¹ Review in Le Temps, 21 October 1888, cited in the critical notes by Mitterand, Henri for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Le Rêve, Les Rougon-Macquart IV (Paris, 1966), 1654.Google Scholar

² Extract from Zola's sketches, Les Rougon-Macquart, IV, 1627.Google Scholar

³ Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957), 136–40.Google Scholar

⁴ The major study is Ripoll, Roger, Réalité et mythe chez Zola (Paris, 1981).Google Scholar

⁵ Frye, , Anatomy of Criticism (see n. 3), 136–7.Google Scholar

⁶ Zola's involvement was recorded by Philippine Bruneau in her fragmentary unpublished memoirs (Bibliothèque Nationale, Mus. Mme Bruneau, l.a.s. 5). Jean-Max, Guieu gives a brief account of the genesis of Le Rêve in Le Thêâtre lyrique d'Emile Zola, (Paris, 1983), 39–45,Google Scholar and Bilodeau, Louis adds some facts and additional perspective in ‘Le Rêve: des Rougon-Macquart à la scène lyrique’, Les Cahiers naturalistes, 43 (1997), 239–50.Google Scholar See also Bruneau's memoir of his friendship with Zola, A I'Ombre d'un grand cœur: souvenirs d'une collaboration (Paris, 1932; reprint, Geneva, 1980), 17–38.Google Scholar

⁷ For a review of these issues with reference to L'Attaque du moulin see Huebner, Steven, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford, 1999), 410–23.Google Scholar

⁸ Carolyn Abbate describes music that is not manifesdy ‘real’ as the ‘operatic body’ in Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991);Google Scholar the normative ‘deafness’ of operatic characters to music is vital to her brilliant argument about a counterpoint of voices, some truthful, others not, in the work of Wagner and others. For the purposes of the present essay, the construct of ‘real music’ is all that really matters, but my own point of view, which I share with Kivy, Peter (‘Opera Talk: A Philosophical “Phantasie”’, this journal, 3 (1991), 63–77) is that even within the ‘operatic body’ characters cannot be deaf to pitch configurations or phrases, just as characters in a play would have to acknowledge that they are emitting words and sentences. Put another way: characters in spoken drama also move in and out of ‘performative’ situations … without abandoning verbal discourse (‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ versus, say, ‘Et tu, Brute?’).Google Scholar Appropriate to the extravagance of the genre (Lindenberger's, Herbert term, Opera the Extravagant Art (Ithaca, 1984)), it seems to me that operatic characters modulate between a mode of communication that one might describe as ‘(extravagandy) heightened lyrical discourse’ (ultimately inseparable from narrative and atmospheric frames, but also sometimes in counterpoint with them) and ‘real’ or ‘explicit’ song where stage characters either assume a self-conscious stance as performers or listeners, or where the reality of the music is in some other way unavoidable.Google Scholar

⁹ Bruneau, Alfred, ‘Rapport sur la musique en France du XIIIe au XXe siède’, La Musique française (Paris, 1901), 9–10.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Tribute by Alfred Bruneau to Gustave Charpentier and his opera Louise, cited by Delilia, Alfred, ‘La 50^me de Louise’, Le Figaro, 28 July 1900.Google Scholar

¹¹ Bruneau was preceded in this by François-Joseph, Fétis who called Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion ‘le plus ancien opera-comique qui existe’. ‘Adam de la Hale’ (sic), Biographie universelle des musiciens, 2nd edn, I (Paris, 1868), 13.Google Scholar

¹² See my ‘Between Anarchism and the Box-Office: Gustave Charpentier's Louise’, 19th-century Music, 19 (1995/6), 135–60,Google Scholar as well Fulcher, Jane, ‘Charpentier's Operatic “Roman musical” as Read in the Wake of the Dreyfus Affair‘, 19th-century Music, 16 (1992/3), 161–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ Reprinted as ‘L'Opéra-Comique’, in Les Ecrits de Paul Dukas sur la musique (Paris, 1948), 422–7.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Ibid., 426.

¹⁵ Review of Messidor, Le Petit Journal, 19 February 1897. On the costumes of Messidor.Google Scholar see the fine discussion by Guieu, Jean-Max, Le Théâtre Lyrique d'Emile Zola (see n. 6), 92–3.Google Scholar

