Paris Opéra in the generation after Lully, using dance as a means of charting incursions of Italianate culture and comedy, and surveying the growing cultural prominence of star dancers. The bipartite structure of the book emphasises the break that occurred after the untimely death of Lully, the first director of the Académie Royale de Musique, who had held a virtually unchallenged royal monopoly over composing and producing operas in France. The break was not merely a shift in who could compose and produce opera; following Lully’s death, composers drew increasingly on comic, pastoral and Italianate tropes which in turn demanded new stylistic approaches from dancers. Consequently, Harris-Warrick organises Part Two by invoking the mythological muses of comedy, tragedy and dance – Thalie, Melpomène and Terpsichore, respectively. This organisation allows her to focus thematically on how each aspect of opera vied for attention on stage following Lully’s death: how Melpomène adapted to novelties introduced by Thalie, and how Terpsichore asserted a larger role that was more independent of the drama (but never completely severed from it) by the end of the period under study.

Harris-Warrick’s unparalleled command over the historical evidence relating to French baroque opera allows her to dismantle orthodoxies about this repertoire. She begins by challenging the commonly held notion that the divertissement in Lully’s operas functioned as a diversion from the central narrative, or as a purely celebratory scene. Instead, Harris-Warrick conceptualises the divertissement ‘as a structural term, which refers to a conventionally circumscribed portion of every act, regardless of its contents’ (8). This intervention liberates us from understanding French baroque opera as delineated into episodes of plot alternating with divertissements, encouraging an integrative vision of dance and drama in the genre. She considers divertissements through the lens of their texts, their dance music and their didascalies (i.e. the indications in the libretto about what is going on during an act or scene: Harris-Warrick finds the direct English translation, ‘stage directions’, insufficient). By closely examining divertissements in three of Lully’s well-known operas – Alceste (1674), Atys (1676) and Armide (1686) – Harris-Warrick demonstrates how a divertissement may reflect and develop characters’ identities or elucidate the power networks and social rituals that drive characters’ decisions. She justifies, for instance, the boisterous fourth-act divertissement of Atys, in which river gods celebrate the approaching marriage of their princess Sangaride to King Célénus, as a means of emphasising that Sangaride egregiously transgresses social and familial networks when she breaks off the betrothal. When a group of Fortunate Lovers performs the famous passacaille in Act V of Armide (1686), the sultry dance enhances Armide’s characterisation as a seductress with a visual and sonic intensity that is inaccessible from the libretto or score alone (16–19). Though Harris-Warrick does not mention it, the passacaille is further integrated into the narrative of Armide by its unusual placement. We expect it to fall at the end of the act as a bridge to a grand ball that would bring the drama to an end, as often happens in Lully’s other operas; instead, the passacaille occurs near the beginning of the act, where it can build towards the dramatic and emotional climax in which Renaud decides to abandon Armide.

Harris-Warrick also emphasises that dance typically operates within a vocal context in French baroque opera. Whether in its musical form or key or by sheer proximity, a dance almost always relates to a vocal piece (the major exceptions are marches and entrées graves). Dance and singing, however, do not usually coincide; by examining the didascalies, Harris-Warrick finds that audiences were usually treated to the visual spectacle of dance and the aural spectacle of singing sequentially. A character might sing a solo phrased like a minuet, and then a dancer would perform the minuet, or vice versa. Additionally, when vocal music alternates with instrumental music within choruses, the untexted portions offer opportunities for dance (40–6).

Despite the sequential treatment of dance and song, this steady alternation of the two forms of spectacle integrated dance deeply into the drama. Rather than operating as a series of airs, récitatifs dances and choruses organised only by scene or act, Harris-Warrick argues, French baroque operas were conceptually organised in large building blocks of dance and vocal music combined (66). This conceptual approach can equally be applied to divertissements that Harris-Warrick does not discuss: in Act IV, scene 7 of Lully’s and Quinault’s Persée, for instance, we find Ethiopians and sailors celebrating Perseus’s rescue of their princess. A gigue, minuet, rondeau and chorus are interleaved around the dance-song ‘Notre espoir allait faire naufrage’ (‘Our hope was going to be wrecked’), to form a divertissement in which an Ethiopian sings and sailors dance. These pieces function as a discrete conceptual unit rather than a loosely connected chain of dances and songs. Working together, the dance and vocal music construct a convincing portrayal of festivity that contributes to, rather than detracts from, the plot.

