The Comedians of the King: "Opéra Comique" and the Bourbon Monarchy on the Eve of Revolution

By Julia Doe

Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. This was true not only of tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) but also its comic counterpart, opéra comique, a form tracing its roots to the seasonal trade fairs of Paris. While historians have long privileged the genre’s popular origins, opéra comique was brought under the protection of the French crown in 1762, thus consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined. 

In The Comedians of the King, Julia Doe traces the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the turbulent prerevolutionary years. Drawing on both musical and archival evidence, the book presents the history of this understudied genre and unpacks the material structures that supported its rapid evolution at the royally sponsored Comédie-Italienne. Doe demonstrates how comic theater was exploited in, and worked against, the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—a negotiation that became especially fraught after the accession of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette. The Comedians of the King examines the aesthetic and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular foundations was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine, and when a group of actors trained at the Parisian fairs became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226743394

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THE COMEDIANS OF THE KING

THE COMEDIANS OF THE KING

Opéra Comique and the Bourbon Monarchy on the Eve of Revolution

JULIA DOE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74325-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74339-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226743394.001.0001

This book has been supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment and James R. Anthony Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Doe, Julia, author.

Title: The comedians of the king : opéra comique and the Bourbon monarchy on the eve of revolution / Julia Doe.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020032134 | ISBN 9780226743257 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226743394 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Opéra comique—France—18th century. | Bourbon, House of—Music patronage—History—18th century. | Music patronage—France—History—18th century.

Classification: LCC ML1950.D64 2020 | DDC 782.1094409/033—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032134

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Editorial Principles

INTRODUCTION

Institutional History

Dialogue Opera and the Cosmopolitan Revolution

The Politics of Genre

1. OPÉRA COMIQUE AND THE LEGACY OF COLBERT

Comic Theater and the Querelle des Bouffons

Theater and the Nation

La Nouvelle Troupe

New Rivalries

2. CHARACTER, CLASS, AND STYLE IN THE LYRIC DRAME

Bienséance in Ancien Régime Opera

Opéra Comique and the Drame

Romance and Refinement

Recitative for the Peuple

Lyric Drame at the Opéra

3. THE MUSICAL REVOLUTIONS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE

The Musical Patronage of a Habsburg Queen

Tragédie Lyrique and Its Parodies

Italian Opera at the French Court

Despotism and Privilège

4. THE DECADENCE OF THE PASTORAL

Pastoral Living at the Petit Trianon

Private Pastorals: The Troupe des Seigneurs

Ceremonial Pastorals for Court and Capital

The Pastoral as Adaptation: C. S. Favart’s Ninette à la cour

5. HEROIC COMEDY ON THE EVE OF 1789

Opera and Revolution at the Salle Favart

The Development of Heroic Comedy

The Heroic Sargines

Continuity and Rupture

6. EPILOGUE: THE FOUNDATION OF A PEOPLE’S ART

Richard Coeur de Lion: The First Fifty Years

Richard Coeur de Lion: The First One Hundred Years

Conclusions: Richard Coeur de Lion and the Revolutionary Centennial

Color Plates

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES

The Comedians of the King reproduces a trove of archival documents from the eighteenth century, the grammatical conventions and spelling of which may differ from those in modern usage. In transcribing these materials, I have generally maintained the original orthography, while adding punctuation and capitalization to improve clarity for the modern reader. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

The scores of opéra comique from this period are only rarely available in modern editions. Most of this book’s musical examples are generated from eighteenth-century prints. (I have defaulted to the first edition, where extant, of the published score, which was frequently prepared with the involvement of the composer.) Because these publications were commercial items and tended to be produced quickly after an opera’s premiere, they do occasionally contain irregularities. I have edited discrepancies in text setting with reference to printed librettos; I have also silently corrected obvious errors in pitch.

