Grétry's Operas and the French Public

From the Old Regime to the Restoration

R.J. Arnold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134803767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Opera Music

Why, in the dying days of the Napoleonic Empire, did half of Paris turn out for the funeral of a composer? The death of André Ernest Modeste Grétry in 1813 was one of the sensations of the age, setting off months of tear-stained commemorations, reminiscences and revivals of his work. To understand this singular event, this interdisciplinary study looks back to Grétry's earliest encounters with the French public during the 1760s and 1770s, seeking the roots of his reputation in the reactions of his listeners. The result is not simply an exploration of the relationship between a musician and his audiences, but of developments in musical thought and discursive culture, and of the formation of public opinion over a period of intense social and political change. The core of Grétry's appeal was his mastery of song. Distinctive, direct and memorable, his melodies were exported out of the opera house into every corner of French life, serving as folkloristic tokens of celebration and solidarity, longing and regret. Grétry's attention to the subjectivity of his audiences had a profound effect on operatic culture, forging a new sense of democratic collaboration between composer and listener. This study provides a reassessment of Grétry's work and musical thought, positioning him as a major figure who linked the culture of feeling and the culture of reason - and who paved the way for Romantic notions of spectatorial absorption and the power of music.

Chapter 1
‘In the Bosom of One’s Family’: Grétry’s Earliest Opéras Comiques and their Audiences

I.

In February 1770, the Éphémérides du Citoyen, a highly serious journal of physiocratic opinion, departed from its usual policy by including a long review of a new comic opera. Silvain was the story of a harsh landowner and his estranged son, and culminated in the father being brought to tearful forgiveness by an encounter with the son’s humble but loving household. It was not the sentiment of the piece that appealed to the Éphémérides, but the incidental questions of land management – in particular, supporting the right of tenants to hunt and forage – that chimed with its interest in agricultural and economic reform. The Éphémérides apologised to its readers for basing its arguments on an apparently trivial example; such, it wrote, was the spirit of the times. Besides, it argued that an airing of these progressive ideas on the stage had a greater chance of effecting change than dry, academic exposition. ‘The current character of the nation is such that it is necessary to render morality and justice in ariettes, and one cannot preach more effectively than at the Opéra Comique’.¹

The journal’s decision to review Silvain was not simply an acknowledgement that opéra comique was then very much in vogue, attracting large and socially-mixed audiences. Nor did it spring from any notion of the novelty of the subject matter, since moralistic tales of personal virtue and seigneurial privilege were part of the literary and dramatic stock-in-trade of the time. Rather, it arose from the conviction that the addition of music gave such stories a unique power to command the attention and enlist the sympathy of audiences: moral lessons sung out ‘in ariettes’ had a persuasive force that not merely amplified, but in various ways transcended, the occasionally equivocal impact of the words.

At a historical remove, assessing the nature of this force on its original listeners is problematic. It is, for example, not easy to accept the potency attributed to the ariette, as distinct from the work’s verbal content, or the dramatic situation more generally.² In his exploration of the Italian composer of ‘semi-serious’ opera Giovanni Paisiello, Stefano Castelvecchi has pointed out the requirement for ‘an act of historical imagination’, attempting to think beyond modern spectatorial attitudes, in interpreting the impact of eighteenth-century opera on its audiences.³ Of course, some in those audiences wrote down how they felt, or reported the apparent feelings of others, but even a close reading of contemporary criticism of music raises a host of interpretive difficulties. In its own review of Silvain, the Avant-Coureur described the music of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry in terms that would become customary for the composer:

The music is by M. Grétri, music of genius and sentiment, which conveys with energy the affections of the heart, and the passions of the soul; picturesque music which is nuanced to the smallest detail; and which, always neat, precise and true, does not tire the ear, making itself audible to sensitive souls.⁴

Aside from the writer’s wholehearted approval for Grétry’s music, what in concrete terms emerges from this extract? The music was clearly prized for its imitative, painterly qualities, but while music might depict aural effects such as birdsong or running water, how exactly could it be said to convey the motions of the heart and soul – especially, as the writer insisted, down to the smallest nuance? While the reference to tiring the ear might indicate an avoidance of prolixity or bombast, how was it that qualities such as truth or precision helped mitigate fatigue? And were the results of this effort available for everyone to hear, or only for these poorly defined, but presumably exclusive, ‘sensitive souls’?

Elusive as they might seem, these remarks at least suggest keys for puzzling out the impact of Grétry’s music on his contemporaries. This was imitative music, in the broad sense of one that demanded some external rapport; but rather than fussily attempting to depict every imagined affective inflection, it was concerned primarily to allow room for the most direct communication of sentiment, as mediated by the performer. It did not ‘tire the ear’, because it did not fight against the dramatic flow with interpellations of its own. It was apparently simple music, in which a leading role was to be played by the sensitive imagination of the listener; indeed, it presupposed a distinctive mode of listening, where the spectator, instead of being borne along on a wave of pleasure, became an acute and receptive partner in the unfolding creation of the musical drama. It imposed demands on the listener, but what was required did not derive from the privilege of education, still less of wealth or social status, but from natural sensitivity or insight, the potential property of all.

