Lyric poem, coined by the Italians as lyric poem or drama in music, Opera , and this word was adopted in French.

All imitative art is based on a lie: this lie is a type of premise that is established and recognized by virtue of a tacit convention between the artist and his judges. Forgive me this first lie, said the artist, and I will lie with such truth that you will be deceived in spite of yourselves. The playwright, the painter, the sculptor, the pantomime dancer, and the actor all have a specific premise under which they undertake to lie and which they cannot lose sight of for an instant without depriving us of this illusion that makes our imagination an accomplice to their deceptions. Because it is not truth itself but rather the image of truth that they promise us, and what lends charm to their output is not nature but rather the imitation of nature. The closer an artist adheres to his chosen premise, the more we praise his talent and genius.

The imitation of nature through song must have been one of the first that occurred to the imagination. Occasionally, every living being is urged by a sense of his own existence to exclaim sounds that are more or less melodious depending on the capacity of his instrument: how, amid so many singers, could man have remained in silence? Joy likely inspired the first songs; initially, we sang without words, then we sought to set to song a few words consistent with the feeling it ought to express; the rhyming couplet and the song thus became the first music.

But the man of genius did not confine himself to these songs – the offspring of simple nature – for very long. He conceived of a bolder and nobler project: that of making song into an instrument of imitation. He soon realized that we raise our voice and we put more emphasis and melody into our discourse depending on the degree to which our soul stretches beyond its regular purview. By studying people in different situations, the man of genius actually hears them sing at all of life’s important occasions; he sees that each passion, each condition of the soul has its own tone, inflexions, melody, and unique song.

From this discovery was born imitative music and the art of song, which became a type of poetry, a language, an imitative art whose premise was to express through melody and with the aid of harmony all types of discourse, of tone, of passion, and sometimes even to mimic these through physical effects. The unification of this art – as sublime as it is close to nature – with the dramatic arts gave birth to the spectacle of Opera, the most noble and most brilliant among the modern performance arts.

This is not the place to examine whether or not the nature of drama in music has been known since antiquity. If we only reflect on the importance role drama played for the ancients, on the immensity of their theatres, on the effects of their dramatic representations on an entire population, it would be difficult to consider these effects as the work of simple declamation and of ordinary discourse stripped of all prestige. Today, there is hardly a man of taste or of critical judgment who doubts that chant was originally a type of written recitative.

But without bogging ourselves down with discussions unrelated to the present subject, here we will only discuss drama in music as it exists today in Europe, and we will try to find out what kind of poem must have emerged from the union of poetry and music.

Music is a language. Imagine an inspired and enthusiastic people, whose heads are always elated, whose spirit is always drunk with ecstasy. Given our passions and our principles, they would therefore be superior in the subtlety, the purity, and the delicacy of their senses, by the versatility, the finesse, and the perfection of their voices. Such a people would sing instead of speaking – its natural language would be music. The lyric poem does not represent beings from a realm different from our own, but simply from a more perfect realm. These beings speak in a language we could only master through genius and that we would also not be able to understand without a degree of delicate taste, and without exquisite and engaged senses. Thus, those who have called song the most fantastic of all languages and have mocked a theatre in which the heroes expire while singing exhibit far less reason then we had assumed. However, since for such people, music is at best only a harmonious and agreeable noise, a series of consonances and cadences, they must see it as a foreign language; it is not up to them to appreciate the composer’s talent. Only an Attic ear can appreciate Demosthenes’ eloquence.

The advantage that the musician’s language has over that of the poet is that of a universal language over a specific idiom; the latter only speaks the language of his century and of his country, whereas the former speaks the language of all nations and of all centuries.

Every universal language is vague in nature; thus, in trying to embellish theatrical representation with his art, the musician was obligated to rely on the poet. Not only does he need him to create the structure of the lyric drama, but he also requires an interpreter in those instances where the precision of discourse becomes indispensable, where the vague language of music would leave the spectator uncertain. The musician requires no help to express pain, despair, the frenzy of a woman threatened by great misfortune, but it is the poet who tells us: this tearful woman you see is a mother who dreads a disastrous catastrophe for her only son...This mother is Sara, who, failing to see her son return from the sacrifice, remembers the secrecy with which this sacrifice had been prepared and the care with which she had been kept at a distance from it; she begins to question her son’s companions, feels fear at their embarrassment and silence, and thus gradually moves from suspicion to anxiety, from anxiety to terror until she goes mad. Thus, in the turmoil she suffers, she believes herself surrounded even when she is alone, she no longer recognizes her companions... sometimes urging them to speak, sometimes imploring them to remain silent.

Having thus specified the subject matter and created the situation after preparing and establishing it through dialogue, the poet simply furnishes the masses that he abandons to the genius of the composer; it is up to the composer to give the work all its expression and to develop all the subtle details to which it is susceptible.

A universal language immediately hits our senses and our imagination and is also by its very nature the language of feeling and of the passions. Its expressions, which travel straight to the heart without passing through the spirit so to speak, must produce effects that are unknown in any other idiom, and the very wave that inhibits it from lending its articulations the precision of speech (instead entrusting the care of interpretation to our imagination), allows the imagination to experience a realm that no other language would know how to convey. This is the power that music has in common with gesture, which is another universal language. Experience teaches us that nothing appeals to the soul more directly nor moves it more strongly than these two ways of making it speak.

Drama in music must, therefore, make a far more profound impression than ordinary tragedy and comedy. It would be useless to deploy the most powerful tool and merely produce mediocre effects. If the tragedy of Mérope moves me, touches me, makes me weep, in opera, the anxieties and mortal fears of this unfortunate mother ought to pierce my very soul; I ought to be terrified of all the ghost that obsess her, and her pain and disintegration should tear and wrench at my heart. The musician who relieves me a few tears through a passing emotion is on top of his art. The same is true of comedy. If the comedies of Terence and Molière are enchanting, comedy in music must be ravishing. The former represents men as they exist; the latter gives them a touch more verve and genius until they are on the verge of madness. To appreciate comic theatre, one needs only ears and common sense, but sung comedy appears to be made for the elite men of spirit and taste. Music lends an original character and a subtlety of expression to the ridiculous and to the moral and requires a quick and delicate sensitivity and practiced senses to be properly understood.

Yet passion also has breaks and intermissions, and the art of theatre wants us to understand this as nature’s cadence. At the theatre one cannot always roar with laughter or dissolve into tears. Orestes is not always being tormented by the Eumenides; in the midst of her anxieties, Andromaque experiences a few rays of hope that calm her; there is but this moment of security before the horrible moment in which she sees her son perish, but these two moments are different, and the latter only becomes more tragic thanks to the tranquility that preceded it. The minor characters, however much interest they take in the action, cannot have the passionate tone of the heroes. And so the most poignant situation only becomes touching and terrible gradually; it must be prepared and its effect in large part depends on what preceded and led up to it.

Here then are two distinct moments in lyric drama: the moment of tranquility and the moment of passion. The composer’s first priority consists of finding two different and specific types of declamation, one to convey tranquil discourse, the other to express the language of passion in all its power, in all its variety, in all of its disorder. This latter type of declamation is called an air, aria ; the former is called recitative.

This latter is a notated declamation, sustained and propelled by a simple bass line that is heard at each modulation and thus prevents the actor from losing the pitch. When characters ponder, deliberate, speak and discuss together, they do this in recitative. Nothing would be more artificial than seeing them discuss in song or converse in couplets so that one couplet becomes a response to another. Recitative is the only proper tool for such scenes and for dialogue; it should not be sung. It needs to express the genuine inflections of discourse via intervals that are a bit more emphatic and a bit more sensitive than ordinary declamation. For the rest, it should preserve seriousness and speed and all other characteristics. It should not be performed too metronomically but should be left to the intelligence and the enthusiasm of the actor, who should accelerate or slow down depending on the type of role and performance. A recitative without all these characteristics could never be used successfully on stage. Recitative is beautiful to spectators when the poet creates a beautiful scene and when the actor has performed it well; it is beautiful to the man of taste when the musician really captures not only the overall tone of the declamation but also all the subtleties of the age, sex, morals, condition, and interests of those speaking and acting in the drama.

The aria and song begin with emotion; when it appears, the musician has to seize it with all the resources available to his art. Arbace explains to Mandane what motivated him to leave the capital before dawn, thus separating himself from what he values most in the word. The tender princess Mandane disputes her lover’s reasoning, but upon recognizing his sound argument, she resigns herself to their separation, although not without extreme regret. [2] This is subject of the scene and recitative. However, she will not leave her lover without expressing to him all the pains his absence causes her, without emphasizing her most tender love, and this is the passionate moment of song.

