On 13 March 1830, an anonymous theatre-goer from the northern French town of Valenciennes took issue with the upcoming local premiere of Daniel Auber’s La muette de Portici (1828).Footnote 1 In a censorious letter printed in the town paper L’écho de la frontière, a self-titled ‘amateur de spectacle’ disparaged the work of director Henri Delorme in his first year managing the itinerant theatre troupe that performed in Valenciennes. The letter-writer accused Delorme of neglecting Valenciennes in favour of other towns in his touring itinerary across the departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais.Footnote 2 More pressing, however, was an artist matter: the amateur feared that Delorme would present ‘his Muette reduced to the size of his troupe’.Footnote 3 This stinging charge suggests that the potential spectator was more concerned about how touring troupes would stage large-scale opera in his locality than with the arrival of a new piece and genre.
The letter does not state how the amateur had formed his expectations of the implied ideal non-‘reduced’ (or ‘complete’) form of La muette. Given the centralisation of the nineteenth-century French theatrical world, it is likely that he implied the operatic practices of the capital, whether experienced first-hand, understood through press criticism or extrapolated via the pages of the Muette score, libretto or staging manual.Footnote 4 The new forms of large-scale musical, dramatic and visual spectacle created for La muette at the Paris Opéra could be expected to provoke excitement outside of the capital for two reasons. First, the ‘synchronicity’ of musical, dramatic and visual expression in Auber’s piece (to use Karin Pendle and Stephen Wilkins’s term) defined the aesthetic parameters for the development of the Opéra’s dominant stage genre throughout the mid-nineteenth century: grand opéra. Footnote 5 Second, the arrival of such a piece in Valenciennes held additional significance because of the traditional relationship between the capital and the provinces: regional journalists commonly positioned Paris as the purveyor of operatic and wider theatrical novelty. The amateur’s letter, however, highlights a local view of La muette’s transfer between the capital and a small-scale theatre that focused on the opera’s material conditions, rather than the novelty of receiving new repertoire. The worry about receiving a ‘reduced’ performance indicates that the theatre-goer was anticipating disappointing cuts or other changes to the opera’s music, drama or staging. In doing so, the northern theatre-goer’s letter reveals a set of striking aesthetic and material preoccupations about the relationship between France’s centre and its peripheries.
In this article, I explore the staging practices of grand opéra performance in the northern touring circuit of the French provinces during the thirty years after the genre’s emergence, with a focus on productions in Valenciennes, a historic lace-making centre very close to the Belgian border with almost 19,000 inhabitants.Footnote 6 I argue that the ways in which the musical, dramatic and visual components of grand opéra were embraced in touring environments adds important nuance to current scholarly understanding of the genre. Recent exploration of the European and North American circulation of grand opéra has expanded the traditional conception of the genre as defined by the reception and performance conditions of its home institution, the Paris Opéra.Footnote 7 There has been little investigation, though, of how grand opéra functioned nationally on a French scale. Foundational to this question are Sabine Teulon Lardic and Mélanie Guérimand’s short case studies and Katharine Ellis’s longer investigation of grand opéra production by residential companies in large regional cities such as Lyon, Montpellier and Bordeaux. These municipally funded theatre troupes had the largest artistic resources and personnel in the provinces. Accordingly, Ellis, in particular, characterises much of the production of grand opéra in these towns as demanding the same scale of musical and visual effects as in Paris, the fervent replication of the Opéra’s artistic conditions demonstrating the act of aping cultural capital.Footnote 8 From this provincial viewpoint, grand opéra appears as a centralised and monumentalised form within France.
The much greater contrast between the artistic environment of the Paris Opéra and an itinerant company, however, has the potential to reveal grand opéra working in varying ways across France. For instance, it was the difference in scale between the Opéra and Delorme’s itinerant company that provoked the fears of the Valenciennes ‘amateur de spectacle’, arguably justifiably so. The Opéra employed almost eighty chorus members, more than eighty musicians, plus supernumeraries and child performers.Footnote 9 A team of sixty machinistes also worked to showcase the lavish historical decors and stage effects for which grand opéra became known, including the eruption of Vesuvius in La muette. Footnote 10 By contrast, Delorme’s troupe consisted of only seventeen singers and one dancer, alongside a librarian/prompter, chef d’orchestre and director.Footnote 11 They would perform accompanied by only around twenty orchestral musicians, largely students and amateurs recruited ad hoc from each town on the troupe’s itinerary. Additionally, Delorme’s company toured without its own decors, relying on stock backdrops supplied by each municipality.Footnote 12 It is likely the difference between Parisian and touring conditions that lies at the heart of Ellis’s assessment that the scale of grand opéra prohibited performances by French travelling troupes.Footnote 13 Delorme’s staging of La muette, though, demonstrates that resources were no impediment for operatic ambition. Indeed, as I will argue here, the as yet undiscovered phenomenon of touring grand opéra emerged as vital force across France shortly after 1830, with many directors following Delorme’s example.
Throughout, I claim that the touring environment reveals the important role which provincial operatic practice played in debating and determining the aesthetic values and artistic function of French grand opéra on a national scale during the nineteenth century. This occurred across two distinct phases which structure the two halves of my article. I first establish the theatrical context within which Delorme’s company operated, before reconstructing the musical and scenic conditions of the 1830 Valenciennes premiere of La muette. This context reveals that 1830 represents a host of turning points for French operatic practice beyond the emergence of early grand opéra: the first circulation of the Opéra’s repertoire to the touring network; the transformation of several musical and visual elements of La muette in productions away from the centre; and the parallel change in certain itinerant troupe practices brought about by performances of Auber’s opera. I then chart broader artistic trends in the establishment of grand opéra as a touring genre between the mid 1830s and early 1860s, particularly in northern France. I consider how prestige associated with different musical and visual elements was used by the provincial press to discuss the theatrical relationship between France’s centre and its peripheries. The later period reveals a move away from adaptations in individual contexts and a growing emphasis on the pan-provincial imitation of established models for the visual spectacle of grand opéra, in particular.
