The Three epochs of French opera repertory, 1770-1900

Sabine Teulon Lardic (1) , Patrick Taïeb (2)

1 CRISES - Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Sciences humaines et Sociales de Montpellier
2 IRCL - Institut de recherche sur la Renaissance, l'Age Classique, et les Lumières.

Delineating the Operatic repertoire of French cities leads to consider a periodization over a broader nineteenth century. Thanks to the production system in which Paris creates first the operas, then departmental theaters spread it, a "national" repertoire progressively emerges, uniformized by several factors. By considering the whole programming (reprises, creations and premières), treated with the quantitative method, brings out three periods. Before 1830, the genre of opéra comique triumphs before coexisting with the Grand opéra's genre and foreign operas, using the processes of translation and adaptation. After 1864, this mixed repertoire is filtered and stimulated again by the advent of the operetta and Italian and German operas. In appendices, some extracts of the programming of Bordeaux, Rouen, Lyon, Montpellier and Nîmes give some evidence while addressing age variations within the repertoire.

Mots clés: "national" repertoire; Grand opéra's; opéra comique; operetta; translation: adaptation

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Sabine Teulon Lardic, Patrick Taïeb. The Three epochs of French opera repertory, 1770-1900. Cormac Newark and William Weber. The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon, Oxford University Press, pp.157-184, 2020, Oxford Handbooks, 978-0-19-022420-2. ⟨hal-03975970⟩