INTRODUCTION

Few repertories of Western art music have been more persistently identified with absolutist politics than the tragic operas of prerevolutionary France. Tragédie lyrique was invented under the auspices of monarchy and functioned from its start as an embodiment of national cultural hegemony and governmental prestige. The most famous examples of the genre, by Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau, have been described by one scholar as veritable symbol[s] of musical Bourbonism,¹ and by another, more colloquially, as the courtiest court operas that ever were.² Tragédie lyrique has often found a historiographical foil in its less esteemed and more politically ambiguous comic counterpart, opéra comique. If lyric tragedy was intimately associated with Louis XIV’s Versailles, French dialogue opera had urban origins, at the seasonal fairs of Paris. If serious opera was devoted to the spectacular and allegorical affirmation of the king, the fairground players specialized in deflating this celebratory rhetoric, with plots that valorized the conditions of the working classes and music that drew upon the popular language of the vaudeville. And if the administrators of tragédie lyrique held legal controls over operatic production throughout France, the authors of early opéra comique existed at the margins of this official system, constantly adjusting to judgments passed down from above. This theatrical order seems to offer a tidy microcosm of the society that constructed it, reflecting the competing impulses of court and capital, privileged and popular, authoritarian grand siècle and reforming century of Enlightenment.

As with most binaries, of course, such a starkly conceived division of theatrical forms contains both an underlying truth and many elements of oversimplification. Tragic opera was highly institutionalized and firmly identified with the political and social hierarchy,³ from its founding through the early stages of the Revolution. But it did not remain a perfect mirror of the agenda and musical aesthetic of the roi soleil. By the death of Louis XIV in 1715, tragédie lyrique had already begun to elicit the scrutiny of opposing factions at court.⁴ As the eighteenth century progressed, it would accommodate a variety of cosmopolitan styles and respond to the demands of a widening public at its home base in Paris, the Académie Royale de Musique (also known as the Opéra). Although opéra comique has endured a certain scholarly stigma as a result of its fairground roots,⁵ it too was subject to remarkable development, especially from the 1750s onward. Spurred by the innovations of imported Italian intermezzi, the genre emerged as a threat to France’s three Crown-sanctioned theaters, the Opéra, the Comédie-Française, and the Comédie-Italienne. In 1762 the government responded by engineering a merger between the forains (fair players) and the youngest of these official companies (the Comédie-Italienne), in the process elevating lyric comedy to the status of royal entertainment. Opéra comique thus joined tragédie lyrique under the protection of the French Crown, diversifying the traditional identity of monarchical spectacle and consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined.

The Comedians of the King investigates the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the period between the 1762 merger and the Revolution. In the simplest terms, the book presents the history of an understudied musical genre and the material structures that supported it, determining how royal sponsorship contributed to the rapid evolution of this lyric form. As composers and librettists grappled with the legitimized standing of dialogue opera at the Comédie-Italienne, they began to test and expand its conventional limits, transforming it into a substantive alternative to the elite tragédie lyrique. This stylistic shift, coming at a time of tremendous cultural change, had sizable political implications. I address, on this larger scale, how comic theater was exploited in (and worked against) the construction of the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image. In the waning ancien régime, opéra comique increasingly appropriated the rhetoric of courtly ceremony, but it did so uneasily, and in a manner that contradicted the established expectations of its form and social message. In essence, The Comedians of the King examines the institutional, aesthetic, and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular roots was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine—and when a collection of actors trained at the fairs of Paris became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.⁶ I ask of opéra comique a question that has long stood at the heart of inquiry for French tragic opera: what did it mean for comedy to be put into the service of the monarch?⁷

The central claim of this book is that there was a fundamental conflict between the modernizing taste of the Bourbon regime and the long-standing—and politically symbolic—organizational system for lyric theater that the Crown itself had put in place. In eighteenth-century France, operatic production was based on a hierarchy of privilège, a set of bureaucratic regulations that protected the cultural supremacy of the Opéra and reinforced the homogeneity and exclusivity of the tragédies lyriques that it staged. However, as the government admitted the lighter and more cosmopolitan opéra comique into the rubric of acceptable courtly art, it undermined this legal and aesthetic precedent in a number of significant ways. On the one hand, the legitimation of opéra comique represented a considerable, and potentially transgressive, challenge to the conventional demarcations of French theaters and theatrical forms. For conservative critics, the rise of dialogue opera was an affront to dramatic, and by extension, to social, propriety—a dangerous effacement of the original kingly opera, Lullian tragédie lyrique. On the other hand, and somewhat counterintuitively, this redrawing of generic boundaries was a direct consequence of opéra comique’s adaptation to existing systems of royal representation and display. Put another way, if the monarchical emphasis on lyric comedy constituted a disruption to the theatrical status quo, this was largely because the genre was so successfully adorned with the trappings of traditional courtly spectacle.

