Operatic Echoes in the Global Francophone World
Chair(s): Erica Levenson (University of Michigan)
From its inception, French opera sounded abroad. Courts hired French dancing masters throughout Europe, nobles on Grand Tours sent French orchestras back to their courts in the Holy Roman Empire, Huguenot réfugiés published and performed operatic music and operas in the Netherlands, and touring troupes performed outside of France’s continental borders. But as France’s empire expanded, French opera also echoed in colonial spaces, from Nouvelle-Orléans to Montréal to Port-au-Prince. How was French opera used to impose, regulate, or complicate new forms of hierarchy, governance, and spirituality in these colonial spaces? What adaptive processes did opera undergo for use in colonial settings, and how did listeners hear and ascribe meaning to these sonic experiences?
Despite French opera reverberating—either as spectacle or in constituent parts used for social musicking—throughout the Francophone world, musicological literature has only recently begun to assess larger narratives of its dissemination, migration, sociability, and signifying power. Recent scholarship of French opera and empire has contributed groundbreaking analyses of music in new locales, but the case studies have yet to be placed in dialogue. This session bridges that gap by bringing together scholarship on French opera’s circulation and transformations in the process of moving from Paris—Versailles to global contexts. The first paper analyzes a manuscript owned by the Ursuline nuns in Nouvelle-Orléans to demonstrate how the performance of opera airs repurposed Counter-Reformation rhetoric in the project of constructing racial hierarchies. The second paper investigates the transformation of French opéras-comiques into circus spectacles and argues that the new genre acted as a democratizing rather than a colonizing force in early North America. The third paper examines an early Haitian opera, arguing that its Enlightenment critique of superstition and Vodou dramatizes the anxieties of the Francophile elite over African cultural retentions in a Black republic striving for global recognition. Together, these papers examine how operatic music was conceptualized and repurposed within broader frameworks of empire and colonization, addressing how geography, race, rank, gender, religion, and local aesthetics shaped opera’s many echoes. By doing so, this session illuminates the multifaceted—and often contradictory—ways opera was employed, interpreted, and reused in global contexts.
Presentations of the Symposium
Singing Subjugation: Ursuline Nuns and Opera Airs in Colonial Nouvelle-Orléans
John Romey
Purdue University Fort Wayne
In 1754 Monsieur Nicollet gifted the Ursuline nuns in Nouvelle-Orléans a manuscript, titled “Nouvelles poésies spirituelles et morales,” consisting of 294 sacred parodies—devotional texts set to opera airs to cleanse them of their profane and worldly residue. In this paper, I argue that the manuscript provides evidence of how Counter-Reformation rhetoric, developed to combat Huguenot heresy in France, was repurposed in the colonies to construct racial hierarchies. In Nouvelle-Orléans, sacred parodies functioned as spiritual tools that worked in tandem with the legal codification of slavery under the Code Noir, the royal decree defining the conditions of enslavement in the French colonies. Counter-Reformation theology juxtaposed light, divinity, and salvation against blackness, sin, and death. Through performance of opera airs, the nuns sonically projected a theological justification for racial subjugation, suggesting that divine grace could liberate the faithful from both Hell’s flames, which charred flesh, and spiritual bondage.
The Ursuline convent in Nouvelle-Orléans presents a rich setting for contextualizing the refocused rhetoric of the Counter-Reformation. Soon after their arrival in 1727, the nuns began purchasing and selling enslaved Africans to work on their plantation and within their cloister. Lacking the traditional funding source of dowries provided by new initiates, slave labor enabled the nuns to focus their attention on missionary and educational endeavors. Beginning in the final two decades of the seventeenth century, the Ursulines began to incorporate the singing of sacred parodies of contemporary opera airs into their educational initiatives. Because the Code Noir mandated Catholic baptism for all residents of French colonies, the nuns offered catechism classes for women, enslaved Africans, and native Americans. Enslaved Africans, especially those living or studying in the convent, and free Black men and women would have been subjected to a theological discourses that equated their flesh with sin, while white colonial students were taught to perceive these racial hierarchies as divinely ordained. The manuscript thus reveals how spiritual song repurposed an existing discourse of blackness in a colonial context and how opera airs functioned as sonic vehicles for colonial ideologies of race and servitude.
