Monograph: Opérette

OPÉRETTE: THE FIRST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS [WORKING TITLE]

[This title contracted at 180k words with Oxford University Press, New York, February 2022]

 

Context and Rationale

The time for opérette is now.  One-act comic works in French in which the narrative is sustained in spoken dialogue now make regular appearances on stages across Europe.  Certainly, a handful of larger-scale opérettes by Offenbach – Orphée aux enfers (in it revised version), La belle Hélène, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein – have figured with some regularity, but the far larger repertory of one-act opérette is now receiving exposure: Lecocq’s Le docteur Miracle, Offenbach’s Liszchen et Fritzschen, Barbier’s Faust et Marguerite, Hervé’s Le retour d’Ulysse and Wachs’ Un mari dans la serrure have all received professional performances in high-profile venues in the two years before theatres closed in early 2020.  It is time to return to this repertory with fresh critical eyes, and to review its colossal importance in French, European and global culture.

There is however a mismatch between this vibrant culture of performance and reception and much modern scholarship on opérette during the Second Empire (1850s and 1860s); the latter is badly hobbled by the incessant, if not obsessive, focus on a single composer: Jacques Offenbach.  While the musical world has been exploring, and its audiences deriving enormous pleasure from, repertory not heard for well over a century, scholars seem content to re-tread endless details of Offenbach’s career with endless blinkered preoccupation; the 2019 bicentenary of Offenbach’s birth and the constellation of allied publication merely entrenched this position, and while the presence of biographies of the individual that history has cast as Offenbach’s main competitor – Florimond Ronger (better known as Hervé) – have appeared, even these are now mostly thirty years old.  The result is a scholarly vacuum around the origins of opérette that is not characteristic of, say, research on works of the so-called ‘silver age’ of operetta.  There is clearly a need, as a recent themed issue of the Oxford University Press journal The Opera Quarterly stressed, to ‘take operetta seriously’, although such calls are not often heeded: the chapter on opérette during the Second Empire in the 2020 Cambridge Companion to Operetta for example focusses exclusively on Offenbach (Hervé does well to receive a sentence).

Just how badly does the current exclusive focus on Offenbach, and to a much lesser extent Hervé, represent the culture of the first quarter century, up to c1875, say,  of the history of opérette?  Depending on how you count, Offenbach wrote around 80 works in this period that could be, or have been, considered opérettes, and Hervé rather less than that; furthermore, only a tiny handful of the composers’ works come under any sort of scholarly spotlight, and they are always the same ones.  This figure has to be set against the total number of works under scrutiny in this study during the same period: that figure is around 1200.  In other words, even if every work by Offenbach and Hervé had been taken into account in earlier histories – which they have not – they would still only constitute around 8% of the repertory from this period.  It could be argued that the large proportion of these other works did not have the same impact as those by Offenbach and Hervé, but that is probably true of only a tiny number – single digits, and many opérettes enjoyed a more positive reception than large numbers of those by Hervé or Offenbach.  The case for returning to the broader repertory of opérette during the Second Empire in order to understand the genre, and the culture which created and supported it, is now unassailable.

Opérette: The First Twenty-Five Years aims to write a history of opérette in this period that offers a thick description (the term is Geertz’s) not only of the librettists, composers, performers, entrepreneurs, censors and other agents that contributed to the culture that supported the genre, but also a focus on the works themselves, the conventions that they evolved and subverted, the compositional principles they deployed and their relationships with such other genres as opéra comique and comédie-vaudeville.  It undertakes this work by paying attention not just to Offenbach and Hervé but to all 1200 works in the repertory, not just to the theatres they managed – the Théâtres des Bouffes-Parisiens and Folies-Concertantes/Nouvelles – but to all 90+ institutions that mounted opérette during its first twenty-five years; this figure includes not only opérette in theatres regulated to some degree by the state but also in the salon and the café-concert.  The terminal date of 1875 is chosen largely because the end of the Second Empire in 1870 aligns badly with changes in Parisian musical and theatrical culture.  Important changes fall either side of 1870: the deregulation of cafés-concerts in 1867, the collapse of the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1873 and the burning of the Paris Opéra in the same year, and abandoning the exclusive use of spoken dialogue at the Opéra-Comique also in 1873.  Closing the narrative at 1875 allows the impact of these events on opérette to be assessed.