The Comedians of the King intervenes in three areas critical to the field of opera studies and to the historiography of prerevolutionary France, more broadly. First, this book integrates the comic theater into wider narratives of the politically charged institutionalization of culture under the Bourbon regime. Drawing on extensive new work in the archives of the royal household and the Comédie-Italienne, I emphasize the pragmatic ways in which legal regulations, administrative structures, and economic shifts dictated how opéra comique evolved. If the interventionist cultural programs of Louis XIV and his finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert have long formed a starting point for research on the tragédie lyrique, their legacy also exerted an impact on the development of dialogue opera, demonstrating how firmly and comprehensively invested the monarchy remained in its lyric production through the final stages of the ancien régime. Second, this research sheds new light on the famed, eighteenth-century disputes over French and Italian operatic style, asserting that opéra comique functioned as a locus of musical and dramatic innovation and a crucial intermediary between imported opera buffa and native tragédie lyrique. This line of argument emphasizes the continuing influence of the court, and especially of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette, in the negotiation of national and cosmopolitan musical taste. In the 1770s and 1780s, the aging corpus of tragedies by Lully and Rameau—the eminent and eminently French musique ancienne—fell from favor in the wake of foreign threats. This did not imply that the monarchy abandoned its entrenched policies of theatrical affirmation, but that the queen’s favored genre of lyric comedy might now also, however imperfectly, fulfill this role.

Finally, and most importantly, The Comedians of the King revaluates the political stakes of opéra comique in the period immediately preceding the French Revolution, while interrogating the tensions of continuity and rupture across the fault line of 1789. Many scholars have underscored the genre’s fairground beginnings, Enlightenment influences, and progressive emphasis on characters from the third estate. However, as the Crown-supported repertory indicates, the humble origins of the comic theater did not prevent the Comédie-Italienne from acquiring an elaborate musical and scenographic apparatus, nor did it limit the company’s ultimate appeal to aristocratic audiences. As dialogue opera became increasingly fashionable in court circles, it frequently reflected the worldviews of the elite public that consumed it. Indeed, the growth of the genre in the late ancien régime was heavily dependent on the material patronage of upper-class spectators in Paris and Versailles. If opéra comique would subsequently be reclaimed as an emblematic artistic expression of the 1790s, the foundation for this transformation was laid with support from the Bourbon monarchy in the years before the Revolution began.

Institutional History

The Comedians of the King builds upon recent researches into the history of operatic institutions, emphasizing how the organizational structures and material conditions of production influenced the evolution of lyric genres in France.⁸ Theatrical life under the ancien régime was subject to constant regulation. In the words of Henri Lagrave, At any given moment the authorities intervened in the theaters’ activities, sometimes to a persnickety degree; this constant surveillance translated into numerous orders and counter-commands. . . . Every breach of the rules was punished.⁹ Such standards served to preserve a system of hierarchy, distinguishing the three royally sanctioned (or privileged) theaters of the capital from the popular entertainments of the fairs and boulevards. This institutional bureaucracy exerted a powerful influence in the realm of dramatic music. The place of performance shaped the scope, audience, and form of an opera and also affected the way it was received.

The programming announcements from the Journal de Paris provide one illustration of the accepted organization of the city’s theaters (fig. 0.1).¹⁰ The listings for the boulevard troupes—run by independent entrepreneurs, without financial or legal assistance from the Crown—are sequestered at the end of the announcements, squeezed in between the day’s exchange rates and burial notices. They are kept entirely separate from the schedules of the three privileged companies, which are given a prime position and boldface heading in line with their relative clout. France’s royally affiliated theaters shared several defining features. Though centered in the capital, these institutions were each subject to internal interference from the menus plaisirs du Roi, the administrative bureaucracy charged with monarchical entertainment, and they benefitted from various forms of material, governmental support. (The Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne collected annual subventions; the Opéra received periodic bailouts for debts and exceptional expenses.)¹¹ In exchange for these financial protections, the privileged actors were considered employees of the king, and bore exclusive responsibility for the spectacles he enjoyed at court. These artists presented regular showcases of the monarchy’s patronage: a season of ceremonial entertainments in the autumn months at Fontainebleau, and another at Versailles during the winter and early spring.¹² Despite their common duties, the three Crown-supported troupes were not perceived as equal or interchangeable, by either the regime or the Parisian public. At the pinnacle of the newspaper arrangement, as it always stands, is the most highly esteemed of French dramatic institutions, the Opéra.¹³ The Opéra’s status was reinforced by certain pragmatic rights: since its founding under Louis XIV, this company had possessed a monopoly on through-composed musical theater. No other troupe could legally produce opera, whether in French or any other language, without having obtained this permission from the nation’s most prestigious lyric stage.¹⁴