It would have been wrong to sing during the scene’s dialogue; there is no aria up to the task of conveying the reasons for Arbace’s departure. But however pure and touching Mandane’s farewell, whatever tenderness an able actress puts into her manner of declaiming these four lines, they would remain cold and insipid if they were to be merely recited.

It is obvious that at the moment of separation, an affected lover finding herself in Mandane’s situation would repeat these words to her beloved in twenty different impassioned ways: Conservati fedele. Ricordati di me. She would sometimes say them with extreme tenderness, sometimes with resignation and courage, sometimes in hope of a better fate, sometimes without faith of a happy return. She can only urge her lover to think at times of her loneliness and her pain, all without really seizing the situation she is about to find herself in: hence the words, pensa ch’io resto e peno assume the air of the most touching lament, which Mandane perhaps follows with a sense of finality out of fear of rendering the moment as painful for Arbace as it is for herself. This effort can perhaps only be followed by more weakness and by a gentle lament that will end in sobs and tears. In a word, Mandane’s aria is composed of all that the softest and most tender passion could inspire in the sensitive soul in this situation. But what pen could be eloquent enough to give an idea of all that an aria contains? What critic would be bold enough to delimit the bounds of genius?

In this example, I chose a delicate emotion, an interesting but tranquil situation. With this as a model, it is easy to imagine what an aria would be like in the most poignant situations, in the most tragic and terrible moments.

Let us now suppose two lovers in an even crueller situation, threatened by eternal separation the same moment that they expected a very different outcome; this situation would lend the aria a more poignant quality. It would not be natural if, caught up in the same circumstance, only one lover sang. Thus the lover speaks to his distressed beloved, telling her:

Such a farewell, said with a type of finality by a deeply affected lover, will sap the courage of his grieving lover; she will undoubtedly dissolve into tears or, stricken by a profession of love that would have been so sweet but is now so cruel, she will exclaim:

I do not need to point out how powerful and touching these relatively feeble verses will become in music. The rest of the aria will be nothing more than exclamations of pain and tenderness. One lover will cry:

The other:

At the end, their pain and their expression will no doubt intermingle in this simple and touching exclamation:

The duet, or duetto , is thus a dialogue aria sung by two people inspired by the same passion or by opposing passions. At the most poignant moment of the aria, their expressions can intermingle, since this is natural. An exclamation, a lament can unite them, but the rest of the aria must be a dialogue. It can never be natural for Armide and Hidraot to express their desire for vengeance by singing in unison couplets:

They repeat this couplet ten times in a row with frenzied noise and enraged movements, which to a man of taste would seem like the same artificial declaration tediously repeated.

With this example, we see the way in which arias for two, three, and even several actors can be incorporated into lyric drama.

Based on all that we have observed here, we can also see what an air or aria is and what its character is. It consists of developing an interesting situation. With four little lines furnished by the poet, the musician seeks to express not only the general idea of the character’s emotion, but also all of its implications and nuance. The better the composer guesses the most intimate movements of the soul in each situation, the more beautiful the aria and the more he proves himself a man of genius. This is also where he can deploy all the depth of his art by uniting pleasing harmony with pleasing melody, by uniting the captivating quality of the voice with the allure of instruments. The aria’s performance is split between song and gesture; it is not just the work of a capable singer but of a great actor, because the composer hardly pays less attention to the indication of movement and pantomime than to the expression of passion that his aria lends to the scene.

According to a famous philosopher, the aria is the recapitulation and the peroration of the scene. This is why the actor almost always exits the stage after having sung; instances in which the language of emotion gives way to ordinary declamation are rare.

The quality of an aria is fundamentally different from that of the couplet or of the song: this latter is the result of gaiety, of satire, of feeling, if you will, but never of declamation or imitative music. A song can only give the text a general character and a vague expression; the periodic return of the same music with each couplet prohibits specific expression and development. A symmetrically organized song can only function as a memory in dramatic music. Anacreon can sing couplets in the middle of his dinner guests; [5] when Lise wants to express her innermost feelings to Dorval, the presence of a witness forces her to disguise her feelings in a song that she pretends to have heard at her convent. This twist of events is ingenious and realistic, but in each case the couplets are historical: it is a song that is known by heart and that is recalled. In comedy, there are frequent opportunities to insert couplets, but I cannot think of any occurring in tragedy. To keep with our example, if Mandane had turned her words conservati fedele into a couplet rather than an aria, this couple – however tender – would have been cold, insipid and artificial. We have already remarked that it would be the height of absurdity and of bad taste to use couplets in a scene’s dialogue or for discussions among the actors.

As the composer’s most powerful tool, the aria should be reserved for important scenes and sublime moments in lyric drama. To maximize its effect, it has to be used tastefully and using good judgment: the imitation of nature, the realism of theatre, and experience all agree on this. This is as true of music as it is of painting. The secret behind great effects is less the power of colour than in art and its deterioration, and the process of a great colourist is different from that of an able dyer. A series of the most expressive and varied arias, following each other without interruption or rest, leaves the ear exercised and even more passionate for music. It is the transition from recitative to aria and from aria to recitative that produces the greatest effects in lyric drama; without this alternation, opera would most assuredly be the most boring, the most tedious, the most artificial of all forms of theatre.

It would be equally artificial to make the characters of lyric drama speak and sing in alternation. Not only would the transition between speech and song and back again be somewhat disagreeable and abrupt, but this would also be a monstrous mixture of realism and artifice. The suspension of disbelief should not disappear even for an instant, regardless of the type of imitation; it is the very convention on which the illusion is based. If you let your characters adopt an ordinary declamatory tone, you depict them as ordinary people, and I cannot see a reason to allow them to sing without violating common sense.

One could say that it is creativity and the distinctive quality of aria and recitative that led to lyric poetry, although recitative works without instruments and only differs from ordinary declamation in that it accentuates the inflections of speech through the most sensitive intervals that can be notated. It is no less worthy of attention from the great composer, who knows how to inject it with genius, subtlety and variety. He can even set it to orchestral accompaniment and interject different musical ideas in the breaks to make the actor’s discourse (before becoming song) more lively as it approaches the moment in which the power of emotion transforms it into an aria.

The internal economy of musical theatre is based on realistic imitation on the one hand, and on the nature of our senses on the other hand, and should serve the lyric poet as a basic poetics. In truth, this poetics must submit completely to the musician; it can only aspire to take a secondary role, but it retains enough appealing resources to share the glory with its companion. The choice and nature of the subject matter, the structure and progress of the entire drama is the work of the poet. The subject must be full of interest and undertaken in the simplest and most interesting way. Everything must be directed toward action and must aim to be most effective. The poet should never be afraid of giving the composer too difficult a task. Since speed is an inseparable characteristic of music and is responsible for its prodigious effects, the pace of the lyric poem must always be quick. Long and idle speeches are completely misplaced.

Semper ad eventum festinat. [6]

The drama should hasten towards its dénouement by developing under its own steam, without self-consciousness or hesitation. Nothing prevents the poet from developing strong characterizations so that the music can lend each character his/her own unique style and language. Although everything needs to take place in action, the composer does not demand from his poet a series of actions stitched together one after the other. Nowhere is the unity of action more indispensable than in lyric drama, but all the successive plot developments pass under the audience’s scrutiny. Each scene needs to present a situation, because only situations offer realistic occasions for singing. In a word, the lyric poem must be a series of interesting situations pulled from the depths of the subject matter and concluding with a memorable climax.

The simplicity and speed necessary for the progress and development of the lyric poem are also indispensable to the style of the poet. Nothing could be more antithetical to musical language than the long tirades of our modern plays and the abundance of words that the convention and necessity of rhyme has introduced to our theatres. Feeling and passion are specified through diction. They hate the profusion of words. They always recognize the most energetic expression as the most appropriate one. In moments of passion, they repeat this expression twenty times rather than seek to vary it through cold paraphrase. The lyrical style must be energetic, natural and effortless. It must be graceful but abhors studied elegance. An epigram, a clever speech, an ingenious madrigal, abstruse feelings, stuffy turns of phrase – all that gives off drudgery, invoicing and bookishness – constitute the composer’s burden and dismay, because what song, what expression can be given to all these?

