Over the last decade, the theatre and opera of the French Revolution have been the subject of intense scholarly reassessment, both in terms of the relationship between theatrical works and politics or ideology in this period and on the question of longer-scale structures of continuity or rupture in aesthetics. Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789-1794 moves these discussions boldly forward, focusing on the Paris Opera (Academie Royale de Musique) in the cultural and political context of the early French Revolution. Both institutional history and cultural study, this is the first ever full-scale study of the Revolution and lyric theatre. The book concentrates on three aspects of how a royally-protected theatre negotiates the transition to national theatre: the external dimension, such as questions of ownership and governance and the institution's relationship with State institutions and popular assemblies; the internal management, finances, selection and preparation of works; and the cultural and aesthetic study of the works themselves and of their reception.
In Staging the French Revolution, author Mark Darlow offers an unprecedented view of the material context of opera production, combining in-depth archival research with a study of the works themselves. He argues that a mixture of popular and State interventions created a repressive system in which cultural institutions retained agency, compelling individuals to follow and contribute to a shifting culture. Theatre thereby emerged as a locus for competing discourses on patriotism, society, the role of the arts in the Republic, and the articulation of the Revolution's relation with the 'Old Regime', and is thus an essential key to the understanding of public opinion and publicity at this crucial historical moment. Combining recent approaches to institutions, sociability, and authors' rights with cultural studies of opera, Staging the French Revolution takes a historically grounded and methodologically innovative cross-disciplinary approach to opera and persuasively re-evaluates the long-standing, but rather sterile, concept of propaganda."

This study offers a reassessment of the librettist, parodist and critic Nicolas-Etienne Framery (1745-1810) whom scholars have frequently mentioned in passing, but whose career remains little known and poorly understood today. Though Framery was also active as a translator of Italian epic works and an occasional author of narrative, this study considers his work as a dramatist and theatrical critic, and demonstrates his constant concern for progress in French lyric theatre. Framery was one of the generation of librettists to write for the new Comedie-Italienne after 1762, and his enthusiasm for the innovative opera-comique was unfailing. His attention to musical terminology made him one of the major contributors, alongside Momigny and Ginguene, to the Encyclopedie methodique: musique. Unlike better-known theorists of music such as Rousseau, Framery adopted a progressive stance towards musical theatre and took an active part, in the 1770s, in the introduction of Italian lyric forms into the French theatre world. Parodies of Sacchini and Paisiello are considered here, as are Framery's theoretical views on composition, on the relationship between music and language, and on operatic word setting. His progressivism extended to journalism (he was the editor of the first periodical on music in France, the Journal de musique, and a columnist for the Mercure de France) and to administrative issues (he acted as agent for the Bureau established to protect authors' rights during the Revolution). Framery's writings for the Journal, for the Encyclopedie methodique, and for the Institut de France show him to be a pioneering thinker on music who preferred the concept of expression to classical theories of music as imitation. Framery's approach led him to adopt a career at variance with tradition and it is only now, in the light of recent research on the opera-comique, that his innovations in the lyric theatre can be properly appreciated.

This book seeks to recontextualize the quarrel, embedding it in the cultural politics of the 1770s, and thereby to offer a richer account of the disputes which would account for some of the wider issues at stake.

Eighteenth-century French cultural life was often characterised by quarrels, and the arrival of Viennese composer Christoph Wilibald Gluck in Paris in 1774 was no exception, sparking a five-year pamphlet and press controversy which featured a rival Neapolitan composer, Niccolo Piccinni. However, as this study shows, the Glick-Piccinni controversy was about far more than which composer was better suited to lead French operatic reform.

Janvier 1793: Alors que se dechaine le conflit entre les radicaux et les moderes, une piece de theatre fait scandale, provoquant une vive querelle qui divise les plus hautes instances du gouvernement, l'armee nationale et des dizaines de milliers de Parisiens, et qui prend vite une telle importance qu'elle interrompt le proces de Louis XVI, entraine un retablissement de la censure dramatique, et motive, neuf mois plus tard, la fermeture de la Comedie-Francaise et l'emprisonnement de sa troupe Cette piece, c'est "l'Ami des lois" de Jean-Louis Laya. A elle seule, elle souleve de nombreuses questions parmi les plus debattues pendant la periode revolutionnaire, dont notamment la necessite et les limites d'une politique culturelle etatiste, la legitimite de la censure, la forme que devrait adopter la justice, et la fonction du theatre dans un pays libre (forum politique, tribunal national, ou instrument d'education morale et civique ?). La presente edition retrace soigneusement l'histoire de ces debats, ainsi que celle du texte de Laya et de ses representations. L'inclusion en annexe d'un grand nombre de documents d'archives jusqu'alors inedits enrichit cette edition et en fait un ouvrage essentiel pour toute personne s'interessant a la culture revolutionnaire.