¹ Pellegrin, , Hippolyte et Aricie (Paris, 1733),Google ScholarPreface, in Recueil général des opera (Paris, 1703–1705; rpt. Geneva, 1971), III, 471.Google ScholarI follow the text of the 1733 libretto in quoting the Preface and text of Hippolyte et Aricie but include references to the more available reprint. The French text at the beginning of the Preface and an English translation are in Appendix II. Translations of Hippolyte et Aricie are by Lionel Salter from the booklet accompanying the Archiv recording. Other translations are my own; in the case of Phèdre, I have followed Salter whenever possible, elsewhere preferring literalness to any vain hope of capturing Racine's magic.Google Scholar

² Poétique de l'opéra françis (Paris, 1991), Part II, in particular pages 220–1, 231, 240 and 243. Translations are my own.Google Scholar

³ Lebrun, Antoine-Louis, Théâtre lyrique (Paris, 1712).Google Scholar

⁴ Girdlestone, Cuthbert M. in La Tragédie en musique (1673–1750) considérée comme genre littéraire (Geneva, 1972), 4–6, summarises the reasons why the tragédie lyrique can be considered a literary genre in its own right.Google Scholar

⁵ Racine, Louis, Mémoires sur la vie et les ouvrages de Jean Racine, in Racine, Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1962), 53.Google Scholar

⁶ Corneille, Pierre, Discours sur la tragédie, in Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1963), 832B; see 831 A, 832A, 833B.Google Scholarde La Bruyère, Jean, ‘Des Ouvrages de l'esprit’, in Les Caractères (Paris, 1688), §10, §67.Google Scholar

⁷ Sainte-Albine, Rémond de, Le Comédien (Paris, 1747), 3.Google ScholarVoltaire, , Commentaires sur Corneille (1764; Paris, 1862), 542.Google Scholar

⁸ Furetière's Dictionnaire universel (1690; rpt. Paris, 1978) defines ‘parfait’ as ‘Achevé, complet. Accompli, où il n'y a rien à desirer ni à ajouter. “Il n'y a rien de Parfait sur la terre”. On le die aussi de ce qui approche de la perfection’. For ‘perfection’, Furetiére gives ‘Consommation, achèvement de quelque ouvrage que ce soit … “Ce livre a été mis par l'Auteur à sa demiere Perfection”.’.Google Scholar

⁹ Regnault, François, La Doctrine inouïe. Dix leçons sur le théâtre classique français (Paris, 1996), 17. [Le théâtre classique, lui, à condition de lui rendre cette ‘règie des trois unités’ qui est son symbole et sa question, revendique, sur un fond d'éternité dans le temps, et d'infinité dans l'espace, l'essence parfaite d'une action conforme à la nature humaine, supposée la même toujours et partout.]Google Scholar

¹⁰ ‘Action’, in the seventeenth century, often referred to discourse and its delivery. This meaning of the word is important to understanding Regnault's point in the quotation above; ‘this all-powerful nature of the word, which is action, this infinity of space, which is a point, this eternity of time, which is an instant’ (292).Google Scholar

¹¹ There are 3,263 words in Racine's eleven profane tragedies, according to Bernet, Charles, Le Vocabulaire des tragédies de Jean Racine (Geneva/Paris, 1983).Google Scholar

¹² Racine, Jean, bTheatre complet, ed. Morel, Jacques and Viala, Alain (Paris, 1980).Google Scholar

¹³ ‘Derober’ means to steal, to carry off; as a reflexive verb it means to escape, to sneak off. Hélène a ses parents dans Sparte dérobée; (1.1.85)…Je voulais en mourant prendre soin de ma gloire, Et dérober au jour une damme si noire: (1.3.309–10)…Me puis-je avec honneur dérober avec vous? (V.I.1380)…Faut-il qu'à vos yeux seuls un nuage odieux Dérobe sa vertu qui brille à tous les yeux! (V.3.1431–2)Google Scholar

¹⁴ The presence of two ‘mute’ e sounds in six syllables creates an effect not unlike that of the growing immobility — and purity — of Mallarmé's swan in ‘Le vierge, le bel, le vivace aujourd'hui’.Google Scholar

