The Comedians of the King

The American observer is often bemused by the importance, and the budget, that the French state attributes to culture. On this side of the Atlantic, where the White House attempted to zero out the modest budgets of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts for 2021, a cabinet-level culture appointment is unthinkable.The strong bond between French identity and culture today harks back, mutatis mutandis, to the signal importance ascribed to official cultural production by the ancien régime and the control it attempted to exert over it. Starting with Louis XIV’s powerful minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, “the mercantilist association of economic and cultural development” (p. 30) was the foundation of the crown’s policy. One of the most valuable contributions of The Comedians of the King is to have integrated a deep dive into the business side of opéra-comique and the administrative machinery of culture, which made it possible for the genre to flourish, with an exploration of the artistic innovations and successes that it accomplished during the final decades of the eighteenth century. As a result of this capacious approach, Julia Doe captures in exemplary fashion the full complexity and paradoxes of the genre’s expansion in late eighteenth-century France. Aside from the pathbreaking work of David Charlton and recent scholarship by Mark Darlow, little sustained work has been undertaken on this repertoire. The Comedians of the King will have a lasting impact on the study of eighteenth-century French musical culture and on scholars who, following Doe, hope to ground their work in a robust interdisciplinary methodology.Just as many historians now agree that the Revolution of 1789 was at least in some measure aided and abetted by liberalizing initiatives on the part of the aristocracy itself, Doe connects the operatic innovations that began in the 1760s and accelerated during the 1770s with the influence of Marie-Antoinette, shifts in aristocratic taste, and the collapse of conservative-minded distinctions between tragédie en musique and the various forms of French musical comedy. In other words, while the subject matter of opéra-comique did indeed showcase what we might identify as bourgeois values and critiques of abusive privilege, support for the dialogue operas that featured these themes, and for the actors and institutions that made them possible, paradoxically came from the Bourbon crown.The first chapter covers the event that precipitated the transformation of dialogue opera that Doe explores: the 1762 consolidation of the Comédie-Italienne, the Italian players supported by the crown, and the Opéra-Comique, the fair theater that staged a variety of works ranging from parodies of tragedies performed at the Opéra, to farces and other comic works. The fair players had been eyed with suspicion by those charged with overseeing theater, in part because their lowbrow and sometimes vulgar performances were seen as inappropriate and did not represent France well to foreigners visiting the capital, but also and more importantly because they had become increasingly successful in luring audiences away from the official theaters. Both the Comédie-Française and the Opéra attempted on multiple occasions to limit or suppress the ability of the fair actors to perform. The merger was thus undertaken with the explicit Colbertian aim of harnessing the innovative Opéra-Comique under the protection and control of the crown’s cultural administration.The Comedians of the King tells the story of the intended and unintended consequences of this decision. Though it may have been initiated in the spirit of Colbertian cultural-economic protectionism and specialization, the merger led eventually to a blurring of the cultural lines separating the Comédie-Italienne from the Opéra, and to a move away from the strictest forms of bienséance, or propriety, that had guided stage representations since the time of Louis XIV.The second chapter directly addresses the transformation of the repertoire enabled by the merger, the increasing sophistication of dialogue opera, and the erosion of hard lines between “serious” and “comic” repertoire. In this chapter and in others, Doe skillfully positions situations that are presented as mise en abyme, where the diegetic elements within individual opéras-comiques exemplified the newfound prominence and predicaments of the Comédie-Italienne and the genre it had recently taken under its wing. Doe notes, for example, that in Sancho Pança dans son île by François-André Danican Philidor on a libretto by Antoine-Alexandre-Henri Poinsinet the title character’s lyric expression moves from inflated forms characteristic of opera seria, mirroring the character’s overblown self-regard, to fairground vaudeville once he is humbled, creating a parallel with the relative status and pretentions of French theaters during the 1760s. While the rise of dialogue opera was in part fueled by borrowings from the serious tradition, these innovations, in turn, inspired shifts in the repertoire of the Opéra. The second chapter concludes with examples of this influence, notably in Aline, reine de Golconde by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny and Michel-Jean Sedaine, and in Philidor and Poinsinet’s Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège, of 1766 and 1767 respectively, which relied notably on new dramatic and lyric idioms of sensibilité and innovative uses of the chorus. As Doe remarks, the tables had turned: the high and mighty Opéra “was invigorated by music from a theater it had consistently endeavored to suppress” (p. 79).Doe argues that the development of opéra-comique was indebted to “the rise of the Diderotian drame” (p. 12) through the importance the latter gave to new and more serious subject matter, forms of staging, and expression. Indeed, though Diderot’s own attempts at dramaturgy ended in failure, he was particularly successful in theorizing the changes to theater imagined in his 1757 Entretiens sur “Le fils naturel.” Doe is correct to state that “the authors of opéra comique capitalized on Diderotian ideals” (p. 47). Yet it is also the case that the influence went in the other direction, that the rise of opéra-comique may have had just as much influence on the development of the spoken genre sérieux. Mark Ledbury has shown that the innovations of Sedaine’s 1765 Le philosophe sans le savoir, which figures among the very best plays of the late eighteenth century, came less from Diderot’s theories than from Sedaine’s own work in dialogue opera: the success of the play “represented the deliberate appropriation of the innovations and the appeal of the opéra-comique by the philosophes, and not the unconscious justification of Diderot’s theories.”1 By raising this issue, which is strictly speaking beyond the scope of The Comedians of the King, my intent is not to criticize Doe’s excellent study, but rather to suggest that yet more work could be done to explore the complex story of mutual influence between dialogue opera and the drame during this period.A major