Provincial grand opéra
The diverse infrastructural, artistic and social conditions of the touring troupe system significantly informed the way in which grand opéra was received in northern France. Delorme’s group was known as the 1st troupe d’arrondissement, one of eighteen travelling companies forming part of the itinerant tier of the French government’s complex theatrical infrastructure governing the provinces during the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 14 In the provincial theatrical hierarchy established largely in Napoleonic legislation from 1806–7 but reformed in 1815 and 1824, touring companies occupied a lower position than their sedentary counterparts, sometimes referred to as the ‘third’ order of French theatres and, in the eyes of Parisian writers, often associated with performers lacking in talent.Footnote 15 Yet these companies had important theatrical responsibilities, being mandated by the Ministry of the Interior to tour twice a season for at least fifteen performances to a list of designated small towns within their region (the arrondissement). For Delorme, this circuit encompassed Dunkerque (in English, Dunkirk), Cambrai, Arras and Saint-Omer alongside Valenciennes around 1830.Footnote 16 Flexibility lay at the heart of troupe d’arrondissement practice before 1830 and after, as performers adjusted to the different sizes of each town stage, the variability of stock decors, and differing numbers of orchestral musicians.Footnote 17 Companies were also legislatively mandated to perform across sung and spoken genres. Arrondissement troupe members were expected to move nimbly between opéra-comique, vaudeville, drame, comédie and mélodrame, often within one night, and Delorme’s introduction of grand opéra into their repertoire added an additional dimension to the required skillset. Each performer was contracted for one or two emplois, a casting and contractual category referring to voice type, physique and onstage mannerisms, plus characters’ social hierarchy and age.Footnote 18 Emplois indicated the expected roles that singers took on in at least one genre (i.e. the ingénue, the father figure), but performers still needed to hone pluriform skills to fit into other roles across contrasting sung and spoken, ‘low’ and ‘high’ art genres within multi-piece programmes.Footnote 19 While the chopping and changing between genres was accentuated in a small touring company of under twenty singers such as Delorme’s, plural performance skills were the norm within provincial troupes at large. Such conditions were a far cry from those of theatres of the capital. In Paris, government legislation also originating from Napoleon’s 1806–7 laws ensured that the profile, repertoire and performers’ skillsets of institutions such as the Opéra, Opéra-Comique, Comédie-Française were kept largely separate in order to protect the distinctiveness of stage traditions.Footnote 20
The difference between the singing requirements of touring companies and those of the Paris Opéra is evidenced by the fact that, prior to 1830, Delorme’s troupe had not performed the operas created at this institution. His singers were familiar with the alternating spoken and sung numbers of opéra-comique, but not the larger, recitative form created at the Opéra even prior to grand opéra (as exemplified in pieces such as Gaspare Spontini and Étienne de Jouy’s La vestale). The situation was mirrored across the provinces as touring companies almost unanimously avoided the repertoire of the Opéra.Footnote 21 Many municipal companies did as well, despite their larger forces often reaching around thirty chorus members plus principal singers and nearing fifty permanent orchestral musicians.Footnote 22 Only the largest and most prestigious Grand Théâtres in the important urban centres of Marseille and Lyon appear to have regularly staged pieces such as La vestale prior to 1830, presumably because they were the best equipped vocally, and also scenically, to match the Opéra’s scale.Footnote 23 Delorme’s decision to stage France’s largest-scale operatic form for the first time in Valenciennes in 1830, though, highlights the sea change that La muette represented for operatic culture on a national scale. The director’s embrace of La muette suggests that the opera’s new effects prompted a shift in his perception of the Opéra repertoire’s significance for their own theatrical environments and its accessibility to much smaller companies.
The performance practices and audience experiences of grand opéra were also informed by the way in which the touring circuit established particular relationships between localities. Performances in theatres such as Valenciennes were understood by administrators, the press and spectators to take place within a shared itinerant circuit in which the director had to juggle towns’ differing population sizes, tastes, municipal support and the state of their theatrical resources. As I have argued elsewhere, this connectivity created an imagined arrondissement community whereby actions and events occurring in one node of the touring network informed how the press elsewhere advocated for audiences to behave, imagined the economic and political role of local theatre and appraised troupe performers.Footnote 24 Such collaborative and competitive dynamics are evident in the reception of La muette, starting with the amateur’s accusation that Delorme neglected Valenciennes in his regional itinerary. His comment likely implied a comparison with the longer seasons that the troupe offered in nearby Dunkerque, the largest town in their arrondissement, which was often the first to receive new repertoire and which hosted the group’s very first performances of La muette in January 1830.Footnote 25
The tensions inherent within the radical change in programming undertaken by Delorme in March 1830 led the director to make a public statement in advance of performances in which he addressed the importance of materiality and intra-provincial relationships in defining his Muette. Delorme penned a letter in response to the amateur’s accusation that was published in the same journal a week later. The director defended the time and effort he spent in Valenciennes versus other arrondissement towns and, in a postscript, specifically addressed the issue of operatic scale. He played on the theatre-goer’s term ‘reduced’ to reassure readers that his Muette would be performed
next Sunday, not reduced to the size of my troupe, but in the way that [the piece] is played across the provinces, and in my theatre without omitting anything. People who know the piece will be convinced of this.Footnote 26
Delorme promised spectators just what the amateur feared could not be produced in Valenciennes: a faithful staging presenting La muette in a recognisable, noteworthy form. Such a claim might well be expected of any impresario attempting to reassure potential ticket buyers. Yet the director’s statement crucially reveals how he conceived of the wider theatrical influences that would determine the shape of the inferred recognisable staging. This was determined by performance practices shared across the provinces and brought to Valenciennes, rather than drawn from Paris.
Delorme’s letter is significant in two ways. First, by using the category of provinces, rather than the specific touring circuit, Delorme made a claim for his lowly ‘third’ level company to be considered on equal terms with larger and better equipped municipal theatres. Second, and most crucially, the director’s letter challenges the centralising values that scholars traditionally associate with the French theatrical system and with grand opéra, in particular. As mentioned in my introduction, the genre’s form, values and meaning in France have thus far largely been tied to the context of its home institution. Pendle and Wilkins argue that the changing stage practices and business model of the Opéra from the late 1820s onwards allowed grand opéra to showcase a new synchronicity and layering of visual technologies, music and drama to express operatic narrative and characters.Footnote 27 Anselm Gerhard, Sarah Hibberd and Jane Fulcher have also emphasised the cultural and socio-political environments of urban Paris as essential to grand opéra’s creation and reception.Footnote 28 Where Hibberd positions grand opéra as a space of ideological, historical and political contest in which ideas of the nation’s past, present and future were represented and debated, Fulcher has characterised the genre, as seen at the Opéra, as working to legitimise the power of the restored monarchies and, in so doing, portraying ‘the nation’s image’.Footnote 29 Not only has the Opéra’s symbolism and context been extrapolated to be nationally representative, but this status has also been granted to its specific artistic effects. H. Robert Cohen and, more recently, Léa Oberti argue that the printed mise-en-scène manuals produced to record grand opéra staging reveals practices that were fundamentally codified, not only in terms of reproduction across the nineteenth-century at the Opéra itself but also in the expectation of imitative stagings across France.Footnote 30 Together, these authors define grand opéra as a genre symbolising the social and political modernity of the nation, with spectacular and technological artistic means that were so monumentalised as to necessitate imitation of the Parisian spectacle throughout France.
Delorme’s description of his La muette in L’écho, though, offers a new way to appraise grand opéra’s significance and material conditions, beyond a top-down trajectory of influence emanating from the capital. Rather than looking to Paris, the director established ‘the way that [the piece] is played across the provinces’ as the model for his Muette. Footnote 31 While Delorme references the provinces, in general, his model must have specifically alluded to the work of contemporary residential theatre companies, since records indicate that Delorme’s 1st troupe d’arrondissement was almost certainly the first itinerant troupe to stage Auber’s opera. In profiling horizontal directions of theatrical influence between provincial locales as significant for the circulation of grand opéra, the director, above all, defined a mode of provincial grand opéra that, he implied, existed separately to practices at the Opéra.
La muette in Valenciennes
What artistic markers made up Delorme’s concept of provincial grand opéra in 1830? The reconstruction of the specific artistic conditions of his northern performances of La muette, or any by an itinerant troupe, is admittedly a tricky business. It is known that Delorme premiered Auber’s opera in Valenciennes on 21 March 1830 and repeated the piece on 25 March and 4 April to public acclaim.Footnote 32 Yet in the absence of traditional musicological evidence such as performance materials (scores, libretti, stage plans), I rely on a range of fragmented primary sources relating to theatrical administration alongside newspaper reviews to piece together the probable musical and dramatic features of these performances. Accordingly, at points in the following section, I linger on the process of archival sleuthing involved in reconstructing these artistic elements, with the aim of presenting a model for the wider study of the ephemeral – to modern eyes – conditions of touring opera.
