| Title: | Opera, Italian |
| Original Title: | Opéra, Italien |
| Volume and Page: | Vol. 11 (1765), p. 496 |
| Author: | Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt (biography) |
| Translator: | Desmond Hosford [City University of New York] |
| Original Version (ARTFL): | Link |
| Rights/Permissions: |
This text is protected by copyright and may be linked to without seeking permission. Please see http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/terms.html for information on reproduction. |
| URL: | http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.015 |
| Citation (MLA): | Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de. "Opera, Italian." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Desmond Hosford. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2002. Web. [fill in today's date in the form 18 Apr. 2009 and remove square brackets]. <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.015>. Trans. of "Opéra, Italien," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 11. Paris, 1765. |
| Citation (Chicago): | Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de. "Opera, Italian." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Desmond Hosford. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.015 (accessed [fill in today's date in the form April 18, 2009 and remove square brackets]). Originally published as "Opéra, Italien," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 11:496 (Paris, 1765). |
Opera, Italian. This entertainment was invented at the beginning of the XVIIth century in Florence, a state favored by fortune as well as nature, and and to which we owe the revival of many arts that had been extinguished for centuries, and the creation of some new ones. The Turks chased it from Greece; the Medici revived it in their states. It was in 1646 that the cardinal Mazarin had Italian operas performed for the first time in France, with voices that he had had brought from Italy.
But our first writers of opera did not know that art and the genius of the genre of dramatic poem until after the taste of the French had been elevated by the tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Also, we today would not know how to read without disdain the operas of Gilbert and the Pomone of the abbé Perrin. These works written 90 years ago appear as Gothic poems to us, written five or six generations before us. Finally, M. Quinault, who worked for our lyric theater after the authors that I have cited, excelled in this genre, and Lully, creator of a type of song suited to our language, rendered immortal his music for the poems of Quinault.