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The Opera Parodies of Florent Carton Dancourt[1] John S. Powell (article originally appeared in Cambridge
Opera Journal,13:1 (2001)) In his landmark
1941 article ‘Seventeenth-Century Parodies of French Opera’, Donald Grout
traced the practices of operatic parody as found in French plays of the early
1690s.[2] These farces, written by the playwrights
Fatouville, Monchesnay, Lenoble, Palaprat, Dufresny, and Regnard for the commedia
dell’arte actors of the Comédie-Italienne, were subsequently collected
and published in the Théâtre Italien de Gherardi.[3] In addition to offering parodies of spoken
plays, several of the farces targeted the operas of Jean-Philippe Quinault
and Jean-Baptiste Lully—which remained staples in the repertory of the
Académie Royale de Musique for nearly a century after Lully's death in
1687. According to the 18th-century
theater historian Louis Riccoboni, the Gherardi collection contained the
first examples of opera parody to appear in France.[4] However, opera satire and parody
first appear in French comedy much earlier.
Indeed, a tradition of satire and opera
parody can be traced back to 1674, two years after Lully purchased the royal
opera privilège from Pierre Perrin and established the Académie Royale
de Musique (the Paris Opéra).[5] Furthermore,
Dancourt’s parodies of Lully and Quinault's last two tragedies-lyriques,
Roland and Armide, predate the opera parodies of the Gherardi
collection.[6] That Angélique et
Médor (1685) and Renaud et Armide (1686) were performed during the
lifetimes of Lully and Quinault set them apart from later opera parodies,
written long after the Quinault/Lully operatic canon had been
established. The premières of
Dancourt's parodies at the Comédie-Française during the first runs of
Roland and Armide at the Opéra made for ready comparison—and
thereby allowed the 17th-century spectator to perceive thematic
connections that might be unnoticed by modern audiences. Consequently, Dancourt's Angélique et
Médor and Renaud et Armide will be the main focus of this
essay. Before examining them,
however, we will consider the background of the earlier opera parodies, the ongoing
rivalry among Parisian theaters, the musical limitations imposed by Lully’s privilège
on public theater and subsequent restrictions, and the rationalist objections
to opera expressed in spoken plays of the time. Early Opera Parody.
Several earlier French plays prefigure the satiric and parodic
procedures that inform Dancourt's opera parodies. These defining features include: (1) the satire of opera in general, and of the Quinault/Lully tragedies-lyriques
in particular, (2) the introduction
of a sung ‘operatic’ performance within the context of a spoken play, (3) the
portrayal of opera as a costly and irrational form of entertainment, (4)
reference to the Opéra and to the current state of musical affairs in Paris
theaters, and (5) an implicit connection between opera and madness. After
Lully acquired the opera privilège from Pierre Perrin in 1672, Hauteroche's
comedy Crispin musicien alluded to the shift of power that had taken
place in the Paris opera scene.[7] This musical comedy became so closely
identified with the new operatic art form that a provincial company billed it
as ‘l'Opéra de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne’.[8] In this piece, the master of the house is
both a singer and harpsichordist, and his household servants display varying
degrees of musical talent. The play’s
overture is performed on-stage by six of his lackeys playing strings (in
compliance with recent restrictions on theater music, which limited
instrumentalists to six).[9] While there is no mention of the
Quinault/Lully operas then in repertory, the cast of Crispin musicien featured
an opera singer from Gascony—a character no doubt inspired by the provincial
opera singers which Lully inherited from Perrin's defunct Académie Royale des
Opéra. Recruited mainly from
Languedoc, these singers reportedly could not speak proper French.[10] That same year Brécourt's L’Ombre
de Molière appeared, and became the first play to include a quotation
from a Quinault/Lully opera.[11] The troupe of the Hôtel de Bourgogne paid
tribute with this musical comedy to the memory of their great rival and
Lully’s former collaborator. The
setting is the Elysian Fields, where a tribunal is to be held. Molière's ghost is brought before Pluto,
accused by various character types that he satirized in his comedies and comédies-ballets: a précieuse, a marquis, an
imaginary cuckold, and Monsieur de Pourceaugnac. Quinault becomes the target of ridicule in scene 2, where a
figure identified only as ‘le Poète’ bemoans finding himself among the
shades. The ferryman Charon
reproaches him for having portrayed Greek heroes in Alceste as ‘very
pretty boys’ (‘de fort jolis garçons’), and himself as a teller. The poet's line ‘Hélas, Caron, hélas!’,
which is then mockingly repeated by Charon, is from the underworld scene in
Act 4 of Alceste. Given that
Lully's melodic setting only consists of a pleading half-step, this line
could easily have been sung by the actors. In August of 1680, the two French
companies in Paris—the Théâtre de Guénégaud and the Hôtel de Bourgogne—were
joined by royal decree to form the Comédie-Française. During its first season the new company
premièred Les Fous divertissants, a comédie-ballet by the
actor-playwright Raymond Poisson that borrowed material from Quinault and
Lully's latest tragedies-lyriques, Proserpine (III,3) and Bellérophon
(II,1).[12] Its setting is an asylum, where the young lover
Léandre gains entrance by pretending to be an opera lunatic, driven mad by
having to sing repeated high notes.
