Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France

Olivia Bloechl

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780226522753
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226522890
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: French History

From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique).
 
In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera's political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What's more, opera's creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre's larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre's distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time.
 
By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.

CHAPTER ONE

The Politics of Glory: Angelic Citizenship and the Contemplative Chorus

Lully’s opera choruses, though beloved by spectators in the parterre who reportedly sang along, are rarely regarded as political, except as the baldest form of monarchical propaganda.1 Choruses in praise of a royal “héros” (hero), like this one from the prologue of Armide, are ubiquitous in the early tragédie en musique:

Chantons la douceur de ses lois,

Chantons ses glorieux exploits.2

[Let us sing of the leniency of his laws, / Let us sing of his glorious exploits.]

A glance at the verses for such numbers confirms the commonplace view that their main purpose was to glorify the French sovereign. Choruses located in the prologue were especially given to princely encomium, but glorification choruses appeared as well in the form’s spectacular divertissements. Regardless of their location, such choruses have long been taken as support for the ideological nature of the tragédie en musique.

Hearing these choruses as ideological is well justified, of course. Their idealization of kingship and monarchical government is clearly in line with official rhetoric lauding the Bourbon dynasty (an alignment that was first facilitated by the crown’s censoring body, the Petite Académie).3 What is less clear, though, is why opera choruses’ adoration of the monarch and his reign should be so salient to the interests of the French kingdom. Why, in other words, did the monarchical state need the glorifying choruses that opera routinely supplied?

This paraphrases the question driving Giorgio Agamben’s recent work on the “archaeology of glory,” namely, “Why does power need glory?”4 If there is no direct causal link between glory and effective political control, then its value for politics is unclear. Agamben explains:

If power is essentially force and efficacious action, why does it need to receive ritual acclamations and hymns of praise, to wear cumbersome crowns and tiaras, to submit itself to an inaccessible ceremony and an immutable protocol—in a word, why does something that is essentially operativity and oikonomia need to become solemnly immobilized in glory?5

The usual answer, in early modern and modern political thought, is that glory was instrumental to good government, inspiring respectful obedience in subjects and impressing foreigners with a prince’s power and resources.6 Bossuet, for example, saw displays of “magnificence and dignity” as “necessary for the sustaining of majesty in the eyes of peoples and foreigners,” and he thought that the ostentation of kings was divinely willed, in order “to impress a certain respect on peoples.”7

Such rationales were repeated often enough in French writings on opera and other courtly musical theater as well, especially in the prefatory material of livrets and scores printed for académie productions. Glorification choruses in these productions also seem designed to serve governmental purposes, as I discuss below. Yet purely economic (meaning, instrumental and calculative) explanations for choruses like these are not ultimately satisfactory, despite their appeal for critical thought. In this chapter I offer an alternate view of the tragédie en musique’s glorifying choruses as vital to both sovereign and governmental forms of power on the French lyric stage.

Taking Agamben’s archaeology of glory as a starting point, I argue that the core function of the genre’s choruses of praise, celebration, and acclamation—which I will refer to as “contemplative choruses”—is their presentation of an angelic model of citizenship, which had long furnished an ideal for Catholic absolutist thought. Encounters between choruses and glorious figures like gods, heroes, or rulers were a mainstay of the genre. In scenes like these, the choral groups who attend these figures nearly always greet them with contemplative song, which gives voice to choruses’ leisurely, wondering reflection on the splendor they witness. If the tragédie en musique can rightly be said to have elaborated a theological myth of ruler sovereignty, its librettists and composers likewise crafted a doxological myth of citizenship with the groups they arrayed around their icons.8 Contemplative choral song was an integral part of the tragédie’s secular liturgy of glory, where the chorus took the part of the angels.

Reducing the genre’s contemplative numbers to their strategic functions implies that the glory they hail is ultimately mundane and instrumental, when in Christian polities glory had long figured a transcendent dimension of power. As Agamben points out, glory was most properly recognized in these contexts not with submission but with ritual acts of acclamation, celebration, or supplication that “constitute a threshold of indifference between politics and theology.”9 Princely glory in particular was felt in the ancien régime to have an integral, if mysterious, relation to the glory of divinity.10 The theological-political nature of glory was especially important for divine right discourse, which framed the mundane workings of princely government within the beyond-human reality of the heavenly kingdom.

