French opera

It is one of Europe's most important operatic traditions, containing works by composers of the stature of Rameau, Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet, Massenet, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Messiaen.

Many foreign-born composers have played a part in the French tradition, including Lully, Gluck, Salieri, Cherubini, Spontini, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi and Offenbach.

French opera began at the court of Louis XIV with Jean-Baptiste Lully's Cadmus et Hermione (1673), although there had been various experiments with the form before that, most notably Pomone by Robert Cambert.

In the second half of the 19th century, Jacques Offenbach dominated the new genre of operetta with witty and cynical works such as Orphée aux enfers;[4] Charles Gounod scored a massive success with Faust;[5] and Georges Bizet composed Carmen, probably the most famous French opera of all.

This was partly for political reasons, since these operas were promoted by the Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin, who was then first minister during the regency of the young Louis XIV and a deeply unpopular figure with large sections of French society.

[11] It was a work in a new genre, which its creators Lully and Quinault baptised tragédie en musique,[12] a form of opera specially adapted for French taste.

Acts end with a divertissement, the most striking feature of French Baroque opera, which allowed the composer to satisfy the public's love of dance, huge choruses and gorgeous visual spectacle.

The recitative, too, was adapted and moulded to the unique rhythms of the French language and was often singled out for special praise by critics, a famous example occurring in Act Two of Lully's Armide.

Quinault's verse combined with the set designs of Carlo Vigarani or Jean Bérain and the choreography of Beauchamp and Olivet, as well as the elaborate stage effects known as the machinery.

French audiences disliked the castrato singers who were extremely popular in the rest of Europe, preferring their male heroes to be sung by the haute-contre, a particularly high tenor voice.

Arguments over the respective merits of French and Italian music dominated criticism throughout the following century,[16] until Gluck arrived in Paris and effectively fused the two traditions in a new synthesis.

Lully's supporters were dismayed at Charpentier's inclusion of Italian elements in his opera, particularly the rich and dissonant harmony the composer had learned from his teacher Giacomo Carissimi in Rome.

The subject matter was generally far less elevated too; the plots were not necessarily derived from Classical mythology and even allowed for the comic elements which Lully had excluded from the tragédie en musique after Thésée (1675).

He was a prolific composer, writing five tragédies en musique, six opéra-ballets, numerous pastorales héroïques and actes de ballets as well as two comic operas, and often revising his works several times until they bore little resemblance to their original versions.

This was the so-called Querelle des Bouffons, in which supporters of Italian opera, such as the philosopher and musician Jean-Jacques Rousseau, accused Rameau of being an old-fashioned, establishment figure.

The "anti-nationalists" (as they were sometimes known) rejected Rameau's style, which they felt was too precious and too distanced from emotional expression, in favour of what they saw as the simplicity and "naturalness" of the Italian opera buffa, best represented by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La serva padrona.

[27] Opéra comique began life in the early eighteenth century, not in the prestigious opera houses or aristocratic salons, but in the theatres of the annual Paris fairs.

In spite of fierce opposition from rival theatres, the venture flourished, and composers were gradually brought in to write original music for the plays, which became the French equivalent of the German Singspiel, because they contained a mixture of arias and spoken dialogue.

He was a versatile composer who expanded the range of opéra comique to cover a wide variety of subjects from the Oriental fairy tale Zémire et Azor (1772) to the musical satire of Le jugement de Midas (1778) and the domestic farce of L'amant jaloux (also 1778).

[32][33][34][35][36] Under the patronage of his former music pupil, Marie Antoinette, who had married the future French king Louis XVI in 1770, Gluck signed a contract for six stage works with the management of the Paris Opéra.

Gluck's opponents brought the leading Italian composer, Niccolò Piccinni, to Paris to demonstrate the superiority of Neapolitan opera and the "whole town" engaged in an argument between "Gluckists" and "Piccinnists".

Nevertheless, the lighter new opéra-comiques of Boieldieu and Nicolas Isouard were a bigger hit with French audiences, who also flocked to the Théâtre-Italien to see traditional opera buffa and works in the newly fashionable bel canto style, especially those by Rossini, whose fame was sweeping across Europe.

[46] Guillaume Tell might initially have been a failure but together with a work from the previous year, Auber's La muette de Portici, it ushered in a new genre which dominated the French stage for the rest of the century: grand opera.

This was a style of opera characterised by grandiose scale, heroic and historical subjects, large casts, vast orchestras, richly detailed sets, sumptuous costumes, spectacular scenic effects and – this being France – a great deal of ballet music.

Grand opera had already been prefigured by works such as Spontini's La vestale and Cherubini's Les Abencérages (1813), but the composer history has above all come to associate with the genre is Giacomo Meyerbeer.

His first work for the Opéra, Robert le diable (1831), was a sensation; audiences particularly thrilled to the ballet sequence in Act Three in which the ghosts of corrupted nuns rise from their graves.

Though Berlioz grudgingly admired some works by Rossini, he despised what he saw as the showy effects of the Italian style and longed to return opera to the dramatic truth of Gluck.

These include Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868) by Ambroise Thomas; Samson et Dalila (1877, in the Opéra's new home, the Palais Garnier) by Camille Saint-Saëns; Lakmé (1883) by Léo Delibes; and Le roi d'Ys (1888) by Édouard Lalo.

Yet composers such as Gounod and Bizet had already begun to introduce Wagnerian harmonic innovations into their scores, and many forward-thinking artists such as the poet Charles Baudelaire praised Wagner's "music of the future".

[55] The early years of the twentieth century saw two more French operas which, though not on the level of Debussy's achievement, managed to absorb Wagnerian influences while retaining a sense of individuality.