¹⁵ SeeMorel, Jacques, ‘Pellegrin adaptateur du mythe de Phédre’, in Agréables mensonges. Essais sur le théâtre du XVIIe siécle (, Paris, 1991), 385–95.Google Scholar(Revised version of ‘Hippolyte et Aricie de Rameau et Pellegrin dans l'histoire du mythe de Phèdre’, in Actes du Colloque Rameau [Dijon, 1987]). In discussing several borrowings (‘emprunts’) by Pellegrin from Racine, Morel calls them ‘hommages’ that ‘contribute to ensuring the dignity of the lyric genre’ (392).Google ScholarGreen, Thomas, in ‘Rameau's return’, Opera News, 61/16 (05 1997), 59, suggests quite plausibly that ‘Rameau's decision to write an opera based on the tragedy of Phédre was no doubt calculated to stimulate the curiosity of the Parisian public and to ensure that his debut as an operatic composer would be nothing less than spectacular’.Google Scholar

¹⁶ ‘Je n'aurais jamais osé après un Auteur tel que RACINE, mettre une Phédre au Théâtre’. See Kintzler (n. 2), p. 41, where she points out that it makes much more sense to call the tragédie lyrique a ‘completely separate poetic species’ than a genre.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Diana is the dominant divinity in Hippolyte et Aricie, protectress of the innocent young couple. She is mentioned only once in Phédre (‘Et la chaste Diane, et l'auguste Junon, / …/ Garantiront la foi de mes saintes promesses’; V.I.1404–6), where Venus, though not physically present, is far more important. For other discussions of the differences between these two treatments of the Phaedra myth, in addition to Morel's article cited above (n. 15), see Girdlestone (n. 4);Google ScholarKern, Edith, ‘Tragedy into opera: Phèdre and Hippolyte et Aricie’, in Jost, François and Freedman, Melvin J., eds., Aesthetics and the Literature of Ideas (Newark, NJ, 1990), 122–33;Google ScholarSadler, Graham, ‘Rameau, Pellegrin and the Opéra: the revisions of Hippolyte et Aricie’, Musical Times, CXXJV (1983), 533 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ See Catherine Kintzler, ‘La Préface d'Hippolyte et Aricie ou la critique de Phèdre’, in the Programme for the Opéra National de Paris, September 1996, 67–73, and Low, Peter, ‘Credulity and credibility: Pellegrin's critique of Racine's Thésée’, Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association, 80 (1993), 81–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ I am not for a moment suggesting that anything is lost in these Racinian récits. In fact, one could consider Théramène's account of Hippolyte's death the greatest aria in French theatre, spoken or sung.Google Scholar

²⁰ Succinctly in ‘La Préface d'Hippolyte et Aricie ou la critique de Phèdre’ and in depth in her Poétique de I'opéra français (see n. 2).Google Scholar

²¹ Pellegrin none the less calls Racine ‘le plus digne Rival du grand CORNEILLE’, which suggests that, for Pellegrin, the eternal comparison between the two great tragic dramatists favours Racine's elder. Of course, by phrasing it this way, Pellegrin not only makes himself look a little less foolhardy (a little less full of ‘noble hardiesse’) but also suggests that he too is qualified to be a rival of these great poets.Google Scholar

²² There are only three occurrences of ‘détour’ in Phèdre. Par vous aurait péri le monstre de la Crète, Malgré tous les détours de sa vaste retraite. (II.5.649–50)…C'est moi, prince, c'est moi, dont I'utile secours Vous eût du labyrinthe enseigné les détours. (II.5.655–6)…Ciel! comme il m'écoutait! Par combien de détours L'insensible a longtemps élude mes discours! (III. 1.743–4)Google Scholar

²³ In Pellegrin's text, she seems almost the Wicked Witch of the West in the first act. However, a performance such as that of Hunt, Lorraine (Brooklyn Academy of Music, May 1997) adds considerably more depth than one notices at a casual reading, and Rameau gives her music appropriate to a queen.Google Scholar