contribution of chapter 3 is to go beyond the textbook view that Christoph Willibald Gluck’s operatic “revolution” was the only thing going on in late eighteenth-century French lyric theater. Doe argues that the overwhelming focus on Gluck underestimates the influence of Marie-Antoinette on opéra-comique in the musical revolutions of the period: “in the 1770s,” she argues, “the height of operatic progressivism emanated from the center of reactionary, absolutist control ”(p. 87)—that is, from the musical patronage and progressive tastes of the queen. Operas staged at court theaters during this period were remarkably modern, Rameau and Lully falling far behind Antonio Sacchini, André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, and Gluck; and the latter does not even make it into the top ten composers performed at Versailles from 1770, where opéra-comique, not tragédie lyrique, dominated. Turning the tables on ancien régime hierarchies, more parodies of tragedies were performed at court than were tragédies lyriques themselves. The court was undermining the theatrical hierarchy that had long been at the heart of its own cultural policies, overlooking existing rules that determined what the Opéra and the Comédie-Italienne could and could not stage. Because the innovative mixture of serious and comic in the new works was in many respects, Doe argues, the result of the artistic patronage of the queen, she was often criticized for disregarding long-standing theatrical proprieties and regulations.The shift from an older aesthetic model featuring Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses to newer forms of stylized rusticity is addressed in chapter 4, together with continued reflections on the role of Marie-Antoinette in the transformation of the lyric theater. Doe explores the repertoire of rustic-themed opéras-comiques staged by the queen at the Petit Trianon with the Troupe des Seigneurs, a group of noble amateurs. There was a decided dissonance between the performance circumstances of these works, set at Marie-Antoinette’s exclusive royal-rustic retreat at the Petit Trianon, and the thematic content of the operas, which celebrated the simple and virtuous life of country folk and at times challenged the established hierarchies of the ancien régime. The queen herself, too, performed in roles that were not always befitting of her status, which exacerbated the accusations of detachment and impropriety that plagued her. Though Doe does not reference Louis XIV here, one wonders if Marie-Antoinette did not miss an opportunity to learn from the Sun King, who stopped dancing on stage in 1670, a gesture often interpreted as an astute realization on the king’s part that he should assume the role of grand metteur en scène rather than be mis-en-scène.Doe identifies the fault lines and contradictions that resulted from the upward trajectory of rustic opera and the perceived tensions between the messages conveyed by the works and the institutions that staged them. While the operas featured benevolent bonds between seigneurs and peasants, thereby ostensibly affirming the established hierarchies and a utopian view of nobility, they also tested the limits of royal symbolism, of theatrical proprieties, and of the respective roles of the official theaters. The chapter concludes with a case study, on C. S. Favart’s Ninette à la cour, originally performed in 1755 but adapted to new circumstances in the 1770s and 1780s. As with Sancho Pança dans son île, Doe skillfully presents the theme of a peasant out of place among nobles as reflecting the extradiegetic oddity of court dialogue opera issuing a condemnation of aristocratic immorality. Her analysis adroitly integrates considerations of thematics with an exploration of the increased musical complexity of the work in its new adaptations and the ways in which the ballet d’action contributed to the tensions between subject matter, message, and courtly context.The final two chapters examine the fate of opéra-comique during the Revolutionary years and into the nineteenth century, up to the reframing of Grétry’s Richard Cœur-de-lion at the time of the centennial of the Revolution. Doe avoids the pitfalls of interpretive overreaching that can afflict scholarship tempted to connect aesthetic innovation and political upheaval. The spectacular and violent theatrical representations of the 1790s, rather than being inspired by political drama and violence outside the theater, were equally the result of pre-Revolutionary technological and material improvements in staging and choral forces at the new Salle Favart. These representations were also made possible by the efforts of the company to build a strong financial base during the years leading up to the Revolution. Opéra-comique, which had been upgraded from its fairground origins to meet the more sophisticated needs of the monarchy, was now equipped to serve the needs of the Revolutionary state. In particular, a type of dialogue opera that the troupe called “heroic” comedy allowed the actors to rebrand opéra-comique to suit Revolutionary causes and ideals.Sargines, by Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac and Jacques-Marie Boutet (known as Monvel), staged in connection with the Estates-General of May 5,1789, and performed in revised versions during the Revolutionary years and the Directory, serves to detail the claims of chapter 5. Pathbreaking music was integrated with a reactionary political message in this work, which reached back into a medieval setting to offer an idealized vision of ancien régime values and hierarchies. In its Revolutionary guises, the opera shifts praise from the monarchy to the battlefield hero. Like Sargines, Grétry’s Richard Cœur-de-lion was able to weather changes in political climate, highly contested at times because of the fidelity to the king it portrayed, but also a mainstay during the Empire, Restoration, and July Monarchy. Doe provides a fascinating example of the ways in which the supposed “simplicity” of the music, according to nineteenth-century commentators, was at first considered admirable as an example of the best of what its time could produce though later came to be seen as embodying an authentic Frenchness in the face of Teutonic incursions.As The Comedians of the King artfully demonstrates, stylistic and aesthetic “revolutions” do not map neatly onto the sociopolitical landscape of history. Aesthetic upstarts can generate reactionary messages. While indeed opéra-comique was shot through with Enlightenment ideals, the genre was also grounded in aristocratic impulses and advanced through monarchical intervention and investment. Doe’s lasting contribution will be to have offered a nuanced picture of a complex set of aesthetic developments, bureaucratic initiatives, social contexts, and political events that were part and parcel of the rise of opéra-comique in late eighteenth-century France, while at the same time offering specific examples of how musical innovation and thematic changes made French dialogue opera an international success

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