FIGURE 0.1 Journal de Paris, 3 May 1777. Yale University Library, Franklin Collection.

The Opéra’s preeminent position in this institutional hierarchy is reflected in a healthy body of scholarly literature. Several recent monographs have examined the bureaucratic structures of this theater and the ways that it was influenced by the state—and explored the impact of these factors on the works it produced. Solveig Serre has described the administration, finances, and personnel of the Opéra between 1749 and the fall of the Bastille,¹⁵ while Mark Darlow has traced its evolution into the revolutionary era.¹⁶ Darlow places the theatrical institution at the hub of interactions between the various organs which regulated culture,¹⁷ investigating its role in the creation of repertory and the shaping of artistic policy. The Comédie-Italienne, the most significant rival to the Opéra at the end of the ancien régime, has yet to serve as the subject of a dedicated musicological study.¹⁸ But it arguably offers even richer fodder to these questions of institutional and material history; the development of opéra comique was closely intertwined with the administration of the venue where it was performed, while simultaneously placing pressure on the wider organizational system that governed it.

The Comédie-Italienne of the late eighteenth century was a uniquely structured company, indeed a literal mix of Italian and French and of courtly and popular, and as such a locus of hybridity and stylistic innovation. As mentioned above, this troupe was formed from the union of two discrete groups, the royal Italian comedians and the Opéra-Comique of the Parisian fairs. The first of these, the original Comédie-Italienne, had been resident in the French capital, on and off, since the reign of Louis XIV.¹⁹ It performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, a theater in the present-day second arrondissement, though contemporary commentators commonly used Comédie-Italienne to refer to both venue and troupe. Granted its official charter only in 1723, it was the least prominent of the royal companies and often struggled to stay afloat. Its repertory was founded on works in the commedia dell’arte tradition but over time expanded to include spoken plays in French, ballets, satires of tragédie lyrique, and—by the 1750s—adaptations (or newly composed imitations) of imported opera buffa.²⁰

The primary competition to the Italian players was the Opéra-Comique, a title given to the successive bands of French actors that had performed at the seasonal trade fairs of Paris—the Foire Saint-Laurent and the Foire Saint-Germain—since the turn of the eighteenth century (fig. 0.2).²¹ The company was best known for its namesake genre of opéra comique: a lyric form founded on the alternation of dialogue and re-texted popular tunes (known as vaudevilles), but later incorporating substantial, original music.²² On account of its fair venue and mixed public, the Opéra-Comique was considered a second-class spectacle. By the time of the querelle des bouffons, however, it had grown much more sophisticated than this reputation implied: it performed in well-equipped halls, employed top-rate vocal talent, and had built a repertory of works by highly respected authors, from Alain-René Lesage to Charles-Simon Favart.²³ Such was the success of the Opéra-Comique, indeed, that government officials called for the merger of the two comedic troupes in 1762, integrating select actors from the fairs into the Italian theater. (This event and its ramifications will be discussed in detail in the next two chapters.) In brief, the blended company retained the title of Comédie-Italienne but was otherwise substantially altered. Reorganization confirmed this institution as a site where performers and authors negotiated contrasting operatic styles and where elite and popular cultures came into close contact. While the Opéra was administered through a consolidated, top-heavy power structure, passing between the city of Paris, the menus plaisirs, and a series of managing directors,²⁴ the postmerger Comédie-Italienne was run as a société, a collaborative venture in which the actors were responsible for their own internal governance and in return received shares of the profits. If all of the royal theaters felt the competing pulls of court and capital, the configuration of the Comédie-Italienne exacerbated this sense of bifurcated identity. Its artists supplied new works for the pleasure of the king, but they remained financially dependent upon—and thus highly responsive to—the evolving tastes of their Parisian audiences.²⁵

