Opera in Paris from the Empire to the Commune

Studies in the history of French nineteenth-century stage music have blossomed in the last decade, encouraging a revision of the view of the primacy of Austro-German music during the period and rebalancing the scholarly field away from instrumental music (key to the Austro-German hegemony) and towards music for the stage. This change of emphasis is having an impact on the world of opera production with new productions of works not heard since the nineteenth century taking their place in the modern repertory.

This awakening of enthusiasm has come at something of a price. Selling French opera as little more than an important precursor to Verdi or Wagner has entailed a focus on works produced exclusively for the Paris Opéra at the expense of the vast range of other types of stage music produced in the capital: opéra comique, opérette, comédie-vaudeville and mélodrame, for example. The first part of this book therefore seeks to re-introduce a number of norms to the study of stage music in Paris: to re-establish contexts and conventions that still remain obscure. The second and third parts acknowledge Paris as an importer and exporter of opera, and its focus moves towards the music of its closest neighbours, the Italian-speaking states, and that of its most problematic partners, the German speaking states, especially Weber and Wagner.

Prefaced by an introduction that develops the volume’s overriding intellectual drivers of cultural exchange, genre and institution, this collection brings together twelve of the author’s previously published articles and essays, fully updated for this volume and translated into English for the first time.

Mark Everist is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton. His research focuses on the music of western Europe in the period 1150-1330, Opera in France in the nineteenth century, Mozart, reception theory, and historiography. He is the author of Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century France (1989), French Motets in the Thirteenth Century (1994), Music Drama at the Paris Odeon, 1824-1828 (2002), Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in Nineteenth-Century Paris (2005), Mozart’s Ghosts: Haunting the Halls of Musical Culture (2013) as well as editor of three volumes of the Magnus Liber Organi for Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre (2001-2003). In addition, he has published over 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals and collections of essays. The recipient of the Solie (2010) and Slim (2011) awards of the American Musicological Society, he was elected a fellow of the Academia Europaea in 2012. Everist was President of the Royal Musical Association from 2011-2017, and was elected a corresponding member of the American Musicological Society in 2014. His monograph, Discovering Medieval Song: Latin Poetry and Music in the Conductus was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018, as was The Cambridge History of Medieval Music, co-edited with Thomas Kelly. A monograph on Gluck reception in the nineteenth century has just been completed.