The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 25 (2019) No. 1

Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History. By Rebecca Harris-Warrick. Cambridge Studies in Opera. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. [xx, 484 pp. 978-1-107-13789-9.]

Reviewed by Graham Sadler*

1. Introduction

2. The Operas of Lully

3. The Rival Muses in the Age of Campra

References

1. Introduction

1.1 In the 1660s, when France finally embraced the concept of opera in its own language, a centuries-long national obsession with dance was at its height, stimulated by lavish productions of court ballets and in particular by Louis XIV’s celebrated prowess as a dancer. It was thus inevitable that Jean-Baptiste Lully and his librettist Philippe Quinault, in creating French opera from an eclectic mix of elements, would accord a major role to dance. Virtually every act of every opera produced during the nine decades encompassing the operatic output of Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and their contemporaries includes a substantial divertissement involving dancing, singing, and stage spectacle. But although audiences of the period were in no doubt about the dramatic significance of the divertissement, modern historiography has generally underplayed its significance. Indeed, the very term “divertissement” tends to suggest something peripheral, decorative, inconsequential.

1.2 Only recently has this view begun to change, thanks in large measure to the work of Rebecca Harris-Warrick, who has been in the vanguard of those seeking to reveal the close bonds that link dance and drama in French Baroque opera.[1] The present book, which summarizes and hugely extends her published research on this topic, “explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic, and staging practices at a complex institution—the Académie Royale de Musique—which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera” (rear dust cover). In so doing, it concerns itself with far more than the divertissements alone, devoting at least as much space to drama as to dance.

1.3 The book covers the period from 1672, when Lully wrested control of the Académie from Pierre Perrin, until the early 1730s, when Rameau made his operatic debut. (The author is currently preparing a second book dealing with the operas of Rameau and his contemporaries.) It is divided into two parts, the first devoted to the operas of Lully, the second to the forty-six-year period between Lully and Rameau.

2. The Operas of Lully

2.1 Part 1 begins with a chapter that explores the dramaturgy of Lully’s divertissements, focusing on three works that, between them, exemplify a number of crucial principles and conventions. For each work Harris-Warrick deftly sketches the essential dramatic features in order to illustrate the particular roles played by each divertissement. It is here that we are first shown how divertissements are not merely justified by the plot but conform wherever possible to the convention of nécessité¸ in that their removal would damage the work.[2] This becomes abundantly clear in the case of Atys, for example, where the author rightly concludes that “in Quinault’s carefully crafted libretto we do not merely hear about the obstacles the protagonists confront, we see them in action. This opera, shorn of its divertissements, would make little sense” (p. 17). Comparable conclusions are drawn throughout the book.

2.2 There follows a sequence of chapters dealing in turn with the mechanics of Lully’s divertissements, the principles of Baroque dance, the make-up of the Académie Royale’s dance troupe, and onstage dance practices. The approach throughout is work-centered. While theoretical writings are by no means ignored and are often quoted to support or refute a given line of inquiry, Harris-Warrick adopts a methodology that rigorously focuses on the librettos, scores, dance notations, visual material, contemporary commentaries and suchlike in pursuit of clues that have some bearing on each of the numerous elements studied. Particularly reassuring are the close parallels that emerge between evidence from the Lully-Quinault sources and from two independent contemporary manuscripts: the annotated autograph of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s music for Thomas Corneille’s Circé (1675) and André Danican Philidor l’aîsné’s Le mariage de la grosse Cathos (1688), the latter fully choreographed in Favier dance notation.

2.3 In demonstrating the extent to which dance and vocal music are intimately related, Harris-Warrick establishes a number of important staging conventions: that dancing was avoided during solo singing; that the dancers often acted as “body doubles” for the chorus and the minor characters who sang in the divertissements; and that dancing during the choruses took place only in the purely instrumental sections and occasionally in the final choral section, once the sung text had become sufficiently familiar through previous repetition. A strict principle of alternation is thus established whereby the dancers and singers (contrary to standard modern practice) avoided deflecting attention from each other.

2.4 The source-critical approach adopted in these chapters proves immensely fruitful. Never before have the “nuts and bolts” of the manner in which the divertissements functioned been revealed and articulated with such clarity and completeness. For anyone seeking to visualize how the divertissements were staged, these sections will prove especially enlightening.

