Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer
Paris, 1830-1914
Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer
Paris, 1830-1914
Opera and musical theater dominated French culture in the 1800s, and the influential stage music that emerged from this period helped make Paris, as Walter Benjamin put it, the “capital of the nineteenth century.” The fullest account available of this artistic ferment and its international impact, Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer explores the diverse institutions that shaped Parisian music and extended its influence across Europe, the Americas, and Australia.
The contributors to this volume, who work in fields ranging from literature to theater to musicology, focus on the city’s musical theater scene as a whole rather than on individual theaters or repertories. Their broad range enables their collective examination of the ways in which all aspects of performance and reception were affected by the transfer of works, performers, and management models from one environment to another. By focusing on this interplay between institutions and individuals, the authors illuminate the tension between institutional conventions and artistic creation during the heady period when Parisian stage music reached its zenith.
456 pages | 37 halftones, 5 musical examples, 16 tables | 7 x 10 | © 2009
History: European History
Music: General Music
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
part i. Institutions
1. The Company at the Heart of the Operatic Institution: Chollet and the Changing Nature of Comic-Opera Role Types during the July Monarchy
Olivier Bara
2. Fromental Halévy within the Paris Opéra: Composition and Control
Diana R. Hallman
3. Systems Failure in Operatic Paris: The Acid Test of the Théâtre-Lyrique
Katharine Ellis
4. Jacques Offenbach: The Music of the Past and the Image of the Present
Mark Everist
5. Carvalho and the Opéra-Comique: L’art de se hâter lentement
Lesley Wright
6. Finding a Stage for French Opera
David Grayson
part ii. Cultural Transfer
7. Auber’s Gustave III: History as Opera
Sarah Hibberd
8. Analyzing Mise-en-Scène: Halévy’s La juive at the Salle Le Peletier
Arnold Jacobshagen
9. Lucia Goes to Paris: A Tale of Three Theaters
Rebecca Harris-Warrick
10. Cette musique sans tradition: Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Its French Critics
Annegret Fauser
11. La sylphide and Les sylphides
Marian Smith
12. Questions of Genre: Massenet’s Les Érynnies at the Théâtre-National-Lyrique
Peter Lamothe
part iii. The Midi and Spain, or Autour de Carmen
13. Carmen: Couleur locale or the Real Thing?
Kerry Murphy
14. Spanish Local Color in Bizet’s Carmen: Unexplored Borrowings and Transformations
Ralph P. Locke
15. La princesse paysanne du Midi
Steven Huebner
Appendix: A Documentary Overview of Musical Theaters in Paris, 1830–1900
Alicia C. Levin
Bibliography
Contributors
Index