1 André Tissier, Les spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution: répertoire analytique, chronologique et bibliographique, two volumes (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1992); Emmet Kennedy, Marie-Laurence Netter, James P. McGregor and Mark V. Olsen, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996); and Calendrier électronique des spectacles sous l'ancien régime et sous la révolution, www.cesar.org.uk/cesar2/home.php.

2 For an overview of these statistics see Kennedy and others, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences, 379–386.

3 There are exceptions, of course. Méhul's Euphrosine (1790) and Stratonice (1792) were quite frequently performed during the Revolution and into the early decades of the nineteenth century. For a new consideration of Méhul's presence within this repertory see Étienne Jardin, ‘La programmation de Méhul à Paris de son vivant’, in Le fer et les fleurs: Étienne-Nicholas Méhul (1763–1817), ed. Alexandre Dratwicki and Étienne Jardin (Arles: Actes Sud, 2017), 435–466.

4 These include Pierre Baurans's La servante maîtresse (1754; the French translation of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La serva padrona) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Le devin du village (1752), with 335 and 264 performances respectively.

5 All examples in this article are drawn from the first edition of the libretto (Paris: Duchesne, 1763) and the first edition of the printed score (Paris: Sr Hue, 1763). The work was not called an ‘opéra comique’ by its authors (the modern term does not capture the diversity of labels applied to the genre during the eighteenth century); rather, it is described in the libretto as a ‘comédie en un acte mélée d'ariettes’, and in the score as a ‘comédie en un acte’ with music.

6 In this case, as elsewhere, there are discrepancies between the figures of Tissier and the authors of Theatre, Opera, and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris – a testament to the overwhelming scope and complexity of the dataset involved. Here I cite the count of the latter, which covers the entirety of the Revolutionary decade; Tissier addresses only the years between 1789 and 1795. However, these tallies should be treated as bare minimums, since each analysis catches performances that the other misses.

7 Egidio Duni, Les deux chasseurs et la laitière, Accademia dell'Arcadia, conducted by Roberto Balconi (Brilliant Classics 95422BR, 2016).

8 Tissier, Les spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution, volume 2, 491.

9 Kennedy and others, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences, 90.

10 See Elizabeth, M. Bartlet, C., ‘The New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary Rhetoric and Operatic Consequences’, in Music and the French Revolution, ed. Boyd, Malcolm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 107–156Google Scholar.

11 See, for example, Paul d'Estrée's classic account of theatre under the Terror, Le théâtre sous la Terreur: théâtre de peur, 1793–1794 (Paris: Emile-Paul frères, 1913), or, more recently, Nadeau, Martin, ‘La politique culturelle de l'an II: les infortunes de la propagande révolutionnaire au théâtre’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 327 (2002), 57–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a nuanced account of the ways that programming might work independently of official policy see Darlow, Mark, Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opéra, 1789–1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

12 It bears repeating that theatres were frequently renamed during the 1790s. The Comédie Italienne was rechristened the Opéra Comique in 1793, and the Théâtre Feydeau had originated as the Théâtre de Monsieur in 1789.

13 Opera has only belatedly been integrated into histories of canon formation. Important correctives include Parakilas, James A., ‘The Operatic Canon’, in The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Greenwald, Helen M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 862–880Google Scholar; the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon, ed. Cormac Newark and William Weber; and the ongoing research project ‘Opera and the Musical Canon, 1750–1815’ at Dalhousie University, http://operacanon.io.

14 The collection of watercolours known as the ‘Album Ziesenis’ is thought to depict performances of French actors (active after 1774) at the Théâtre-Hollandais in Amsterdam. On this source see Noëlle Guibert and Michèle Thomas, eds, Le théâtre et la dramaturgie des Lumières: images de l'album Ziesenis (Arceuil: Anthèse, 1999).

15 Duni and Anseaume, Les deux chasseurs, first-edition libretto, 40–41 (my translations throughout unless otherwise indicated).

16 Performance statistics from the Old Regime have been compiled from Brenner, Clarence D., The Théâtre Italien: Its Repertory, 1716–1793 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961)Google Scholar, and from the registres of the Comédie Italienne (F-Po, Th.OC 45–72).

17 Duni and Anseaume, Les deux chasseurs, first-edition libretto, 45.

18 Kennedy and others, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences, 31.

19 On Bigot see Frégault, Guy, François Bigot: administrateur français, two volumes (Ottowa: Institut d'histoire de l'Amérique française, 1948)Google Scholar.

20 Kennedy and others, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences, 22.

21 The passage was certainly cut by 1801, if not earlier. See Les deux chasseurs (Paris: Fages, 1801). And, indeed, the alteration is so straightforward that the strophe could easily have been omitted in practice before the libretto was altered in print.

22 Heartz, Daniel, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (New York: Norton, 2003), 701–800Google Scholar, and Charlton, David, Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 281–299Google Scholar.