²⁴ All forms of the nouns and adjectives listed are included under the masculine singular form; all forms of the verbs are included under the infinitive. The number of times each word occurs in Phèdre is given in parentheses after each entry. This list excludes articles, common pronouns, possessives, auxiliary verbs, etc. By relative frequency within a play, I mean the number of times a word occurs divided by the total number of words in the play (the total number of words in Hippolyte et Aricie is 5,252; in Phèdre it is 14,415). In comparing Hippolyte et Aricie to Phèdre, I have compared the relative frequency of a word in the former play to the relative frequency of the same word in the latter play. In comparing Phèdre to the rest of Racine's tragedies, I have divided the number of times a word appears in Phèdre by the average number of times the word appears in each of the eleven tragedies. Given the length of the two plays, a word would have to be used roughly twice as often in Phèdre as in Hippolyte et Aricie to be considered to have a greater relative frequency. Bernet's Le Vocabulaire des tragédies de Jean Racine (see n. 11) offers a more sophisticated way of making such comparisons, taking into account the length of each play. The ‘vocabulaire caractéristique’ (see 179–82) that he gives for Phèdre on pages 334–6 differs from the list of characteristic words that I give for Phèdre, but one could draw similar conclusions from either list. The asterisk indicates words that are used fewer than eleven times but much more frequently than in Phèdre.Google ScholarSee my ‘Taking things into your own hands: Phèdre on the eighteenth-century operatic stage’, in Car demeure l'amitié. Mélanges offerts à Claude Abraham, ed. Assaf, Francis, Biblio 17, vol. 102 (Paris/Seattle/Tubingen, 1997), 125–37, for more details on these statistics.Google Scholar‘Fidèle’ is in the category of glory and duty because only one of the eleven occurrences involves fidelity in love. The frequency of the verbs ‘faire’ and ‘rendre’ is indicative of the importance of the themes of love, glory and duty, since heroic deeds are often associated with ‘faire’, and ‘rendre’ is often used in conjunction with words such as ‘heureux’, ‘sensible’ and ‘tendre’ (V.6; 1.8; III.l; V.5, V.7). ‘Jour’ is used in the sense of ‘perdre le jour’.Google Scholar

²⁵ Encyclopédic, article ‘Coupe’. Jean-Louis de Cahusac (1706–59) was one of the major eighteenth-century writers on music {La Danse ancienne et moderne, 1754) and the author of several libretti, including Zaïs and Zorastre for Rameau.Google Scholar

²⁶ Racine's two previous tragedies, Mithridate and Iphigénie, can be considered exceptions to this generalisation, and they are also the two Racinian tragedies which have the greatest similarities to opera.Google ScholarI have discussed in ‘Trailing clouds of glory’, Cahiers du XVIIe, 1/2 (1988), 21–36, how these two plays reflect the same public taste as d o the first two Lully—Quinault tragédies lyriques, which were first performed after Mithridate and before Iphigénie. Charles Dill, in his essay in this issue, discusses the eighteenth-century efforts to create a more edifying spectacle, at the expense of the seventeenth-century emphasis on love and gallantry.Google Scholar

²⁷ A classic example is ‘Brûlé de plus de feux que je n'en allumai…’ [Burned by fires more numerous than those I lit'] (Andromaque, 1.4.320).Google Scholar

²⁸ Batteux, Charles, Les Beaux arts réduits à un même principe (Paris, 1747), 303, favours ‘a simple, naïve poetry, which flows softly and effortlessly’ [‘avec molesse et negligence’]. L'AbbéGoogle ScholarBos, Jean-Baptiste Du, Réflexions critiques sur la poësie et sur lapeinture (1719; Geneva, 1967), 503, argues that ‘poetry that contains sentiments is suitable for being set to music’.Google Scholar

²⁹ ‘La Préface d'Hippolyte et Aricie,’ 73.Google Scholar

³⁰ Sadler, Graham, ‘A diffident débutant? Rameau and the première of “Hippolyte et Aricie”, in the booklet that accompanies the Archiv recording of Hippolyte et Aricie (1995), 16.Google ScholarSee also Trowell, Brian, ‘Rameau, “Hippolyte et Aricie” and early French opera’, in the booklet that accompanies the Oiseau-Lyre recording of Hippolyte et Aricie (1965): ‘From Racine, Pellegrin took surprisingly little … Some of Pellegrin's scene-directions are based on descriptive speeches in Phèdre, making visible what Racine had been content merely to evoke in the imagination. And he took over a few—very few—lines of verse: Aricie's second aria, for example, is taken from (of all places) a speech of Phèdre's’.Google Scholar