It is clear that performances of La muette involved flexibility and change in musical and scenic terms. As might be expected, the small size of the Valenciennes company and its lack of a dedicated chorus or ballet troupe led to several musical cuts. This can be deduced from administrative sources detailing the running of the Valenciennes theatre. The length of the opera was listed as three hours in Louis-Jacques Solomé’s staging manual, a document to which I will return later. In Valenciennes, though, Auber’s Muette was not staged alone but shown alongside two or three other pieces of around an hour each night.Footnote 33 These double or triple bills also involved several scene-change intervals within and between pieces lasting up to half an hour each, plus a performance by the town’s amateur orchestra, the Société Philharmonique.Footnote 34 If La muette had been performed in full, the combined elements in a typical Valenciennes programme from the theatre’s opening at 6pm would have easily lasted longer than the judicially mandated theatrical curfew of 11pm.Footnote 35 As there is no police record of a director’s fine for these performances, however, it is implied that Delorme shortened the opera – an understandable decision given his limited workforce.Footnote 36
The cuts made to La muette were likely informed by touring troupes’ practices. One key difference between the workforce of itinerant companies such as Delorme’s and their sedentary provincial and Parisian counterparts was the lack of a dedicated chorus. Reviews of performances in Valenciennes in 1831 and 1834, though, reveal that troupe singers were used to performing principal roles and chorus parts in the same grand opéras once the genre was established in Delorme’s repertoire.Footnote 37 Such versatility implies that at least some chorus numbers were also included in the Muette premiere. Still, some of Auber’s thirteen choruses – and the three dance numbers – were almost certainly the first in line for the cuts made by Delorme in order to eliminate scenes in which the small size of his troupe might be noticeable. While Delorme’s exact cuts are untraceable, it is important to note that excisions made for practical purposes would have nonetheless reshaped audiences’ experiences of the opera, owing to the importance of chorus scenes in transmitting political meaning within La muette, as in later grand opéras. As James Parakilas shows, many of the socio-political resonances of grand opéra play out in chorus scenes featuring opposing groups, and the presence of large choruses also manifested the important dramatic contrast between the intimate relationship of protagonists and the inexorable forces of power and fate, represented by the crowd.Footnote 38 In the case of La muette, the chorus numbers in each act chart the changing allegiance of the Neapolitans from deferential Spanish subjects to mobilised revolutionaries and back again at the death of their leader Masaniello.Footnote 39 Practical changes in Valenciennes thus had the potential to significantly reshape how audiences understood the essential dramatic and political components of grand opéra and, as I mention later, did so on at least one occasion.
By contrast, expansion, rather than reduction, appears to have governed the orchestral side of Delorme’s production. It is clear from press reports that he recruited a more comprehensive set of instrumental forces than was usual in Valenciennes and in touring practice more broadly. As remembered by writer Champfleury (Jules Fleury-Husson), it was the norm for touring opera productions to feature orchestras made up of musicians with a range of talent and assorted instruments, sometimes resulting in a ‘battalion’ of flutes standing in for various missing instruments, played by absent-minded clerks and students distracted by the action onstage.Footnote 40 La muette, though, represented a turning point for orchestral accompaniment in Valenciennes. Writing in advance of performances, journalist Benoît Henry referred to Delorme’s orchestra as ‘reinforced and completed’, describing the larger recruitment of amateur performers than was usual for troupe productions.Footnote 41 Reviewing their work after the premiere, Henry confirmed that the expanded forces resulted in a new level of care given to orchestral accompaniment. He wrote that spectators previously subjected to the ‘monotonous theatre orchestra’ reportedly heard a transformation to ‘animated and sustained music’, which he believed had also improved singers’ performances.Footnote 42 The importance of this change is emphasised in Henry’s voicing of the wider public’s thanks to the musicians of the Société Philharmonique for embracing Auber’s music with ‘zeal’. Such comments further emphasise both the novelty of hearing more complete orchestral sonorities within touring opera and the effort required to develop this new auditory experience.Footnote 43
La muette also likely offered Delorme’s singers new vocal challenges. As already mentioned, the touring company was not only significantly smaller in size than the Opéra’s workforce but inexperienced in the large-scale five-act operatic forms and recitatives particular to this institution’s repertoire within and prior to grand opéra. Footnote 44 No score survives to record Delorme’s musical choices, yet his letter to L’écho claimed that his singers would perform La muette ‘without omitting anything’ in the manner of other provincial theatres. This phrase could refer to music, drama or spectacle. If the former, press records from Lyon and Marseille (possibly the only two companies outside Paris that staged Auber’s piece before Delorme) indicate that these regional troupes did so with recitative.Footnote 45 Delorme’s troupe, it would follow, aped this practice. The brief Valenciennes reviews do not go into enough detail to verify that recitative singing was without a doubt present in 1830. Yet alongside Delorme’s letter appeared a newspaper column, potentially also written by the director, advertising that ‘arrangements have been made so that the musical elements will not leave anything to be desired’, perhaps affirming that, alongside the reinforced orchestra, such arrangements also referred to the troupe’s taking on of a new style of singing they had not yet encountered.Footnote 46 Certainly, a widespread embrace of recitative by various touring companies emerged in the years immediately after 1830, for pieces such as Giacomo Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829) and Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1831).Footnote 47 With Delorme at the forefront of French touring grand opéra production it seems incredibly likely that recitatives were heard in Valenciennes for La muette. At any rate, the director’s push to reassure the public about his ‘not-reduced’ Muette, coupled with the press’s highlighting of ‘new attention’ given to musical elements, displays that directors and journalists both recognised that there were important credentials associated with the promise of singing and playing the music of grand opéra in its original form.
The use of recitative in grand opéra in Valenciennes is worth stressing since the transformation of Delorme’s troupe’s vocal practice contrasted with the way in which the provincial singing of La muette was envisaged by a voice from the centre: Opéra régisseur Louis-Jacques Solomé. In his 1828 staging manual addressed to provincial directors and made to facilitate the dissemination of La muette across France, Solomé recorded and communicated the Opéra’s mise en scène to an external public for the first time.Footnote 48 The Indications générales et observations pour la mise en scène de La muette de Portici (1828) built on his publication of similar Indications for Les trois quartiers at the Comédie-Française a year prior, and, with these two manuals, Solomé catalysed the creation of hundreds of guides to replicating staging across different genres that were published throughout the century.Footnote 49
The historical function of staging manuals for grand opéra, specifically, has prompted significant musicological debate since the rediscovery of these sources. Cohen and others have argued that the codification of grand opéra’s stage movements, decors and accessories in these manuals testify to the genre’s staging within France as ‘an art of preservation rather than creation […] not intended to be altered’ between the late 1820s and 1880s.Footnote 50 Arnold Jacobshagen, though, has challenged these claims of fixed operatic practice in Paris by showing that staging practices at the Opéra were, in fact, constantly in flux during this period, departing from the recorded instructions printed within booklets.Footnote 51 Jacobshagen credibly repositions staging manuals as commercial operatic objects, often not even created by the original régisseurs working on the opera, whose significance within the nineteenth-century theatrical industry must be explored as separate to institutional influence. Building on Jacobshagen’s arguments, then, Solomé’s Indications for La muette is ripe for reassessment as a manual that communicates one theatrical professional’s assessment of how to record –and, crucially, change – the opera’s Parisian practice for wider France, rather than an effort to codify the Opéra’s practices. In doing so, the manual offers meaningful comparisons with Delorme’s parameters for grand opéra, including the singing of recitative, that illustrate significant differences in how the genre’s components were seen nationally in its nascent years.
