ABSTRACT
The period that separated the Querelle des Bouffons (1752–54) from Gluck’s arrival in France (1773) was a time of uncertain direction for the Académie royale de musique, more familiarly known as the Paris Opéra. Rameau composed few new works, yet no composer of similar stature appeared to replace him. At the fair theaters and Comédie-Italienne, a new genre of opéra-comique flourished, but it was not adopted by the Opéra. Since new librettos were scarce, Dauvergne and others experimented with the Italianate practice of making fresh settings of old librettos, but few such pieces succeeded at the box office. 1 Indeed, few new pieces of any kind were written for the Opéra; the institution filled its calendar mainly with revivals of old works by Rameau and others. Editors even breathed new life into some of Lully’s tragédies en musique by reworking them to fit contemporary taste, and these productions did well financially. Still, an increasingly large part of the Opéra’s schedule had to be filled by so-called “fragments”—independent actes de ballet and individual acts from opéra-ballets grouped together to make an evening’s entertainment. Not even Philidor’s tragédie-lyrique Ernelinde (1767) established a new direction for French serious opera, despite its innovations. In the end, it was Gluck who brought renewed vigor to the Paris Opéra by converting it “from a museum into a place of musical novelty and dramatic vitality.” 2