A third key point that Harris-Warrick establishes relates to opera prologues. Musicologists and French historians, most notably Peter Burke and Buford Norman, have noted the overtly political bent of Lully and Quinault’s prologues, which typically praise the king and often allude to contemporary political events.Footnote ³ Atys (1676), for instance, opens with the goddess of Spring beseeching Louis to rest from war long enough to enjoy the opera: a reference to the Franco-Dutch Wars (1672–8). Scholars have also proposed that prologues metaphorically placed the king onstage by alluding to politics, allowing the monarch to perform his majesty without having to dance himself (142). For Harris-Warrick, any analysis of an opera prologue must consider dance as well. She notes, for instance, that minuets and gavottes feature significantly more frequently in prologues than in the acts of operas proper: two of the best-known dances amongst late seventeenth-century high society. By displaying these dances onstage, Lully therefore activated the muscle memory of spectators, inviting them to participate in the prologue’s adulation of the king (153).

I would suggest that Harris-Warrick’s discussion of prologues is best read in conversation with Franko’s Dance as Text, which does not appear in the bibliography of Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera. Where Harris-Warrick’s readings are meticulously evidence-based – that is, adhering closely to details from libretti and scores – Franko contributes a more ideological perspective, reading the dancing baroque body as a marker of aesthetics and politics. Though his study centres on court dance in France between 1573 and 1660, his approach is applicable to later operatic dance. For Franko, court ballet reflected the political situation of the French nobility, with the result that the dancing body used carefully controlled movements not only to demonstrate subservience to the Crown, but also to assert independent agency against political pressure from the monarch.Footnote ⁴ By putting Franko’s reading of baroque dance in dialogue with Harris-Warrick’s findings on the predominance of oft-practised dance types in opera prologues, we are rewarded with a more visceral understanding of such prologues as political theatre. Gazing upon dances whose steps they recognised while experiencing deeply embedded muscle memory, noble spectators saw an idealised demonstration of corporeal and ideological subservience to the Crown. At the same time, the nobility might have appreciated the prologue’s inclusion of familiar dances as a way of symbolising the class’s importance to the Crown.

With Franko in mind, we might also consider the debt that French baroque opera owes to the ballet de cour, a genre of dramatic court ballets performed at the French court beginning in the early sixteenth century and into the reign of Louis XIV. As Franko demonstrates, the ballet de cour established a paradigm in which dance had political, aesthetic and narrative meaning. Harris-Warrick alludes to this genre several times throughout Part One, noting that many dancers in Lully’s dance troupe had performed in ballets de cour (101), and pointing out that the writings of Claude-François Ménéstrier (1631–1705) on the ballet de cour were influential to eighteenth-century writers on dance and opera (120–1). A deeper and more focused exploration of the legacy of the ballet de cour on French baroque opera would be fruitful in demonstrating the long history of association between dance and narrative in French musical drama.

Charting the gradual introduction of Italian elements into French baroque opera following the death of Lully, Harris-Warrick displays dexterous command of the musical institutions in Paris and the historical personages who exercised agency within them. Parisians were familiar with Italian theatrical traditions before the Opéra began to integrate them into its productions. The Comédie italienne, a theatrical troupe that merged elements of commedia dell’arte traditions with tropes from French theatre (especially the plays of Molière), was enormously popular in Paris. When it was disbanded by royal authorities in 1697, the Opéra incorporated some of the troupe’s stylistic hallmarks into its opera productions. Partly due to its ideological fidelity to the framework of Lully and Quinault’s tragédies en musique, and partly to avoid royal censure, the Opéra integrated Italianisms and comedy in ways that did not threaten a predominant French character. Several works, including Campra’s L’Europe galante (1697) and Les Fêtes vénitiennes (1710), featured a mixture of French and foreign characters in Venice. Some operas, such as Campra’s Le Carnaval de Vénise (1699), portrayed French characters watching an opera or other performance genre in Italian. This technique allowed Parisian audiences to sample a taste of Italy without feeling that their native musical art form was being threatened by foreign influences. In operas that incorporated Italianisms, Harris-Warrick reveals how dancers also took on increasingly specialised roles that included commedia dell’arte characters, such as Arlequin (227–33).

This historical narrative is richly detailed. Harris-Warrick explains, for instance, that the Italianisms at the Opéra were matched by a growing presence of Italianate musical styles in the latest non-operatic compositions, such as the instrumental repertoire of François Couperin (231). The incorporation of ballroom scenes – which were typically set in Venice – in operatic works was directly encouraged by French fascination with Italian culture (266). The Regent Philippe d’Orléans was himself an Italophile, and it was only after he invited a new Italian troupe to Paris to replace the defunct Comédie italienne in 1716 that the Opéra decreased its implementation of comic elements drawn from Italian traditions (300).