Solomé’s Indications was based on the régisseur’s first-hand knowledge of managing the stage direction of La muette at the Opéra, but also drew from his vast experience working in provincial theatrical administration, including time in the 3rd and 1st arrondissements, the latter region in which Delorme premiered La muette. Footnote 52 The sixty-page Indications contained descriptions of the decors, costumes and stage movements for the principals and chorus, and repeatedly specifically addressed provincial directors.Footnote 53 The potential for adaptation was placed at the heart of the document, communicated to directors in annotated comments featured alongside the main text, as well as in appendices. Alongside various instructions about how to scale down stage effects and change costumes, chorus allocations, decors and accessories, Solomé offered instructions for musical adaptation. Controversially, given the capital’s strict differentiation of theatrical institutions by musical genre, Solomé suggested that regional companies could perform La muette in the form of an opéra-comique:
In certain provincial theatres, the directors can play La muette de Portici in the manner of the lyrical dramas that are performed at the Théâtre Feydeau, by taking away the ballets and by speaking the recitatives, as well as anything that is not designated as an air or an ensemble piece.Footnote 54
Continuing this switch of genres, Solomé also offered casting instructions listing the opéra-comique emplois for the principal male roles after the grand opéra ones.Footnote 55 Through both sets of instructions, Solomé put forward a printed model for La muette that suggested the piece be performed by drawing on musical practices from two separate French operatic traditions. In doing so, he placed genre hybridity, rather than the Opéra’s vocal and formal specialism, at the centre of La muette’s provincial identity.
Just like Delorme, Solomé considered grand opéra to operate by different rules in a provincial context. The régisseur’s suggestion of genre hybridity offers a way to recover the likely aural experience of the Valenciennes performance in 1830. Delorme’s troupe chose to perform La muette in its original recitative form, showcasing different interpretations to Solomé of the specific adaptations needed to catalyse the piece’s circulation. The voices of the northern company taking on roles such as Masaniello and Elvire, though, were still contracted and trained for opéra-comique. Embedded within Delorme’s claim of a ‘non-reduced’ Muette, the aural experience in Valenciennes would therefore also have showcased the meeting of opéra-comique voice and grand opéra form. Indeed, although singers’ and audiences’ experiences of this meeting of vocal traditions was not commented upon by critics in Valenciennes in 1830, a friction between both operatic genres did come to define the press’s discussion of grand opéra performance in the years following, as I will argue in the second half of this article.
Provincial customs for troupe casting were another determining factor in the 1830 production. Singer Mme Alphonse Jules Lejeai performed the mute dancing role of Fenella in Valenciennes even though Delorme’s troupe did include one dancer, Louise, employed as coryphée (a low-ranking ballet corps position).Footnote 56 Delorme likely overlooked Louise’s dancing role and specified responsibility within the troupe in order to prioritise upholding troupe hierarchy over catering to specific skillsets. This hierarchy affected both singers and audiences. Mme Jules Lejeai was contracted as the troupe’s dugazon, an emplois for a light opéra-comique voice in second soprano/young lover roles.Footnote 57 She shared the status of the highest-ranking female singer in the troupe with Scholastique Leméteyer, the première chanteuse à roulade, a coloratura, leading-lady emplois. Footnote 58 As well as receiving the highest female salaries, both women could expect to be cast in leading roles according to genre: Leméteyer would claim opéra-comique leads and secondary ones in vaudeville, and Jules Lejeai vice versa. Provincial spectators and critics expected such rote casting, at times berating directors who asked singers to step outside their official role types.Footnote 59 Consequently, Delorme faced the problem of having to correlate the women’s existing emplois into grand opéra repertoire for the first time in La muette and for a piece with only one female star singing role, Elvire. By having Leméteyer play Elvire, casting convention thus maintained that Jules Lejeai was given the only other principal female role, above the troupe’s designated dancer. In this instance, Delorme mirrored Solomé’s instructions in his manual for provincial directors to cast a singer as Fenella, yet it is important to note that they reached the same conclusion for different reasons.Footnote 60 Delorme chose to cast singer Jules Lejeai in the role not because his troupe was lacking in trained dancers, as was Solomé’s impetus for suggesting an adaptation, but to fit around pre-existing touring troupe hierarchies.
Spectators’ experiences of Auber’s opera in Valenciennes were informed by an additional troupe convention: mixed-genre programmes. La muette was performed alongside the vaudevilles La famille normande (Mélesville and Nicolas Brazier, 1822) and Le gastronome sans argent (Eugène Scribe and Nicolas Brazier, 1821) on 25 March, and produced on 4 April in an Auber double bill with his opéra-comique La fiancée (1829).Footnote 61 Susan Valladares has argued in the context of contemporary British multi-genre programmes that the form, themes and characters of each piece inevitably informed spectators’ understandings of others in the programme.Footnote 62 The juxtaposition of the pieces listed above in Valenciennes, too, would have lent a particular shape to the presentation of La muette, compared to its solo production during its premiering run at the Opéra.Footnote 63 Without any extant testimonies from sources it is only possible to speculate whether the pairing of La muette with La famille normande, a vaudeville about the return home of a peasant-soldier, portrayed as a typical ‘Norman caricature’, might have given rise to comparative thoughts about military control or regional backwardness in the context of La muette’s plot centred on a Neopolitan revolutionary figure.Footnote 64 Alternatively, the night featuring two Auber operas may have inspired spectators to marvel at the composer’s prowess across operatic genres, potentially bridging spectators’ experiences of the auditory gap between grand opéra and opéra-comique through a showcase of Auber’s multi-institutional output. What is more certain, however, is that provincial directors rotated the pairings of pieces on different nights. New pairings thus allowed a piece such as La muette to be open to constantly changing interpretations as audiences related its dramatic and musical content to other pieces. In Valenciennes, these pairings ranged from a drame recounting an assassination attempt on Napoléon, to a vaudeville satirising romanticism, and La muette was also staged on a début evening where spectators were primed to focus on assessing the suitability of new troupe members to determine their future in the company.Footnote 65 Such varying pairings may well have invited reflections on grand opéra’s meanings that were more flexible and wide-ranging than the socio-political readings of the repertoire staged individually in Paris.
So far, my piecing together of Delorme’s La muette has revealed that parts of the opera’s defining musical features in Paris were done away with in Valenciennes for practical reasons, but also to fit distinctive itinerant troupe practices which the director chose to retain. At the same time, the standard touring practices of Delorme’s company were also transformed, musically, to make way for grand opéra, in the expansion of orchestral size and learning of the new singing style of recitative. The mixture of established provincial customs and new influences in the evolution of provincial grand opéra is also evident in terms of the visual staging of La muette. Prior to 1830, travelling troupes’ staging practices relied upon re-using stock backdrops, depicting the same generic settings of, say, a farm or interior salon, used for different titles and genres.Footnote 66 The resulting lack of specific interplay between the narrative of each opera and its depicted setting contrasted significantly with the bespoke scenery used to highlight the musical and dramatic effect of La muette and later repertoire at the Opéra.Footnote 67 For his production, though, Delorme made a substantial effort to offer his spectators a new level of what he described as ‘great care’ lavished on the scenery, costumes and accessories, as described in the Journal de Valenciennes. Such care included:
In the third act, a scene portraying a busy market on one of the squares of Naples; in the fourth act, Masaniello’s triumphal entry on his parade horse, and in the fifth act, the eruption of Vesuvius that ends the piece.Footnote 68
The advertisement emphasised the shift in representation from troupes’ use of approximate operatic settings to the recreating of specific scenes, underlining newly bespoke decors as a prestige element within local operatic practice.
