ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to consider the implications for National operatic culture of the sociable practices. In all cases 'talking about opera' raised the question of authority and by implication also cultural 'ownership', whose full implications for the Revolution. Talking about opera was both a philosophical and an aesthetic issue, a political problem, and a social practice. In 1773, Andre Morellet was an admirer of Italian music, had written a sizeable theoretical text which, at least by implication, supported operatic reform along Italian lines; and the following year was also enthusiastic about Christoph Willibald Gluck's opera. The interrelation of cultural authority and musical taste is however a complex and important aspect of the sociology of opera in eighteenth-century France. For instance, the metaphor of line and colour derived from the late seventeenth-century querelle du coloris was a central part of the means by which Gluck conceptualized the revised relationship between libretto and score in his French 'reform' operas.
