The Théâtre des Variétés has been almost entirely overlooked in our canonical histories of nineteenth-century music. The institution receives no mention in Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker's history of opera; nor is it cited in seminal histories of Western music by Richard Taruskin, and Donald J. Grout, Claude V. Palisca and James P. Burkholder.Footnote ¹ Carl Dahlhaus evokes the theatre once in his Nineteenth-Century Music, if only to compare it negatively to Vienna's Volksoper; similarly, the theatre is referenced in the Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, but only in relation to artists like Jacques Offenbach and Philippe Musard, who had brief associations with the company.Footnote ² And yet, from 1807, the Théâtre des Variétés was a staple of Paris's theatrical landscape, a more permanent cultural force than, say, the short-lived but more prestigious Théâtre Lyrique.

I suspect that this collective historical amnesia can be partially explained by the fact that the Théâtre des Variétés – which was legally restricted to the performance of vaudeville comedy until 1864 – simply does not fit the orthodox historiography of nineteenth-century opera. Conventional wisdom holds that the nineteenth century was the age of musical organicism – of all-encompassing musical, dramatic, and scenic cohesion. Yet it is precisely from its lack of organic musical cohesion that the Variétés derived its musical complexity and political bite. Richard Sherr's 2021 critical edition of Ohé! les p'tits agneaux!, a revue de fin d'année (end-of-year revue) which played at the Théâtre des Variétés in 1857, demonstrates this. Indeed, through the sheer magnitude – the sheer elaborateness – of his editorial undertaking, Sherr demonstrates the rarely acknowledged musical and dramatic sophistication of the nineteenth-century vaudeville comedy.

Although its score is an enormous set of contrafacta of popular timbres: there is nothing ‘p'tit’ at all about Ohé! les p'tits agneaux!. It is a gargantuan, metatheatrical political satire of life in Second Empire France – barbed with an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, edge, but composed on the scale of a grand opera. Sherr's edition painstakingly reconstructs this long-forgotten work from the archives of the Théâtre des Variétés. It is a towering achievement: 640 pages; 87 individual numbers and a ballet score; a detailed plot synopsis with historical commentary; a libretto with translation; a press dossier; a biographical list of performers; and a number of high-quality plates displaying primary source material.

The past decade has seen a growing interest in the comédie-vaudeville among the humanities at large. Recent volumes such as Mark Everist's Opera in Paris from the Empire to the Commune and Jean-Claude Yon's Une histoire du théâtre à Paris de la révolution à la grande guerre have sought to elevate Paris's boulevard theatres within our historical consciousness, drawing attention to their complex role within the heavily regulated operatic ecosystem that preceded the 1864 liberalization of the theatres.Footnote ³ The value of Sherr's edition, however, lies in its attentiveness to the under-studied musical characteristics of French vaudeville comedy during this period.

It is very difficult for the historian to get a complete sense of what French vaudeville comedy sounded like: the most complete source for any given work, the livret, usually only contains the retexted lyrics to each vaudeville, along with the names of the corresponding timbres. Popular chansonniers containing the melodies (and occasionally the original lyrics) to these timbres had been published on the Parisian market since the early eighteenth century, and sometimes the melodies were also printed in the livrets themselves. There were certainly no published orchestral scores of the likes produced for the official lyric theatres. Thus, while historians know a lot about the basic melodic material and, of course, the textual material, orchestrations, harmonisations, choral arrangements, ballet music, overtures and instrumental interludes have remained mysterious to scholars of this genre.