In II,9, Léandre and his beloved Angélique perform for the amusement
of Grognard, her fiancé and the warden of the asylum. During the course of their operatic
performance, Grognard remarks amusedly on the miraculous effect that
Angélique’s singing seems to be having on the madman, and how convincingly
they play the roles of lovers. Two
features of Les Fous divertissants would be further developed in
Dancourt's Angélique et Médor:
the feigned madness of one of the singing lovers, and the operatic
performance used to facilitate an elopement. The Musical Machine-Plays and
Royal Restrictions on Music. Dancourt’s opera parodies followed several spectacular musical
productions that tested the royal restrictions imposed on music and
dance. Upon the formation of the
Comédie-Française, the company began reviving its older repertory of
machine-plays with music by their resident composer, Marc-Antoine
Charpentier. After its 1680
production of Poisson's Les Fous divertissants and the successful 1681
revival of Gabriel Gilbert's musical machine-play Les Amours de Diane et
d'Endimion (1657), the company had every reason to expect that the King
would consider lifting the ban on music and dance in the public theater. In the fall of 1681 the Comédie-Française
and the Comédie-Italienne participated in the court revival of Le Ballet
des Muses. The newly-added
Prologue featured the actors Poisson and Rosimond heatedly debating with
Scaramouche and Harlequin the relative merits of French vs. Italian
opera. Fiorilli (known as Cinthio),
head of the Italian troupe, and La Grange, head of the Comédie-Française,
finally intervene and Cinthio proposes that the Italian actors put on ‘a
little Italian opera’.[13] At the end, La Grange reconciles them ‘by
pointing out the advantages of drama and music, and concludes that nothing is
able to satisfy all the spectators more than a staged play combined with
music’. In July of 1682 the
Comédie-Française revived Pierre Corneille's 1650 machine-play Andromède
in a spectacular production with a new musical score by Charpentier.[14] The performances were scheduled to
coincide with the première of Persée, Quinault and Lully's tragédie-lyrique
based on the same Greek fable.
However, the King (probably at Lully’s behest) upheld the ban of 1673,
and further stipulated that henceforth the 2 singers permitted must be
regular members of the company, not professional singers.[15] Thereafter the Comédie-Française continued
its revival of machine-plays, albeit with the amount of music significantly
diminished. Michel Baron's Le
Rendez-vous des Thuilleries (1685) alluded to this sad state of musical
affairs in the public theater, when one character remarks that ‘as is well known, for a long time we have been forbidden to know
how to
sing or dance’[16] Rationalist Prejudices toward Opera. The context in which operatic borrowings are introduced in
French comedies suggests many playwrights' critical stance toward Quinault,
Lully, and their operas. In
17th-century France, classical spoken tragedy was the standard against which
other forms of theater were judged.
