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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.
Opéra Comique
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.
Reform and Revolution
In the 1770s Gluck's reformed opera was introduced to Paris, treating very differently the kind of subjects that had been the substance of the tragédie lyrique . French versions of his earlier Italian operas, already staged in Vienna, were now mounted in Paris. Gluck was able, in fact, to show a new compromise. The subjects of his operas might be drawn from classical mythology and legend, like the subjects chosen by Lully, but these were treated in a modern way. The operas were less stylized and very much more dramatic in their effect. At the same time the form of so- called opéa comique could also turn its attention to more serious subjects, as comic opera had in Italy, catering largely for a new middle-class audience. The period before the Revolution also brought the building of provincial opera-houses, where such works would provide the general repertoire.
The Revolution brought obvious changes. French serious opera, in the form of the tragédie lyrique was essentially associated with the monarchy, and had, in any case, been affected by the Paris operas of Gluck, with their new element of dramatic realism. The 1790s, however, demanded work of revolutionary relevance. This trend lasted only a short time. The new century brought a re-organization of opera throughout the country under Napoleon, who instituted reforms in the opera in Paris itself, exercising a limiting control over all theatres. Under the restored Bourbon monarchy opera flourished. The period saw the success in Paris of Rossini and his operas written for the French stage. At the same time there was a continuation of the opéra comique by composers like Auber, Halévy, Berlioz and Bizet. Subjects varied from the light- hearted to the tragically serious, with productions at the Opéra- Comique, the company established in 1714, distinguished from those at the Opéra by their less formal requirements. French opéra comique, in the 19th century at least, does not have to be comic; the descriptive term indicates a much wider category of work.
Grand Opéra
From the later 1820s Paris saw the creation of operas of greater pretensions in the grand opéra staged by the Opéra, the leading official company, itself. These operas, which reach a height of grandeur and spectacle in the work of Meyerbeer, were held in the highest esteem. The first grand opéra , in 1828, was Auber's La muette de Portici (The Dumb Girl of Portici), followed in 1829 by Rossini's last opera Guillaume Tell (William Tell). From Meyerbeer came Le prophète , Les Huguenots and L'africaine . These involved elaborate and complex spectacle. The scenery offered a degree of realism and often of grandeur. Crowd scenes allowed the chorus to act, rather than stand in formal poses, while music added to general effect. Examples of grand opéra retain in themselves their own place in operatic history but also deserve attention for the effect they had on other opera on a similarly grand and spectacular scale, works by Verdi and by Wagner. Socially the Opéra was important. Its magnificence reflected the growing wealth and prosperity of the country and of its upper classes.
The Opéra- Comique
 French opera continued in the 19 th century with the official company known as the Opéra- Comique, derived from the tradition of the same name and allowing more freedom in choice of subject and treatment. The company had been established early in the preceding century, derived from the performances of the Paris Fairs. It had amalgamated with the Paris Italian Theatre and then with other establishments offering similar repertoire. In particular, the Opéra- Comique, in the various theatres in which it performed, allowed some spoken dialogue. Outstanding examples of works staged by the Opéra- Comique include Gounod's Faust and Bizet's Carmen . Neither of these, of course, are comedies. In Gounod's opera Faust sells his soul to the Devil, a bargain from which he is finally rescued by the intervention of the spirit of the girl he has seduced. Carmen is a story of low life in Spain, a tale of criminals, jealousy and murder that has much in common with Italian verismo . The tradition continued with some of the operas of Massenet, a composer of importance in the last part of the 19th century. His Manon , where the heroine is convicted of immorality and transported, to die in the American desert, was staged by the Opéra- Comique, as was his treatment of the story of Cinderella, Cendrillon.
Opéra Bouffe
It would be impossible to leave Paris without mention, at least, of the genre of French opéra bouffe in the second half of the 19 th century. This owes its name to Jacques Offenbach and is very much lighter in style than the comedies of opéra comique , which, by comparison, grew in seriousness of purpose. Best known of Offenbach's works in this form is Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld). This mocks the serious legend tackled earlier by Monteverdi and by Gluck, among many others. Now Orpheus is glad to be rid of Eurydice, while she is quite happy to enjoy herself in the Underworld, where the Blessed Spirits have greeted her with a spirited can- can. Opéra bouffe is light-hearted operetta, designed to satirise and to entertain. As such it seems typical of the French Second Empire, the period of Napoleon III, brought to a disastrous end in the defeat at Sedan in 1870.
20 th Century
The new century brought various changes. The traditional form of opéra comique had come to involve itself in more serious subjects, and composers understandably preferred other descriptive titles for works that lacked any trace of comedy. The early years brought Debussy's remarkable Pelléas et Mélisande , based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, set in an impressionistic pre-Raphaelite world. Other French operas reflected the interests and trends of the day. Ravel collaborated, after the First World War, with the writer Colette in his delightful L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Enchantments), in which a naughty child is tormented by his victims. Darius Milhaud collaborated with Paul Claudel in Christophe Colomb and Francis Poulenc with the surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire in Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias). Later in life he was to tackle the weightier subject of religious martyrdom in Dialogues des carmélites (Dialogues of the Carmelites), while Olivier Messiaen turned to the life of St Francis for a subject.
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