From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution,
serious opera in France was associated with the power of the
absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of
our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost
genre, the tragedie en musique). In Opera and the Political
Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals
another layer of French opera's political theater. The make-believe
worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of
sovereign rule, but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over
public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear
side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What's more,
opera's creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well
beyond the genre's larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers,
magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre's distinctive
combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern
for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first
time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters
and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession,
punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political
experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienregime
absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges
as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre
than previously thought.
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