FIGURE 0.2 Jacques Jollain, Plan de la foire Saint-Germain (F-Pn, FOL-ICO-ARC, foires). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

More significantly, the institution exerted its influence on the growth of opéra comique because of the prevailing system of theatrical privilège. From the early years of the eighteenth century, the forains had maintained an uneasy alliance with the Opéra, paying hefty annual fees for the rights to perform entertainments incorporating vaudevilles, dance, and instrumental music.²⁶ After 1762, the Opéra imposed more explicit terms on the Comédie-Italienne, invoking its monopoly to limit competition from the newly legitimized opéra comique. A contract signed in 1766, for example, itemized organizational and aesthetic constraints on the output of the consolidated troupe. The Comédie-Italienne was forbidden from programming musical works on Tuesdays and Fridays (evenings on which the Opéra performed), and from hiring singers, dancers, or machinists in the current or former employ of the rival company. Its repertory was likewise delineated to minimize overlap with the offerings of the Opéra: both simple and composed choruses were proscribed, as was the use of continuous music (meaning recitative), and any aria or orchestral interlude that had previously appeared on the tragic stage.²⁷ To the consternation of the comédiens, these protections were strengthened in 1779;²⁸ new translations of Italian opera buffa were prohibited and ensemble writing became more stringently circumscribed.²⁹ The development of French dialogue opera was thus molded by the politics of artistic privilège, and its composers and librettists were under legal obligation to structure their works according to regulations negotiated with the Opéra and the menus plaisirs.³⁰

It is important to clarify, however, that just because these rules were prominently articulated, does not mean that they were treated as inviolable or uniformly enforceable. While I will explore how the authors of the Comédie-Italienne worked within the confines of their genre, I intend to illuminate those moments where they rebelled against—or were tacitly allowed to ignore—these strictures, undermining the traditional divisions between the serious and comic domains. Such genre bending was prompted by shifts in public demand, certainly; but it was also intimately tied to the ceremonial apparatus and elaborate theatrical conventions of the Bourbon court. Georgia Cowart has described the repertory of the Opéra as a dialogic system, in which authors and works engaged with each other, over time, through a variety of means—and often in ways that contradicted the official messaging of the regime.³¹ I take this approach one step further, emphasizing that intertextual exchange took place not only within institutions but also between them. A fundamental goal of this book is to demonstrate the substantial degree of interaction between court and capital, and the formidable impact of rivalry between the Opéra and the Comédie-Italienne. If we are to counter the tragédie-centric view of French music under the ancien régime, it is not sufficient to provide a separate and parallel survey of the production of dialogue opera during this period. It is essential, rather, to examine both how institutional boundaries were established and what it meant when they were broken.

Dialogue Opera and the Cosmopolitan Revolution

The success of the Comédie-Italienne in the late eighteenth century, instigated by the genre-bending efforts of its leading composers and librettists, overturned conventional ideas about where French musical innovation might be centered and cultural patrimony defined. The authors of opéra comique inserted themselves into the well-known controversies over imported Italian music and helped to consolidate a new alternative to the increasingly antiquated corpus of tragedies by Lully and Rameau. In exploring this comic repertory, The Comedians of the King sheds light on one of the most important methodological threads of opera studies in the age of Enlightenment: that of the tension between the formation of national taste and the hegemony of the international style (i.e., the style of Italian vocal music, which then predominated on European stages outside of France).³²

