Building the Operatic Museum: Eighteenth-Century Opera in Fin-de-Siècle Paris is a welcome addition to the growing literature on what can loosely be termed opera reception studies with a cultural-history slant. The book’s purpose is to chart the process of the restoration of half-forgotten eighteenth-century works to the modern opera stage, and in particular, to appraise the contributions of French composers, critics, editors, publishers, scholars, performers and theatre managers to what must have seemed a rather improbable aim at the time: the revival of a whole range of music-theatrical works once consigned to the historical archive – if not to history’s dustbin – by bringing them afresh before modern audiences, not as pious tokens of musical antiquarianism but as valuable extensions of the living repertoire of opera houses worldwide. I am using the term ‘improbable’ in the above because, from the viewpoint of the present day,– when the very idea of the early music revival is taken for granted, it may take some effort to appreciate the intricate concourse of circumstances leading to such a development in the context of turn-of-the-century France.

Gibbons’s study explores a field previously mapped out by Steven Huebner, Katharine Ellis, Jann Pasler, Jane Fulcher, Annegret Fauser and Barbara Kelly, among other scholars situating themselves at the intersection of opera studies, the history of canon building and modern French cultural history. The book falls into three main parts, neatly subdivided into three chapters each. The three parts are devoted to the operatic fortunes of Mozart, Gluck and Rameau in fin-de-siècle France, and the headings of the introductory chapters provide clues to the book’s conceptual framework: according to Gibbons, the notions of ‘restoration’, ‘resurrection’ and the ‘monument’ circumscribe to a large extent the French rediscovery of eighteenth-century opera. Incidentally, I wonder whether resurrection and monument, associated by the author with the Gluck and Rameau revivals respectively, should not in fact work best in reverse order. But this is just a minor quibble.

What makes the book particularly worthwhile is its careful contextualization of the major fin-de-siècle revivals of eighteenth-century operas, including abundant selections from critical discourse, which together give us a detailed picture of the aesthetic, ideological and political energies mobilized by the creation of the so-called operatic museum – the gradual transformation of the musical theatre into a place of cultural memory that Gibbons traces to the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. In the author’s words, ‘the Operatic Museum … quickly transitioned from a naively impractical concept to a cultural necessity. French audiences (not just composers, as had been the focus in the 1860s) needed to see their music history enacted on their most prominent stages; their (re)education was a key part of maintaining narratives of French artistic dominance’ (p. 11). It is worth noting that the operatic museum (the much-repeated claim that the Opéra should be ‘like the Louvre of music’, a rotating permanent display of masterworks)Footnote ¹ is a more tangible phenomenon than what is usually called the canon. It is nothing less than the consolidation of a ‘classical’ repertoire in the opera house alongside the Franco-Italian favourites, with all the dilemmas arising from the conflicting demands of historical fidelity, on the one hand, and practical viability, on the other. One of the merits of Gibbons’ book is the way it enables us to see how these dilemmas were understood, and hotly debated, throughout the period in question, paving the way for a conception of the repertoire that is still very much with us. No matter how enmeshed in the idiosyncrasies of French nationalism, however, one wonders how far the invention of the operatic museum as such can be seen as a specifically French development, as opposed to a pan-European one. In the absence of a broader cultural perspective taking into account parallel developments in other countries, Gibbons’s study is open to criticism as a somewhat one-sided approach to what are in fact larger issues of musical historicism and the idealization of the past as an exercise in pseudo-aristocratic nostalgia.Footnote ² Even in France itself, the literary cult of the fête galante and the related Watteau revival were very much part of the same socio-cultural nexus, and yet this is an issue on which Gibbons has relatively little to offer.