23 Duni had been granted the title of ‘music director’, along with a pension of 1,000 livres per year, in exchange for a contract of exclusivity with the theatre and a promise of two new works each season. See Kent M. Smith, ‘Egidio Duni and the Development of the Opéra-Comique from 1753–1770’ (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1980), 190, and Favart, Charles-Simon, Mémoires et correspondance littéraires, dramatiques et anecdotiques (Paris: Collin, 1808), volume 1, 57.Google Scholar

24 For general biographical information on Duni see Heartz, Music in European Capitals, 728–736, and Dinko Fabris, ‘Il punto sulle biografie di Egidio Romualdo Duni’, in I due mondi di Duni, ed. Paolo Russo (Lucca: Libreria Musicalia Italiana, 2014), 3–25.

25 This opera was not, of course, the first to be publicized in this manner. Dauvergne's Les troqueurs, widely acknowledged as the first opéra comique in the modern sense, was initially passed off as the work of an Italian composer. As Jacqueline Waeber has discussed, many comedies after the mould of Le devin du village were quickly judged as ‘pro-Italian’, even if they also owed a great debt to the tradition of the foires. See Waeber, ‘Le Devin de la Foire? Revaluating the Pantomime in Rousseau's Devin du village’, in Musique et geste en France de Lully à la Révolution: études sur la musique, le théâtre et la danse, ed. Jacqueline Waeber (Berne: Peter Lang, 2009), 156–157.

26 Hobson, Marian, ed., Denis Diderot ‘Rameau's Nephew’ – ‘Le Neveu de Rameau’: A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition, trans. Tunstall, Kate E. and Warman, Caroline (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0098), 161Google Scholar.

27 ‘Monsieur Duni, Éloge de’, in Le nécrologe des hommes célèbres de France, Année 1776 (Maestrict: Chez J. E. Dufour, 1785), 144Google Scholar.

28 Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 288.

29 During this period the gavotte functioned as a common marker of an older and quintessentially ‘French’ style, a paradigmatic example being Colette's ‘Si des galans de la ville’ from Le devin du village. For a broader analysis of musical traits of the vaudeville repertory see Charlton, ‘The Melodic Language of Le devin du village and the Evolution of opéra-comique’, in Rousseau on Stage, ed. Maria Gullstam and Michael O'Dea (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017), 184.

30 Duni and Anseaume, Les deux chasseurs, first-edition libretto, 15.

31 Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 258–259.

32 Jamison Allanbrook, Wye, ed. Smart, Mary Ann and Taruskin, Richard, The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late Eighteenth-Century Music (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), 15Google Scholar.

33 Smith describes this aria in ‘Egidio Duni and the Development of the Opéra-Comique’, 242–247.

34 Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique de Grimm et de Diderot, nouvelle édition, 1 August 1763 (Paris: Furne, 1829), volume 3, 304–305. The Correspondance littéraire was a clandestine newsletter that did not circulate widely, and in fact was often hand-copied rather than printed. Dates in this and following citations of the newsletter refer to the original serial status of the document, but because of the hazy nature of the original circulation, a nineteenth-century edited version published in book form is referred to here.

35 Correspondance littéraire, 1 August 1763, volume 3, 304.

36 See Heartz, Daniel, ‘From Garrick to Gluck: The Reform of Theatre and Opera in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 94 (1967–1968), 111–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Favart, Mémoires et correspondances littéraires, dramatiques et anecdotiques, volume 1, lxxviii. In the same passage, Favart describes his wife's realistic approach to costuming, noting that the actress took care to wear the simple wool clothing and slippers of the French peasantry in his parody of Le devin du village (Bastien et Bastienne, 1753).

38 Correspondance littéraire, 15 January 1769, volume 6, 123.

39 Correspondance littéraire, 15 January 1769, volume 6, 123.

40 These fans are described in Nathalie Rizzoni, ‘Grand succès sur petits écrans au XVIIIe siècle: Les deux chasseurs et la laitière d'Anseaume et Duni (d'après La Fontaine)’, in Le livre du monde et le monde des livres: mélanges en l'honneur de François Moureau (Paris: Presses de l'université Paris-Sorbonne, 2012), 353–385.

41 Caillot is pictured in the same costume in an earlier oil painting: Guillaume Voiriot's ‘Portrait of Caillaud, the Singer, in Costume for the Opera Le Chasseur et la Laitière’, from 1765.

42 On these innovations in staging practice see Waeber, ‘Le Devin de la Foire?’, 150–161; on the upward motion of the ‘bas comique’ see the same author's En musique dans le texte: Le mélodrame de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005), 190–198.

