Opera Audiences in Paris 1830–1870

Huebner, Steven

doi:10.1093/ml/70.2.206

Cited by 12 publications

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“…In his study of Parisian opera audiences between 1830 and 1870, Huebner has noted that the Opéra sought to attract 'more elegant' audiences than those at the Opéra-Comique. 71 Whereas aristocrats and high-society elites frequented the boxes in full evening dress at the Opéra, bourgeois Parisians who constituted much of the city's white-collar workers filled the seats at the Opéra-Comique, where black-tie dress was required only on official State occasions. 72 The bourgeois nature of the Opéra-Comique's audiences extended beyond fashion, however.…”

Section: An Operatic Outlawmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…71 Whereas aristocrats and high-society elites frequented the boxes in full evening dress at the Opéra, bourgeois Parisians who constituted much of the city's white-collar workers filled the seats at the Opéra-Comique, where black-tie dress was required only on official State occasions. 72 The bourgeois nature of the Opéra-Comique's audiences extended beyond fashion, however. By the time that Hérodiade was set to appear, the theatre's foyer had become a popular site for bourgeois wedding interviews and, as parliamentary debates over the reconstruction of the Opéra-Comique intensified during the late 1880s, one deputé cited his nostalgia for his own wedding interview as support for his argument that the theatre should be rebuilt on the same site.…”

Section: An Operatic Outlawmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Church, State and an Operatic Outlaw: Jules Massenet'sHérodiade

Walker¹

2019

OPR

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AbstractWhen Jules Massenet began work on Hérodiade in the late 1870s, he likely expected to see his work premiered at the Paris Opéra. But the coveted Parisian premiere was not to be. Based on a liberal reworking of the infamous tale of Herod, Salome and John the Baptist, Hérodiade undoubtedly challenges traditional Catholic doctrine. Yet Massenet's opera was not as ‘secular’ as it may seem. I argue here that it draws instead on a Republican-friendly brand of Catholicism that encouraged individual religiosity as an anticlerical strategy. Herein, I argue, lay the reasons why Hérodiade was outlawed. It was not so much the libretto's liberal transformations of biblical characters as what those transformations represented both to the Catholic Church and to the French state: in the end the representation of a simultaneously Republican and Catholic Christ presented a dangerous analogue to the country's strained political situation.

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Section: An Operatic Outlawmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Operatic Outlawmentioning

confidence: 99%

Church, State and an Operatic Outlaw: Jules Massenet'sHérodiade

Walker¹

2019

OPR

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The Empire at the Opéra

Everist

2021

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Although nineteenth-century legislation had tried to ensure a precise separation between genre and institution for Parisian music in the theatre, it had inadvertently laid out a field on which the politics of genre could be played out as agents and actors of all types deployed various forms of artistic power. During the Second Empire, from 1854 until 1870, the state took over day-to-day control of the Opéra in ways that were without precedent. Every element of the Opéra's activity was subjugated to the exigency of Empire; the selection or artists, works and more general questions of artistic policy were handed over to politicians. The Opéra effectively became a branch of government. The result was a stagnation of the Opéra's repertory, and beneficiaries were the composers of larger-scale works for competing organisations: the Opéra Comique and the Théâtre Lyrique.

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Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust

Newark

2011

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The turning point of Madame Bovary, which Flaubert memorably set at the opera, is only the most famous example of a surprisingly long tradition, one common to a range of French literary styles and sub-genres. In the first book-length study of that tradition to appear in English, Cormac Newark examines representations of operatic performance from Balzac's La Comédie humaine to Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, by way of (among others) Dumas père's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra. Attentive to textual and musical detail alike in the works, the study also delves deep into their reception contexts. The result is a compelling cultural-historical account: of changing ways of making sense of operatic experience from the 1820s to the 1920s, and of a perennial writerly fascination with the recording of that experience.

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Opera Audiences in Paris 1830–1870

Cited by 12 publications

References 0 publications

Church, State and an Operatic Outlaw: Jules Massenet'sHérodiade

Church, State and an Operatic Outlaw: Jules Massenet'sHérodiade

The Empire at the Opéra

Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust

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