Beyond their evident prestige, the material conditions of Delorme’s scenic elements are, again, difficult to piece together with the lack of surviving information. The fact that he later advertised a new Vesuvius backdrop for reprisals of La muette in Valenciennes in October 1830, suggests that Delorme did not purchase a new backdrop for at least this scene in the March premiere.Footnote 69 Instead, it is likely that, to create his advertised spectacle, the director relied solely on Bengal fire, a slow-burning firework commonly used for explosive effects on European stages from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, including by Solomé for Vesuvius’s eruption at the Opéra.Footnote 70 We know that Delorme had already used that technology in Valenciennes in 1829, almost a year prior, to stage a dance in the vaudeville L’ours et le pacha (1820, Scribe and Joseph Xavier) while working as régisseur under his predecessor Dellemence.Footnote 71 Delorme’s presumed re-use of Bengal fire, rather than a bespoke decor for La muette, would have added further simplifications to Solomé’s imagined scaling down of the finale staged at the Opéra.Footnote 72 Indeed, it is likely that the local reduction of the staging manual’s account of an already scaled-back set of provincial visuals was reflected across the various settings showcased in the opera. The Valenciennes readers of the Journal were not, for example, promised a view of the Act I chapel scene as staged at the Opéra, nor the Act II beach panorama, implying that audiences were left to construct their impressions of these scenes from stock resources. Delorme’s simplification naturally follows the reduction of scale between the Opéra and a touring troupe, yet it is the way in which his choices relate to Solomé’s instructions for adaptation that are most revealing about the way in which these two theatrical entrepreneurs envisaged the circulation of the genre’s aesthetics. Solomé did outline how to cobble together various materials to create the first two acts from existing scenery, yet Delorme chose not to implement these simplified instructions.Footnote 73 The limited bespoke decors seen in Valenciennes highlight the practical limitations faced by the touring company and the adaptative choices needing to be made to move away not only from the Opéra but from the published adaptative model even when Solomé offered clear guidance for altering aspects of grand opéra practice for the provinces. In this way, the production in Valenciennes emphasises that there was greater disparity between the visual technologies of the Opéra and those of small theatres than Solomé anticipated.
The conditions of the Valenciennes Muette that I have so far recovered offer several important insights into the form and meaning of operatic practice beyond Paris and the emergence of grand opéra in the year of change that was 1830. The musical cuts made to Auber’s piece are typical of the ‘event’-orientated nature of traditional European operatic practice, where artists, composers and managers frequently changed the music of operatic repertoire during performances and revivals, much-documented before and during the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 74 Befitting the newness of the musical and scenic elements of La muette, grand opéra unsurprisingly needed to adapt to provincial artistic conditions in order to travel beyond Paris, with Delorme embracing operatic change without sharing the fears of doing so that the Valenciennes amateur felt so strongly.
Yet the expanded orchestral accompaniment and likely new recitative singing that Delorme arranged for La muette suggest that the director also moved away from this more flexible attitude, aiming to instead match the musical dimension of his production more closely to the techniques and forces of an established model, in this case the residential theatres that he referenced in his letter. Similarly, Delorme’s advertisement of some precise decors for Acts III, IV and V recreated in Valenciennes underlines the existence of a similar model for visual spectacle that the director aimed to uphold where possible. Delorme’s desire to imitate other theatrical environments and, crucially, make his readers aware of his choice to do so, reveals that the director valued operatic fixity, both musically and in terms of staging, as a parallel integral part of touring grand opéra – so much so that he embraced the transformation of existing touring practices to do so. Despite all its adaptations, the Valenciennes Muette thus additionally offers a glimpse of a developing view of operatic practice around the mid-century. Francesca Vella describes an emerging understanding of opera ‘as permanent works amenable to reproduction’, a phenomenon conditioned by several means including the codifiable performance of operatic stars, reconceptualisation of compositional authority and the circulation of operatic visual materials and instructions including Solomé’s manuals.Footnote 75 Delorme’s actions, I argue, similarly reveal that provincial grand opéra promoted a way of regarding certain elements of opera as fixed in specific conditions and needing replicating, rather than transforming, through touring.
How representative was Delorme’s La muette of early provincial forms of grand opéra? Evidence from contemporary performances across France suggests that the balance between operatic continuity and change found in Valenciennes was also central to the wider circulation of the genre across the nation in its first ten years. The Montpellier company’s premiere of Les Huguenots in Montpellier, for example, was characterised by musical cuts made to combat singers’ fatigue and inexperience in larger operatic form, but some changes of staging were implemented for artistic as well as practical reasons, much like Delorme’s casting choices and fitting of La muette into a mixed-genre programme.Footnote 76 In Lyon, the premiere of La muette by the resident company in 1829 featured a mix of significant musical and dramatic adaptations to Auber’s piece and local efforts to reproduce the original staging described in Solomé’s manual, as in Valenciennes.Footnote 77 Both premieres, then, hint at a fault line established between the national transfer of musical and visual aspects of grand opéra. While musical elements were more often subject to changes to fit the genre to provincial capabilities, decor and staging were more consistently considered to be more fixed elements, most likely partly thanks to the availability of models for staging such as Solomé’s Indications. Crucially, however, provincial grand opéra c.1830 reveals that ways of conceptualising opera, as adaptative or reproducible, existed alongside each other without overpowering one another. Touring performances of Auber’s piece, like productions elsewhere, were defined by significant efforts made to imitate models of operatic practice outside of Valenciennes, but productions were, ultimately, only made possible through important adaptations to the grand opéra’s originating musical and visual features. The emergence of provincial grand opéra was thus clearly defined across France by coexisting parallel conceptions of fixed and adaptative operatic practice, with different local companies striking their own balance between both approaches.
Grand opéra as the touring norm
In the years after 1830, provincial grand opéra evolved into a fully fledged phenomenon alongside the establishment of a repertoire of grand opéra titles at the Paris Opéra. Directors across France embraced this repertoire wholeheartedly over the subsequent quarter century.Footnote 78 In the north, Delorme and his successors staged nine out of the twenty grand opéras created at the Opéra between October 1839 and October 1862 (the period for which complete records of the 1st troupe d’arrondissement exist), as shown in Table 1.Footnote 79 The awakening of nationwide acceptance of grand opéra performance from the mid-1830s onwards implies an important reappraisal of the means needed to perform the Opéra’s repertoire beyond Paris. Various companies the size of Delorme’s and smaller evidently no longer felt constrained by scale or prior professional experience. In the process, the genre of grand opéra gained a new national significance.