There is even this fundamental difference between the lyric poet and the tragic poet, because as the latter becomes eloquent and verbose, the former must become precise and stingy with words. The eloquence of emotional moments belongs entirely to the musician. Nothing is less susceptible to song than all the sublime and harmonious eloquence with which Racine’s Clytemnestra looks to dispose of her daughter with a fatal knife. The lyric poet, placing a mother in a similar situation, can give her just four lines to say:

The music will instantly transform these four short lines to greater effect than the divine Racine could ever produce with all his magical verses. Oh, the composer knows how to transform the mother’s poignant prayer by varying the declamation! Her supplicating tone penetrates me to the depths of my soul. This humble tone, however, is heightened in proportion to how much faith the mother has in her ability to touch those who control her son’s fate. If this hope vanishes in her heart, an indignant and furious approach will replace pleading, and in her deliriousness, the rendimi il figlio mio that had just been a moving prayer would become a frenzied cry. Her momentary obliviousness to her situation will be repaired by a more submissive tone, and rendimi il figlio mio will become an even more humble and pressing prayer. All these efforts and dangers will finally leave this unfortunate woman in a state of anxiety and failure in which her tight chest and hoarse voice will only permit her to sob and in which every syllable of the line rendimi il figlio mio will be interrupted by the same choking breaths that oppress the spectators, freezing them in fear and pity. Based on this line, let us look at what the musician does with the painful exclamation non son più madre! , and with what care he varies and mixes all these different cries of pain and hopelessness! Let us see if there is a heart strong enough to resist tearing in half when, at the height of despair, this mother cries: ah mi si spezza il cor . Here is a vague outline of the effects music brings to a single aria; music can defy the greatest poet, regardless of nationality or era, to create a piece of poetry that can support this intersection of the arts.

In summary, however talented the poet, he cannot hope to succeed in this genre if he himself is not familiar with music; he depends too much on it at every step to be able to ignore its components, its style, and its subtleties. He must distinguish between recitative and aria in his poem with as much care as the composer does; if this fundamental distinction is not observed, even the most beautiful poem in the world becomes less lyrical and less suited to music. For arias, the composer has the right to demand from the poet a simple, segmented style well suited to being broken down, because chaotic emotions inevitably lead to the breakdown of speech, and an overly mechanical verse would render this too difficult to be practical. Alexandrine verses are not suited to scenes or to recitative because their rhythm is far too long and prompts long and rounded sentences that musical declamation abhors. We observe that verses that are numerous and full of harmony are therefore seldom suited to music, and that there could be a language that, due to a strange misuse of terms, designates as “lyrical” that which is least capable of being sung.

There are three qualities that are essential for the language in which the lyric poem is written.

The language must be simple and, by ensuring it uses the appropriate vocabulary, it should never cease to be noble and touching.

It therefore must have elegance and be harmonious. A language in which the harmony of the poetry consists mainly in the rounding of the verses or in the sheer number of verses the poet writes is not well suited to music.

Finally, the language of the lyric poem must lend itself to the sudden reversals that are indispensable to the expression, the passion, and the chaos of emotion, all without losing its natural sound and elegance.

There are but few languages that successfully unite these three rare qualities, but there is no language that the poet cannot use with success if he really knows the nature of his drama and the genius of music.

Over the course of the previous century, Italian opera was soon imitated in other parts of Europe. Each nation had its own language sung in its theatres; there were Spanish, French, English, and German operas. In Germany especially, there was not a single significant city that lacked an opera theatre, and this collection of lyric poems staged in different theatres would alone constitute a small library. But the country that gave birth to this beautiful and magnificent form of theatre also perfected it around fifty years ago; all of Europe thus turned to Italy with the acclamation:

Graiis musa dedit... [8]

This acclamation was the sign of the failure of all lyrical drama, and Italian opera took hold of all the theatres in Europe. The crowd of great composers that has left Italy and Germany since this period has not wanted to sing in any other language but Italian, whose superiority is universally recognized. Only France has preserved its national opera, its lyric poem and its music, but without being able to tempt the other populations of Europe, however preoccupied they are with French art in general, its tastes and its fashions. In recent times, even France’s youth are torn between the two musics, and Italian music counts Frenchmen among its most enthusiastic supporters. It only remains for us to examine what French opera is as opposed to Italian opera.

On French opera . According to a famous author’s definition, French opera is the epic put on stage and dramatized. What the epic poet’s discretion leaves to our imagination, the lyric poet in France undertakes to stage before our eyes. The tragic poet takes his subjects from history; the lyric poet looks for his in epic; and having exhausted all of ancient mythology and all of modern witchcraft, after having staged every possible divinity, after having clothed everything in structure and shape, the lyric poet still creates fantastical beings by gifting them with supernatural and magical powers and thus creates the mainspring of his poem.

It is thus the marvellous made visible that constitutes the soul of French opera; the actors are Gods, Goddesses, Demi-gods, Shadows, Genies, Fairies, Magicians, Virtues, Passions, abstract ideas, figures personifying morals. The marvellous made visible seemed so fundamental to this drama that the poet did not believe it possible to treat a historical subject without combining it with some supernatural happenings and some fantastical beings of his creation.

To determine if this genre merits the vote of an enlightened nation, critics and men of taste will examine and decide the following questions.

Would the enterprise not run contrary to common sense – for which the genius of the imitative arts has always had the most pious respect – to want to make the marvellous open to theatrical representation? Would what seemed noble and great to the imagination of the poet and his readers not become childish and paltry once made visible in this way?

Will it be easy to find actors to play the roles in the marvellous genre, or would we tolerate a Jupiter, a Mars, a Pluto beneath the figure of an actor full of faults and absurdities? For such representations, would it not be necessary to at least have enormous rooms where the spectator, placed at an appropriate distance from the stage, would be forced to let the machines and masks play games of illusion, where the stunned imagination would compete with the theatrical effects that it can only appreciate in outline? Could the presence of the gods not become tolerable in a close and constricted space where the spectator finds himself under the actor’s nose, so to speak, in which the smallest details, the subtlest nuances are noticed by the spectator and the actor cannot masque or hide any faults in his voice, in his gait, in his figure? Is Horace’s observation, Major è longinquo reverentia [9] , which is no less true of time as of space, not a sensible principle here? Let us therefore suppose that we could put these gods on the enormous stages of antiquity, which accommodated an entire population of spectators. Would this not be the very reason for banishing them from our small theatres, which can perform for only a few cliques that we call the public ?

If a drama full of gods were the fruit of the public’s natural taste, of a national passion for the genre, would this public not begin by putting its own religious divinities on stage? The gods of tradition, which the public only knows imperfectly from mythology, can they move and interest people as objects of cult and belief? Would the opera not necessarily become a religious feast?

Let us as least insist that such a public should have deep knowledge and be enthusiasts for transparency, beautiful forms, the energy and beauty of nature. And what should we think of this public’s taste if it can suffer a Hercules clothed in skin-coloured taffeta in its theatres, an Apollo in white socks and an embroidered coat?

If Horace’s tenet Nec Deus intersit [10] is rooted in reason, what should we think of a drama in which the gods act erratically, in which they arrange and upset everything on a whim, in which their will and direction changes in an instant? Let us remember the discretion with which the ancient tragedians incorporated the gods into their dramas, which were after all religious acts! They would reveal the god for an instant at the decisive moment, while our lyric poet does not worry about flaunting the god before our eyes incessantly. And in so using the gods in this way, does the poet not risk debasing the divine condition, if we can put it this way? So that a god might impress on us an idea that is suited to his grandeur, must he not speak only little and appear as rarely as these Asian monarchs whose appearance is such an august and solemn thing that nobody dares raise his eyes to them on the one occasion he is permitted to perceive them? Would it be possible to preserve this respect for an Apollo who shows himself for an entire three hours under the guise and talents of M. Muguet?

When will it be possible to represent the ancient Greek gods in a noble, dignified and realistic manner? These gods are, after all, historical figures, if also mythical. Will good taste and common sense make it possible to also personify all the beings that the poet’s imagination has given birth to? An airy genius, a game, a joke, a pleasure, an hour, a constellation, all these allegorical and bizarre beings whose nomenclature we read about with astonishment in the programs of the French opera, will they appear in lyric drama with as much entitlement and success as a Bacchus, a Mercury, a Diana? And what will be the goal of such a strange licence?

Let us examine without prejudice the following two scenes, which come from the same genre; in the first, the poet shows us a Phaedrus who has fallen prey to an insurmountable love for her husband’s son, struggling hopelessly against a fatal inclination and finally succumbing to an unrestrained love deliriously and uncontrollably in spite of herself, guilty that her success only makes her action all the more criminal. This is Racine’s scene. [11] In the second scene, Armide turns to her magical arts in order to triumph over an involuntary love that her glory and inclination reject in equal measure. She evokes Hate: at the sound of her voice, Hate emerges from the underworld and appears with her retinue in the outlandish outfit that is etiquette at the French opera. After making her companions dance and flit around Armide for a long while, after making those companions who cannot dance sing instead, the chorus utters a couplet that assures that

After all these pointless ceremonies, void of taste and nobility, Hate wards off Love in all its forms, forcing it out of Armide’s heart in order to take its place, exactly the way in which our priests recently adopted the custom of exorcising the devil. This is Quinault’s scene. We will not say that there is but a single man of genius who is capable of succeeding in the first example and that an ordinary man could successfully hold his own with the second example, but we will report in good faith on those who have seen performances of both works. They shall tell us if Hate, with her viper’s hair, bunch of snakes in her right hand, gloves and red socks with sparkling silver corners, ever made them tremble in fear or feel pity for Armide, and if the Phaedrus, dying of love and shame in the arms of her old nanny, does not tear at every spectator’s heart? The destiny with which the invisible hand irrevocably regulates the fate of mortals, this destiny that no great poet has ever dared draw out of the darkness in which he is surrounded, is it not far more terrifying and terrible than the aged destiny the French opera’s poet shows us so indiscriminately and warns us mid-song that he is subjected to all its earthly and celestial powers?

