France has had its own dramatic and operatic tradition. While Italian opera has had some influence, affected itself by its contact with the principles of French classical drama, French opera has remained true to its own cultural and linguistic traditions.
Comédie- ballet and Tragédie- lyrique
Paradoxically French opera owes its origin to a composer of Italian origin. Jean- Baptiste Lully was brought to France as a boy and as time went on established himself in a leading position in the musical life of his adopted country. In collaboration with Molière he contributed to the art of the comédie-ballet and with the poet Quinault he created the French five- act tragédie lyrique , itself indebted both to earlier French forms of ballet and drama and to Italy. Lully came to hold a dominant position, with a royal monopoly that gave him control over music in the theatre. While it is now usual to perform Molière's comedies without their music or their ballet, the plays were originally conceived with a closely related element of dance and music. Le bourgeois gentilhomme , for example, which has had other more recent musical offshoots, finds a natural place for music as Monsieur Jourdain, the nouveau riche of the title, tries to acquire the arts of a gentleman. Apart from the comic musical episodes of his singing lesson and the scene in which he is supposedly ennobled by a Turkish Mufti, there is also a final comic ballet for a mixture of French, Spanish, Italian and other dancers and singers. The form was stifled when Lully claimed ownership not only of the music but of the texts and succeeded in exercising intolerable control over Molière's collaboration with another composer.
The tragédie-lyrique created by Lully and the poet Quinault was not necessarily tragic, but was, at least, serious in its treatment of subjects usually drawn from mythology. The tradition was continued by composers such as Campra and Charpentier and resumed with signal success by Rameau from the 1730s onwards. These operas, however, have never found a place in international repertoire. They belonged essentially to the French court of the ancien régime and often had political relevance in prologues that praised the King and plots that reflected recent royal successes.
Comic opera
As in Italy, comic opera itself developed from more popular sources in the 18 th century, notably from the Paris Fair Theatres. Here existing tunes were often used for new words, as they were to be in The Beggar's Opera in England. Travelling companies of players and the actors of the Italian theatre played an important part in the development of a form that mixed speech and music and closely involved a popular audience. As the century went on, what had often been a coarse form of entertainment developed into something much more acceptable to the educated. Writers like Favart and the social philosopher Rousseau turned to simple country life for their plots, although the picture they offer is highly idealised.
The 1750s brought the famous quarrel between those who favoured the Italian opera and those who held to older French traditions. This revived a traditional opposition between the French and the Italian that had occurred a hundred years before, when the Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin was blamed by politicians for the high cost of Italian opera that he had had staged in Paris and forced into exile. Now, in 1752, an Italian company presented a series of Italian shorter, lighter- hearted intermezzos in Paris with reasonable success. The literary war that arose, known as the Querelle des Bouffons , was initiated by the German diplomat and critic, Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, at one time a friend of the Mozarts. He had harsh comments to make on French opera and was later joined in his strictures by Rousseau. Their attacks led to a series of pamphlets, espousing one side or the other. While the Italian troupe engaged at the Opéra duly left Paris in 1754, Italian influence remained, to lead to a new form of French comic opera of greater musical and dramatic interest.
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