French opera is both the art of opera in France and opera in the French language. It is one of Europe's most important operatic traditions, containing works by composers of the stature of Rameau, Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet, Massenet, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Messiaen. Many foreign-born composers have played a part in the French tradition, including Lully, Gluck, Salieri, Cherubini, Spontini, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi and Offenbach.
French opera began at the court of Louis XIV with Jean-Baptiste Lully's (1673), although there had been various experiments with the form before that, most notably by Robert Cambert. Lully and his librettist Quinault created , a form in which dance music and choral writing were particularly prominent. Lully's most important successor was Rameau. After Rameau's death, Christoph Willibald Gluck was persuaded to produce six operas for the Paris Opera in the 1770s. They show the influence of Rameau, but simplified and with greater focus on the drama. At the same time, by the middle of the 18th century another genre was gaining popularity in France: , in which arias alternated with spoken dialogue. By the 1820s, Gluckian influence in France had given way to a taste for the operas of Rossini. Rossini's helped found the new genre of Grand opera, a form whose most famous exponent was Giacomo Meyerbeer. Lighter also enjoyed tremendous success in the hands of Boieldieu, Auber, Hérold and Adam. In this climate, the operas of Hector Berlioz struggled to gain a hearing. Berlioz's epic masterpiece , the culmination of the Gluckian tradition, was not given a full performance for almost a hundred years after it was written.
In the second half of the 19th century, Jacques Offenbach dominated the new genre of operetta with witty and cynical works such as ; Charles Gounod scored a massive success with ; and Georges Bizet composed , probably the most famous French opera of all. At the same time, the influence of Richard Wagner was felt as a challenge to the French tradition. Perhaps the most interesting response to Wagnerian influence was Claude Debussy's only operatic masterpiece (1902).See : "A unique distillation of the essence of Wagner" Other notable 20th-century names include Ravel, Poulenc and Messiaen.
The birth of French opera: Lully
The first operas to be staged in France were imported from Italy, beginning with Francesco Sacrati's in 1645. French audiences gave them a lukewarm reception. This was partly for political reasons, since these operas were promoted by the Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin, who was then first minister during the regency of the young Louis XIV and a deeply unpopular figure with large sections of French society. Musical considerations also played a role, since the French court already had a firmly established genre of stage music, , which included sung elements as well as dance and lavish spectacle.Oxford Illustrated pp. 33–35 When two Italian operas, Francesco Cavalli's and , proved failures in Paris in 1660 and 1662, the prospects of opera flourishing in France looked remote."Francesco Cavalli" in Viking Opera Guide, pp. 189–94 Yet Italian opera would stimulate the French to make their own experiments at the genre and, paradoxically, it would be an Italian-born composer, Lully, who would found a lasting French operatic tradition.
In 1669, Pierre Perrin founded the Académie d'Opéra and, in collaboration with the composer Robert Cambert, tried his hand at composing operatic works in French. Their first effort, , appeared on stage on 3 March 1671 and was followed a year later by . At this point Louis XIV transferred the privilege of producing operas from Perrin to Jean-Baptiste Lully.Grout p. 134Viking p. 180 Lully, a Florentine, was already the favourite musician of the king, who had assumed full royal powers in 1661 and was intent on refashioning French culture in his image. Lully had a sure instinct for knowing exactly what would satisfy the taste of his master and the French public in general. He had already composed music for extravagant court entertainments as well as for the theatre, most notably the inserted into plays by Molière. Yet Molière and Lully had quarrelled bitterly and the composer found a new and more pliable collaborator in Philippe Quinault, who would write the libretti for all but two of Lully's operas.
On 27 April 1673, Lully's – often regarded as the first French opera in the full sense of the term – appeared in Paris.Viking Opera Guide p. 589 It was a work in a new genre, which its creators Lully and Quinault baptised ,Also known as a form of opera specially adapted for French taste. Lully went on to produce at the rate of at least one a year until his death in 1687 and they formed the bedrock of the French national operatic tradition for almost a century. As the name suggests, was modelled on the French Classical tragedy of Corneille and Racine. Lully and Quinault replaced the confusingly elaborate Baroque plots favoured by the Italians with a much clearer five-act structure. Each of the five acts generally followed a regular pattern. An aria in which one of the protagonists expresses their inner feelings is followed by recitative mixed with short arias () which move the action forward. Acts end with a , the most striking feature of French Baroque opera, which allowed the composer to satisfy the public's love of dance, huge choruses and gorgeous visual spectacle. The recitative, too, was adapted and moulded to the unique rhythms of the French language and was often singled out for special praise by critics, a famous example occurring in Act Two of Lully's . The five acts of the main opera were preceded by an allegorical prologue, another feature Lully took from the Italians, which he generally used to sing the praises of Louis XIV. Indeed, the entire opera was often thinly disguised flattery of the French monarch, who was represented by the noble heroes drawn from Classical myth or Mediaeval romance.