With the marvellous now staged and made visible, would it not undermine all interest in the lyrical scene? A god can astonish, he can appear magnificent and formidable, but can he be interesting? How will he undertake to touch me? Does his divine figure not rupture all connecting spaces and relationship between us? What do his emotions, his laments, his joy, his happiness, his troubles mean to me? Let us suppose that his anger or his benevolence influences me in the same way that a hero or an illustrious heroine does, since these characters have the same emotions, the same weaknesses, the same nature that I do and have a right to involve me in their situation. What part can I play in a scene in which nothing happens as a result of the nature or necessity of things, in which the most deplorable situation can suddenly – at the drop of a hat – become the happiest situation through a sudden and unforeseen change of heart and by another capricious circumstance become tragic again? Are these not at best but games to move children?

Is the unity of action that is fundamental to all drama and without which no work of art could please not continually violated by marvellous opera? Beings who are immune to the laws of nature, who can change the course of events at their will, do they not dissolve the very crux of this genre’s plot? An opera would become just a series of events that follow one after the other without any logic and, consequently, without any real connection. The poet can prolong, abridge, and add to these events according to his fancy without compromising his subject matter. He can move the play’s acts around, making the first act the third, the fourth act the second, without causing any noticeable upheaval to his vision. He can undo the play in the first act without impeding his ability to follow it with four others in which he undoes and puts things back together as many times as he pleases, or to speak more precisely, there neither the crux nor the dénouement is inherent in the play’s structure. Cannot all subjects of this variety be treated in one act, in three acts, in five, ten, or twenty depending on the caprice and flamboyance of the lyric poet?

If this genre were only able to produce dramas devoid of all interest and realism, would it not have impeded the progress of music in France while the art was brought to the highest degree of perfection in other parts of Europe? How could musical style develop in a country where only fantastical beings sing in unnatural tones without precedent? Given their arbitrary and indeterminate discourse, would it not produce a cold and soporific song, an insupportable monotony that nobody would tolerate without the ballet to rescue the show? Would all musical expression not then be reduced to wordplay, so that the actor is unable to utter to word tears without being made to cry by the composer, even if he has no reason to be afflicted, and so that in the saddest situation, the actor cannot speak of a happy state without the composer thinking he has the right to make his voice shine at the expense of the disposition of the character’s soul? Would the result of this method not be a dictionary of supposedly lyrical words, a dictionary that an able composer does not neglect to present to his poet so that he might have, at the tip of his finger, all the words that music can has nothing to do with and that should never be used in the lyric poem ?

Let us say you choose two composers. You give the first the task of expressing Andromaque’s despair when Astyanax is pulled from the tomb where her piety hid him, or Iphigenia’s farewell as she submits to Calchas’s knive, or her distraught mother’s fury at the moment of this terrible sacrifice. You ask the second to make a storm, an earthquake, a choir of north winds, a flooding of the Nile, Mars’ descent, a magical conspiracy, a diabolical Sabbath. Is this not the same as telling the latter, “I choose you to scare or please children,” and telling the former, “I choose you to be admired by nations and for centuries?” Is it not obvious that the one composer is forced to remain barbaric, without music, without style, without expression, without personality, and that the other had to either renounce the project or – if he is successful – become sublime?

If we also employed two poets, would they not be in the same situation? Would the first not learn to speak the language of feeling, of emotion, of nature, while the other remains feeble, cold, stilted? If the poet has a talent for poetry, the genre’s artifice would deceive the use he needs to make of it. The pompous style of the epic has replaced natural dramatic poetry. Instead of scenes with natural dialogue, we have a collection of maxims, madrigals, epigrams, jingles and turns of phrase for which music has no expressive powers. Taste would have been so underdeveloped that we would not know the difference between poetic harmony and musical harmony and would not understand that the most beautiful part of Tibule [13] would be misplaced in a lyric poem by precisely that which makes it so beautiful and precious. We would finally see the strange phenomenon of a lyric poet, who is full of sweetness and proportion, full of charm to the reader but is incapable of setting these poems to music.

This artificial genre, which has nothing natural about it, would it not have prevented the French composer from knowing and feeling this fundamental distinction between aria and recitative? A heavy and dragging song similar to the gothic chant in our churches would have become operatic recitative. In order to lend it feeling, we have laden it with portamento, trills, and quavers; and in spite of these laborious efforts, we have doubted the ability of art to punctuate chant, to pose a question or make an exclamation in song. The unsustainably slow pace of this recitative, which has a quality contrary to all forms of declamation, also renders the execution of a realistic scene for this theatre impossible. The aria, the other main component of musical drama, appears so seldom that even the term only refers to pieces that the composer creates for dance, or else couplets in which the poet includes maxims that he makes use of in the scene’s dialogue, or finally songs that the actor sings with a type of gesture. To these entertainments, we could add the arietta , but this is never pertinent to the plot, does not adhere to the main subject, and its very name is poor and puerile. Again, these ariettas have miraculously contributed to the slowing down of musical progress, because it is no doubt better for music to express nothing than to see it torment itself over a lance , a murmur , acrobatics , shackles , a triumph , etc.

Given this idea of exposing to the eyes what can only work on the imagination, and of only producing an effect by remaining invisible, does the poet not involve the set designer in the differences and oddities that made him confuse the true application of so precious an art with theatrical representation? What model does a magical garden, a fairy palace, a heavenly temple have in nature? What can we blame or laud in such a project and in the execution of such decoration unless the decorator is as sublime as he is extravagant? Does he not require a hundred times the taste and the genius to show us a great and beautiful building, a beautiful landscape, a beautiful ruin, a beautiful piece of architecture? Would it be a sensible enterprise to want to imitate the decorations of physical phenomena and nature in movement? Instead of occupying their own space, should not turmoil and revolutions (those that attract and scare off) not be the subject of the action and the crux of the drama as well as occupying the heart of the actors?

When it becomes possible to successfully represent natural phenomena and all that accompanies the appearance of a god on a suitably grandiose theatre, is not the pretence of a spectacle where all the characters speak while singing not much too close to our nature to be involved in a drama in which the actors are gods? Would not good taste dictate that such subjects be reserved for dance and pantomime performance in order to rupture the spoken link between the actors and spectators that brings them too close together and that impedes the spectator from believing the actor to have a superior nature to his own? If this observation is correct, it is necessary to confine the marvellous genre to the mute and terrible eloquence of gesture and to use music to translate not words but movement in these instances.

These are some of the questions that must be clarified without prejudice before it is possible to determine the value of the so-called marvellous genre and undertake a poetics of French opera. The arts and public taste can only profit enormously from an impartial discussion.

On Italian opera . After the renaissance in literature, the dramatic arts were quickly perfected in Europe’s various countries. England had its Shakespeare; France had, on the one hand, the immortal Molière, and on the other, Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire. Italy quickly got rid of this false so-called marvellous genre, which barbaric taste had introduced to Europe’s theatres in the previous century, and when one wanted to sing during a scene, one felt that only tragedy and comedy could be put to music. A happy accident came about at the same time: the simplest, most carefree, touching, energetic and illustrious Metastasio along with the huge number of talented musicians produced by Italy and Germany, at the head of which posterity permanently remembers figures like Vinci, Hasse, and Pergolesi. In this century, musical drama was brought to its apex. All the greatest scenes, the most interesting, poignant, terrible plots – all these sources of tragedy and of realistic comedy – were subjected to musical treatment and received a degree of emotion and enthusiasm that attracted people of spirit and taste and the general public all over the place. From its birth in Italy, music was dedicated to its true purpose of expressing feelings and passions, and the lyric poet could not fail the composer in this task; he could not mislead the composer and make him leave the path of nature and truth.

