In his ‘Reminiscences of Auber’ (1871), Richard Wagner recalled he had occasionally met the elder composer over ices at the Café Tortoni back in 1860, at the time the revised Tannhäuser was in rehearsal at the Paris Opera. On one occasion, when Auber was asking after these preparations, Wagner explained to him something of the nature of the opera. Auber ‘gleefully rubbed his hands together’ and replied, ‘Ah, so there will be spectacle; it will be a success, then, never fear!’ Wagner recounts the anecdote with the irony of hindsight, of course, since the Paris Tannhäuser production of the following March (1861) turned out to be a legendary fiasco. Auber naively assumed that Tannhäuser was cut from the familiar cloth of Parisian grand opera, and that French audiences would respond favourably to such elements as the fleshy ballet-pantomime with its nymphs and satyrs, the procession of pilgrims through a ‘Romantic’ landscape of changing seasonal hues, the hunting party at the end of Act I, and the ceremonial entry of the Thuringian nobles to the song-contest at the court of Landgrave Hermann in Act II. It was by no means an unreasonable assumption. Granted, Wagner had updated the score (the opening ‘Bacchanale’ and the scene between Tannhäuser and Venus in Act I, particularly) with touches of the advanced chromaticism and the sequential-developmental style of Tristan und Isolde, quite at odds with the comfortable phraseology of much grand opera. But when Tannhäuser was originally composed, in 1845, Wagner's experience of French grand opera was still relatively fresh, and its impact still considerable.

It is a cliché to observe that opera, and perhaps in particular grand opera, is a composite venture, and that it is from this very hybridity that its strengths are fashioned. One need only peruse the range of ‘resources’ discussed in Part I of this Companion to see that grand opera generates a form of cultural force-field in which otherwise disparate skills are focused in the service of a particular production (and a particular product which hopes to exceed the proverbial sum of its parts). If this is true of performance arts in general, then to the theatrical arts here we must add the musical faculties of orchestration and singing. Indeed, it is hard to resist the sense that these faculties are at the core of a cultural product to which the visual and the textual contribute but which they do not dominate.

One can imagine how the story of the relationship between grand opera and its textual complement, the libretto, might be idealised as a harmonious marriage of equal partners; purely aesthetic criticism would explore how the libretto supports or underpins the project of staging a particular opera. It would, however, probably be a mistake to claim that it is largely in such textual frameworks where we find the most conspicuous innovations of grand opera, innovations which might lead us to recall, for more than purely historical reasons, the merits of an essentially nineteenth-century genre as the twenty-first begins.

ʿPastoralʾ has been defined in a variety of ways, and has been said to include the ʿantipastoralʾ, though some readers will wish to make a rigid distinction between the two, while recognising that both are intimately related. Traditionally, pastoral is a matter of rural life and shepherds, idyllic landscapes in which people corrupted by court and city life are changed and renewed. It suggests a healing antithesis to the corrupting influence of urban experience, but has been characterised simply as poetry of the countryside (however defined), and does not always envision an idealised and falsified, conflict-free zone, transcending the tensions of history, though it can do that, too. ʿAntipastoralʾ, on the other hand, suggests a poetics of undermining, in which pastoral conventions are deployed or alluded to, in order to suggest or declare the limitations of those conventions, or their downright falsity. If pastoral suggests that rural life offers freedom, antipastoral may proclaim it is a prison-house, and the farmers slaves. Historically, antipastoral has been associated with Goldsmithʾs The Deserted Village(1770) and George Crabbeʾs The Village (1783), with certain poems of John Clare, and with Stephen Duck who, in The Thresherʾs Labour (1736)wrote, ʿNo fountains murmur here, no Lambkins play, / No Linnets warble, and no Fields look gayʾ. A defining feature of such poetry has been its realistic treatment of labour, protest against idealising poetic traditions, and in some cases outcry against political conditions related to land enclosure.