The book’s most engrossing section is probably the one devoted to Mozart, for the composer’s place within the French operatic pantheon would always entail the most complex negotiations. It might strike one as odd that Mozart’s reputation in France during the nineteenth century rested to a far greater extent on Don Giovanni (rendered as Don Juan in the standard translations) than any other opera including Le Nozze di Figaro, despite the French credentials of the latter work by way of Beaumarchais. This preference itself is indicative of a very clear set of aesthetic priorities (Don Juan being perceived as a romantic work, and thus a modern one; on the other hand, the authorial slippage entailed in the incorporation of elements of Molière’s play into some of the early versions of the libretto cannot be overlooked). However, the place accorded to Don Juan could hardly disguise the awkwardness of the idea of a ‘French Mozart’, and Gibbons is right to emphasize the way in which the purchase of the autograph manuscript of the opera by Pauline Viardot in 1855 contributed to the work’s symbolic naturalization. At any rate, the decades around the turn of the century were to see a fundamental shift in the way Mozart was perceived by both critics and audiences, as the composer gradually mutated into a ‘classical’ figure, thus inviting a kind of authenticity in performance that was hardly required of a ‘mere’ repertoire work. As Gabriel Fauré put it in 1904, for instance, ‘for a long time we have noted a propensity to envelop masterworks in a pomp that they do not in the least demand’ (p. 40), thus foregrounding a set of values such as elegance, clarity, taste and understatement that could be regarded as both classical and French. According to Gibbons, the de-Romanticization (or perhaps, the de-Meyerbeerization) of Mozart was finally brought to fruition with the staging of Don Juan at the Opéra-Comique in 1912 through the combined efforts of Reynaldo Hahn and Albert Carré, a production deemed closer to the original than anything previously seen in Paris (except at the Théâtre-Italien in the early nineteenth century), with a retranslated libretto and a restored score in two acts (rather than the five that had become mandatory in France), and a reduced orchestra. Unfortunately, here as elsewhere, Gibbons has relatively little to say about the staging itself and the performance style of these early productions, a cause of some disappointment for anyone wishing to approach opera as spectacle rather than simply as text.

It is worth noting that the 1912 Don Juan was not the first example of a Mozart restoration at the Opéra-Comique: the same theatre had staged Die Zauberflöte (La flûte enchantée) in 1909 using the first ‘authentic’ translation of the libretto (with Fauré’s assistance in matters of text setting); the importance of this production – as well as the controversies surrounding its ‘de-translation’ – is explored in another chapter of Gibbons’ book. Although both productions had been generally hailed as artistic triumphs, they were also greeted with scepticism, as the gap between historicism and contemporary (that is to say, mainstream) taste became ever more apparent. Arthur Pougin, for one, found the restoration of the scena ultima in Don Juan unconvincing, to say the least; others complained about the excessive length of the restored acts, although here (judging by de Wyzewa’s account) the problem seems to have been caused by the overlong pauses required by scene-changing, rather than the work’s length as such (a point apparently missed by Gibbons). As for La flûte enchantée, virtually every critic agreed that the original libretto had little to recommend it, prompting the question whether authenticity was always a gain – a far from trivial question even today, but one that is beyond the scope of Gibbons’s investigation. More to the point, the author rounds off the book’s first part with a discussion of some of the threads of French cultural identity running through Mozart’s fin-de-siècle reception, focusing on nationalism, gender issues and aesthetics, thus bringing into relief the contentious issues of Mozart’s ‘Frenchness’, ‘Raphaelism’ and ‘sublimity’ – although the author’s claim that Third Republic audiences would be less inclined to accept works by a composer imbued with an aura of femininity (while seeking validation of traditional gender roles in the theatre) seems to me an oversimplification of a complex question, and an interpretation hardly borne out by the fin-de-siècle response to the music of Bizet, Massenet, Fauré or Debussy. At any rate, Gibbons’s attempt to analyze La flûte enchantée in genderized terms is too perfunctory; in particular, his view of the Queen of the Night’s coloratura as ‘empty’ and purely ‘ornamental’ (p. 80) seems to me both a misreading of the dramaturgical function of virtuosity in this particular context (the power to spellbind the listener, both on and off-stage) and a failure to acknowledge the immense importance of the ornament in fin-de-siècle culture – not for nothing, the age of Symbolism and Art Nouveau.

