Michel-Jean Sedaine (1719-1797)

Theatre, Opera and Art

David Charlton, Mark Ledbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367134792
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429640254
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 2000, this book highlights the interst Sedaine's life and work is now, belatedly, provoking in many scholarly disciplines. If Sedaine speaks today to literary history, theatre history and opera studies, it is because he possessed a multivalent vision, one which accounts for both his past neglect and is present rediscovery. Like many others, he believed that the established, 'official' genres needed to be reformed; unlike many, he made it his business to transform the actual language and operation of the theatre arts he practised. Until late eighteenth-century opera and drama in France become better understood, Sedaine's immense importance for the development of Romantic opera and theatre risks remaining generally concealed; to reveal something of this importance is one main reason for publishing the present volume.

This book includes chapters on Sedaine and the question of genre, the representation of the female in the dramas of Sedaine, and the words, gestures and other signs in the era of Sedaine.

PART 1

Genre and Representation

Chapter 1: Sedaine and the Question of Genre

Mark Ledbury

It has long been asserted that the concept of genre was central to the way in which the arts were understood in ancien-régime France: one of the fissures that divide early modem artistic practice from modem practice is seen to be the abandonment of those rigid systems of genre which formed the dominant discourse in the production and reception of all art.¹ More recent research has stressed that generic structures, like other aesthetic discourses, are connected in complex ways to wider social structures. It is certainly true that the need to classify and construct orders was an essential aspect not just of the rationale of academies, but of the politics of the court society which spawned them, and indeed of everyday life.² Félibien’s famous pronouncement concerning the hierarchy of genres did more than establish an upward progression of types of painting. It also made clear the philosophical, religious and social bases for this hierarchy, as it classed painters according to the complex and finely gradedsystems by which rank was understood at court.³ In literature and drama too, as Bray and others have shown, the progressive emphasis on generic rules as a structure for the production and reception of creative writing was associated with the hegemony of academic thinking.⁴

If hierarchical structures of thought and behaviour were central to the mind-set of the court society and left their mark on its artistic products, the same might also be said of what has come to be known as the ‘Enlightenment project’. For many different and often opposite reasons, the encyclopédistes and other philosophes from Buffon to Diderot all argued for the importance of genre and generic categorisation as a key to organising and understanding the complexity of nature and culture.

However, as I have argued in other work, discourse on genre mutated in the course of the eighteenth century from a discourse of hierarchy to a discourse of opposition.⁵ Theorists such as Roger De Piles, the abbé Du Bos, Claude-Henri Watelet and Voltaire started to recast the taxonomy of hierarchies of genre in terms of an overarching oppositional structure which, of course, associated the notion of genre with that of gender.⁶ The opposition of genres was the structure around which debate was facilitated, and in aesthetic disputes such as La Font’s attack on the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the 1740s, or the long-running Italian/French opera dispute (including the querelle des bouffons), or many other eighteenth-century aesthetic disputes, the language of opposition is clear. La Font’s critical terminology was specifically derived from gender opposition, as he railed against Boucher’s feminised mythologies and demanded a male and noble style.⁷

This shift is related to the re-formation of the political sphere in the course of the eighteenth century, one in which finely divided hierarchies and shades of nobility which dominated the systems of patronage and clientage in the court society themselves become increasingly recast as oppositions, whether in models of government, reason, science or art. Such oppositional thinking was integral to the ideologies of the French Revolution when a succession of oppositions became central to Revolutionary rhetoric.⁸

One brief but central example of this movement from hierarchy to opposition is the treatment of genre in the Encyclopédie. Voltaire’s article on literary genre begins by asserting the multiplicity of different genres, but later states:

Chaque genre a des nuances différentes; on peut au fond les réduire à deux, le simple et le relevé. Ces deux genres qui embrassent tant d’autres ont des beautés nécessaires qui leur sont également communes.⁹

This tendency to convert a hierarchised taxonomy into an opposition between two separate, even opposed, genres is also evident in Watelet’s adjacent article on genre in painting, in which he states: ‘Le mot genre … sert à distinguer de la classe des peintres d’histoire, ceux qui, bornés à certains objets, se font une étude particulière de les peindre.’¹⁰ Watelet thus explicitly narrows Félibien’s hierarchy into an opposition between history painting and all the rest, now simply defined (by default) as ‘non-history’.

Diderot is often credited with a revolution in thinking on genre in painting and drama. However, he too succumbs to the same kind of thinking. At points in the Entretiens sur le Fils naturel he, or rather his idealistic partner in dialogue, Dorval, seems to be saying that the opposition that exists between tragedy and comedy might be nuanced by his new genre, the genre sérieux.¹¹ One year later, however, Diderot reverted to an oppositional understanding of genre in De la poésie dramatique, where his new genres are subsumed into subsections of the most opposed categories of drama.

