Author: DARLOW, MARK

Source: Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 32, Number 4, December 2009 , pp. 563-576(14)

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Abstract:

This article examines the principal reforms made to the repertoire of the Paris Opéra in the 1780s. The main aim was to encourage the submission of new works to the Opéra, hence to grow its repertoire, by means, first, of a competition for librettos under royal sponsorship and, second, of a reform of the system of authors' rights. The correspondence which passed between Dauvergne, the director of the Opéra, and Papillon de La Ferté, who was in charge of the Royal Entertainments Department (les Menus-Plaisirs), also reveals an attempt to correct what it calls the insubordination of the principal subjects. Among other points, there was the question of changing the salary system in order to make salaries depend on the number of performances, thus ensuring a higher quality of performance. But, as the Chéron case proves (they were dismissed in 1790 for going absent without leave), artists were increasingly concerned for their public reputation and considered themselves less and less to be `subjects' of the king's household. The third type of reform concerned the use of try-out rehearsals in order to sift the libretti and eliminate those unlikely to prove successful in performance, before beginning the production process. Thus we see how the directors and the officers of the king's household were in fact attentive to correcting certain abuses in the management of the institution well before 1789, contrary to the commonly held view that the privileged theatres had ossified in the decades before the Revolution.

Keywords: institutions; Académie royale de musique / Opéra; lyric theatre; French Revolution; ancien régime; policy; reform; repertory; rehearsal

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2009.00227.x

Affiliations: 1: University of Cambridge, and Christ's College

Publication date: 2009-12-01

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