The interrogation of these competing impulses rests at the foundation of much recent scholarship on tragédie lyrique. Musicologists have addressed the interaction of local and cosmopolitan traditions in serious opera through the lenses of reception history, musical analysis, and large-scale repertory formation. These planes of investigation have coalesced around a common narrative—one of increasing (though still modest) openness at the long-insular Opéra. The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a gradual loosening of the ingrained aesthetic outlook and political alignment of French lyric tragedy, distancing these facets of the genre’s identity from the twin cultural legacies of Lully and the roi soleil. Critical catalysts for this process were the arrival in Paris of Eustachio Bambini’s Italian buffa players in 1752, and the partisan querelles that erupted around them in the years that followed. David Charlton, for example, has reconstructed the context of the bouffons’ performances and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Le devin du village, charting the modernizations of acting style, subject matter, and ensemble writing—among other factors—that took hold at the Opéra around these watershed events. If Charlton traces a nascent reform-from-within in French works of the 1750s and 1760s, William Weber devotes his attention to the definitive, and externally oriented, rupture that followed: the arrival of Christoph Willibald Gluck in late 1773. Weber’s analyses of programming at the Opéra confirm that the advent of the Bavarian-born, Italian-trained Austrian composer signaled a break with the historical and exclusionist orientation of this theater.³³ A subsequent influx of international composers and idioms within the tragédie lyrique, Weber argues, demonstrated the waning importance of the distinctive, courtly strains of musique ancienne and an increasing influence of cosmopolitan taste in French musical life.³⁴

The history of opéra comique in the second half of the eighteenth century presents a complementary, but by no means identical, view of this negotiation of the French and cosmopolitan poles. While foreign-born composers of tragédie lyrique remained a rarity before Gluck (the gallicized Lully being a major exception), the roster of the Comédie-Italienne was long defined by its comparative diversity. Although several of the featured players in this book were native Frenchmen—including Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, François-André Danican Philidor, and Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac—many others were transplants from abroad. At the time of the merger, the music director of the Comédie-Italienne was the Neapolitan-trained Egidio Duni;³⁵ arguably the most important opéra comique composer of the period, André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, was born in Liège and arrived in Paris after studying with Giovanni Battista Casali in Rome. The authors of lyric comedy experimented with Italian styles of vocal expression earlier and more extensively than did their counterparts in the serious domain; they were vital in the consolidation of the innovations of the bouffons and unquestionably paved the way for the acceptance of these foreign ideas at the Opéra. And yet, a crucial feature of opéra comique, during the last decades of the ancien régime, was its self-conscious stylistic mixture. The genre’s Italianate characteristics were placed in dialogue with elements of the French musical and dramatic heritage. Within this repertory, ultramontane ariettes and obbligato recitatives stood side by side with songs of the fairgrounds and the folk (chansons, romances, and the like). And all this music was incorporated into plots that reflected the most important trends of contemporary French literature and theater—the rise of the Diderotian drame, for example, and the prerevolutionary vogue for stagings of patriotic national history. The authors of opéra comique were fluent in the pan-European strains of the galant style but naturalized them, subtly adapting them to fit the expectations of audiences both at court and in the capital.

It was this emphasis on cosmopolitan mixture, paradoxically, that enabled opéra comique to be claimed as a national art form in its own right. By the 1770s, at the very moment that tragédie lyrique lost its exclusive aura of Frenchness, dialogue opera began to be incorporated into protectionist discussions of the nation’s artistic patrimony.³⁶ If the tragic genre was prized because it was unique and idiosyncratic—that is, because it could not have been conceived or developed anywhere else³⁷—dialogue opera generated value from its synthetic appeal. The composers of the Comédie-Italienne, in this view, had not only preserved local musical traditions but also improved upon the foreign music brought into France. As Laurent Garcin reflected in his Traité du mélo-drame (1772):

By French Music I mean the new genre adopted in the past several years [opéra comique], the genre which from now on will be that of the Nation. . . . We really must stop protesting that this music doesn’t belong to us simply because we were inspired by the Italians. To be sure, what makes this music melodious (and not mere noise) owes much to our study of the Italian style. But what makes this music French owes much to our study of nature. We have a dramatic song; the Italians do not. It is here that the fundamental distinction between the two musics lies.³⁸

To Garcin, opéra comique represented a melding of the best aspects of competing aesthetic traditions, a marriage of ultramontane lyricism with the natural expression of Gallic theater. While it would be inappropriate to describe such critical writings as nationalist in the modern, politically inflected sense,³⁹ they resonated with intensifying patriotic discourses that portrayed France as a new Rome, the open and welcoming center of a universal civilization.⁴⁰ The repertory of the Comédie-Italienne proved the cultural authority of the French by perfecting music developed abroad, thereby creating an art form capable of international popularity.