Broadly speaking, Opérette: The First Twenty-Five Years sets the same parameters for research that would be recognised for most other forms of scholarly inquiry in the humanities; this is the way in which the book responds to the call to ‘take operetta seriously’.  This means attempting to understand conventions that govern genres and cultures and to be able to point to moments of misunderstanding, contest and destabilisation.  The book adopts the same tone as other forms of scholarly inquiry, distancing itself from those works whose discursive mode is occasionally inflected by the wit and repartee of the libretti of opérette itself, but ore tellingly frequently deploys aggressively xenophobic caricatures of the Paris of the Second Empire.  One of the obvious things that the book will be able to achieve is to recontextualise the works of Hervé and Offenbach that have dominated previous work in the field.  Just a couple of examples make the point: Offenbach’s use of musical parody has been endlessly vaunted, and justly so, but the results of the research that underpin this book show clearly that Offenbach was an almost solitary voice in the use of musical parody; just about every libretto of the 1200 works considered here parodies the mores, personalities or conventions of the Second Empire, but the specific parodies of grand opéra or melodramma – or even, best known, of Gluck – were not something that characterises the culture of opérette more broadly.  And, second, although Offenbach’s most famous works are in two or three acts, three quarters or more of the repertory consists of opérettes in a single act and almost all of the examples in more than one act before 1865 are by Offenbach himself.  But to focus on Offenbach risks missing the point; Opérette: The First Twenty-Five Years aims at the scholarly analysis of the entire culture with all witnesses taken into account.

Methodology

Sources and Editions.  Establishing the scope of the repertory is a formidable task; there are late-nineteenth and. early twentieth-century sources that list compositions (Wicks in particular) as well as listings for individual theatres.  The print revolution of the nineteenth century meant that libretti and scores for the vast proportion of the material was published and the digital revolution of the twenty-first century has meant that similarly large proportions of material has been digitised; 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 Interdisciplinary.  Opérette: The First Twenty-Five Years is as much a study in theatrical history as it is in musical history and interlocutors for the project have been as frequently theatre historians as they have been musicologists.  This is not a naïve belief in the superiority of a cognate discipline – in some cases the shortcomings in one’s own are magnified by those of others – but an understanding that there is more than a single historiography into which a modern contribution may be inserted and a recognition that shared methodologies help rather than hinder

Related Digital Resources.  Given the scale of the undertaking the supports Opérette: The First Twenty-Five Years, a vast amount of data has already been put on line and will act as an accompanying digital resource for the ‘printed’ book.  This database is Music in the Second Empire Theatre (MitSET), 2019- (http://www.fmc.ac.uk/mitset/index.html?#/) and accessible to all.

 