In contrast, it is not surprising that in the realm of taste and the arts, tragedy without music was completely neglected. However moving tragic theatre is, it always seems weak and cold beside tragedy that has been animated by music, and spoken theatre completes in vain with the effects and impressions of music. In order to console itself with its failure to match its neighbours in the discipline of music, France tells itself that if it had excelled in this art form, it might never have had Racine.

Why, then, with all its powerful means, has Italian opera today not revived the awesome effects of ancient tragedy that history documents for us? How are we able to pay attention to certain scenes without worrying about our hearts breaking too painfully and falling into a state too painful and proximate to the awful situation of the play’s hero? An enlightened critic cannot accuse either the poet or the composer for being on top of their art in such instances. We therefore have to look at what techniques were used to make such sublime efforts of genius either useless or lacking effect.

When a performance only entertains a passive audience, that is to say this national elite we call good company , it is impossible for it not to assume a certain importance, and whatever talent you ascribe to the poet, the execution of the theatrical piece and a thousand other details of his poem are impacted by his frivolous goal. Sophocles wrote tragedies for his country, for religious reasons, for the most august solemnities of the republic. Among all the modern poets, Metastasio has perhaps enjoyed the sweetest and happiest fate. Sheltered from envy and persecution, which today are so often the genius’s recompense (as they sometimes were for the ancients), the talents of Italy’s first poet were constantly honoured by the protective reigning house of Austria in recognition of his virtues and services rendered to the state. His role in Vienna was therefore different from that of Sophocles in Athens! For the ancients, the theatre was an affair of state; for us, if the authorities are involved, it is only to make a thousand small quibbles and insist on compliance to a thousand bizarre conventions. The audience, the actors, the impresarios, have all usurped the lyric poem – a ridiculous empire – and its creators (the poet and the composer) are themselves victims of this tyranny and are consulted the least in matters of its creation.

Everyone knows that in Italy, the public does not gather at the theatre simply to see the performance, but that these houses have become as much circles of conversation that renew themselves many times over the course of the performance. The practice is to spend five or six hours at the opera, but not to give it five or six hours of attention. The poet is only required to produce a few scenes, some very poignant and others very beautiful, and the audience is easy about the rest. When the composer succeeds in making these sections so famous that everyone knows them by heart in a way that is novel and worthy of the art, we are delighted, ecstatic, we abandon ourselves to enthusiasm. But once the scene is over, we do not listen any longer. Thus, two or three arias, a nice duet, one very beautiful scene are sufficient to ensure the success of an opera, and one is indifferent to the overall drama provided one is given three or four ravishing moments and that it passes the time one is destined to spend in the opera theatre.

In a nation passionate about singing, which recognizes the greatest sacrifice in the voice’s charm, and in which singing has become an art that demands not only the most fortunate physiological disposition and the longest and most persistent period of study, the singer quickly usurped a whole illegitimate domain from the composer and poet. Everything has been sacrificed to the singer’s talents and caprice. We are rarely shocked by the imperfections of theatrical action so long as the vocal part is expertly carried out so that it seduces and enchants. The singer, without being preoccupied by the plot or character he is portraying, confines all his efforts to vocal performance; the scene is recited and played with shameful negligence. The public, which by necessity spectates, remains but a group of listeners. The public shut its eyes and opened its ears, and by leaving the imagination to show a realistic attitude, a realistic gesture, the features and figure of Hector’s widow, or of Carthage’s founder, the public is content to hear these realistic tones.

This indulgence from the public has on the one hand left theatrical action in a very imperfect state and on the other has made the singer the master of his masters. As long as his role gives him the opportunity to develop the resources of his art and make his technique shine, it will not bother him much if his role is quite different from the one specific in the drama. The poet was obliged to abandon dramatic style, to stitch to his poem a few pastiche bits of comparisons and epic poetry, and the composer had to write arias in in the most ornate style that is consequently completely opposed to musical theatre. To get the singer to undertake a few simple and really sublime arias that are indispensable to the plot’s foundation, the composer has to buy his compliance with brilliant variations at the expense of verisimilitude and the overall effect. This abuse was taken to the limit when, finding the arias not his liking, the singer substituted others that had won him approbation in other works and in other theatres; he thus changed the words as far as possible in order to relate them to the plot and his character and cause as little harm as possible.

Finally and above all, opera’s impresario becomes the most unjust and absurd of the poet’s tyrants. This is more or less what he proposes to the lyric poet as a result of his discoveries, having studied the public’s taste, its passion for singing, its indifference to the propriety and ensemble of the drama.

“Of all the men in the world, you are the man I need least to ensure the success of my drama, and after you comes the composer. What is crucial for is to have one or two performers the public idolises; there is no such thing as a bad opera with a Caffarelli or a Gabrieli. [14] My job is to make money. Since I am obliged to pay my singers handsomely, you will appreciate that there is very little left for the composer and even less for you: consider the glory as your payment.”

Here are a few fundamental conditions under which I will agree to risk setting your poem to music and having it performed by my singers.

1. Your poem must be in three acts, and these three acts together must occupy at least five hours, including a few ballets that I will have composed for the entr’actes.
2. In the middle of each act, I need a change of scene and place so that there are two sets per act. You will tell me that I am in fact asking for a poem in six acts, since the stage has to be left empty to allow for each set change, but these are the details of your profession and I will not concern myself with them.
3. There must be six roles in your piece, never less than five and never more than seven. This means a first actor and actress and a second actor and actress, who will constitute two couples singing soprano , or one in each couple (either the man or the woman) singing contralto . The fifth role is that of the tyrant, the king, the father, the governor, the old man, and will belong to the actor singing tenor. On top of this you may also use the role of the confidant or one or two minor characters.
4. In keeping with this sensible structure, which has become enshrined by tradition, you need to feature a double love plot. The first actor must be in love with the first actress, the second actor with the second actress. You must take care to develop the plot of all your dramas according to this structure, or else it will be of no use to me. I will not insist that the first actress can only reciprocate the first actor’s love; on the contrary, I give you every liberty in this respect to develop any combination since I do not care to be difficult without good reason. So long as there is a double plot and so long as my second actors do not complain to me that I have forced them to play more minor roles, I will not quibble about the rest. Each actor will sing twice in each act except perhaps in the third act, where the action hastens to its conclusion and might not permit as many arias as in the preceding acts. The minor character can also sing fewer arias than the other actors.
5. I only require a single duet , which by right belongs to the first actor and first actress. The other actors do not have the privilege of singing together. This duet should not be placed in the third act; you should try to put it at the end of the first or second act, or right in the middle of one of these acts right before the scenery change.
6. Each actor must leave the stage immediately after singing his aria. Thus, while the plot will have assembled the characters on stage, they will exit one after the other, each after having sung in turn. You will see that the last one remaining will be well placed to sing a brilliant aria containing a reflective section, a maxim, and a comparison relevant to his situation or to the situation of the other characters.
7. Before having an actor sing his second aria, all the other actors must have sung their first, and before he can sing his third, the others must have sung their second, and so on until the end. You will appreciate that you must not confuse the ordering or violate the rights of any of the actors.

To these strange points, we can add the indispensable observation made by the emperor Charles VI, who had a strong aversion to tragic catastrophe. This prince wanted everyone to leave the opera happy and peaceful, and Metastasio had to rectify everything so that at the opera’s dénouement, all the characters in the plot are happy. The evildoers are forgiven, the virtuous renounce the passion that caused their misfortune or the misfortune of others over the course of the drama, and other obstacles disappear. Each actor is a bit penitent, and everything is peaceful at the end of the opera.

Here are the principles on which the poetics of Italian opera is founded. The lyric poet is treated more or less like a puppet whose legs are made to dance in order to make his task more difficult and his tours de force even more dazzling.

It is surprising that, in spite of his shackles, Metastasio was able to preserve a degree of nature and truth in his works. However, the structure of the lyric poem must inevitably have felt constrained by these bizarre and absurd laws. The power of the morals must have disappeared along with that of the plot. The second love couple have to persist with an episodic love that disfigures almost all Italian operas. In this way, the lyric poem has become a problem where every work is cut from the same pattern and every historical and tragic subject exhibits more or less the same characters.

Comic or buffa opera has, in truth, not been subjected to these chains, but on the contrary, it has only been undertaken by writers of farce or mediocre poets who sacrifice everything for momentary flashes of wit. These works are usually full of comic situations, because the necessity of incorporating an aria necessarily leads to such situations. But although it may be original and pleasant, we cannot forgive the poet his extravagant form and construction and the pitiful means he uses to bring about the scenario.

What must be conceded to the poet and the composer is that they never for an instant deceived themselves about their vocation or the goal of their art, and if Italian opera is full of faults that weaken its impression and effect, fortunately there is not fault that can be effaced without fundamentally and essentially damaging the lyric poem .

