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Opera under the French Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1967

Winton Dean
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Extract

There is never much danger of historians underrating the political, social or literary importance of the French Revolution. While that cataclysmic event is acknowledged to have affected the course of musical development, as of everything else, the music composed in Paris at the time has received little attention. This neglect has distorted our view of the past. We are apt to think of the romantic movement in music as a German development, stemming from Beethoven, who in turn built on tidy foundations laid by Haydn and Mozart. This view, fostered by German scholarship, contains an element of truth; but it is very far from being the whole story. If there was such a thing as a romantic breakthrough, it occurred in France in the early 1790s. before Beethoven had formed his style. It was largely a product of the Revolution, and like most other musical innovations during the baroque, classical and romantic periods—monody, the symphony, sonata form, the Mozartian concerto, the relaxation of tonality in Wagner—its origins must be sought in the opera house.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 94 , 1967 , pp. 77 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 The locus classicus is Lesueur's grand opera La Mort d'Adam, produced in 1809 but composed some ten years earlier. This must be the most comprehensive and spectacular opera ever conceived. The libretto combines a Klopstock play with substantial portions of the Book of Genesis and Paradise Lost. The characters embrace not only the entire human race but the total population of heaven and hell. The dying Adam prophesies much of future human history, including the coming of Christ. The Leitmotiv system is elaborate; at least twelve earlier passages are recalled, sometimes in combination, in the death scene.Google Scholar

2 Some of these were reconstructions of instruments depicted on Trajan's Column. The Revolution looked to Ancient Rome for inspiration, but found it more often in the Republic than in the Empire. The buccinus was a kind of trombone with the bell turned upwards and painted with a ferocious dragon's head, which according to Sarrette ‘produced an absolutely novel and terrifying sound’.Google Scholar

3 The inarch, along with vigorous dances like the polonaise and waltz, may be said to have taken the place of the old courtly dances.Google Scholar

4 He was in later years a passionate admirer of Mozart, though it is not clear when he first came in contact with his music.Google Scholar

5 Méhul even set a version of Metastasio's Adriano in Siria, which was banned in 1792 and taken off on the orders of the Directory after four performances in 1799; it was doubtless too soon to represent a sympathetic emperor in the theatre.Google Scholar

6 Spectacle had long been a feature of serious opera – for example in Rameau and many of Handel's London operas, especially on magic subjects – but always at a distance from reality, and never in opéra-comique.Google Scholar

7 Cherubini was to go further in this direction in his next work, Élisa, the first opera to exploit the romantic attractions of Alpine scenery.Google Scholar

8 In Gaveaux the trumpet-call occurs in the dialogue, and Pizarra does not sing at all.Google Scholar

9 The action of one of the more exotic rescue operas, Boieldieu's Béniowski (1800), takes place in a prison camp in Kamchatka and ends with the rescue of the entire cast, not from the prison governor, who is a sympathetic character, but from the rigours of the Russian climate.Google Scholar

10 Like the rising and falling minor third, it is almost a Méhul fingerprint; it had already occurred in the storm music in Act III of Mélidore et Phrosine. This tendency to repeat himself in later operas is a symptom of Méhul's limited powers of invention.Google Scholar

The lecture was illustrated by the following examples;Google Scholar

  • a.

    a. A recording of Cherubini's overture to Élita.

  • b.

    b. The overture to Méhul's Mélidore et Phrosine, pkyed on the piano by Mr. Richard Burnett.