In the Politiques, for example, Bossuet justified princely glory by appealing to state necessity, but also to the divine ordination of kings. Referring to the French coronation ceremonial, he paraphrased the prayer offered for the king’s splendor and magnificence, “such that the glory and majesty of the royal dignity will shine in the palace in the eyes of everyone, and cast everywhere beams of the royal power.” He concluded by justifying royal éclat in both rational and theological terms, writing, “This splendor must convey to all minds an impression of the power of kings, and seem to be an image of the celestial court.”11

Bossuet’s metaphor of the celestial court serves as a clef for my analysis of opera’s contemplative choruses. With it, he likened royal glorification—whether in coronation ceremonies or in opera prologues—to the adoration of God by hosts of angels and the blessed in heaven. His reference to a heavenly “court” drew on an angelological strand of Christian political thought that, by the late seventeenth century, had a venerable legacy dating from the Patristic era and flourishing especially in late-medieval scholasticism. In the wake of the Wars of Religion, this legacy offered French royalists an authoritative model for the charismatic publicity many attributed to kingship, as well as for the well-ordered government that supposedly flowed from it. Specifically, the model of the heavenly court reestablished a sacral relationship among “God, the king, and the people” that the Reformation and the Wars of Religion had placed in question, while still “preserving the unity and uniqueness of the monarch” that was so important for divine right theory.12 Angels were perfectly attuned to divine will, their offices reflected the mystery of the Trinity, and their society was harmonious despite its intricate hierarchical divisions.13 What better model for the realm and its people following the upheavals under the Valois?

Following Patristic precedent, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure divided the hosts of angels into contemplative and administrative types. The adoring seraphim and cherubim were the paradigmatic attendants, while the lower orders of principalities, archangels, and so forth were charged with carrying out administrative functions. Aquinas wrote in Question 112 of his Summa Theologiae,

The angels are spoken of as assisting and administering, after the likeness of those who attend upon a king; some of whom ever wait upon him, and hear his commands immediately; while others there are to whom the royal commands are conveyed by those who are in attendance—for instance, those who are placed at the head of the administration of various cities; these are said to administer, not to assist.14

This division of contemplative and ministerial angelic functions proved very useful for absolutist political thought, and it also takes us a long way toward defining a political typology of the chorus in the tragédie en musique.

Like the nine traditional angelic orders, the tragédie’s choruses were mainly given to contemplation, especially in its prologues and fêtes. It is true that choral groups in the main acts were sometimes more active, as when they implemented noble personas’ projects, transmitted information, interpreted events, or voiced judgments. However, in tragédies composed through Rameau’s lifetime, choral agency stemmed mainly from the higher-ranked personas in whose name they acted, recalling the ministerial function of the lower angelic orders. This capacity for action notwithstanding, the chorus’s most salient purpose in this tradition was its enjoyment of glorious presence. As Aquinas noted of the angelic offices, “We must . . . observe that all the angels gaze upon the Divine Essence immediately; in regard to which all, even those who minister, are said to assist.”15

The resemblance of fictional choral collectivities to the angels consisted in this, that their massed, adoring song bore witness to the glory of sovereign being and its government. In so doing, the chorus consecrated and publicized sovereign government and, by extension, itself. Indeed, the tragédie’s political theater can be said to have depended in a sense on contemplative choral groups as the avatars of an admiring citizenry without whom charismatic authority could not work. Absolutist apologetics depicted the attraction of majesty as so powerful that citizens’ admiration was spontaneous and even passionate. But the civil conflicts that rocked France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a reminder that the glorious image of French kings was not universally affirmed. The virtuously devoted choruses of the tragédie en musique reflected an ideal of monarchical citizenship; yet, reasoning a contrario, librettists also presented their opposite in the retinues of evil magicians, rebels, and tyrants whose vicious publicity they modeled on the fallen angels.

Virtuous choral citizenship is prominent in Quinault and Lully’s first tragédie en musique, Cadmus et Hermione, especially its mythological prologue. After discussing the example of Cadmus, I offer some historical background on the angelological strand of political thought and ceremonial in the ancien régime as it bears on opera’s contemplative choruses. A sampling of contemplative choruses in the next section reveals their remarkable stability across the repertory, as well as important shifts in the objects of their hymnody. One of the most striking findings of this overview is that the doxological orientation of the tragédie’s chorus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• contents
• Editorial Principles
• Preface
• Introduction. Sovereignty and Government in the Tragédie en musique
• 1.  The Politics of Glory: Angelic Citizenship and the Contemplative Chorus
• 2.  Choral Lament and the Mourning Public
• 3.  True Confessions: Opera’s Theater of Guilt and Remorse
• 4.  The Tormenting Orchestra
• 5.  Spectral Kingdoms: Poetics and Politics of Les Enfers
• 6.  Pluto, the Underworld King
• Conclusion. A Theater of Precarity
• Appendix. Operas and Ballets Cited
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index