On some techniques of lyric poetry . We have explained what one must think of couplets, duets, and the way in which it is possible to have two or more actors sing together without hurting common sense and verisimilitude. All that is left is to discuss choruses, which are very frequent in French operas and very rare in Italian operas. This latter usually ends with a couplet sung by all the reunited actors as a chorus, and which is unrelated to the plot and will disappear as soon as the poet is allowed to finish the work as the subject demands. There is no way to tack on a chorus couplet after the opera Didone abbandonata . [15] In French opera, each act has a divertissement, and each divertissement consists of dances and sung choruses, and the supporters of this entertainment have always considered these choruses among its main attractions.

In order to judge which case to make, we need only remember what was said above on the subject of the couplet, which good taste has never regarded as a component of musical theatre. If it contradicts common sense for one actor to respond to another with a song, how could an entire assembly or a whole population express its feeling by singing a couplet, the same words, the same aria together as a chorus with any degree of verisimilitude? We have to assume they were concocted in advance and that they agreed on the aria and its words, through which they would express their feeling on whatever the subject’s scene, which they could not have known beforehand. That the people assembled at a religious ceremony sing a hymn in honour of a divinity, I can understand, but this couplet is a sacred canticle to which everyone knows the words by heart, and on such occasions, choruses can be majestic and beautiful. An entire people can witness an interesting scene, cry out exclamations of joy, of pain, of admiration, of indignation, of fear, etc. A chorus that exclaims only a few words, and is often only an inarticulate cry, can be used to much greater effect. This is more or less the use of the chorus in ancient tragedy, but choruses are so different from the cold, loud couplets that rid the French opera of action with its arms crossed and with an inflation of the lungs that stuns even the most hardened ear!

Good taste therefore proscribes the choruses of the lyric poem until the opera approaches nature enough to show grand tableaux and grand gestures with the realism they demand. At this wonderful time for the arts, bring me the man of genius who knows the language of emotion and the science of harmony, and I will be his poet and give the chorus words that no one will be able to hear without shivering. Let us imagine an oppressed people degraded under the reign of an odious tyrant. Suppose this tyrant is massacred, or dies in his bed (because after all what does the fate of an evildoer matter?) and the people are drunk with the most unbridled happiness to be delivered and assemble to proclaim his successor. In order to turn the subject into a historical one, I call the tyrant Commodus and his successor to the empire, Pertinax . Here is the chorus I propose the composer has the Roman people sing:

“Let us snatch glory from the enemy of the state...the enemy of the state! parricide! gladiator!...Let us snatch glory from parricide...let us drag parricide...let us throw it into the street...so that it is torn...the enemy of the gods! parricide of the senate!...to the streets, gladiator!...enemy of the gods! enemy of the senate! into the street, into the street!...He massacred the senate, into the street!...He massacred the senate, let him be torn apart piece by piece!...He massacred the innocent: let us tear him up...let us tear him up, let us tear him up...He did not spare his own blood; let us tear him up...He planned your death, let us tear him up...You trembled for us, you trembled with us; you shared our danger...O Jupiter, if you want to ensure our happiness, preserve Pertinax for us!...Glory to the loyal praetorians!...to the Roman armies!...to the senate’s piety!...Pertinax, we implore you to tear apart parricide...that you tear it apart, we ask this of you...Tell us that traitors will be thrown to the lions...Tell us, the gladiator to the lions...Eternal victory to the Roman people!...liberty! victory!...Glory to the loyal soldiers!...to the praetorian ranks!...Let the tyrant’s statues be torn down!...everywhere, everywhere!...Let us tear down parricide, the gladiator!...Let us drag the citizens’ assassin...let us break his statues...You live, you live, you command us, and we are happy...oh yes, yes, we are...we are truly, worthily, liberally happy...we no longer fear anything. Tremble, traitors!...our salvation demands it...Out senators, traitors!...traitors to the ax and rods!...traitors to the lions!...traitors to the rods!...Banish the memory of parricide, of the gladiator!...The gladiator’s statues perish!...Into the street, gladiator!...Caesar, command the fangs...let the senate’s parricide be torn apart...command it, it’s the tradition of our ancestors...He was more cruel than Domitian...more impure than Nero...let us do to him what he did to us!...Restore the innocents...honour the memory of the innocents...Let him be dragged, let him be dragged!...command it, command it, we implore you...He put the knife into each of our breasts. Let him be dragged!...He did not spare the aged, nor the women, nor his parents, nor his friends. Let him be dragged!...He stripped the temples. Let him be dragged!...He violated confidences. Let him be dragged!...He ruined families. Let him be dragged!...He put prices on our heads. Let him be dragged!...He sold the senate. Let him be dragged!...He looted the heir. Let him be dragged!...Get his spies out of the senate!...his traitors out of the senate!...corruptors of slaves, out of the senate!...You trembled with us...you know all...you know the virtuous and the evildoers. You know all...punish those who deserve it. Rectify the wrongs he has done us...we have trembled for you...we have crawled lower than our slaves...You reign. You command us. We are happy...yes, happy...Let us put parricide on trial!...command it, command its trial!...Come, show yourself, we await your presence...Alas, the innocents are still unburied!...Let the corpse of parricide be dragged!...Parricide opened the tombs. It snatched the dead...let its corpse be dragged!”

This is a chorus. This is how one should have an entire population speak if one dares to show it onstage. Let us compare the Roman people’s acclamation at the elevation of the emperor Pertinax with the acclamation of the Zephyrs when Atys is named high priest of Cybèle : [16]

Que devant vous tout s’abaisse et tout tremble. Vivez hereux, vos jours sont notre espoir: rien n’est si beau que de voir ensemble un grand mérite avec un grand pouvoir. Que l’on benisse le ciel propice, qui dans vos mains met le sort des humains.

(Let everything before you humble itself and tremble. Live happily, your days are our hope: nothing is more beautiful than to see great merit together with great power. Let us bless the auspicious heavens, which put the fate of humans into your hands.)

Or, let us compare it with this other chorus by a group of river gods:

Que l’on chante, que l’on danse, rions tous, lorsqu’il le faut: ce n’est jamais trop tôt que le plaisir commence. On trouve bientôt la fin des jours de réjouissance; on a beau chasser le chagrin, il revient plutôt qu’on ne pense.

(Let us sing, let us dance, everyone laugh when necessary; it is never too late for pleasure to begin. We soon come upon the end of days of rejoicing; however you drive away grief, it always returns sooner than expected.)

What people have ever expressed their most vivid ecstasies in such a monotonous and cold manner? Let us now remember the even more monotonous air Lully gives to these lines, and we see that the composer exceeded his poet by a lot.

Let people of taste decide between these choruses and the one I propose, and they will be forced to judge me equal to the best lyric poet in France. This is because dear Quinault sought his choruses in an insipid and artificial genre, while I took mine from reality and from the History that Lampridius preserved word for word.

This chorus might seem long, but it would not seem so to an able composer, who would recognize at a single glance the speed with which all these cries have to follow one another and be repeated. He would more likely reproach me for infringing on his rights for having put all sorts of expression, disorder, tumult, the confusion of an entire frantic population into my chorus, rather than confine myself to a simple outline of the principle ideas that music subsequently interprets as a poet should. He would reproach me, so to speak, for dictating all the roles and the musical score, for marking which cries are exclaimed by a single voice, and would reproach me from another perspective for interrupting a curse with an exclamation of joy, or for remembering the tyrant’s atrocities one after the other, for having one character say, “he did not spare the aged, nor the women,” and have another reply, “nor his parents,” and have third conclude, “nor his friends,” before all join together to cry, “let him be dragged!” This is an undertaking worthy of a man of genius. What a scene! I am struck by the cries of a thousand people drunk with fury and joy. I shiver at the appearance of the most terrifying and terrible image of public zeal.

On dance. In all countries, dance became musical theatre’s companion.

In Italy and in other theatres in Europe, the entr’actes are filled with ballets that bear no relation to the lyric poem . If this practice is barbaric, it is still possible to abolish it without compromising the basic performance, and this occurs as soon as the lyric poem is delivered from these episodes and enclosed as its spirit and constitution demand.

In France, the ballet is immediately associated with singing and the fundamental part of opera. As soon as a happy or unfortunate event occurs, it is immediately celebrated by a dance, and the action is suspended by the ballet. This pastiche section has recently even become the main feature of the lyric poem . Each act requires a divertissement – which has never acquired such a specific and strict meaning – and today the success of an opera depends not exactly on the ballet’s beauty but on the ability of the dancers performing it.

Nothing, it seems, testifies against French opera’s poem and music more than the continual and urgent need for these ballets. The action of this poem must be devoid of interest and warmth so that we can suffer it to be interrupted and suspended at any point by minuets and rigaudons. The song must be monotonous and insufferably boring, since we cannot be that engaged when each act is cut by a divertissement.