Consequently, some felt that opera—with its absurd occurrences, its
obsession with gloire and amour, its wanton disregard of the
unities, and its direct appeal to ‘the pleasures of sight and hearing’—was
essentially an irrational or meaningless entertainment. In Andromède Pierre Corneille took
care not to entrust anything meaningful to song: as he explains in the Examen d'Andromède, ‘since singing
usually prevents the words from being heard, nothing of importance to the
understanding of the plot should be sung’.[17] Whereas in Baron's Le Rendez-vous des
Thuilleries the Marquise acknowledges that ‘it is fashionable to affect being wild about music’, she 'could not
bear ‘hearing at the expense of good sense and reason all of these heroes
speak of their misfortunes by singing’.[18] A century later, Beaumarchais's Figaro
would echo this common wisdom, proclaiming that ‘today whatever isn't worth the trouble of saying is sung’.[19] Opera's
lack of appeal to the reasoning faculties was a common complaint among its
critics. François Riccoboni, the
author of several opera parodies (and the son of Louis Riccoboni), held the
genre in contempt. 'Opera is a type
of composition that neither withstands nor merits criticism: one is obliged
to sacrifice everything to the pleasure of seeing and hearing, [and] one almost
never has occasion there to speak to the intellect.'[20] The intellectual emptiness of opera is a
recurring theme in several early opera parodies. Frequently these operatic borrowings serve as a subterfuge,
whereby a musical performance is used to advance a courtship that is obstructed
by a parent, guardian, or jealous fiancé.
The on-stage spectators, caught up in the theatricality of the event
and the sensuous appeal of the music, fail to notice the meaning of the sung
lyrics. The inherent irrationality of
the genre is underscored when one of the performers pretends to be mad—as in
Poisson's Le Fou raisonnable (1664), Les Fous
divertissants (1680), and Dancourt's Angélique et Médor (1685)—or
surrenders to operatic madness, as in Renaud et Armide (1686). The Insanity of Opera. Spoken comedies that portray the feigned
or real madness of a singing ‘operatic’ character take opera's irrationality
to a higher level. Michel Foucault,
who has made a study of madness during the Ancien Régime, identifies
four general categories of literary madness as depicted in French drama of
this time: (1) madness caused by
identification with some fictional character or ideal, (2) madness brought on
through delusion of superiority or omnipotence, (3) madness caused by guilt,
and (4) madness of the desperate lover.[21] In light of the plays surveyed here,
opera-mania—in which characters have been driven mad by singing, studying, or
otherwise obsessing on operatic music, situations, passions, costumes and
sets—could also be added to Foucault’s list.
Musical
performance is depicted as a creative outgrowth of madness, particularly when
the lunatic fancies himself a mythological singer or an operatic
character. Charles Beys's early
comedy, L'Hospital des fous (1636),[22] devotes much space
to the entertainments furnished by the lunatics in a madhouse. The pageant of lunatics includes a
philosopher, a lawyer, an astrologer, a soldier, an alchemist, a poet, an
actor, and a singer who believes himself to be Orpheus.[23] The latter enters playing his lute and
claiming to make rocks and trees come alive with his divine song (I,3), and
then departs to sing his chanson backstage to an imaginary Pluto. Crisotine,
the heroine of Saint-Evremond's comedy Les Opéra (c. 1676), has ‘lost
her mind by reading opera scores’.[24] She finds a kindred spirit in Tirsolet, a
young opera fanatic, with whom she converses in song as the two imagine
themselves to be Cadmus and Hermione (from the Quinault/Lully opera). The physician Guillaut declares that her
madness is analogous to the literary delusions of Don Quixote, and suggests
that marriage might restore Crisotine to her senses (a theme which recurs in
Dancourt’s Angélique et Médor).
And so Crisard offers her to his cousin, the Baron de Pourgeolette—who
is advised to communicate with her through song. He attempts an air from Psyché (‘Aimable Jeunesse’),
but when Crisotine immediately formulates a parody on it (‘Honteuse
Vieillesse’) the Baron loses his temper and decides to give her up. Hearing Crisotine singing with Tirsolet
(again in the character of Cadmus and Hermione), the physician proposes that
the young lovers go join the Opéra in Paris—for, after six months of
rehearsals, continual singing, putting on and taking off costumes, and
discovering that the machines are but painted backdrops, the gods and
goddesses are but singers, and that the miraculous flights are effected by
means of ropes, he predicts that they will rid themselves of their operatic
delusions and return home saner and wiser.