Performances of grand opéras by the 1st troupe d’arrondissement, 1830–62
The musical shape of grand opéra stagings after La muette in Valenciennes and beyond remained largely the same after 1830, prioritising flexibility and adaptation to fit the genre into the previously mentioned confines and conventions of travelling troupe singing and programming. Reviews from the north, Brittany and Alsace demonstrate that large- and small-scale musical changes, including the cutting of whole acts and the transposition of numbers or changes to vocal lines, were routinely made by itinerant troupes between the 1830s and 1860s.Footnote 80 Such cuts were now overwhelmingly accepted by the press as part and parcel of grand opéra’s provincial existence, without the anxious overtones of commentary such as that of the Valenciennes subscriber in 1830.Footnote 81 Although normalised, adaptative practices would certainly have affected spectators’ understanding of the musical, dramatic and visual meanings of specific pieces, although not always in the ways perhaps expected by scholars. The repeated presentation between 1833 and 1859 of only La muette’s first four acts in Valenciennes to better fit the opera into a mixed programme, for instance, may well have led to spectators’ understanding of the opera as glorifying Masaniello’s usurping of the King of Spain taking place at the end of Act IV, ignoring the dramatic shift of power back to the monarchy portrayed in Act V.Footnote 82 Surprisingly, the political implications of the four-act version were neither raised by censors nor discussed by journalists, perhaps implying that La muette’s revolutionary charge, as discussed in Paris, did not make the same impact in northern France even if the opera’s dramatic conclusion was presented in a significantly different way.Footnote 83
The fate of Les Huguenots in this region further emphasises that grand opéra’s political content was appraised differently across France. As seen in Table 1, Meyerbeer’s opera was noticeably lacking in performances in the 1st arrondissement, despite appearing on the repertoire lists of Delorme’s successors Guillaume and Prosper Bertéché’s 1838–9 and 1850–1 seasons.Footnote 84 Northern France was a region with traditional Huguenot sympathies.Footnote 85 While Meyerbeer’s opera was not specifically censored by the Prefect of the Nord department, who had the local power to do so, Bertéché father and son frequently received reminders from this administrator and the Mayor of Valenciennes that the repertoire they performed must not be ‘capable of wounding social or political standards’.Footnote 86 It thus follows that, although the Bertéchés came close to considering the piece twice, they likely chose not to stage Les Huguenots because its depiction of the brutality of religious war was considered by them a topic still too sensitive for a pro-Huguenot region. Indeed, a ministerial report from 1850 concerning the limited circulation of Meyerbeer’s opera across the country suggests that the northern situation had parallels across France, with several administrators and directors keeping Meyerbeer’s opera off their stages in places ‘where religious quarrels have left morbid memories’.Footnote 87 The easy embrace of an overtly republican four-act version of La muette in Valenciennes and the clear rejection of Huguenot persecution depicted in Meyerbeer’s opera reveal the potential for sensibilities to political and religious operatic themes both locally dampened or heightened in comparison to those in the capital. However defined the genre’s political overtones were at the Opéra, these were far from nationally uniform.
In the visual realm, directors increasingly prioritised stage technologies that imitated grand opéra’s Parisian conditions more closely after 1830. Although there remained an element of adaptation, Delorme and his counterparts left behind stock resources to a greater extent after La muette and invested in a much larger range of bespoke scenery and, newly, costumes, to present grand opéra. The Parisian connections traced by these new materials were proudly advertised to spectators in town newspapers, for example for Delorme’s 1834 Valenciennes premiere of Robert, featuring two new decors depicting a graveyard and Parma cathedral.Footnote 88 As advertised in L’écho, these were constructed by Achille Varnout, the machiniste of the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, and painted by Devoir and Pourchet, artists working at the Opéra, Folies-Dramatiques and Porte Saint-Martin.Footnote 89 Set pieces also gathered complexity: the fact that Varnout travelled to install and service the decors indicates that Delorme not only ordered a backcloth but a complex structure, likely the trap door for Bertram the devil’s descent into hell.Footnote 90 Audiences’ warm embrace of these new stage technologies is implied by Auguste Lemaire writing in Le mémorial de Saint-Omer, a neighbouring town to Valenciennes, to which the 1st arrondissement also toured. Reacting to an 1835 production of Robert, Lemaire underlined that bespoke decors offered performances in which the visual elements were, for the first time in his town, ‘analogous to the subject’ of the opera.Footnote 91 As Lemaire highlights, novel technologies allowed for the increasingly specific depiction of operatic narratives through musical, dramatic and now visual means in a touring environment unused to these means of representation. Provincial audiences’ embrace of the correlation between the subject of an opera and its represented setting led to a boom in touring directors’ commissioning of specialised decors in the subsequent twenty years. Directors Bertéché father and son commissioned new decors for northern premieres of La juive, Halévy’s La reine de Chypre and Charles VI and Verdi’s Jérusalem, as well as for pieces in other genres, and several other directors also rented magasins de costumes from Paris-based theatrical agencies.Footnote 92 These investments highlighted the growing importance of delivering an experience of grand opéra on tour that matched audience expectations drawn from an established model, rather than from individual interpretation.
A rare illustration of Bertéché’s troupe performing in Valenciennes in 1848 offers a glimpse of how exactly the staging, decor and costumes of this period might have looked and related to Parisian models. The print does not depict a grand opéra, but represents a performance of Halévy’s opéra-comique Haydée, staged in Valenciennes on 12 October 1848 with a bespoke backdrop.Footnote 93 Accordingly, the print can be seen as representative of the wider touring trend for imitating Parisian visual technologies across sung and spoken stage genres, particularly as the Act II scene depicted in the Valenciennes print (Figure 1) can be directly compared to a Parisian illustration of the same scene at the Opéra-Comique (Figure 2).
Haydée ou Le secret, Opéra-comique de MM. Scribe et Auber, représenté sur le théâtre de Valenciennes, le 12 octobre 1848, mise en scène par Mr Bertéché fils. Décoration de MM. Meurice père et fils. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Bibliothèque-musée de l’opéra, ESTAMPES SCENES Haydée (2), 1848.
Haydée ou Le secret, opéra-comique d’Esprit Auber: illustration de presse. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Arts du spectacle, 4-ICO THE-2802, 1848.
The print of Bertéché’s troupe was published in the Valenciennes paper L’impartial du Nord, evidently based on the Parisian press sketch. As the former was published three days after the troupe performance it is likely that the Valenciennes artist had time to draw from his experience of the local production, rather than simply copying the Parisian one with imagined changes.Footnote 94 Both prints are incredibly similar in terms of backdrop, scenery, costumes and placement of performers onstage. These features suggest that spectators would have experienced a high level of continuity in staging between the capital and a provincial town, facilitated by the contemporary boom in the production of staging manuals.Footnote 95 There are, however, some crucial differences that reflect the impact of smaller troupe resources. For one, we may note the striking disparity in theatrical scale between the twelve performers of Bertéché’s troupe and the crowds shown in the Parisian illustration, with the size of the onlooking crowd shifting the dramatic context of the scene. There are also differences in the ships’ details and the cityscape, even if both portray Venice: the nearby churches in the Valenciennes backdrop give an impression of the ship sailing through the city centre, while the much smaller buildings depicted on the horizon in the Opéra-Comique illustration represents the vessel much further away from civilisation. Overall, these sketches do suggest a level of national standardisation within opera’s decors and mise-en-scène by the mid-nineteenth century, while also emphasising that provincial performances continued to make room for local inflection, whether due to practical constraints or artistic choice.