43 Duni and Anseaume, Les deux chasseurs, first-edition libretto, 15. Concerning the attention paid by librettists of the Comédie Italienne to stage directions see Charlton, David, ‘La comédie lyrique au temps de Diderot’, in Musique et pantomime dans Le Neveu de Rameau, ed. Salaün, Franck and Taïeb, Patrick (Paris: Hermann, 2016), 72–73Google Scholar.

44 Duni and Anseaume, Les deux chasseurs, first-edition libretto, 30–33.

45 Waeber, ‘Le Devin de la Foire?’, 155–156.

46 Titon et l'Aurore, pastorale héroïque (Paris: Chez la V. Delormel et Fils, 1753).

47 Duni and Anseaume, Les deux chasseurs, first-edition libretto, 26–27.

48 See Betzwieser, Thomas, ‘Musical Setting and Scenic Movement: Chorus and ‘choeur dansé’ in Eighteenth-Century Parisian Opera’, Cambridge Opera Journal 12/1 (2000), 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 31–46.

49 See Parakilas, James A., ‘The Power of Domestication in the Lives of Musical Canons’, Repercussions 4/1 (1995), 5–25Google Scholar.

50 Devriès, Anik and Lesure, François, Dictionnaire des éditeurs de musique français, two volumes (Geneva: Minkoff, 1979), volume 1, 9–10Google Scholar.

51 This proliferation was the result of a surprising degree of latitude in the French engraving industry. If printed music from moveable type had long been subject to the strict monopolies of the Bourbon monarchy, engraved scores were subject to no such limitations.

52 Johansson, Cari, French Music Publishers’ Catalogues of the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century, two volumes (Stockholm: Publications of the Library of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, 1955), volume 2, 21Google Scholar. Peters's enterprise spawned several imitators; the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France contain a libretto of Les deux chasseurs in the binding of one such borrowing firm (F-Pnas, RF-7638).

53 Michèle Garnier-Butel also places the rise of instrumental arrangements in the 1760s. See ‘Du répertoire vocal à la musique instrumentale: les transcriptions d'airs connus en France dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, in Le chant, acteur de l'histoire (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999), 127–139.

54 On Clément, who was a harpsichordist at the Comédie Italienne and largely devoted to the repertory of this theatre, see David Fuller and Bruce Gustafson, ‘Clément, Charles-François’, Grove Music Online oxfordmusiconline.com. There is some precedent for this form of work. In 1742, for example, the publisher Leclerc offered the various instrumental parts of the concertos of Locatelli in instalments. See Devriès, Anik, Édition et commerce de la musique gravée à Paris dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Geneva: Minkoff, 1976), 59–61Google Scholar.

55 Devriès, Édition et commerce, 12.

56 Quoted in Devriès-Lesure, Anik, L’édition musicale dans la presse parisienne au XVIIIe siècle: catalogue des annonces (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2005), xGoogle Scholar.

57 The announcement appeared in the Annonces, affiches et avis divers of 11 August 1763, 555. See also Devriès-Lesure, L’édition musicale, 170.

58 The announcement of the extracts appears in the Avant Coureur of 5 September 1763, 565.

59 Clément, Journal de Clavecin, composé sur les Ariettes des Comedies; Intermedes; et Opera Comiques, qui ont eù le plus de succès (1764), 2, 13, 34, 45, 52–53, 68.

60 To say nothing of Les deux chasseurs et la laitière, grande fantaisie sur l'opéra de Duni pour piano, published by a certain A. Cramer more than a century after the opera's premiere, in 1866.

61 Johansson, French Music Publishers’ Catalogues, 144.

62 Around mid-century, Grimm noted the existence of at least 160 society theatres in Paris. See Lilti, Antoine, Le monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 249Google Scholar.

63 Contant d'Orville, André-Guillaume, Manuel des chateaux, ou lettres contenant des conseils pour former une bibliotheque romanesque, pour diriger une Comédie de Société, & pour diversifier les plaisirs d'un salon (Paris: Moutard, 1779)Google Scholar.

64 Contant d'Orville, Manuel des chateaux, 246.

65 Contant d'Orville, Manuel des chateaux, 248.

66 These same features of ‘reproducibility’ characterized many of the most persistent and widely travelled French lyric comedies of the eighteenth century, Le devin du village and La servante maîtresse foremost amongst them.

67 Fleury, Mémoires de Fleury de la Comédie Française, publiés par J.B.P Lafitte (Paris: Adolphe Delahays, 1847), 233–234. See also the discussion of this anecdote in Rizzoni, ‘Grand succès sur petits écrans’, 365.

68 On the circulation of theatre in the French provinces – and the wide popularity of opéra comique in these contexts – see Lauren Clay, Stagestruck: The Business of Performing in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), especially 103–131.

69 ‘Théâtre de Société à Montréal’, Quebec Gazette, 31 January 1805.

70 Weber, William, ‘Mentalité, tradition et origines du canon musical en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 44/4 (1989), 860–864Google Scholar.