Democratizing French Opéra-Comique: Circus Show in Eighteenth-Century Montréal
Elizabeth Rouget
Princeton University
This paper argues that the transformation of French opéras-comiques into circus spectacles rendered the new genre a democratizing rather than a colonizing force in early North America. In the long eighteenth century, French travelling troupes hailing from France and Saint Domingue performed the most popular opéras-comiques by composers such as Grétry, Dalayrac, Monsigny for French-speaking audiences from New Orleans to Québec City. These works were enthusiastically consumed by an eager Francophone public looking to reinforce their French allegiances and sensibilities. Ricketts’s Amphitheatre, a circus troupe founded in Philadelphia, provided significant innovation by performing opera favourites, such as Duni’s Les deux chasseurs et la laitière (1763), as ballet pantomimes. For audiences accustomed to the physicality and visual spectacle of the circus, these ballet productions not only solved the problem of the compatibility of the genre, but also its linguistic intelligibility.
Circus performances in early North America performed a rubaboo of entertainments catering to a varied set of tastes. Although largely a French-speaking city, Montréal in the eighteenth century was home to many English speakers and the success of performances relied on their accessibility in a multilingual context. Duni’s Les deux chasseurs et la laitière was performed as an opera by the Théâtre de Société in 1789 and 1797, and as a pantomime by Ricketts’s circus in 1798. By comparing the Montréal reception of the traditional performances of Duni’s work to those of its pantomime variation, I argue that the genre mutation was necessary to appeal to a larger and diverse audience. The comparatively inexpensive tickets to the circus provided greater access to such entertainments and their outdoor setting allowed unseated viewers (often servants and children) to catch a glimpse of the action. From a court context to a circus tent, the quintessential French genre became democratized in its new setting, and it was precisely this kind of hybrid form of entertainment that would play such a crucial role in the development of musical theatre on the North American continent.
Reflections on the So-Called Enlightenment: Staging Science and Superstition in Post-Revolutionary Haiti
Henry Stoll
University of Michigan
In August 1820, a young woman “of sixteen or seventeen years” captivated the Haitian city of Port-au-Prince with inexplicable feats—vomiting nails, conjuring live animals, and extracting pins from her eyes—and enchanted audiences with a “musical talent of brilliant execution.” In a city that had, just that year, welcomed the antics of European illusionists and traveling circuses, her performances drew vehement condemnation from the nation’s Francophile elite, increasingly anxious about the influence of Vodou within the fledgling republic. Leading the charge against her was Noël Colombel, a Paris-educated statesman and member of Haiti’s Commission for Public Education, who, in a twenty-three-page polemic—Réflexions sur un prétendu prodige (Reflections on a So-Called Miracleworker, 1820)—decried the spread of sorcery and superstition in a land “where imaginations are so fertile and flexible.”
Yet, her marvelous acts also inspired one of Haiti’s earliest operas. Published anonymously—though likely by Colombel or journalist Jules Solime Milscent—Le Philosophe-Physicien (The Philosopher-Physicist, 1820) stages an intervention against baseless superstition through its protagonist, Gélanor, a “skillful physicist” whose “cabinet of truth” compels all who enter to divulge “their most secret thoughts.” Representing the Haitian populace, meanwhile, is his naïve servant, François, whose suspicion of his patron’s craft—“I am inclined to believe that our papa-loi [Vodou priests] are just as cunning as your physicists”—represents public skepticism of scientific claims and “so-called” rationalism. In twelve songs and thirteen scenes, the playwright draws heavily upon Enlightenment rhetoric and French operatic convention as myriad characters, in a quest for candor, step into Gélanor’s “cabinet of truth.”
This paper raises Le Philosophe-Physicien as a case study for understanding the paradoxical nature of the early Haitian Republic: a nation rhetorically committed to republican ideals yet ambivalent about its Afro-diasporic cultural identity. Though intended as a rationalist critique of irrational beliefs, the opera unwittingly dramatizes the failure of Haiti’s elite to police the boundary between “European science” and “African superstition.” And in the end, the opera’s moralizing agenda collapses under its own logic: by centering its critique on a fantastical “cabinet of truth,” it endorses the very supernaturalism it seeks to discredit.
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