Angélique et Médor and Opera
Satire. Dancourt's
opera parodies began appearing shortly after the Comédie-Française abandoned
the revivals of its older repertory of musical machine-plays. By the mid-1680s, the Comédiens du Roy and
Lully were still at odds—and one cannot help but speculate that Dancourt's
opera parodies were designed in some measure to pique the draconian director
of the Opéra. The plot of Angélique
et Médor revolves around a performance that Monsieur Guillemin is
preparing to give in his home, and the play's dialogue provides tantalizing
details that seem to pertain to the current state of affairs in opera. Merlin, a valet posing as an opera
authority, mentions that they no longer snuff the candles at the Opéra,[25] and that the
costly machines are no longer in fashion.[26] Dancers are another expensive luxury that
Guillemin would readily omit, as they appear to him ‘too puppet-like’ (‘trop
marionette’) on-stage. However,
Merlin cannot conceive of opera without dancers, and contends that they
constitute ‘le saupiquet [spicy sauce] d’un opera’.[27] Opera
singers also become the butt of laughter, and many of the ironic asides look
forward to Marcello's famous satire, Il teatro alla moda (1720). We learn in sc. 1 that good singers are
hard to find—although mediocre ones will suffice for this private
performance, as Guillemin is ignorant about musical matters.[28] As proof of this, the young lover Eraste
arrives posing as an opera singer in sc. 8—which prompts Guillemin to observe
that ‘he has a very good manner, and one sees very few singers who look so
well’.[29] Later, Dorise, a 15-year-old singer, shows
up to audition for the opera. Despite
the fact that she cannot read music, she knows nearly all of the airs from Roland. Clearly, opera was viewed as an easy road to
success—for the young singer ingenuously remarks to Guillemin: ‘Excuse me,
sir, but I have been told that I had only to sing in an opera to make myself
known and have some reputation’.[30] Later
on we are introduced to Cléante, a conceited opera singer who has become
discontent at the Paris Opéra. He
arrives in sc. 13 singing an ‘entrance aria’: Je quitte l’Opéra, Y chante qui voudra, Puisqu’on y veut retrancher nos gage, Je n’y veux plus chanter davantage’ [‘I am leaving the Opéra, let whoever wishes sing there; since they insist on cutting our wages I will sing there no
longer’] Cléante then proclaims that the present opera will be worth
nothing unless he sings in it—which the singer will not agree to unless Guillemin
entreats him and agrees to pay him handsomely. When Guillemin refuses, Cléante has an immediate change of
heart and agrees to sing in Guillemin's opera after all. Of course, he will not deign to perform
anything but ‘les grands Roles’. Dancourt
devotes scene 11 of Angélique et Médor to broad satire aimed directly
at Lully and Quinault.
Monsieur Guillemin, with an eye to curbing the mounting production
costs, decides that it would be too expensive to commission an original
work. ‘You are right’, agrees Merlin,
‘and you would have to deal with some miserable poet who would sell you
shoddy merchandise at great cost, and who would just enrage you.’[31] Furthermore, Merlin
adds that ‘there is nothing that makes a musician curse more than a poet, and
Music and Poetry never go well together when they work out of self-interest’.[32] Guillemin thereupon
decides that it would be cheaper and less trouble to choose a ready-made
opera, and he considers several by Quinault and Lully—but rejects them for
various reasons: Cadmus et
Hermione requires gunpowder to make the flaming dragon's breath in the
Prologue, which might frighten people; Atys sets a bad example by
portraying an old woman who wishes to corrupt a young priest; and Alceste
contains a tombeau scene that might be ‘trop triste &
ennuyeux’. While Guillemin admits
that there is an attractive scene in Amadis featuring ‘infantry
soldiers armed with swords who tilt at the ring’, he finally settles on Roland,
Quinault and Lully's latest opera—despite the fact that ‘at first they said
that it was not worth anything, and no one went to see it’.[33] Merlin assures him that
Roland is ‘the most beautiful of all the operas’. Moreover, it calls for a large cast of
colorful and exotic characters:
islanders, Indians, cupids, mermaids, river-gods, enchanted lovers,
and the ghosts of heroes. Dancourt also satirizes contemporary opera
performance in general. In the
satiric vein of Marcello's Il teatro alla moda, Merlin proclaims that
‘however wretched an opera might be, it will not fail however to attract a
crowd’.[34] Furthermore, he points
out that not everyone pays attention to the on-stage spectacle, for ‘there is
a certain amount of dealing and connection between those in the upper
balconies and those in the pit that attracts many people’.[35] The subject matter of
opera comes under fire in sc. 5, when the valet Merlin claims to have had
experience in composing operas:
[MERLIN: I composed last
year a Turkish opera that is the most beautiful thing in the world. GUILLEMIN: A Turkish opera?
