Vaudeville and opéra comique in eighteenth-century Paris
Opera as a genre developed in France under the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, who composed tragédie en musique at the court of Louis XIV. Since the seventeenth century, theatrical performances were strictly controlled in Paris and only three government-sanctioned stages existed: the Académie Royale de musique (better known as the Opéra), the Comédie-Italienne, and the Comédie-Française. Despite these absolutist policies, non-sanctioned performances were held in boulevard and fair theaters, which incorporated not only music, but also acrobatics, puppetry, and other forms of entertainment.
Through these unofficial performances, vaudevilles became an exceedingly popular musical genre. This entry from the Encyclopédie describes vaudevilles as a type of song to which lyrics are added to a known melody. Vaudevilles, by the end of the eighteenth century, came to be like today's broadway musicals–a mix of dialogue and song, often the text of which is set to pre-existing melodies. Many vaudevilles did, however, contain new music. Les Visitandines (1791/3) is an example of such a work that combined pre-existing and new musical material.
The intermingling of vaudeville with Italian opera, which briefly graced Parisian stages twice during the eighteenth century before it was met with (temporary) banishment, gave birth to a new genre called opéra comique. The definition of this new genre remained in flux over the course of the entire eighteenth century.
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