Conference Agenda

In 1673, a group of musicians and actors from Madrid wrote a desperate letter from the French border: they wanted to return home and asked the kings of Spain for financial help. They had been sent to France ten years earlier with the young queen of France, infanta Maria Theresa of Spain, to entertain her. With her marriage to Louis XIV, the history of the Spanish players in her retinue was lost, part of a broader “disappearing” of her own past that happened as she was absorbed into the French royal family. While the women who became Queen of France were often more symbol than person, and therefore quasi-invisible (Cosandey), this was particularly true for Maria Theresa, who came to the throne while the powerful Queen Regent, Anne of Austria, was still alive. Finally, patrilinear histories concentrating on Louis XIV have ignored the Spanish heritage of his queen and the artists around her.

Using the presence of the Spanish troupe in France as a lens, I explore the cultural consumption and patronage of Maria Theresa. As an immigrant herself, she was a vector of mobility for migrant musicians and actors, someone who can center the performances of “cultural outsiders” in our histories. Drawing on newly-discovered archival documents (diplomatic correspondence, court records, letters between various members close to the court, travel literature, etc..), my paper sheds light on the previously uncharted activities of this troupe in France, including why they ended up in miserable circumstances. This troupe consisted of about 20 people, among them were some of the most renowned actress-singers in Madrid, as well as actors, harpists, guitarists and their servants. During their decade in Paris, they performed half-sung plays in Spanish, "comedia" with music and dances, and participated in ballets de cour such as the Ballet de Muses (1666).

My study of their performances reveals the kaleidoscopic reality of a court where languages and musical styles coexisted. Ultimately, it rescues the unknown story of a collective that played a significant role as cultural creators in two countries.

This paper revisits research on the dedication of print music in the late eighteenth century (Green 2019). It examines two hitherto unexamined volumes of revolutionary songs authored by a French patriot, Thomas Rousseau (1750–1800), dedicated to a gender-inclusive group called “citizen youth” (la jeunesse citoyenne) in 1792 and 1795. This dedication of these volumes entitled Les Chants du patriotism occurred when the feminist Olympe de Gouges died on the guillotine in 1793.

The revolutionary songs compiled in these volumes commemorated critical events during the French Revolution, providing a historical narrative by chronicling major revolutionary milestones. Many songs were set to operatic arias excerpted from opéras comiques (e.g., Grétry’s Richard Coeur de Lion and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Le Devin du village), still performed in theaters during the French Revolution (Doe 2021). They reveal Rousseau’s impact as a collector of songs, from the pamphlets he created showing songs with new lyrics set to known operatic arias to printing pamphlets for subscribers and compiling them as volumes. This multi-step process illustrates how oral and print cultures constructed citizenship identity for both genders.

The dedication of songs to a group (not an individual) indicates the domestic construction of the citizen—citoyen and citoyenne—as a political identity molded by fathers as the targeted subscribers of these prints. It also extends Jann Pasler’s argument of public utility’s relation to citizenship in Third Republic France back to the 1790s (Pasler 2009). Moreover, these two song collections helped to explain Rousseau’s later works, including Le Livre utile et agréable pour la jeunesse (1798), which served as an instruction manual for instilling the values of courage and virtue in the youth of both sexes. There, rather than emphasizing Olympe de Gouges’s La Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791), Rousseau reprinted La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et de devoirs du citoyen and lyrics of the patriotic songs—including La Marseillaise, the national anthem adopted in 1795—that enthused singers as children of liberty. Dedicating these songs to the gender-inclusive “citizen youth” demonstrates an attempt--at a delicate moment--to acknowledge gender in citizenship.

French opéra-comique, which flourished in America between 1780 and 1810, provides unexpected insights into the volatile political environment and the formation of the new national American identity. Performed in the original French, or in translation with ballet pantomime, these delightful works, starring such renowned musician-dancers as Alexandre Placide and Suzanne Douvillier—who had sought refuge in North America after the French and Haitian revolutions—charmed audiences in cities such as New Orleans, Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Montréal, and Québec City. Most French comic operas, especially pre-Revolutionary ones, have unambiguous royalist agendas: the king (or noble lord) is the powerful hero who brings peace to a world in a crisis. In post-revolutionary America, these works were necessarily problematic. In cities that retained loyalist sentiments, opéra-comiques could be performed as originally written, in either English or French, however, in places with strong revolutionary fervour—such as Philadelphia—they typically underwent modifications to reflect the emerging values and identities of new audiences.

Monsigny’s Le déserteur is one such work that upholds the values of royal guardianship and sovereignty. After the protagonist is condemned to death for desertion, his fiancée pleads to the King for a royal pardon, he magnanimously agrees, and the opera’s finale culminates in a resounding chorus of “Vive le Roi!” In Philadelphia, where the opera was performed at least twelve times between 1787 and 1799 using Charles Dibdin’s English translation, a rousing chorus of “Long live the King” would certainly have evoked the specter of George III rather than the more distant Louis XVI, potentially heightening political tensions in a volatile moment in American history. Drawing upon newly discovered archival sources, my paper explores the performances of Le déserteur in Philadelphia, how it was altered to suit English-speaking audiences, and the qualities that rendered it so successful within the early federal American context. In so doing, I reveal as well how the reception history of Le déserteur—opéra-comique in North America—was implicated in the complex political tensions between French royalists, British monarchists, and American revolutionaries.