Scribe and the term ‘grand opera’

As we saw on p. 3, ‘grand opera’ is not a generic term with secure historical credentials. Since William Crosten's book French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business (1948) it has gained currency in musicology for a not very precisely definable subspecies of nineteenth-century opera that is French and influenced by France. From the late 1820s, long before the emergence of the generic paradigm, librettists and composers did, according to Anselm Gerhard, use the term to ‘characterise individual works’, but not very systematically. In 1803, for instance, when Henri Berton dedicated his Aline, reine de Golconde to Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, he referred to the ageing Monsigny's 1766 setting of the same libretto as follows: ‘With your tuneful songs you enriched the poem La Reine de Golconde, grand opera’. In fact, the older work had been designated as a ballet héroïque and as an opéra. Critics of Auber's operas at their first performances did not use the generic label ‘grand opera’; nor did Scribe and Auber when their works were printed. It is, however, found in a number of Scribe's manuscript librettos for five-act operas such as Le Prophète and Noëma (intended for Meyerbeer and containing elements that were reused in L'Enfant prodigue), for four-act operas such as Dom Sébastien (set by Donizetti), for one-acters such as La Tapisserie or for the adaptation of Auber's opéra comique Le Cheval de bronze as a three-act opera-ballet for the Opéra.

Introduction

Verdi's publisher, Léon Escudier, nicknamed the Paris Opéra the ‘grande boutique’ (‘big shop’, but with pejorative undertones), an appellation that the composer cheerfully adopted. Of all the Italian composers who wrote for the Opéra during this period, Verdi had the most mixed feelings about the institution and the requirements for success. Yet even he felt obliged, at times against his inclination, to try to meet the challenge, and even after he no longer wished to compose for it, wanted to stay up-to-date about developments there.

Why was Paris, and specifically this theatre, such a magnet for musiciens transalpins, ‘musicians from the other side of the Alps’, as the French called them? Even before Spontini's arrival in 1803 (see Chapter 1) Antonio Sacchini and Antonio Salieri scored major triumphs in Paris before the Revolution; several of their works – notably Dardanus (1784) and Ædipe à Colone (1786) by the former, and Tarare (1787) by the latter – were performed well into the nineteenth century. Success in Paris after the Restoration of 1815 brought substantial financial advantages. Composers were assured of continuing honoraria for every performance at the Opéra (unlike the situation in Italy – not yet politically united – during the first half of the nineteenth century). The thriving music publishing industry provided another important source of revenue, since resident composers’ rights were protected by law. The sheer size of the Opéra's establishment was an attraction and a challenge. Finally, Paris was the literary capital of Europe.

The ‘first’ grand opera, La Muette de Portici, has been remembered since its première in 1828 for its revolutionary sentiments: the depiction of a violent but unsuccessful revolt in seventeenth-century Naples, resonant with the events of 1789. Two years later it was performed following the successful July Revolution in Paris and it apparently sparked the Belgian revolt against the Dutch in the same year, which resulted in the independence of Belgium. Thereafter it was regularly recognised in France as a symbol of national spirit, during such events as the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. At this same moment, Wagner famously associated the opera with subsequent political events, recalling how ‘[La Muette], whose very representations had brought [revolts] about, was recognised as the obvious theatrical precursor of the July Revolution, and seldom has an artistic product stood in closer connection with a world-event’. More than a century after Wagner, Jane Fulcher commenced her book on the political role of opera in nineteenth-century Paris with an assessment of La Muette as a dangerous and seditious work with a populist message.

Yet, in spite of the undoubted turbulence in Paris in 1828, it was not the political aspect of the opera that exercised its first audiences and critics, but rather its mute heroine. This is shown not only by the reports of the Opéra's literary committee and by newspaper reviews, but also by the unprecedented response of various state-funded and commercially run theatres in the city.

‘The devil who steals Peter Schlemihl's shadow’

In an 1841 puff piece on the soprano sensation of the moment, Sofia Loewe, Henri Blaze de Bury related that Giacomo Meyerbeer had recently become so infatuated with Loewe's voice that he had gone religiously to hear her sing in Berlin, hiding himself behind the curtains of a loge and noting down details of her technique, hoping to cast her in his next opera. Blaze de Bury concluded:

The vaguely sinister image of the composer scribbling furiously in the obscure depths of his opera box is given an extra uncanny tinge by the allusion to Peter Schlemihl, a folk character immortalised in an 1814 novella by Adalbert Chamisso, who sells his shadow (in reality, his soul) to the devil in exchange for limitless wealth.