OPÉRA DE SALON: SOCIETIES AND SPACES, 1850-1875
Mark Everist
[This title contracted at 85k words with Oxford University Press, New York, October 2022]
Context and Rationale
Opéra de salon emerged in the early 1850s out of a much longer tradition of théâtre de société: the cultivation of performing plays in aristocratic town houses and châteaux which continued into the Second Empire of the 1850s and 1860s and beyond. The generic descriptor for opéra de salon is misleading: it consisted of a one-act opérette with between six and nine musical compositions separated by spoken dialogue that carried the action in the same way as opéra-comique or opérette itself. Opéra de salon was separated from opérette and related genres by its performance context: never shared with the regulated theatre, opéra de salon was cultivated in domestic living spaces that were repurposed in ways that ranged from simply pushing back the furniture to building a fully-fledged theatre in one’s own home. Opéra de salon furthermore found its way into the concert culture hosted by Parisian piano manufacturers (Herz, Erard, Pleyel and so on).
The c130 opéras de salon that were composed and performed up to around 1875 represent a significant generic trajectory in the history of nineteenth century music and theatre. Composed by the major composers and librettists of the day, opéra de salon plays into questions of gender, age and urban topography in ways that illuminate the culture of the nineteenth-century in ways impossible for other musical and theatrical genres. The genre emerges at exactly the same moment as the séance – the tables-tournantes – in the early 1850s and in exactly the same bourgeois salons and parloirs, and the relationship between the two constitutes a reciprocal point of reference.
Opéra de salon: Societies, Séances and Salons brings out the qualities of opéra de salon for the first time. Not only does the book chart the structure of the repertory, its producers and consumers, but it also pays attention to its differing modes of circulation: although around half the repertory circulates in print like most other stage works outside the theatre, an equally large proportion were published in journals aimed at young unmarried women – the Journal des demoiselles and the Magasin des demoiselles – and the contexts for the cultivation of opéra de salon ‘between the schoolroom and the salon’, (to quote the Paris historian Rebecca Rogers) are paramount in this inquiry.
In scholarly terms, Opéra de salon: Societies, Séances and Salons brings into the light a genre and a set of cultural practices that has been obscured for too long. It aligns with current thinking not only in that its focus is on the salon – the domestic, the private – but in that it seeks to problematise these issues. Opéra de salon moves effortlessly between intimate familial space, the more public salon, to the public and largely commercial concert hall in ways that prompt reflection on the status of all of these critical categories. It furthermore throws down a challenge to the hermetic discipline of ‘opera studies’ by opening up massive repertories that are still unknown, and by developing critical practices that go beyond traditional categories of theatres, institutions, consumers and creators.
Methodology
Sources and Editions. Opéra de salon: Societies, Séances and Salons depends on almost no secondary literature and is built out of first-hand research on printed and manuscript documents in many cases studied for the first time. Establishing the scope of the repertory is a formidable task. The print revolution of the nineteenth century meant that libretti and scores for nearly all the material was published in one form or another, and the digital revolution of the twenty-first century has meant that similarly large proportions of material is available anywhere with a network connection; indeed source work for the project dovetailed with the digitalisation of the holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and obliging librarians and digital managers accelerated this part of the work considerably. For works that left no printed trace, the much maligned censors insisted on the deposit of every libretto in manuscript form, and occasionally this is the only surviving point of access for the work in question. The culture of opéra de salon is explained through a systematic search through the press, and this material (around 200 documents) has already been mounted online at http://fmc.ac.uk/collections/opéra_de_salon_(1850-1870). This currently only extends to 1870, and to match the rest of the project will be extended to 1875.
The Interdisciplinary. Opéra de salon: Societies, Séances and Salons is as much a study in social history as it is in musical or theatrical history, and interlocutors for the project have been as frequently historians of the salon, schoolroom or the supernatural as they have been musicologists. Historians recognise that the sorts of musical cultures revealed by such publications as the Journal des demoiselles or the Magasin des demoiselles are largely ignored in conventional accounts, and the story of the broader musical context to opéra de salon will also be able to be told here for the first time. Similarly, the relationship between the occult and opéra de salon – indeed the occult and music in the Second Empire tout court – is set forth here for the first time.
Related Digital Resources. Given the scale of the undertaking the supports Opéra de salon: Societies, Séances and Salons, a vast amount of data has already been put on line and will act as an accompanying digital resource for the ‘printed’ book. In addition to the database of texts relating to opéra de salon, the works themselves are inventoried Music in the Second Empire Theatre (MitSET), 2019- (http://www.fmc.ac.uk/mitset/index.html?#/) and accessible to all (a search for ‘[opéra de salon]’ under the <Institutions> tab reveals the entire repertory. There will be a further online database of performances of opéra de salon which focuses on patrons, locations, and programming; it is currently complete and simply awaits mounting on the web.
