ABSTRACT
The Prometheus myth achieved tremendous popularity in France much later in the nineteenth century than in German-speaking lands, a delay three factors explain. First, the fusion of Prometheus and Napoleon that appealed to writers and composers during revolutionary upheavals became unattractive in France after Napoleonic idealism collapsed. Indeed, except for Ferdinando Paër’s Italian-language cantata, Prometeo al Caucaso, completed in Paris during the 1810s, composers produced no other musical renditions during the succeeding imperial, republican, and royalist periods until 1849, when Fromental Halévy published his large-scale cantata.1 Second, critical and popular reactions to romantic theatrical excess precipitated a flurry of new translations of classical dramas during the 1840s, reinforcing an earlier neoclassicism that suffused paintings of Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) and other emulators of Renaissance models. And third, even after neo-Hellenism regained artistic potency, Prometheus endured lingering neglect because Aeschylus was considered inferior to the other great Athenian playwrights, Sophocles and Euripides.2 The situation changed by the late 1840s, when new Aeschylean translations demonstrated his supposed literary coarseness was a virtue, not a flaw. His Prometheus Bound subsequently inspired nine musical settings, all completed between 1849 and 1900.3
Four of these versions raise unique, extraordinarily diverse issues of importance in French culture while preserving the myth’s traditional humanism, whereby mankind progresses toward enlightened freedom. Halévy’s cantata reflects burgeoning neoHellenism by using quarter tones, intervals found in the music and theory of ancient Greece. Another cantata by Camille Saint-Saëns glorifies his nation’s emergence as an industrial power. An unpublished score by Augusta Holmès offers a perspective on the Franco-Prussian War. And Fauré’s tragédie lyrique, designed for a giant amphitheater in Béziers, articulates Languedoc’s regional identity and honors populist theatrical traditions.