The was a form in which all the arts, not just music, played a crucial role. Quinault's verse combined with the set designs of Carlo Vigarani or Jean Bérain and the choreography of Beauchamp and Olivet, as well as the elaborate stage effects known as the machinery.French Baroque Masters p. 27 As one of its detractors, Melchior Grimm, was forced to admit: "To judge of it, it is not enough to see it on paper and read the score; one must have seen the picture on the stage".Girdlestone, p. 111General references for this section: chapter on Lully in French Baroque Masters by James R. Anthony; the chapter "Lulli's in Girdlestone, pp. 104ff.; article on Lully in Viking.
From Lully to Rameau: new genres
French opera was now established as a distinct genre. Though influenced by Italian models, increasingly diverged from the form then dominating Italy, . French audiences disliked the castrato singers who were extremely popular in the rest of Europe, preferring their male heroes to be sung by the , a particularly high tenor voice. Dramatic recitative was at the heart of Lullian opera, whereas in Italy recitative had dwindled to a perfunctory form known as , where the voice was accompanied only by the continuo. Likewise, the choruses and dances that were such a feature of French works played little or no part in . Arguments over the respective merits of French and Italian music dominated criticism throughout the following century,For examples, see until Gluck arrived in Paris and effectively fused the two traditions in a new synthesis.
Lully had not guaranteed his supremacy as the leading French opera composer through his musical talents alone. In fact, he had used his friendship with King Louis to secure a virtual monopoly on the public performance of stage music.French Baroque Masters pp. 6–7 It was only after Lully's death that other opera composers emerged from his shadow. The most noteworthy was probably Marc-Antoine Charpentier,See chapter on Charpentier by H.Wiley Hitchcock in French Baroque Masters pp. 73 ff. whose sole , , appeared in Paris in 1693 to a decidedly mixed reception. Lully's supporters were dismayed at Charpentier's inclusion of Italian elements in his opera, particularly the rich and dissonant harmony the composer had learned from his teacher Giacomo Carissimi in Rome. Nevertheless, has been acclaimed as "arguably the finest French opera of the 17th century".Viking p. 204 Other composers tried their hand at in the years following Lully's death, including Marin Marais (, 1703), André Cardinal Destouches (, 1714) and André Campra (, 1702; , 1712).
Campra also invented a new, lighter genre: the .Girdlestone pp. 321–22 As the name suggests, contained even more dance music than the . The subject matter was generally far less elevated too; the plots were not necessarily derived from Classical mythology and even allowed for the comic elements which Lully had excluded from the after (1675).French Baroque Masters pp. 28–29 The consisted of a prologue followed by a number of self-contained acts (also known as ), often loosely grouped round a single theme. The individual acts could also be performed independently, in which case they were known as . Campra's first work in the form, ("Europe in Love") of 1697, is a good example of the genre. Each of its four acts is set in a different European country (France, Spain, Italy and Turkey) and features ordinary middle-class characters.Viking p. 181 continued to be a tremendously popular form for the rest of the Baroque period.
Another popular genre of the era was the , the first example of which was Lully's last completed opera (1686).Viking pp. 595–96 The usually drew on Classical subject matter associated with pastoral poetry and was in three acts, rather than the five of the .French Baroque Masters p. 265 Around this time, some composers also experimented at writing the first French comic operas, a good example being Jean-Joseph Mouret's (1714).French Baroque Masters p. 266
Rameau
Jean-Philippe Rameau was the most important opera composer to appear in France after Lully.Oxford Illustrated p. 64 He was also a highly controversial figure and his operas were subject to attacks by both the defenders of the French, Lullian tradition and the champions of Italian music. Rameau was almost fifty when he composed his first opera, , in 1733. Until that point, his reputation had mainly rested on his works on music theory. The opera caused an immediate stir. Some members of the audience, like Campra, were struck by its incredible richness of invention. Others, led by the supporters of Lully, found Rameau's use of unusual harmonies and dissonance perplexing and reacted with horror. The war of words between the "Lullistes" and the "Ramistes" continued to rage for the rest of the decade. Rameau made little attempt to create new genres; instead he took existing forms and innovated from within using a musical language of great originality. He was a prolific composer, writing five , six , numerous and as well as two comic operas, and often revising his works several times until they bore little resemblance to their original versions.