³¹ The comparisons were made with a program I wrote in SNOBOL4 which took each group of three words from each line of Hippolyte et Aricie (words one, two and three; then words two, three and four, etc.) and searched for the same group in each line of Phèdre. I used the text of the 1733 libretto, which differs in several places from the 1733 score, especially in 1.2, II. 1 and FV.2,Google Scholarbut I also compared Racine's text to the passages in the 1733 score and its supplement (Rameau, , Œuvres complètes [Paris, 1900], VI) that are different from the libretto; see examples 80–2 in Appendix I.Google Scholar

³² ‘Tous les jours se levaient dairs et sereins pour eux’ [‘Every day dawned clear and serene for them’] (IV.6.1240). These are the only three occurrences of ‘serein’ in the two works.Google Scholar

³³ Morel speaks of ‘emprunts, qui…semblent souvent hors de leur place’ [borrowings which … often seem out of place] (391). In some cases passages from the two works share several key words but not in the same order. For example, Il n'en est échappé qu'un seul à sa fureur; Frappe; ce Monstre est dans mon cœur. (III.2; no. 44 in Appendix I) Crois-moi, ce monstre affreux ne doit point t'échapper; Voilà mon cceur; c'est là que ta main doit frapper. (II.5.703) [Only one (of the monsters) has escaped his fury; Strike; that Monster is in my heart. Believe me, this horrible monster must not escape you;Here is my heart: it is there that your hand must strike.]Google Scholar

³⁴ This scene contains the largest number of borrowings: eleven. 1.2 has ten, IV.4 has seven, FV.2 and IV.3 have six; n o other scene has more than four.Google Scholar

³⁵ See Vinaver, Eugène, ed., Racine. Principes de la tragédie en marge de la Poétique d'Aristote (Manchester and Paris, [1951]), andGoogle ScholarSpitzer, Leo, ‘The Récit de Théramène’, in Linguistics and Literary History (Princeton, 1948), 100.Google Scholar

³⁶ Jean-Marie Villégier, in the Programme for the Opéra National de Paris, September 1996, 79, also speaks of Pellegrin as ‘redistributing his materials’ (‘Musician in a ruined landscape’, unpublished translation by Geoffrey Burgess, 1997).Google Scholar

³⁷ ‘Le merveilleux dont toute cette Fable est remplie, semble déclarer hautement lequel des deux spectacles lui est le plus propre’.Google Scholar

³⁸ Why they would be suitable is of course a complex question. In many cases, words are suitable because they are such exquisite expressions of general situations, situations that are likely to move a spectator at any kind of tragic theatre. Metrical considerations would be important, since libretti use lines of different length whereas a spoken tragedy is written solely in Alexandrines. Furthermore, words would have to be singable and understandable and would have to refer to situations and subjects with which opera audiences were comfortable; it appears that Pellegrin thought words such as ‘marâtre’ [stepmother, with a negative connotation and unpleasant sound] and ‘brigand’ [highwayman] would be too strong, since he changed them to ‘ennemie’ [enemy] and ‘Monstre’ [monster]: ‘J'affectai les chagrins d'une injuste marâtre’ (1.3.294) to ‘J'ai su d'une ennemie affecter la rigueur’ (III.3; no. 36 in Appendix I) and ‘Reste impur des brigands dont j'ai purgé la terre’ (IV.2.1046) to ‘Est-ce done pour venger tant de Monstres divers / Dont ce bras a purgé la terre’ (II.2; no. 26 in Appendix I).Google Scholar

³⁹ Voltaire, Commentaires sur Comeille, 542 [‘le chef-d'œuvre de l'esprit humain, et le modèle éternel, mais inimitable, de quiconque voudra jamais écrire en vers’].Google Scholar