Investments in touring technologies also ensured a new kind of theatrical continuity across itinerant circuits. Directors now travelled with their own decors rather than using municipal collections in each town, meaning items outlived individual entrepreneurs as they were sold to successors or to municipal theatre collections.Footnote 96 Rented costumes also freed troupe performers from the usual responsibility of sourcing their garments, in the process ensuring that clothing remained in a director’s care across different seasons, while singers tended to move on after one-year contracts.Footnote 97 Grand opéra’s material conditions were thus increasingly defined by both top-down and horizontal standardisation after 1830. Yet it is important to note that not all touring locations were large enough to sustain directors’ standardisation of itinerant technologies. Rather, as testified in an account of Guillaume Bertéché’s career by his son Prosper, the fact that directors travelled with their own collections in the 1840s did not entail uniformity in regional production. Prosper states that directors made sure to own a selection of decors ‘appropriate for the various theatres of the arrondissement’: he either implies the choice in each theatre of whatever appropriate backdrop in the director’s resources that was of a correct size; the use of backdrops that could be altered to fit stage sizes (removing or adding visual elements); or, perhaps least likely, that the troupe possessed a range of the same backdrops in different sizes, resulting in audiences’ experiences of different scales of the scenes depicted.Footnote 98 In the first two cases, the newly commissioned decors would still have emphasised the place of adaptative elements, such as detachable panels, within standardising technologies, or showed that such materials were conceived as limited in touring terms, only destined for specific buildings on a director’s itinerary.
In larger touring centres such as Valenciennes that could benefit fully from directors’ emphasis on visual splendour, though, touring developments after 1830 emphasise the increased prestige associated with imitating the visual technologies of the Paris Opéra in a much more extensive way than was possible for La muette. These developments reveal a shifting understanding of the importance of spectacle and of historical and geographical specificity within touring grand opéra: these were aesthetic values that could, from the mid-1830s, be considered to define the genre in its national as well as Parisian context. Moreover, there is evidence that directors may have looked to keep up with changes in staging at the Opéra in order to maintain their up-to-date imitation of Parisian practices. As Jacobshagen has observed, developments in the placement of chorus ensembles and switching of scenery were central to performances of La juive and, he argues, was likely integral to recurrence of all grand opéra titles within the Opéra’s mid-century repertory.Footnote 99 The new decors advertised in 1837 for Robert in Valenciennes only three years after the premiere thus potentially indicate that director Bertéché responded to a similar Parisian development – although it is possible that directors continued to also look to other provincial theatres as models.Footnote 100 Audiences, too, were invited to appraise grand opéra repertoire differently from the 1840s as touring companies began to stage some pieces such as La favorite individually. As the sole performance filling an entire evening, spectators’ attention could now focus on the narrative and characters of the Opéra’s pieces, no longer drawing inference from a surrounding programme and reinforcing the individual and specialised nature of the genre.
Overall, directors’ efforts to replicate models for grand opéra’s visual spectacle reveals a growing understanding of the genre as bearing fixed decorative parameters from the mid-1830s. As Vella argues, this trend mirrored the material circumstances of the genre’s European circulation.Footnote 101 Moreover, the monolithic and monumental values of grand opéra’s visual elements was reinforced by the staging manuals produced after La muette. These contained far fewer, if any, adaptations for provincial companies, instead focusing on imparting stage action in increasing detail, and providing new tools such as costume sketches to aid directors in replicating operas in increasingly specific ways.Footnote 102 In European practice, as well as in codification of grand opéra in commercial publications, the importance placed on copying visual elements thus moved away from local variability and increasingly configured its repertoire as replicable operatic works.
Provincial prestige
I finish by considering how developments in the musical and visual elements of grand opéra were associated with cultural prestige in the touring environment, a term I have already invoked several times. There were crucial differences to the way that such prestige was articulated on tour compared to larger provincial centres. As mentioned in my introduction, in Ellis’s study of grand opéra in residential companies she shows how municipally funded theatres’ budgets were stretched to breaking point because managers strained to replicate the forces of the Opéra in exacting ways.Footnote 103 Ellis argues that grand opéra was considered a monumental force: it would not be staged unless the full artistic requirements such as a large chorus or ballet company could be recruited, for fear that the theatre in towns such as Bordeaux and, by extension the town as a whole, be considered inadequate by local audiences and the municipal council. Here, reduced or non-specialised forces such as Delorme’s singer–dancer Mme Lejai and his principals doubling as the chorus would not be tolerated in circumstances where civic pride for theatre professionals working in lager provincial centres was directly related to upholding Parisian practices. The negative associations of adapting grand opéra’s conditions in the capital underline what Jonathan Hicks describes as the ‘cultural cringe’ present in grand opéra’s global transfer, that is, the frequency of historical commentators assessing certain operatic conditions in locations from New Orleans to London as lacking because of their distance from the Opéra’s resources.Footnote 104 In these scenarios, the cultural capital associated with grand opéra in municipally funded operatic environments was fundamentally tied to aping the large-scale artistic means by which titles were staged in Paris.
The situation in Valenciennes, as representative of the wider touring circuit, is notably different. Knowledge of the gap between local and Parisian versions of grand opéra was certainly evident, and some critics did refer to the smaller-scale experience of the genre as lacking: for example, in 1834 journalist Arthur Dinaux wrote longingly about missing effects such as the moonlight in the Robert graveyard scene, presumably experienced in Paris.Footnote 105 By and large, however, Valenciennes reviewers and directors could react to the differences in musical and scenic scale between their stage and the Opéra in a more sanguine manner than their municipal counterparts. Without a municipal cahier de charges that tied directors into civic expectations for the size and talent of their company and its type of repertoire, touring managers such as Delorme and Bertéché were free to produce grand opéra with tiny forces and without ever recruiting specific chorus or dancers.
Some aspects of itinerant grand opéra did admittedly struggle more than others to be accepted locally on provincial rather than Parisian terms, most notably singers’ voices. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, journalists continually accentuated the vocal strain that grand opéra cost touring troupes. Writing about Valenciennes and Saint-Omer, journalists Dinaux, Ernest Bouton and Lemaire all identified a clash between smaller voices trained for opéra-comique and the larger scale of the Opéra’s repertoire. This rhetoric was at times used to define Meyerbeer, Auber and Halévy’s music by its ‘proportions that [our singers] could not attain’, but the three critics overwhelmingly emphasised the positive attributes of grand opéra’s vocal challenge and the tussle with troupe singers’ specialism: they particularly admired performers that took on ‘exhausting’ roles in which the press identifies musical ‘weight’ and ‘difficulty’ compared to opéra-comique. Footnote 106 Troupe members’ limitations were thus reconfigured as heroic vocal efforts in taking on roles such as Robert or Rachel, rather than missing the standards of the Opéra.Footnote 107 Another journalist known as J. P. L., writing in L’écho, even argued that Valenciennes spectators needed to close their ears to Parisian markers for local grand opéra singing. In reviews of performances of Robert in September 1834 featuring a guest appearance by Julie Dorus-Gras, a Valenciennes native and star of the Opéra for whom Meyerbeer wrote the role of Alice, J. P. L. described that Dorus-Gras’s performance led spectators to reappraise their usual troupe artists that they had previously enjoyed: ‘the rest is rubbish for a crowd seduced by a big name’.Footnote 108 J. P. L. argued that Dorus-Gras’s specialised voice endangered ‘the enjoyment of the public’ and argued that spectators needed to instead develop localised parameters to appraise singers in order to dispel the temptation to compare them negatively with the Opéra.Footnote 109 The journalist’s rhetoric showcases the local expectation of compromise evident within grand opéra production, not apparently possible in towns such as Bordeaux but essential, he argued, to accepting the genre on its own local terms in Valenciennes.