Following this practice, French opera has become a spectacle in which all of the characters’ happiness and misfortune is reduced to a dance.

In order to evaluate if this practice deserves the approval of men of taste, and if it is of inestimable value (as we constantly hear) to French opera over all other types of lyrical theatre to have dance united with poetry and music, it will be necessary to reflect on the following observations.

Dance, like the verses, can sometimes be historical in the lyric poem . Roland arrives to the meeting the treacherous Angélique has granted him. [17] After waiting for her in vain for a period of time, he sees a young group of people approach singing and dancing, celebrating Médor and Angélique, whom they have just accompanied to the port. It is from these expressions of joy and youthful and lively innocence that Roland learns of his misfortune and of his mistress’s betrayal. This situation is very beautiful, and it has been regarded as the masterpiece of French lyrical theatre with good reason. Let us see if the execution and theatrical representation respond to the sublime vision of the poet, and if Quinault was himself not forced to spoil it in order to conform to operatic practice. Having waited for a long time, having examined the numbers and the inscriptions and repressed the suspicions growing in the jealous heart, Roland hears some folk music. It is the youths catching up with him after having accompanied Médor and Angélique. Hoping to find his mistress among this happy gathering, Roland leaves the stage and goes out to meet the noise. At this very instant, the dancing and singing youths appear. Roland should reappear with them, but apparently he has already realized that Angélique is not among them. He thus goes to find her in the surrounding areas and leaves the place to the dancers and choristers. It is only after they entertain us with verses and dancing for half and hour that the hero returns and explains his misfortune. It is obvious that if we judged this ballet according to good taste, all that happens is the youths dance across the stage, that they initially mention Médor and Angélique, that from this moment a trembling Roland expresses his misfortune, and that he has no more patience than we do to wait for these entrées and contredances to finish in order to discover his fate, which is the only thing that interests us. I confess that it is not unrealistic for a group of youths, full of sweetness and joy, to stop in a nice place to dance and sing; but it suspends the plot of the drama at its most interesting moment, because the subject of the scene is not Angélique and Médor’s love or their praise. What effect do all these cold verses have on us at this moment? It is Roland’s misfortune and the natural and naïve way he discovers it that constitute the charm and interest of this truly admirable scene.

I have deliberately extended myself on the subject of the most fortuitously placed ballet that has even been staged in France’s lyric theatre, and it is evident that good taste and good sense reduce this ballet to nothing. What will they therefore do to those that the poet uses all the time, and if their voice is ever heard in this theatre, will the hero of the opera be allowed to prove his ardent desire to his mistress by having a group of people dance around her?

But is the idea of linking two ways of imitating nature in the same performance not fundamentally opposed to common sense and true taste? Is this not a barbarism worthy of these gothic times, in which the front of a painting is realised in relief, in which one smears a beautiful statue to give it black eyes or chestnut hair? It is permitted to confuse two different principles in the same poem and to have half of it performed by people who claim to only be able to speak while singing and half by others who pretend to know no other language than gesture and movement?

In order to successfully accomplish this drama, it is not necessary at least to have actors equally gifted in both arts, who are as good dancers as they are singers? How can it be tolerated that some of them never dance and that others never sing? Is it agreeable for a god to not know how to dance the meanest verses of a chaconne and to have to give his place to M. Vestris, whose only role in the drama is as servant to this god, but who crushes his god in an instant with the grace and nobility of his postures while the god himself is relegated, along with his elevated class, to a bench in the corner of the theatre?

Here in this childish or impossible performance is one of the many inconveniences of this confusion of the two talents, the two methods of imitation, which has come to be seen as an advantage but which has undoubtedly impeded the progress of dance in France.

To judge by the continuous use of these ballets, we would be forgiven for thinking that the art of dance is brought to its highest perfection in French operatic theatre. But when we realise that the ballet is only used in French opera as dance and not as imitation through dance, we can no longer be surprised by the continued mediocrity of French dance, and we can understand that in this case, a Frenchman full of talent and vision (M. Noverre) goes elsewhere to create ballet far from his native land.

It is true that in reading the programs of various operas, one finds a marvellous variety of celebrations and entertainments. But this variety gives way to the saddest uniformity in performance. All the celebrations are reduced to dancing for dancing’s sake; all the ballets are comprised of two lines of dancers who line up on either side of the theatre and then mingle, forming figures and groups randomly. The best dancers are therefore reserved for solo pieces or duets; for important occasions, they perform pas de trois, quatre, and even five or six, after which time the ballet’s main group, which stopped to leave room for the soloists, resumes its dance until the end of the ballet. For all these different divertissements, the composer writes chaconnes, lourés, sarabandes, minuets, passé-pieds, gavottes, rigaudons, and contredances. If there is occasionally an idea in the ballet, anmoment of action, this takes place in a pas de deux or pas de trois, after which the main group resumes its insipid dance. The only real difference between one celebration and another can be reduced to the tailoring of the opera that is being put on, which sometimes clothes the ballet in white, sometimes in green, sometimes in yellow, sometimes in red in keeping with the principles and rules of the warehouse.

In French opera, the ballet is therefore really nothing more than a dance academy, where mediocre subjects exercise under the eyes of the public, making figures, breaking them up, regrouping, and the greatest dancers show us the most difficult studies in different noble, graceful, and knowledgeable poses. The poet gives five or six different names to these academic exercises over the course of his poem. He sometimes gives his dancers white socks, sometimes red socks, sometimes blond wigs, sometimes black wigs, but the man of taste will not recognize any diversity in these ballets and can only regret that so many able dancers are used just for a few steps and rounds of the stage in the theatre.

In effect, this is the result of having so long misunderstood the use of art, which works on our senses through agitation and produces the deepest and most terrible impressions. What would we say about an academy of painters and sculptors that only shows us studies, heads, arms, legs, and poses without any concept, application, or specific imitation in a public exposition? All these things undoubtedly have value in the eyes of an enlightened connoisseur, but an exposition hall is not the same as a studio.

Dance is like song: joy must have led to the creation of the first dances just as it inspired the earliest songs, but a minuet, a contredance, and all the dances duplicating a ball are also displaced on the theatre precisely as song and verse are. It is only when the man of genius realized that dance could be a unique imitative art capable of expressing all feelings and passions without recourse to a language other than gesture and movement that dance became worthy of being staged. It is true that of all types of performance, this one has made the least progress among today’s artists, and it we have had a few attempts in Italy, England, and Germany, it must be admitted that it is still far from the prodigious efforts of pantomime that ancient history preserves the memory of.

Dance performance requires a poet, a composer, and a dance master. Its premise is to imitate nature through gesture and pantomime without any other discourse, without any inflection other than the one furnished by instrumental music towards the interpretation of its movements. The danced poem , or ballet, has to be followed, tied and untied like the lyric poem . It demands a lot more than speed of action and a large variety of situations. Since in this theatre discourse can only be expressed through gesture, nothing would be more misplaced than argumentative and conversational scenes, and dialogue in general cannot be used either in tragedy or in comedy, however much it is indispensable to the transition and preparation of significant scenes and interesting situations.

The poetics of lyric poetry are very easily applied to the ballet. Since nothing is less natural than an opera in which one sings from beginning to end, likewise nothing is more artificial than a ballet in which one always dances. The dance’s choreographer must know and be able to distinguish between tranquil and impassioned moments in nature, namely the scene and that of the aria. He must look for two distinct ways of expressing two such different moments and divides his poem between walking and dancing, just as the composer divides his between recitative and aria.

According to these principles, the ballet’s characters only dance in a moment of passion, because nature’s reality dictates that such a moment is one of violent and speedy movement. The rest of the action will be performed just by simple gestures, by a cadenced walk, more marked and more poetic than the ordinary course of events, from which there is no way to transition naturally and realistically into dance.

This moment holds the same place in ballet as the aria does in the lyric poem , but we can easily understand that this moment cannot be used to dance a minuet, a gavotte, or a few lines of chaconne. All these dance arias mean nothing, imitate nothing, express nothing. The poet indicates the subject and situation for this aria moment in the dance, and the composer’s role is to develop the emotion of all these movements. If they understand the same language as their art’s profession demands, the dance master and the intelligent dancer will find all their gestures marked and the order and nuance of all the movements marked in the composer’s aria.