2.5 The final two chapters in Part 1 deal respectively with the prologue, where dance is shown to have had a distinctive but more circumscribed role, and with what Harris-Warrick calls “Lully’s lighter side.” In the latter chapter she considers not only the place of comic elements in Lully’s first three tragédies, already much discussed, but also the numerous lighter stage works that often get ignored, such has been the traditional emphasis on the tragédie en musique. As the author demonstrates, some of these works anticipate developments in the post-Lullian era—Le Temple de la Paix, for example, with its exotic individuals from Africa, the New World, and elsewhere, and the almost entirely comic pastiche Le Carnaval, its characters drawn from the contemporary world rather than ancient sources, and its lyrics incorporating passages in foreign languages.

3. The Rival Muses in the Age of Campra

3.1 If the death of the dictatorial Lully in 1687 dealt a colossal blow to the Académie Royale de Musique, it also opened up opportunities for aesthetic change, the first of which emerged rapidly. In a pleasing conceit derived from the librettos themselves, Harris-Warrick presents this period as a struggle for dominance between Thalie, Melpomène, and Terpsichore, the respective Muses of comedy, tragedy and dance, and she allows each Muse to preside over several of the chapters in Part 2. Music is not assigned an individual chapter since, as the author points out (p. 207), it figures in them all.

3.2 For many readers, I suspect, the territory explored in this second part will prove not only less familiar but also highly illuminating. It was a shrewd plan to devote the first chapters to Thalie, since we immediately encounter many of the sharpest departures from the Lullian norms and the largest number of new trends, many of them impacting on the character of the dances and dancing style. Harris-Warrick traces the emergence of new or revitalized genres, not only the opéra–ballet, pastorale, and ballet héroïque but also the so-called fragments, composite spectacles composed of acts or entrées from existing works—a genre often dismissed as insignificant but one that allowed for a degree of innovation and experiment.

3.3 Much space is devoted to the gradual Italianization of French opera around the turn of the century and beyond. In discussing this and other phenomena, Harris-Warrick examines the degree of cross-fertilization between different Parisian theaters, particularly the Théâtre Italien and the Fair Theaters (the future Opéra-Comique). The author displays an enviable command of the repertoire of these popular theaters, which allows her to identify specific models. To take just one example, the entrée “Le bal, ou Le maître à danser” in Antoine Danchet and André Campra’s Les fêtes vénitiennes (1710) is convincingly shown to be modeled on the equivalent dancing-master scene in Charles Dufresny’s L’opéra de campagne, created at the Théâtre Italien in 1692, to the extent that the style of dancing in Campra’s entrée must surely have been influenced by that of the Italian comedians.

3.4 The chapters on the development of the tragédie en musique are enriched by a lengthy section showing how Lully’s divertissements were treated at the frequent and ever-popular revivals of his operas. This section thus highlights the challenges faced by the great man’s successors in trying to emulate his achievement. One strategy they adopted was to enrich the divertissements with new elements in which the role of ballet was enhanced. Another was to import specific divertissement types from the lighter genres.

3.5 In the final chapters, presided over by Terpsichore, an illuminating discussion is devoted to the choreographic symphonie, an innovative genre developed by Jean-Féry Rebel and comprising a chain of dances with no intervening vocal movements. While these symphonies originated as autonomous works, Harris-Warrick illustrates their rapid influence on operatic divertissements.

3.6 It will be clear that the ground covered in this masterly study is immense. Such is the quantity of new research presented here that the book will be essential reading for specialists; yet at the same time, it covers so many fundamental aspects of the workings of the Académie Royale de Musique and the evolution of French operatic genres that it could equally serve as a lucid introduction to this entire subject. Above all, I hope that it will be read by practitioners, many of whom would surely find it revelatory. No longer need producers and directors be baffled by (or dismissive of) the presence of dance in French opera. And Rebecca Harris-Warrick makes it clear that there are abundant clues to choreographic interpretation in the music itself for those prepared to seek them out: as she observes, “sensitive listening to ballet music is a skill historians and performers alike need to develop” (p. 408).