Indeed, while opéra comique originated as a secondary lyric form within France, it soon came to dictate the experience of French music for many audiences outside of the nation’s borders. To a far greater extent than the tragédie lyrique, dialogue opera was an emblem of l’Europe française, taking part in the broad transfer of French language and culture throughout the republic of letters in Enlightenment Europe.⁴¹ As presented by traveling French actors and adapted by foreign troupes, the genre attained a truly stunning diffusion in the second half of the eighteenth century. Permanent companies were established in Germany (Dresden, Frankfurt, and Berlin), Austria (Vienna), Scandinavia (Stockholm and Copenhagen), Russia (St. Petersburg), and throughout the French colonial empire.⁴² Periodic productions also took place across the Low Countries (Brussels, Liège, Amsterdam, and the Hague) and in the United States (New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston).⁴³ To the delight of patriotic critics, opéra comique even gained a foothold in Italy, with performances recorded in Modena, Naples, Venice, Parma, and Monza in the two decades before the Revolution.⁴⁴ In a letter published in the Mercure de France in 1776, the composer Étienne-Joseph Floquet praised Grétry for the enthusiasm with which his operas had been embraced south of the Alps:

A troupe of French players recently visited Florence, where they performed Lucile, Les deux avares, Zémire et Azor, etc. with astonishing success. The latter of these, in particular, was passionately received, even though it was presented without sets and by mediocre singers. Here they see you as the greatest of all the masters who have worked in the comic genre. Over dinner the marquis de Ligniville . . . remarked that a single aria from Zémire et Azor was worth more than all the Italian opera buffa of the last thirty years combined.⁴⁵

Opéra comique should be recognized as a new repertory of national music, Floquet continued, because of its ability to dictate an international sound.⁴⁶ No less an authority than the monarch agreed. In a 1779 administrative edict, Louis XVI lauded the genre for improving the reputation of France’s lyric production as a whole: "French music, which was once greeted with scorn or indifference from foreigners, has now spread throughout the continent. . . . [The Italian comédiens] have succeeded in making their theater infinitely pleasing to our nation and to foreign ones."⁴⁷

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, French opera—and particularly French courtly opera—was strongly identified with the Lullian corpus of musique ancienne. By the end of the ancien régime, however, this was no longer the case: opéra comique had mounted a challenge to the prestigious tragédie lyrique within France and served as a key artistic export abroad. A crucial contribution of The Comedians of the King is to show that this politically fraught transformation in how French lyric theater was defined stemmed not merely from the initiatives of the Comédie-Italienne but also from the evolving preferences of the Bourbon regime. As the king’s words of praise indicate, the rise in esteem of opéra comique was hardly anathema to aristocratic taste but a direct reflection of changes taking hold at Versailles. A primary instigator of these shifts—and a living symbol of the new and vibrant interchange between national and cosmopolitan currents—was Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette. Exposed to a wide array of international music during her childhood in Habsburg Austria, the queen exerted a profound influence on operatic programming, both at court and in Paris, throughout her reign. Marie Antoinette’s support for Gluck is well documented, but she and members of her inner circle also became important patrons of opéra comique, developing personal ties with Grétry, Dalayrac, and Jean-Paul-Gilles Martini, among others. Dialogue opera served as a vehicle for Marie Antoinette’s personal entertainment, programmed extensively for the small-scale concerts and performances she presented to her associates at court. The public face of Bourbon spectacle soon mirrored this repertory, with opéra comique largely dictating the seasons of ceremonial theater at Versailles and Fontainebleau and not infrequently expressing the kinds of political ideals more commonly associated with la musique ancienne.

The modernization of serious opera, then, is but one facet of the wider acceptance of cosmopolitan music in late eighteenth-century France. This period did witness a loosening of the link between tragédie lyrique and the absolutist state, as the aging repertory of Lully and Rameau ceded to the more outward-looking aesthetic of Gluck and his Italian rivals. But this did not mean that the Bourbon regime ceased to further its agenda through lyric spectacle, nor that it suddenly lacked a coherent system of theatrical affirmation. As la musique ancienne declined in cultural and political relevance, dialogue opera evolved to fulfill certain prerogatives of ceremonial display. The musical images of nation and monarchy were