MERLIN: Yes, truly, a Turkish
opera. That surprises you? Oh, I compose all kinds of operas, you
see, and I composed one in which there are all kinds of airs and languages,
and that is so fine and so exceeds the imagination that the most
knowledgeable people understand nothing in it.][36] Dancourt's satire
broadens into farce when Merlin recalls having sung in a production of Hercule
mourant at Brussels, wherein he delighted the audience by seizing a man
by his feet and breaking his head against the wall: ‘Everyone was enchanted with that’, he tells us.[37] The first musical quotation in Angélique
et Médor, however, is not from Roland but rather from Les
Amours de Diane et d'Endimion—Gilbert's 1657 machine play, which recently
had been revived at the Comédie-Française with new music by Charpentier. In Dancourt's parody, Mme Bélise arrives
in sc. 6 looking for her daughter Isabelle, who is upstairs en tête à tête
with her lover Eraste. Thinking fast,
Merlin warns the lovers by singing the line ‘Séparez-vous, séparez-vous
heureux amans’ (see Ex. 1). To distract
Guillemin and Bélise further, Merlin praises the beauty of this air and then
proceeds to give them a detailed (and unwanted) explanation of Gilbert's
plot. The quotation of Charpentier’s
music at this point in the play prepared for the later introduction of
musical quotations from Roland.
Moreover, the juxtaposition of musical excerpts by Charpentier and
Lully invited a comparison that would gain resonance in the central musical
episode, which featured ‘improvements’ upon the Quinault/Lully tragédie-lyrique
(Ex. 2a).
Dancourt's singing characters also
use rationalist prejudice toward opera to their own advantage.[39] With Guillemin looking on, Eraste (singing
the role of Médor) proposes that Angélique (sung by Isabelle) run away with
him—and uses double entendres delivered via the medium of improvised song to
conceal the meaning of his lyrics. Only
the first couplet (‘How happy Médor is | Angelique has fulfilled his wishes’)
is borrowed from Act 4 of Roland.
The remaining lyrics constitute Eraste's addition, which in turn
becomes the instrument that facilitates his elopement with Angélique. After their departure, Merlin is left
explaining to the bemused Guillemin ‘that Isabelle and the singer have gone
to finish the opera’. Finally
realizing that he has been duped, Guillemin announces that he is quite beside
himself and he displays his anger through pantomime and gesture. Meanwhile, Merlin and the maid Lisette
furnish sung commentary borrowed from Act 4 of the opera, where it described
the outward manifestations of Roland's madness (Ex. 3). Here, the importation of Quinault's lyrics
and Lully's music into a burlesque context results in the comic
transformation (described by Louis Riccoboni as 'tourner en ridicule') that
lies at the heart of parody.[40]
At
some point Charpentier composed a more extensive, 'operatic' love-scene for
Isabelle and Eraste, for his autograph manuscripts contain a ‘Dialogue
d'Angélique et de Médor’. This
setting incorporated the sung lyrics found in the Flemish editions of the play
(with slight modification), together with additional lyrics—all set to
continuous music (Ex. 2b).[41] Given the amount of dialogue in his play
devoted to discussing opera preparations, Dancourt may well have decided that
this central musical episode required further amplification—and so he turned
to Charpentier to provide Eraste's ‘improvements’ upon the scene from
Roland. Dancourt might well have expected some kind of response from Lully and Quinault. Not only had his play made a travesty of their latest tragédie-lyrique, but it showcased music by a rival composer while it exceeded the limitations placed on theater music.[42] As we have seen, the previous success of the machine plays at the Comédie-Française (also with music by Charpentier) had brought on new wave of restrictions curtailing the company's illegal musical practices. But whereas these machine spectacles had aimed to rival the Quinault/Lully operas, Dancourt's parody posed no such threat. Indeed, Angélique et Médor might well have been regarded as a kind of ongoing advertisement for Roland.[43] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