La comédie gaie, qui a pour objet le ridicule et le vice, la comédie sérieuse, qui a pour objet la vertu et les devoirs de l’ homme. La tragédie, qui aurait pour objet nos malheurs domestiques; la tragédie, qui a pour objet les catastrophes publiques et les malheurs des grands.¹²

In painting too, his interventions are often seen as nuancing the division established by De Piles, Du Bos and Watelet; however, in the Essais sur la peinture, his most involved intervention on genre, Diderot’s quarrel is not with the fundamental oppositional structure of genre, but with what should be included within this opposition:

Il me semble que la division de la peinture en peinture de genre et peinture d’histoire est sensée, mais je voudrais qu’on eût un peu plus consulté la nature dans cette division.¹³

He goes on to try to recategorise the painters of domestic life as part of the history category. However at no time does he question the need for a fundamental division. If I stress Diderot’s conformism rather than his undoubted originality here, it is to demonstrate how even the most brilliant thinkers involved with the Encyclopédie, as well as more conservative strains of Enlightenment thought represented by Watelet, tend to assume a ‘natural’ oppositional order of genre.

Two important aspects of the theoretical reworking of hierarchy as opposition were the difficulty in reconciling and compromising between the opposing poles, and the horror and fascination provoked by the possible products of such a collapse. In the articles referred to above by Watelet and Voltaire there are stark warnings about the danger of overstepping borders and seeking to escape from oppositional structures. Watelet felt that the attempt to cross boundaries between the high and the low would lead to the production of monsters. Even Diderot, who had theorised an intermediate genre, saw some mixtures and hybrids as dangerous and impossible.

Les peintres et les poètes ont le droit de tout oser; mais ce droit ne s’étend pas jusqu’à la licence de fondre des espèces dans un même individu. … Vous voyez que la tragi-comédie ne peut être qu’un mauvais genre, parce qu’on y confond deux genres éloignés et séparés par une barrière naturelle.¹⁴

It is against this background that some of Sedaine’s struggles and innovations in many areas emerge as more widely significant. The history of his practice and much other practice in all the arts in the eighteenth century is in some senses the history of the creative interrogation of systems of genre; although it is possible to see the eighteenth century as a conservative one, resistant to innovation and ‘playing by the rules’, we must also recognise that, often in marginal or undervalued spaces (such as types of lyric theatre) this same eighteenth century saw the gradual erosion of the strict separation and opposition of genres.¹⁵ Such processes and tensions can be seen in perhaps uniquely sharp focus in the work of Sedaine, who was throughout his life actively involved with generic experiment and challenge, from his early poetry right through to the end of his life. This chapter will draw not only on his dramatic ideas and experiments but also his early interventions in poetry and his relatively unknown contribution to debates in architecture and the visual arts, to explore his engagement with the fraught but crucial question of genre.

In broad terms, one might say that Sedaine’s thinking on genre evolved from a dependence on the structures and modes of thinking on genre mapped out by Boileau and seventeenth-century theorists, through subsequent engagement with Enlightenment models of genre to a finally more radical and less comfortable interrogation of genre which was to have a profound impact on his own career, and which I believe constitutes one reason for his enduring importance as a writer and man of the theatre.

The lower, comic and marginal genres of poetry and drama became the focus of Sedaine’s attention from the time of his first poetry, which is, incidentally, critically underexplored.¹⁶ It cannot be stressed enough that Sedaine was not a naive or uneducated talent but a fiercely autodidactic one; his poetry, with its mixture of translations and renditions of ancient poetry, its songs and dramatico-musical essais, is clear evidence of a sophisticated, literary intelligence learning from a wide variety of sources. The urbane ironic ‘faux-naif’ style which Charlton has analysed as an important part of the rhetoric of his dramatic prefaces is also powerfully present in his early verse collections.¹⁷ His early poetic interventions on genre are also laced with this irony, as Sedaine engages with the didactic texts by Boileau and Horace which provide him with points of departure.

One of the longest and most significant of these early poems on genre was the Satyre contre le goût des ouvrages poissards. This curious poem aimed criticism at the works of the dramatist Jean-Joseph Vadé (1720–57), who was Sedaine’s friend and one of the promotors of his early career.¹⁸ In this work, Sedaine rather ironically set himself up as a new Boileau (‘Prête-moi s’il se peut, contre un nouvel affront/Les traits dont tu flétris le burlesque Scarron’)¹⁹ and goes on to denounce the vogue for poissard plays. After describing a time when

Aux plus exactes moeurs ta muse fut fidelle,

Jamais un mot hardi dans tes tableaux divers

Ne souilla tes sujets aussi purs que tes vers

he regrets that

Cet heureux temps n’est plus; les marchés et les halles

Infectent les esprits des jargons les plus sales:

C’est un marais bourbeux que ce sacré vallon

La fange y cache aux yeux les trésors d’Apollon.²⁰

This alignment of the city, corruption and bad writing, and the horror of mixture evident here, seemed to imply that Sedaine argued as a purist, an upholder of the traditions of rules and the strict separation of high and low genres, who objected to fair cultures permeating wider artistic realms. However, in the articulation of what seem like fairly orthodox, even clichéd views of the infection of drama by street slang, there is in Sedaine’s own poetic tone some lingering metaphorical enjoyment of the combination of the mud and slime of les halles with the sacred ground of the muses, which is at least a renegotiation of the boundaries of criticism.

Sedaine’s longest and most ambitious single poem, Le Vaudeville, a history and defence of opéra-comique, also stressed the problematic evolution and categorisation of low or popular genres:

Il est un genre au dessous du Burlesque

Phoebus honteux ne peut le nommer presque

Enfant du peuple...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustration
• Acknowledgements
• Contributor
• Abbreviations
• Introduction, Researching Sedaine
• 1 Genre and Representation
• Part II Transformations
• Part III The Public Image
• Part IV Sources