II.

The genre of opéra comique developed during the mid-eighteenth century through an invigorating transfusion of the Italian opera buffa into the vaudeville tradition of the Parisian fair theatres.⁵ As late as the 1760s, although opéracomique was now enshrined in statute and installed in its own privileged theatre, there were some who still regarded its defining characteristic – the alternation of musical numbers with speech – with discomfort.⁶ Grétry’s arrival in Paris in 1767, after an apprenticeship in Rome and a brief sojourn in Geneva, was then providentially timed, at a juncture when the genre had passed through its early, developmental phase, but was still fresh and malleable enough to allow scope for experimentation and definition. If it is possible to identify a moment when opéra comique completed its transition from something novel, intriguing but faintly disreputable into an accepted strand of the national theatre, it was in 1769, the year that produced two of the most successful examples of the genre: Le Déserteur, composed by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny to a libretto by Michel-Jean Sedaine, and Grétry’s one-act Lucile.⁷ What Grétry had to offer was, on the face of it, no obvious generic or stylistic departure from the repertoire of the Opéra Comique; the purpose of this chapter, then, is to explore some of the factors behind its extraordinary success.

Le Huron, Grétry’s first work for the Parisian stage, had been an unexpected success from an essentially unknown composer; Lucile was a triumph.⁸ At its first performance in January 1769, the audience experienced an explosion of sentiment. ‘This romantic piece produced in this theatre the rare spectacle of an auditorium dissolving in tears’, wrote the Mémoires Secrets. It is noteworthy that, despite the established popularity of sentimental dramas in other venues, this was an unusual and extreme occurrence on the stage of the Opéra Comique. The composer, the journal wrote, ‘supported the librettist marvellously, and broke hearts with his passionate ariettes. Everyone went home weeping and enchanted’.⁹ The evening produced its own legends – notably the story, related eagerly by Grétry himself, that the Duc d’Orléans had been seen wiping his eyes. Emboldened by this signal of sensitivity, a young man in the audience took the opportunity later to ask the Duke to approve his marriage to a daughter of one of his household; the suitor’s presumption, Grétry wrote, was successful. (It might be noted that Grétry’s anecdote bore a strong resemblance to the climactic scene of Silvain: both showed remote figures of paternal authority softened into magnanimity by displays of familial virtue. This was evidently a vignette of considerable persuasive potency for contemporary audiences.)¹⁰

The account given by the poet Claude-Joseph Dorat – cast in the form of a letter to a female acquaintance – was revealing of the precise calibration of sentimental display as a tool of social interaction: ‘cultivated tears were falling from the boxes, and you shed tears in your own box, without worrying either about hiding them, or letting them be seen; so the work was judged’.¹¹ it was a measure of the depth and naturalness of his interlocutor’s response to the opera, Dorat insisted, that she gave no thought to how her tears would be regarded by others, either by hiding or displaying them for social advantage; this was the ultimate compliment to the work. Nonetheless, it was also clear that she moved in a world where social cues were given by the aristocratic inhabitants of the best seats, and where the reactions of the spectator were a measure of her virtue – the scarcely translatable expression ‘larmes d’étiquette’ being especially suggestive of the way one’s social framework modified emotional behaviour. This way of thinking has informed much scholarship on the cult of sensibility, which has tended to emphasise elements of calculation and social strategy, if not insincerity. in Anne Vincent-Buffault’s conception, for example, weeping was a public, sociable act, aiming at demonstration of fine feelings, and bringing into disrepute the spectator crass enough to laugh in the wrong place.¹² This demonstrative interpretation was also evident in Sarah Maza’s account of celebrated court cases, which highlighted the ways that sentimental topoi were deployed as didactic tools in courtroom rhetoric.¹³

At first glance, the emotional scenes at Lucile were simply a further example of the well-established taste for sentimental drama. The comédie larmoyante was a discrete and identifiable theatrical genre as early as 1730; by the 1760s, its affective potential had been enlisted in the cause of theatrical and social reform in the bourgeois drames promoted by Denis Diderot, Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais and others.¹⁴ The libretto of Lucile, written by Jean-François Marmontel, author of Le Huron, Silvain and four other of Grétry’s early operas, was replete with larmoyant possibilities.¹⁵ The heroine, daughter of a well-off bourgeois, was on the eve of her wedding to a young nobleman. The satisfaction of the couple, and their fathers, was ruptured by the arrival of Blaise, recently widowed from Lucile’s former nursemaid. In an anguished soliloquy, Blaise revealed that, owing to a well-intentioned substitution in the nursery many years before, he was Lucile’s real father. On hearing the news, Lucile virtuously refused to maintain the sub...