¹⁶ For an example of Bruneau's negative assessment of verismo see ‘La Tendance moderne du gout musical’, in Musiques de Russie et musiciens de France (Paris, 1903), 271;Google Scholar his negative review of the Opéra-Comique production of Fervaal is reprinted in his Musiques d'hier et de demain (Paris, 1900), 156–66.Google Scholar He further elaborated on the generic inappropriateness of Fervaal to the Opéra-Comique in the article ‘L’Emminement français’, reprinted in Musiques d'hier et de demain, 180–7.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Review of the Louise première, reprinted in La Musique française (see n. 9) 153.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Reviews of Fervaal by ‘Dom Blasius’ in L'Intransigeant, 12 September 1898,Google Scholar and Le Borne, Fernand in Le Monde artiste, 15 May 1898. The — perhaps minimal — part played by Dreyfus affair politics in Albert Carré's acceptance of Fervaal early in his tenure as director of the Opéra-Comique remains to be explicated: like d'Indy, Carré was openly anri-Dreyfusard just as l'affaire exploded around Zola's J'Accuse after 13 January 1898. Carré assumed the directorship on the very same day.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Musiques d'hier et de demain (see n. 16), 160–1.Google Scholar

²⁰ ‘Livrets d'opéra’, reprinted in Musiques de Russie et musiciens de France (see n. 16), 113.Google Scholar

²¹ ‘Le Drame lyrique’, Le Journal, 22 11 1893.Google Scholar

²² Bruneau described a narrative role for the orchestra in his own essay ‘Le Drame lyrique francais’: [Drame lyrique] requires that the role of the orchestra be no longer passive, but active, [and] that symphonic textures, working together with the vocal line, take part in the drama, comment on the feelings of the characters in this drama, explain their souls, and create an appropriate atmosphere for them. Musiques d'hier et de demain (see n. 16), 112.Google Scholar

²³ In his review of d'Inddy's L'Etranger Debussy remarked that although d'Indy seemed to have liberated himself from some Wagnerisms, ‘would that he had freed himself completely from the need to explain everything, to underline, which sometimes weighs down the most beautiful scenes of L'Etranger.’ Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. Lesure, Francois (Paris, 1971), 69.Google Scholar

²⁴ See her ‘Opera and Verismo: Regressive Points of View and the Artifice of Alienation’, this journal, 5 (1993), 39–53.Google Scholar

²⁵ L'Ecbo de Paris, 7 June 1891.Google Scholar

²⁶ Reprinted in La Musique française (see n. 9), 207.Google Scholar

²⁷ Le Figaro, 16 June 1891.Google Scholar

²⁸ See her ‘Debussy's Phantom Sounds’, this journal, 10 (1998), 67–96.Google Scholar

²⁹ Le Rêve, Les Rougon-Macquart, IV (see n. 1), 869.Google Scholar

³⁰ Citation from Zola's dossier, Les Rougon-Macquart, IV 1661.Google Scholar

³¹ Abbate makes this and similar points in the third and fourth chapters of Unsung Voices (see n. 8).Google Scholar

³² Le Rêve (see n.1), 871.Google Scholar

³³ For a different point of view see Kelkel, Manfred, Naturalisme, vérisme et réalisme dans l'opéra de 1890 à 1930 (Paris, 1984), 303.Google Scholar

³⁴ The discrepancy did not go unnoticed by Bruneau's contemporaries. The d'Indyian critic Gauthier-Villars, Henry wrote of ‘many liturgical chants ingeniously employed: Ave verum, Pange lingua, Laudate pueri Dominum and even a well-known carol les Anges dans les [sic] campagnes, which Monsieur Bruneau has sung during the Corpus Christi procession — I don't know why — accompanied by a drum.‘ Review of Le Rêve, L'Echo de Paris, 29 September 1900.Google Scholar

³⁵ In ‘A Propos du “Rêve”: Chez M. Zola’, Revue et gazette des théâtres, 5 07 1891.Google Scholar

³⁶ Review of Le Rêve, La Liberté, 22 June 1891.Google Scholar

³⁷ A l'Ombre d'un grand cœur (see n. 6), 32.Google Scholar

³⁸ On this point see Kelkel, , Naturalisme, vérisme et réalisme (see n. 33), 98–9.Google Scholar

³⁹ Ibid., 304.

⁴⁰ Le Rêve (see n. 1), 868.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Le Rêve (see n. 1), 994.Google Scholar

⁴² Musiques d'hier et de demain (see n. 16), 120.Google Scholar

⁴³ Ibid., 165.

⁴⁴ Letter of 20 June 1891 to Charles Lecocq in Chabrier, Emmanuel, Comspondance, ed. Delage, R., Durif, F. and Bodin, T. (Paris, 1994), 897.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Guieu, Jean-Max, Le Théâtre lyrique d'Emile Zola (see n. 6), 96.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ ‘Ulysse Revealed’, forthcoming in Regarding Fauré, ed. Gordon, Tom.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Unsung Voices (see n. 8), 118.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Letter of 6 February 1900 to Pierre Louÿs, in Debussy, Claude, Correspondance, ed. Lesure, F. (Paris, 1993), 156.Google Scholar