Sarah Gutsche-Miller, Assistant Professor of Musicology, University of Toronto
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Making the Opéra-Comique Great Again: Establishing National Identity and Modernism Through Ballet
When Albert Carré took over as director of the Paris Opéra-Comique in 1898, his stated goal was to “rejuvenate” French lyric theater. The Opéra-Comique, newly rebuilt and set to reopen that year, had become the focus of debates in the press about what role the city’s second national lyric theater should play in French culture. At stake were issues ranging from how the house should be run to what repertoire it should present: the great French opéras-comiques of the eighteenth century, more foreign works, or new works by young French composers. Although debates initially revolved around opera, Carré’s plans for renewal also included ballet, which had not been seen at the Opéra-Comique for more than a century. He built a company of star dancers, hired Paris’s most famous choreographer, Madame Mariquita, and commissioned French librettists and composers.
This paper discusses the role ballet played in promoting the Opéra-Comique’s mission of regeneration and renewal. The type of ballet that the Opéra-Comique should stage was not immediately obvious, and at first glance the theatre’s repertory seemed at odds with Carré’s progressive goals. The Opéra-Comique staged a single innovative ballet, Le Cygne, in 1899—a pop-culture-inflected modernist mythological parody created by Catulle Mendès, Charles Lecocq, and Madame Mariquita. However, Carré then turned to staging old-fashioned pantomime-ballets by composers such as Saint-Saëns, Messager, and Massenet, confining Mariquita’s more innovative dances to divertissements in contemporary French operas (e.g., Massenet’s Cendrillon, Charpentier’s Louise), new productions of foreign works (e.g., Rimski-Korsakov’s Snegúrochka and Antar) and revivals of Gluck operas (Iphigénie en Tauride, Orphée, Alceste, and Iphigénie en Aulide).
The reason for this mixed repertoire can, I think, be found in the reception of Le Cygne. As it turns out Carré’s initial choice was highly contested, and critics lambasted the ballet. Although ostensibly focused on Le Cygne, their diatribes mirrored on-going discussions in the press and among artists of ballet’s relative value and place in French culture, which in turn led Carré to alter his repertoire choices. I contend that Carré’s initial modernist ballet and his sudden shift to staging a mix of Grecian or modern dances and conventional French pantomime-ballets were part of a calculated political move to establish the Opéra-Comique as both a progressive and distinctly “French” national theatre.
Biography
Sarah Gutsche-Miller is an Assistant Professor of musicology at the University of Toronto, where she is also a member of the Institute for Dance Studies and the Centre for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Music. Her first book, Parisian Music-Hall Ballet, 1871-1913, was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2015. Gutsche-Miller is currently working on two projects: one about modernist ballets created for the Paris Opéra-Comique between 1898-1918, and the other about networks of popular musical culture in nineteenth-century Paris.