The non-specialist reader may on occasion wish for more frequent discussion of the historical, political and cultural forces that informed shifting tastes at the Opéra. Harris-Warrick’s discussion of Italian influences, for instance, would benefit from insight into the historical context that led French spectators to become so enraptured with Italy, and especially with Venice, in the years immediately around 1700. It would be helpful to review, in this context, the more enthusiastic diplomatic relations between France and the Republic of Venice in the years following the Nine Years’ War (1688–97). An additional intervention from Franko’s scholarship would also enrich a reading of Harris-Warrick’s analysis of Italianisms at the Opéra. The dancers who adopted Italianate markers, such as those who danced mute commedia dell’arte roles or Italianesque dances like the forlana, could be said to be performing France’s political rapprochement with Venice. Franko argues that the dancing body was the site of a struggle for power; taking this premise, we can read the operas that incorporated Italianisms without threatening established French aesthetic conventions as a celebration of French cultural superiority – despite the kingdom’s fascination with Italy.

Harris-Warrick shifts the focus of her book onto dancers themselves as she brings her study to a close. The eighteenth century witnessed a heightened interest in dance outside of a vocal context, a shift reflected by the profusion of non-vocal genres intended to showcase dancers, such as Jean-Féry Rebel’s Les Caractères de la danse (1715). Scholars invested in gender distinctions among dance roles, eighteenth-century dance pedagogy and the cultivation of virtuosity among opera dancers will find Chapter 13, ‘Terpsichore, Muse of Dance’, especially valuable. In this chapter, Harris-Warrick tracks the gradual increase in public dancing roles (as opposed to roles in court performances) for women, culminating in the celebration of star female dancers such as Françoise Prévost and Marie Sallé. She also describes the dance styles in which specific male and female performers specialised. Her case study of the four Dumoulin brothers, each of whom specialised in distinct dance styles, for instance, offers potential for a starting point in a study of dance pedagogy or training at the Paris Opéra (387–90). In her discussion of leading dancers at the Opéra, Harris-Warrick positions Rebel’s Les Caractères de la danse at the head of a lineage of independent instrumental pieces and opera divertissements that saw the virtuosic dancer perform a tour de force display of swiftly shifting character-types to match quickly changing dance movements (392–4). For Harris-Warrick, the history of ballet should not be the tale of ‘a struggle for ballet to free itself from opera’s shackles’ (1). Rather, she uses her discussion of the influence of independent instrumental pieces on opera divertissements to demonstrate the fluidity between dance practices and the development of opera, showing, for example, Les Caractères de la danse as a precedent for the dance-heavy prologue of Collin de Blamont’s Les Fêtes grecques et romaines (1723). When paired with scholarship on baroque gesture and the biographies of Opéra dancers, Harris-Warrick’s work builds a more complete picture of the relationship between dance virtuosity, instrumental music and opera during this period. Indeed, Chapter 13 lays solid ground for a discussion of the ballet d’action and the development of pantomime in eighteenth-century French ballet; this reader looks forward to further insights into this performance genre in Harris-Warrick’s forthcoming volume.

Although Harris-Warrick gives a brief survey of basic dance movement vocabulary, her goal is not to provide readers with a dance manual, nor does she attempt to teach choreography notation (84–90). The History will therefore speak most meaningfully to those already equipped with a grounding in the step vocabulary, measured elegance and poise that baroque dance demanded. Artists working to stage French baroque opera today should certainly consult the book as well as scholars, however, not only for Harris-Warrick’s rich descriptions of how dance scenes in individual operas may have been staged, but also for her methodology. Indeed, the plenitude of insights she gains while limiting her sources almost entirely to libretti and scores should encourage scholars of this repertoire to draw upon these sources as diligently for their own work.

Harris-Warrick opens avenues for further inquiry by extending her analytical purview to many operas that have received little attention from scholars and performers, such as André Campra’s Achille et Déidame (1735), Charles-Hubert Gervais’s Hypermnestre (1716) and Jean-Baptiste Stuck’s Méléagre (1709). Much work remains to be done in extending Harris-Warrick’s analyses of the dancing in these operas to lengthier studies that would enrich our knowledge of eighteenth-century French stage works, and recordings of these works would considerably enhance our current sense of the soundscape of French baroque opera. Additionally, Harris-Warrick’s book will prove an invaluable source for pedagogues. As she points out, it can be tempting – especially, I would add, in the classroom – to reduce a study of dance in French baroque opera to a formalist discussion of dance-types and dance-steps; to dismiss, for instance, the narrative context of a minuet and focus instead on its meter, form or step sequences (1). In its love affair with dance, French baroque opera differs from other European operatic practices of the period, and can be marginalised as an aberration in the classroom. A pedagogical approach to the repertoire that follows Harris-Warrick in emphasising the ways that dance was a vehicle for drama might enrich classroom conversations on the genre.

Taken as a whole, Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History constitutes a seminal contribution to the field of scholarship in French baroque opera and dance. More than a history, this is a handbook for scholars and performers alike in comprehending the complex thought and dynamic visions that informed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French opera.