71 Weber, William, ‘Canon versus Survival in “Ancient Music” of the Eighteenth Century’, in The Age of Projects, ed. Novak, Maximillian E. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 91–114Google Scholar.

72 Parakalis, ‘The Operatic Canon’, 863.

73 Kennedy and others, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences, 90. See also the discussion of this argument in Mark Ledbury, ‘The Persistence of the Pastoral in Revolutionary Art and Theater’, Proceedings of the CESAR/Clark Symposium 2008. Visions of the Stage: Theater, Art, and Performance in France, 1600–1800, www.cesar.org.uk/cesar2/conferences/conference_2008/ledbury_08.html.

74 Fournier, Stéphanie, Rire au théâtre à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016), 199–210Google Scholar.

75 Ledbury, ‘The Persistence of the Pastoral in Revolutionary Art and Theater’.

76 Correspondance littéraire, 1 August 1763, volume 3, 308.

77 Rapport fait par M. le Chapelier, au nom du comité de constitution, sur la pétition des auteurs dramatiques, dans la séance du jeudi 13 janvier 1791 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1791).

78 For a discussion of these debates see Darlow, Staging the French Revolution, 120. As Darlow points out, the term ‘liberty of the theatres’ is somewhat misleading, as robust systems of censorship and municipal surveillance remained in place.

79 Root-Bernstein, Michèle, Boulevard Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1984), 201Google Scholar.

80 Almanach général de tous les spectacles de l'Empire français (Paris: Froullé, 1792), 95. This passage is also discussed in Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution, 205.

81 Almanach général de tous les spectacles (1792), 130. This passage is also cited in Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution, 207.

82 Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution, 209.

83 Tissier, Les spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution, volume 1, 275.

84 The list of frequently staged lyric comedies from the Revolutionary decade is, in fact, dominated by works by deceased authors.

85 See, for instance, Colson, J. B., Manuel dramatique, ou Détails essentiels sur deux cent quarante opéras comiques (Bordeaux: J. Foulquier, 1817Google Scholar).

86 See Almanach général de tous les spectacles (1792), 270; and Tissier, Les spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution, volume 1, 292–295.

87 Tissier, Les spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution, volume 1, 292–295.

88 Almanach général de tous les spectacles (1792), 274.

89 Almanach général de tous les spectacles (1792), 291.

90 Napoleon famously forced the closure of many of the theatres that had proliferated during the Revolutionary decade. On these new regulations see Wild, Nicole, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens au XIXe siècle (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1989), 11–14Google Scholar.

91 This spectacle is described in Faul, Michel, Les tribulations de Nicolas-Médard Audinot, fondateur du théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique (Lyon: Symétrie, 2013), 35–38Google Scholar.

92 Faul, Les tribulations de Nicolas-Médard Audinot, 49–50.

93 Audinot's corpus of revivals from the 1750s and 1760s included La servante maîtresse and Jean-Joseph Vadé’s Le poirier (1752) and Les racoleurs (1756).

94 This contemporary description of ‘Sieur Doyen’ is cited in Philippe Chauveau, Les théâtres parisiens disparus, 1402–1986 (Paris: Amandier, 1999), 211.

95 Chauveau, Les théâtres parisiens disparus, 337–341.

96 On this point see Fournier, Rire au théâtre à Paris, 16.

97 Kerman, Joseph, ‘A Few Canonic Variations’, Critical Inquiry 10/1 (1983), 111–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar. William Weber has nuanced the distinction between repertory and canon, instead describing a ‘performing canon’ and a ‘scholarly canon’. See Weber, ‘The History of Musical Canon’, in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 339–340.

98 Almanach général de tous les spectacles (1792), 14.

99 Almanach général de tous les spectacles (1792), 14.

100 Almanach général de tous les spectacles (1792), 12.

101 This certainly supports Weber's conception of early canon formation as dependent on the ‘evolution of separate performing traditions’. Weber, ‘The History of Musical Canon’, 344.

102 Choron, Alexandre, Dictionnaire historique des musiciens, two volumes (Paris: Valade, 1810), volume 1, liii–lxGoogle Scholar.

103 de Momigny, Jérôme-Joseph, ‘Opéra’, in Encyclopédie Méthodique: Musique, two volumes (Paris: Chez Mme. Veuve Agasse, 1798), volume 2, 220–246Google Scholar.

104 Martine, Jacques Daniel, De la musique dramatique (Paris: J. G. Dentu, 1813), 67–110Google Scholar.

105 See, for example, Martine, De la musique dramatique, 94–100; and Choron, Dictionnaire historique des musiciens, volume 1, lviii.

106 On this terminology see Vendrix, Philippe, ‘La notion de révolution dans les écrits théoriques concernant la musique avant 1789’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 21/1 (1990), 71–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

107 ‘Éloge de Monsieur Duni’, 144.