Chapter Outline
Introduction. Simply explaining where opéra de salon sits in the broader culture of theatre and opérette during the Second Empire is a critical first step, and the introduction goes on to set out a number of theoretical trajectories: (1) principles relating to the study of gender as it relates to the young unmarried woman and the incipient category of the nouvelle femme; (2) the concept of spatialité, derived directly from Michel de Certeau but also depending on Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which seeks to distinguish between lieu (the physical environment) and espace (the use to which that environment is put); (3) the ways in which various salon ‘acts’ – music, sewing, reading, séance, theatre, charade, opéra de salon – can be assimilated.
- Opéra de salon: Performers and the Performed. Chapter 1 introduces an entirely unknown repertory, explains its scope, its development from its origins in the early 1850s to the middle of the 1870s, and considers its origins in the much older salon concert and théâtre de société. Preliminary comments about the location of performances of opéra de salon – private homes of the haute bourgeoisie, the studios of professional musicians, the medical profession – serve as the basis for a consideration of the legislative environment for opéra de salon. Comparisons are made between the anatomy of opéra de salon and Hervé’s and Offenbach’s exactly contemporary opérette. The chapter goes on to give a full account of the types of performer – both paid and unpaid (we might say ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ today) who were responsible for the performances of opéra de salon.
- Spaces and Patrons 1: The Medical, the Entrepreneurial and the Artistic. Opéra de salon was largely cultivated in privates lieux, repurposed as performative espaces. A large number of medical professionals hosted performances of opéra de salon in their private homes, and the circumstances of these performances – who mounted the performances, who performed, who listened? – are discussed in detail. The particular circumstances of opéra de salon at the Établissement Hydrothérapique des Néothermes (just down the road from the Salle Herz) concludes this discussion of medical activity, which is then compared to the activity of entrepreneurs and artists ranging from the super-rich (such bankers as Pereire or industrialists as Binder) to the more modest: publishers and art dealers, as well as artists and sculptors who were happy to transform studio space into venues for opéra de salon.
- Spaces and Patrons 2: The Government and The Musician: Public Spaces: . In the second of two chapters devoted to the transformation of lieux into espaces, the role of public figures and members of the imperial family is examined. Access to public spaces – the Louvre, the Tuileries and the Palais Bourbon – give an entirely different perspective on performances of opéra de salon where the same works that were cultivated in sometimes restricted domestic lieux could find themselves in the Salle Diane in front of some of the most powerful in the land. This contrasts with the espaces developed by professional musicians – performers and composers – which range from the use of private lieux to, in the case of Gilbert Duprez – building a four-hundred seat theatre on his own property. This is the background to the use by composers and performers of concert halls – mostly the Salle Herz – as a venue for the performance of opéra de salon.
- Contexts and cultivation. Performances of opéra de salon took place in a kaleidoscope of espaces. Some of these made use of temporary theatres – curtains, footlights, sets, costumes and so on – while others were much more modest. The chapter looks at the tiny repertorial overlap between opéra de salon and the regulated theatre in order to show that the two effectively constituted parallel theatrical and performative spaces that rarely if ever overlapped, even if composers of opérette and even opéra comique engaged in the composition of opéra de salon. The chapter then examines the detail of the presence of opéra de salon in women’s journals and the place of women composers and librettists and other female agents in the cultivation of the genre. This chapter will also be the place for the reconsideration of opéra de salon and the séance. There is a significant overlap not only between the spaces for opéra de salon and the séance but also between those that promoted both activities. The librettist, Victorien Sardou, was a devotee of the table-tournante (he produced the first hand-drawn image resulting from a séance: a picture of Mozart’s house on Jupiter), and Delphine de Girardin (née Delphine Gay) both hosted performances of opéra de salon and spent two and half years with Victor Hugo instructing him in the occult arts. Like opéra de salon, tables-tournantes slipped fluidly from the parloir, to the salon and to the domain of commercial entertainment.
- Geolocation and power. This chapter establishes some general principles about the scope of the culture of opéra de salon by examining questions of how the season (from October to May) played into the performance of the genre, some general issues about the size of the venues that were used and the size of the audience (domestic spaces could easily accommodate audiences of 300-400). It then confronts the issues relating to salon and parloir – in terms not only of size but also of cultural and musical ambition – before exposing a comprehensive geospatial analysis of the cultivation of opéra de salon in Paris, plotting nearly 100 known and localisable performances to show how two key areas – the east end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain (for non-musicians) and Nouvelle-Athènes (for performers and composers) – polarised performative cultures but shared exactly the same works. The chapter ends with an account of opéra de salon outside of Paris, in the spa towns of Croisic, Evian, Dieppe, Cabourg and Vichy and in provincial centres serviced by Parisian artists on tour.
Appendices
Bibliography
Index