Once the poet has created such a poem , and once the dance performance has achieved the degree of perfection that it is capable of, a great composer would no longer distain to set the ballet to music because it would no longer be a collection of pretty minuets and other little dance pieces that are more worthy of the tavern than of the theatre, and which have justly been abandoned to the orchestra’s first violin in Italy and Germany. This series of important and beautiful situations, drawn from the unique action of the subject matter and finishing with a convenient climax, will (in contrast to the composer) open up a vast and brilliant career in which he will be able to use his talents and compete for the most noble and interesting effect that it is possible to offer to a nation passionate for the fine arts.

The choreographer and the dancer will for their part feel that the performance of the poem requires something other than pirouettes and that strong or elegant poses, leg formations, and every detail of academic exercises and rounds of the room have no place in the theatre except insofar as they are appropriately placed with taste and intelligence, as they contribute to the expression of a touching situation, an interesting and poignant plot, as so that we see a profound study of nature and realistic movement in the dancer, quite independent of this science.

What has just been said only contains the preliminary elements of a poetics of dance, but these deserve to be developed with more care and in greater detail for the progress of an art that is far from perfection. The words that M. Noverre published on dance a few years ago are full of warmth and perspective, and seem to impose on him the duty of writing this poetics and of giving his art the influence that is its due and that it held for the ancients thanks to the magic and enthusiasm of its language.

On the creation of the lyric poem . The union of song and dance in same poem is not impossible and is maybe something desirable, but this association is quite different from the one we imaged in French opera and that good taste seems to proscribe.

Song is such a difficult art and demands so much application and skill that we should not hope that a great singer could also be a great actor. Such a case would be too rare to be regarded as anything but an exception. The performance of song and the expression it demands already preoccupy the singer too much for him to be able to give the same care to his acting. The movement that the plot demands is often so violent that it does not permit the singer to sing with elegance or with the necessary power, and I believe it impossible that in the final stages of emotion, the same actor can sing with the requisite warmth and enthusiasm and simultaneously abandon himself to deliriousness and the biggest emotional chaos without the precision of the singing suffering.

From another perspective, by reflecting on the Italian genius for aria , we see quite clearly that it is destined as much for the expression of gesture as for that of song, and an intelligent pantomime would find all its gestures and the entire order of its movements marked with the greatest subtlety in the instrumental part of an aria. On this point, music has imitated nature marvellously well. Passion does not only inspire the voice and vary its inflections; it puts the same variety and warmth into gesture and movement. Thus, moments of passion must in effect be a union of these two modes of expression. How can we therefore present them in our theatres without the one suffering by the other’s presence?

The biggest discoveries are always the work of chance. In Rome, the famous actor Andronicus, who was simultaneously a singer and a mime, was hoarse one day thanks to bis; recovatus obtudit vocem . The public did not want to miss a cherished actor, so Andronicus continued to dance pantomime, agit canticum , over the following days. Since his hoarseness did not make it possible for him to sing, he had a child stand in front of the orchestra’s flutist, and the child sang for him: puerum ante tibicinem statuit ad canendum . This makeshift performance pleased the audience. Excused from singing by an accident of fate, Andronicus applied himself to gesture and pantomime with more enthusiasm, and from this moment on, opera ( canticum ) was performed by two types of actors who simultaneously portray the same character, in the same arias, in the same measures, in the same scenes, the one group through song and the other, through dance or pantomime. The clown, or pantomime, sings only with his hands, histrionibus fabularum actus relinquitur , and the singer acts only with his voice. In collaboration with the flue, the voice explains by singing the plot, while dance executes it through gesture by collaborating with the song’s meter. Ad manum cantatur...Diverbia voci relicta . See [Titus Livius]. [18]

In the creation of our lyric poetry , careful imitation will make us adopt what chance once established in Rome’s theatres. In this way, our castrati, who are ordinarily excellent singers and mediocre actors, would merely be speaking instruments in the orchestra and placed as close to the stage as possible. They would perform the sung portion with such superior skill that nothing would distract them, while a talented pantomime would execute the action portion will the same enthusiasm and expression.

The more we penetrate the spirit of the lyric poem , the more we will be infatuated with the idea. Performed in this way, opera would be more restrained and charm but a small group of excessively sensitive men who understand the language of music. The more ignorant among the public would be as much ahead as the best connoisseur, because the pantomime would take care to translate the music word for word for him and render intelligible to his eyes whatever he could not hear with his ears.

This way of performing the lyric poem also restores the realm that the singer and impresario usurped from the poet and the composer. Anything that is not relevant to the plot would not be tolerated in this theatre. All the figurative and epic style would disappear from dramatic works, because what pantomime gesture can be found to express such words and such arias? And how would such a gesture make us feel that it resembles an untamed and proud steed or a ship battered by a storm without becoming ridiculous. The more poignant situations would no longer be energized by cold and inferior scenes. A bit embarrassed by the length of the show and the number of actors, the poet would direct his plot using a simple, strong plot that moves quickly to the climax that the nature of things or history suggest. I do not know how many acts, sets, or actors are necessary for the operas Andromaque or Didone to be constructed and performed, but I know that stripped of all that disfigures and upsets them, these plots would have a deeper and more terrible impression. The composer will not have changed anything on his side; the poet will have brought his closer to the simplicity and power of Athenian theatre, and theatrical representation will have acquired a realism and charm for which it would be foolish to mark out effects and boundaries.

Suppose that with such constraints, the length of a drama did not fill the entire time allocated to the performance. Nothing would prevent us from again imitating the Athenian practice of performing more than one drama. The singing and dancing of the lyric poem would be followed by the ballet: and this latter would be suited to the representation of a few instances of the marvellous made visible.

But man’s fate means that his insignificance always seems to be irrelevant to his most sublime efforts of genius, and we put so much negligence and inconsequence into the most serious affairs that it is not possible to believe us capable of the stubbornness and perseverance necessary to perfect a simple art of entertainment. The fate of empires and the fate of theatres are all the work of chance: everything depends on a convergence of circumstances that good or ill luck brings together. A great ruler might appear somewhere in Europe, and after having earned the right to devote himself to the glorious hobby of fine arts culture through his deeds, he could give his views on the most beautiful of the arts, and under his reign the dramatic arts might become the greatest monument erected to the happiness of the people and the glory of man’s genius.

The Italians have a lyric poem that they call oratorio . These are dramas with plots taken from biblical stories. They have sometimes been performed on stages placed in churches, but these instances are rare and generally these pieces have no purpose. It is astonishing that this spiritual passion, which favours religious pomp so strongly in Italy, has not assisted poetry and music with the intention of dedicating itself to religion. Such performances might have become very august and interesting in the celebration of the church solemnities.

It would not be odd for a man of taste to make even more of Metastasio’s oratorios than of his most famous operas. We can appreciate that the poet was not liable to a host of arbitrary and absurd rules that only hamper and disfigure the lyric poem .

The composer is permitted a more elevated and elaborate style in the oratorio than in opera. The religion that makes this drama sacred also seems to authorize the composer to distance the characters a bit more from nature by giving them less familiar tones and a stronger poetic style.

Notes:

1. These lines are from the second act of Pietro Metastasio’s oratorio libretto Isacco figura del Redentore (1740). The most famous musical setting is by the Czech composer Josef Mysliveček, whose version of the oratorio was first performed in Florence in 1776.

2. These are characters from Metastasio’s hugely famous libretto Artaserse . The aria text below is also from this libretto.

3. This duet and the excerpts that follow are from Metastasio’s opera seria libretto Demofoonte (first set to music by Antonio Caldara in Vienna in 1733).

4. These lines are from Quinault’s Armide, which was set as a tragédie en musique by Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1686.

5. It is unclear which operas are being referred to here.

6. This quote is from Horace’s Ars Poetica. The full citation is: “Semper ad eventum festinat et in medias res non secus ac notas auditorem rapit.” (“He always hurries to the outcome and he plunges his listeners into the middle of the story as though they were already familiar with it.”)

7. These lines are likely from Metastasio’s Ciro riconosciuto (1736), which is likely based in part on Voltaire’s Mérope.

8. This may be an abbreviated excerpt from Horace.

9. Roughly translated, “Distance enhances beauty.”

10. “Let God not make a difference.”

11. This refers to Racine’s tragedy Phaedra .

12. Again, these lines are from Philippe Quinault’s libretto Armide.

13. Tibule et Délie , or Les Saturnales is a work with music by Mademoiselle Beaumesnil to a libretto by Louis Fuzelier (1784).

14. Caffarelli (the stage name of Gaetano Majorano) was an Italian castrato who lived from 1710-1783. Caterina Gabrieli, nicknamed “La Cochetta,” was an Italian soprano (1730-1796).

15. An opera libretto by Metastasio first set to music in 1724.

16. Quinault’s Atys was set in 1676 by Jean-Baptiste Lully.

17. Lully and Quinault’s Roland was first staged in 1685.

18. It seems this article was never included in the Encyclopédie .