Achieving compromise also appeared to be important in terms of visual effects. Journalists such as Bouton acknowledged that while the Valenciennes version of, say, Robert did not provide theatrical splendour of the same magnitude as the Parisian version, the very presence of the genre in ‘a town of the third order, fifty lieues from the capital’ was cause for rejoicing, once again using the hierarchical third-order term to compare Valenciennes to provincial metropolises and Paris.Footnote 110 Indeed, the self-acknowledged low position of Valenciennes within France’s theatrical and spatial hierarchy appears to have lowered the stakes for the shape of grand opéra locally. This was a positive move, as there was still civic prestige to be had in an adapted version of the genre because audiences were encouraged, by the press, to embrace performances with obvious reductions: one might say ‘liking and lumping’ adaptations, rather than rejecting them as theatre figures feared might happen in Bordeaux.
Some touring environments beyond Valenciennes went even further in stretching the artistic definition of grand opéra’s prestige when they took on the genre with performance practices even more distant from those of the Opéra. In Lorient in 1845, for example, a performance of La favorite by the 6th troupe d’arrondissement featured singers specialising in vaudeville, with reviewer Flammèche noting the enhanced difficulty in switching from this declamatory popular sung style to singing grand opéra. Footnote 111 In the Pyrenees, Joseph Hermant’s 16th troupe d’arrondissement also leapt from their usual vaudeville fare to La juive and La muette in the summer of 1844 to perform in Auch alongside soloists from the temporarily dissolved Grand Théâtre, Bordeaux, a scenario that must have pushed both Hermant’s non-operatic singers and the soloists used to Bordeaux’s exacting imitative standards firmly out of their comfort zones.Footnote 112 The Lorient and Auch performances would have made clear to spectators the disparity between the stage traditions of popular theatre, heard in the troupes’ voices, and the form of so-called high art that they tackled. The very presence and success of these performances, though, reveals that grand opéra’s circulation to certain corners of France depended on and allowed for hybridity between popular and high art genres in a way that was not possible in large towns: as Ellis demonstrates, when Bordeaux and other resident companies ran into difficulties in securing funds to recreate the large-scale forces and effects of grand opéra, the genre was removed from municipal stages, rather than being reimagined.Footnote 113 The flexibility shown in recreating grand opéra in these touring adaptations fundamentally reconfigured where the prestige of the genre lay in mid-nineteenth-century France. In these provinces, prestige rather than ‘cringe’ was found by critics, directors and spectators in the act of translating grand opéra’s musical, dramatic and visual effects into smaller-scale or distinctly provincial practices. In Valenciennes, for example, the effort of singing Alice or the display of a bespoke graveyard decor in Robert retained and conveyed the meaning and saliency of Meyerbeer’s opera and showcased the audacious efforts made by touring companies to bring the genre to their itinerant circuits, even without relying on the specifically Parisian way of producing these effects such as Dorus-Gras’s voice and realistic moonlight.
* * *
I have argued throughout that grand opéra examined from the perspective of touring productions offers new insights into the genre’s aesthetics, meanings and influence within nineteenth-century France. Befitting grand opéra’s status in 1830 as a recently developed and still emerging operatic form, preliminary experiments with grand opéra in the provinces reveal that the genre initially circulated beyond the capital in a malleable state where Paris was not the only influence. In Delorme’s production of La muette in 1830, the director’s desire to produce a ‘non-reduced’ version of opera resulted in musical and visual developments in previous troupe practice. Such expansions took place alongside necessary adaptations made to Auber’s opera in order to uphold troupe conventions as well as reduce the piece’s scale. Crucially, Delorme saw his production as an example of provincial grand opéra, displacing the direct influence of the Opéra and revealing the importance of intra-provincial theatrical relationships. The wider provincial situation suggests that a mix of imitative and adaptative artistic practices characterised grand opéra’s initial journeys outside Paris, although the differences in several musical, dramatic and staging elements that I observed between the Valenciennes staging, Solomé’s instructions for an imagined provincial performance, and snapshots of contemporary productions in Lyon, Montpellier and Bordeaux demonstrate that theatrical entrepreneurs and critics in each centre defined the weighting of different approaches to the genre. Provincial grand opéra, I argue, was more a spectrum of practices than a codified set of theatrical effects, as a variety of historical agents worked to define the most productive relationship between their locality, other provincial centres and the capital. These environments offer a picture of grand opéra as a new genre in flux across the nation, its values being defined in part through its provincial practices.
The situation developed from the later 1830s to the 1860s, during which time touring grand opéra can be characterised as exhibiting parallel growth in practices of local adaptation in musical terms and centralised imitation in visual spectacle. Certainly, there is no denying the Parisian influence over stage practices during this period. The emphasis that directors, critics and spectators across France placed on the genre’s use of bespoke decors and costumes technologies highlights the importance of visual spectacle in the genre’s national circulation, articulating clear efforts by these theatre figures to replicate the Opéra nationally, aided by new publications and resources. These efforts provided a standardised experience that related provincial performances more closely to Parisian models and to most, although not all, other provincial locales. In so doing, directors’ investments transformed previous ways of representing operatic narrative in the touring circuit. These investments also highlighted the now significant cultural capital of replicating an ideal and fixed concept of grand opéra’s spectacle nationwide.
At the same time, it is important to remember that the way in which pieces from La muette to Robert were performed, musically, with forces a fraction of the size of the Opéra and with less specialised vocal skills, emphasises that cultural capital, at least in touring environments, still allowed for a transformation of the musical practices of grand opéra. Touring productions reveal that expectations concerning visual parameters evidently travelled separately from musical ones, where flexibility and adaptation was widely practised and accepted locally. Moreover, as shown in reflections on the subject from Valenciennes journalists, the Parisian comparison was unproductive for local experience. The vocal identities of Opéra singers such as Dorus-Gras were not seen to define grand opéra, locally, because they were not perceived as transferable to the local situation. J. P. L.’s approach to hearing touring grand opéra on its own terms acknowledged that Valenciennes was not Paris, however much directors wanted to copy the Opéra. Significantly, this reasoning did not devalue touring troupes’ performances or crumble local attempts at grand opéra, as happened in Bordeaux. Rather, such comments are indicative of how touring conditions fashioned a broader acceptance that grand opéra could (and, practically, must) undertake several reconfigurations, in musical terms and in terms of scale, without losing its cultural capital or artistic relevance.
The accepted place of artistic reconfigurations in touring environments accentuates that the porousness and the specialisation of grand opéra, together, defined the genre’s identity and place within nineteenth-century French stage culture. The genre was both reimagined as musically open, at times making room for vaudeville voices and, in parallel, it was increasingly monumentalised by aims of achieving the thorough replication of visual spectacle seen at the Opéra. The importance of grand opéra for touring directors, spectators and critics was thus found in both of these elements and in the way they interacted, offering the genre a flexibility that was not possible in Paris, or across all provincial environments.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their comments, Katherine Hambridge and Thomas Wynn for advice offered in the preparation of this article, and Katharine Ellis and Thomas Stammers for comments on an earlier version included in a thesis chapter.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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