Chapter Outline

1. Opérette: scope, terms, ambition. There is much explanatory work to be done before the book can be read; some elements – the regulatory framework for opérette, for example –  are largely understood and can be summarised from the secondary literature, but questions of the physical and legal shifts of institutions across the Second Empire require further elucidation.  Questions of generic terminology – opérette, opéra bouffon, bouffonnerie musicale – are discussed here, as are genres adjacent to opérette.  While readers might be familiar with how opéra comique works (it will still be explained), the same may not be true of comédie-vaudeville; this entire range of music in the theatre is summarised in order for subsequent chapters to follow.  Various issues relating to sources, prosopography and other matters are also outlined here.
2. Sites of engagement. The origins of opérette lie in attempts to broaden the role of music in the theatre during the 1840s, a process that continued throughout the history of its first quarter century up to 1870.   Here the various places where opérette and related types were developed before the appearance of formal opérette houses in the mid-1850s are outlined in general terms; three exceptional cases  – various composers’ work at the École Lyrique, concerts at the Salle Herz that featured opérette, and Hervé’s remarkable activity at the Hospice de la Vieillesse: Hommes – are discussed in detail.
3. Theatres of revolution. The revolution of 1848, and the temporary loosening of regulatory control over theatrical culture enabled many of the latent tendencies of the 1840s to be developed more aggressively.  The impact of comédie-vaudeville as a source for opérette was marked, as composers surreptitiously introduced airs nouveaux into a genre whose music was usually borrowed from other sources, and the role of composers of opérette in the nascent Théâtre-Lyrique are brought into this network of practice.  The third section of the chapter analyses the role of the Théâtre des Variétés as a particularly powerful driver of semi-legal opérette in the early 1850s.
4. Hervé and the ‘Theatre of the Impossible’. When Hervé opened his Théâtre des Folies-Concertantes in 1854 (it was retitled the Théâtre des Folies-Nouvelles later the same year), he and his colleagues were forced to abandon many of the experiments of the previous decade because of the draconian regulatory framework imposed by the Second Empire.  Experiments in what one critic called ‘théâtre impossible’ included the deployment and combination of pantomime, the scène comique, comédie-vaudeville (developing the discussion of these traditions from chapter three) and dance.  The chapter brings together an understanding of these competing genres and techniques to provide a view on the overall repertorial flavour of Hervé’s theatre at the point at which most historians identify as the origins of opérette.
5. Offenbach: competition and aesthetics. Offenbach formally established a theatre (the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens) nearly eighteen months after Hervé, and was – to an extent – able to profit from experience of the Folies-Concertantes/Nouvelles.  Offenbach’s ambitions were different to Hervé’s and centred on a justification of opérette within the traditions of eighteenth-century opéra comique, which he claimed with some justification were under attack from the large-scale opéras comiques of the 1850s.  One of his solutions was run a competition for composers of opérette which took place in 1856-57 and which in part helped to cement the stylistic template of one-act opérette for a generation.
6. The one-act opérette. Composers and librettists at both the Folies-Nouvelles/Concertantes and Bouffes-Parisiens worked out a number of solutions to the restrictions imposed by their licences and the resources with which they could work. The outlines of a consistent set of conventions for one-act opérette become identifiable for the first time: limitations of the licence, subject matter, number of individual compositions within the work, the balance between aria and ensemble, parody, recitative, mélodrame and related techniques are assessed in order to explain how the genre worked once its conventions were established across the activity of a wide range of composers: Costé, Bovery, Jonas, L’Épine, Delibes, Poise, Montaubry, Pilati, de Rillé, Lecocq, Adolphe Adam, as well as Hervé and Offenbach.
7. 7. The Offenbachiade?. Offenbach broke with the tradition of one-act opérette almost as soon as it was identifiable, in his Orphée aux enfers (1858), and what recent scholars have called the Offenbachiade – a small subset of his output – has dominated discussions of opérette in the 1860s to the disadvantage of the vast proportion of the repertory.  This chapter seeks to tease out the vast numbers of opérettes against which the Offenbachiade has been projected, and to demonstrate the continuing dominance of the one-act opérette in a world where the works to which one is encouraged to turn are such large three-act pieces as La belle Hélène, La grande-duchesse de Gérolstein, and so on.
8. Théâtre des Fantaisies-Parisiennes. The Fantaisies-Parisiennes was a theatre poised between the emerging opérette houses that profited from the 1864 deregulation of the theatres and the longer-established Opéra-Comique and Théâtre-Lyrique.  It put on productions of new opérette, but also of older opéra comique as well as path-breaking premieres of foreign works by Paisiello, Mozart, Weber, Verdi, Schubert and others.  Its repertory showed exactly how opérette might be integrated more broadly into a culture of music in the theatre; in short how Mozart could be opérette.
9. Opérette at the Café-Concert. The café-concert surfaced as a venue for opérette in the mid 1860s and took off spectacularly when many of the legislative limitations on sets and costumes were taken away in 1867.  The Alcazar, the Eldorado, the Folies Bergère and a host of others gave a further environment for the cultivation of opérette, and this chapter examines how works and performances at the cafés-concerts  compared – in terms of both style and quantity – with the regulated theatres that promoted the genre.
10. Opérette outside Paris. As with so much in the history of opérette, what is known about the distribution of the genre outside Paris is dominated by Offenbach.  This chapter revisits the trope of ‘Offenbach: The European Musician’ to ask about the extent to which other parts of the opérette repertory travelled abroad, and what effect that circulation had on subsequent historiographies of the genre and of its principal protagonists.
11. Repertorial Trajectories, c1850 to c1875. In many respects, opérette filled a generic vacuum created by the move of opéra comique away from works in a single act to works of much greater ambition, which in turn was enabled by stifling management policies at the Opéra and by the competition offered by the Théâtre-Lyrique.  But at the same time, opérette co-existed with comédie-vaudeville, which not only continued to flourish but also transformed itself as it added opérette to opéra comique and the airs connus from the Clé du caveau as borrowed sources it could exploit.  This final chapter sets the first twenty-five years of opérette in this broader context of Parisian music in the theatre.

Appendices

Bibliography

Index

 

Size.  The scope of Opérette: The First Twenty-Five Years and the fact that it is based on thousands of previously unexplored primary documents gives it a documentary quality that demands extensive treatment; most of the eleven chapters are close to 13k words, and some are longer; with bibliography, appendices and index the word count approaches 180k words.  There are a total of c15 tables, c30 music examples and a dozen illustrations (it is recognised that this could be finessed with a companion website).

Readership and Market.  The book will have a readership well beyond the academy.  Those who attend the performances of this repertory, mentioned at the beginning of this proposal, will have registered the obvious truth: Hervé and Offenbach represent less than 10% of the repertory, and they will need to search elsewhere than in the serried ranks of Offenbach biographies for information about this music.  Just about the only competition of this sort is Traubner’s Operetta – but that covers a much wider span, and the handling of the Second Empire is necessarily restricted.  Bruyas’ Histoire de l’opérette en France is restricted to the genre’s country of origin, but treats the subject up to 1965, and the section on the Second Empire focuses predictably on Offenbach and to a lesser extent Hervé.  In its theoretical orientation towards thick description, Opérette: The First Twenty-Five Years offers a model for other approaches to the study of music in the theatre, and will key to these sorts of studies in upper-level undergraduate and graduate programmes.