Gibbons is back on track with his account of the Gluck revival initiated at the Opéra-Comique in 1896 under Léon Carvalho, implying that ‘[i]n many ways, it was the changing perceptions of classical opera’s relevance to modern audiences that emerged from the Gluck productions at the Opéra-Comique (and, on one occasion, at the Opéra) that allowed Mozart’s triumphant entry into the Operatic Museum in the first decades of the twentieth century’ (p. 80). Due attention is paid to the combined efforts of Berlioz and Pauline Viardot in the revivals of Orphée at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1859 and Alceste at the Opéra in 1861, the latter following the debacle of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, thus triggering off the endlessly rehashed debate on whether the older composer should be regarded as a precursor or as an alternative to Wagner. Although Gluck’s music was frequently heard in concert in Paris, the Gluck revival was not to begin in earnest before the turn of the century, driven in part by the Pelletan edition of the composer’s canon of French operas. Starting in 1873, as a French answer to the monumental editions of Bach and Handel, the project was eventually taken over by Camille Saint-Saëns and Julien Tiersot; a similar Rameau edition, again led by Saint-Saëns, was launched in 1895. It is worth noting, however, that the Pelletan edition did not automatically render Berlioz’s versions obsolete, owing to the need to ‘modernize’ Gluck’s operas for the benefit of modern audiences. Over the course of little more than a decade, all of Gluck’s major operas were to receive a high-profile revival in Paris, thus creating the palpable sense of a lineage of French masterpieces reaching all the way back to the Enlightenment Age, as well as providing a reminder of the rootedness of the modern drame lyrique in a ‘purely’ French tradition of heroic grandeur (Debussy, of course, disagreed, seeing in Gluck an unfortunate accident in French operatic history). As rightly pointed out by Gibbons, the Gluck revival was also instrumental in highlighting the implied bond between modern France and the spirit of ancient Greece; although here too, one should beware of making too much of the uniqueness of Gallic Hellenism, as virtually every contemporary European nation (including, of course, the arch-rival Germany) laid claim to their share in the Greek heritage. Nonetheless, the links between the Orpheus myth and the aesthetics of Decadence/Symbolism would warrant a separate discussion, along the lines of Gibbons’s chapter entitled ‘Symbols’, in which he raises (albeit superficially) the question of the gender ambivalence of the operatic Orphée (usually sung by a woman en travesti) in relation to the Wagnerian ideal of creative androgyny. It is entirely apposite that the critic Raymond Bouyer should have speculated that each epoch saw a different picture reflected in Gluck’s mirror, adding presciently that ‘there are perhaps as many Orphées as there are listeners’ (p. 142).

The resurrection of Rameau is covered in the last part of Gibbons’s book, and here, as might be expected, the rationale behind the composer’s museification is more or less self-evident, given Rameau’s nationality and the consensus regarding his status as the epitome of a French musical Golden Age, turning him into the central exhibit in the Operatic Museum (p. 146). The problem with Rameau, though, was that in spite of all the cultural capital accumulated on his behalf by critics, composers and musicologists, his music remained an unknown quantity to the general public, the common view being that Rameau’s operas were but antiquated curiosities. The gradual introduction of extended excerpts of Rameau’s operas into concert programmes (nowhere more often than at the Schola Cantorum) was decisively enabled by the availability of the relevant scores from 1900 onwards, thanks to the editorial effort initiated five years earlier by Durand. As pointed out by Gibbons, claims of philological fidelity did not always prevent editors (among them Vincent d’Indy) from ‘improving’ Rameau’s musical texts, so as to bring them in line with the picture of the composer as a kind of universal precursor, a picture that, for once, could unite both scholistes and debussistes in a joint celebration of French musical genius (see especially pp. 161–2). The Rameau resurrection (further encouraged by the fact that the Gluck revival had meanwhile reached its zenith) would come to fruition in 1908 with the return of a fully staged Hippolyte et Aricie to the Opéra. Again, Gibbons discusses this epoch-making production in terms of the compromises born of the contrasting claims of authenticity and contemporary relevance, noting that the Opéra managers’ vision was by turn evocative of the Opéra’s original eighteenth-century production, and modern in the manner of the Gluck productions (p. 179). Although Fauré was to greet the 1908 Hippolyte as the rebirth of a style forgotten for so long that it seemed new again, the revival did not immediately convince critics and theatre managers of the modern viability of the tragédie lyrique. It was only ten years later, amidst the patriotic fervour of the Great War, that Rameau reappeared on the stage of the Opéra with Castor et Pollux, a production widely hailed as a celebration of French musical taste, past, present and (presumably) future. Judging by the contemporary testimony of the critic Théodore Lindenlaub, the occasion also seemed to mark the point at which the opera theatre had finally turned into something like a time-suppressing machine: in Lindenlaub’s words, ‘once the curtain fell … it was the street, and the city, and everything tangible that seemed … artificial and fragile’ (p. 194). It seems to me that, beyond the more overtly nationalistic uses of the eighteenth-century legacy, it was this trans-historical utopia – no less political in its transfigurative potential – that led to the ultimate triumph of the Operatic Museum.