Sherr reconstructs the full orchestration of Ohé! les p'tits agneaux! (along with the text alignment of its retexted vaudeville timbres) from the extant partbooks and a conductor's cue score known as the répétiteur, allowing us to better understand how these performances would have sounded. The results are nothing short of revelatory: Sherr reveals that the Théâtre des Variétés would not only borrow popular tunes from other operas, but would also lift orchestrations wholesale from these operas, or, indeed, from past performances at the Théâtre des Variétés. Thus, ‘while a revue de fin d'année at the Variétés was ephemeral, never to be repeated, its music was not’ (vol. 1, xxx). I was particularly struck by the surprising richness of the orchestrations, especially in the third act – which culminates in a parody of French grand opera. From the sumptuous pastoral loure for strings, piccolo and clarinet that opens the enchanted forest scene, to the dazzlingly kaleidoscopic overture (cobbled together from newly composed music and vaudeville tunes) and the bizarre chromatic outburst that accompanies the appearance of a vampire, Sherr's reconstructed score for Ohé! les p'tits agneaux! unearths an orchestral tradition unlike any other in Second Empire Paris in its unfettered variety. Having this exemplar of a full-length, fully orchestrated work from the nineteenth-century Théâtre des Variétés will be of immeasurable value to scholars hoping to understand how the popular Parisian tradition of retexting airs connus (‘popular songs’) was amplified for the nineteenth-century operatic stage.

An otherwise neatly formatted score was mired by some minor but pervasive engraving errors. Hyphens separating different syllables within a single word were aligned left against the preceding syllable, rather than being centred between the two syllables, leaving sizeable gaps in the middle of most multisyllable words. I often did not register these uncentered hyphens as I was playing and singing through the score, and, as a result, I frequently found it difficult to parse the text, especially when characters were singing in stylized patois. This is not necessarily Sherr's fault: this formatting issue has been endemic across many recent publications in this series.

The revue de fin d'année was set apart from other genres of vaudeville comedy by its expressly topical bent. Timely political satire was a feature of most comédies-vaudevilles staged at the Théâtre des Variétés. But the revue de fin d'année, with its free-wheeling, episodic plot, was explicitly designed to serve as a satire of the preceding year's key events. As such, the text, on its own, can be occasionally baffling to the modern reader, its humour so rooted in the news of the day, its jokes now lost to the ages. For example, to understand Act 2, Tableau 4 of Ohé! les p'tits agneaux!, the modern reader must first know that the trees on the Champs-Élysées were attacked by bark beetle in the mid nineteenth century and had undergone extensive medical treatment in the year 1857.

Sherr's edition takes pains to elucidate and historicize the eccentricities of this plot: in addition to an extensive ‘analytical synopsis’ (which summarizes the general thrust of the opera's fragmentary plot, contextualizing it within the news of the day), a series of endnotes to the translated libretto explain specific historical references in the text itself. Sherr underscores the extent to which scenarios from the plot were drawn from satirical cartoons and articles in the popular press, and he includes many such caricatures in the edition's plates. The scope of Sherr's textual analysis here – the sheer number of intertextual references that he has unearthed in this single work – provides us with a unique insight into the literary complexity of the revue de fin d'année genre. Sherr presents the revue de fin d'année as a kind of operatic time capsule, containing that year's current affairs, literary trends, and musical hits – a rich source of data for musicologist and historian alike.

Sherr's use of sources in these explanatory notes is particularly striking: he is careful to outline differences between the published livret and the livret de censure, thereby providing a record of the censorship process for the Théâtre des Variétés. Theatrical censorship has been a topic of considerable interest for scholars of nineteenth-century French opera in recent years and Sherr's edition, in showing the French censors ‘in action’, provides fascinating insights into how these censors approached the problem of the explicitly parodistic boulevard theatre.

As I was playing through Sherr's edition, I began to consider the matter of performance. In many cases, critical editions are produced to facilitate the performance of lesser-known (or lesser-known versions of) musical works. Would it even be feasible to stage a modern-day performance of Ohé! les p'tits agneaux! – a work so grand that it required a cast of 41 singers and a full chorus to play its 91 different roles; a work so contextually specific that it warrants multiple pages of historical exegesis to understand its plot? Sherr's edition is a vital scholarly resource; but, in its current form, it seems doomed to remain just that. I hope that we see more editions of nineteenth-century French vaudeville in the future. But I also hope that the sights and sounds of the nineteenth-century boulevard theatres and cafés-concerts do not remain stuck in the ivory tower, so that we can bring these scores to life on the operatic stage in ways that are immediate and accessible to modern audiences. As Sherr's edition has emphatically shown, this long-forgotten music deserves to be heard once more.