Conference Agenda

This paper takes as its premise that the choice of air connu in a vaudeville was not simply a question of mindlessly plugging a lyric into any tune that it would fit and that there is a reason why certain airs were used over and over. To demonstrate this, I shall consider Le beau Lycas aimait Thémire (Caveau 1778), a very popular air connu which has its orgins in Les Artistes par occasion ou L’Amateur de Tivoli, Opéra bouffon en un acte, libretto by Alexandre Duval, music by Charles-Simon Catel, first performed at the Opéra-Comique on 4 February 1807. To date, I have found 103 vaudevilles produced between 1817 and 1867 in which this air appears. Part of the reason for its popularity was the composer’s decision to provide a melody that is basically one note per syllable of text (unlike an elaborate operatic aria) which made it easy for any other author to plug in a different text. But there is more. My other hypothesis is that there was something about the original lyrics of the air and its musical setting that made it appropriate for particular dramatic situations in vaudevilles. In particular, I will argue that the original lyrics, while innocuous on the surface, contained a hidden sexual, even obscene, meaning that everybody, including the original composer recognized, that the original composer crafted his musical setting to express that meaning, that the first users of the air in vaudevilles were also aware of this subtext, and reflected it in the new lyrics they provided for the air, thus creating a template that was adopted by later authors of vaudevilles long after the original text of the air was forgotten. I will further show that the main characteristics of the original orchestration were also reproduced regardless of date or theatre; in so doing, these vaudevilles transmitted the actual music from the opéra comique (as opposed to just the tune) to a wider general public.

To argue for the singularity of anything is to provoke: in this paper I will suggest that we have yet to explore the singularity of music-text relations in 18^th and 19^th-century French vaudeville. This is perhaps unsurprising given the relatively early stage of musicological scholarship on vaudeville, and yet vaudeville has always been acknowledged as a “background” to French opera, particularly opéra-comique. Paradoxically, then, exploring vaudeville’s singularity, and recasting its relationship to other music theatre genres, will also inform our understanding of the evolution of text-setting in French opera and chanson, and question our enduring assumption that breaking into song is always a “heightening” of register.

In the first part of my paper, I outline two facets of vaudeville’s singularity. Informed by practice-based research — preparing a vocal score for Sewrin, Merle and Dumersan’s La Laitière Suisse ou L’Aveugle de Clarens (1815) for performance; resetting, and workshopping, songs from Bouilly, Pain and Doche’s Fanchon la Vielleuse (1803)—I show how the much-vaunted 18^th-century French tradition of honouring spoken inflections in song is turned on its head by vaudeville by a more pragmatic tradition of setting new text to pre-existing music. This in turn poses questions of performance practice, namely, how to balance the particular (singular) interaction of musical and textual logics in vaudeville songs. But in addition, the vaudeville scripts reveal an often “unmarked” interchange between spoken and sung text, itself requiring a delivery that reduces the distance between those two registers in order to maintain the flow of dialogue.

Both characteristics, I argue, reveal very different combinations of musical and textual priorities and significations relative to other stage genres in this period. In the second part of the paper, I make the historical case for vaudeville’s singularity, contextualising my practical and analytical observations in both German and French reception and theoretical discourses of the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the difficulty expressed by adapters and translators of French vaudeville into other languages and contexts, including August von Kotzebue and Heinrich Himmel’s “normalization” of Fanchon into a Singspiel for the Berlin stage in 1804, makes a further case for vaudeville’s singularity.

Three assumptions shape our common understanding of ninetheeth-century Parisian vaudeville and operetta. First: vaudeville used borrowed music until the 1864 deregulation of theatres. Second: after 1864, vaudeville dropped its vocal numbers. Third: fin-de-siècle opérette is the successor to Second Empire opéra-bouffe. The first is mostly (though not completely) accurate; the other two are not.

This paper stems from a larger project that seeks to apply ‘distant reading’ principles to late nineteenth-century Parisian theatre with vocal numbers. From an examination of the roughly 300 full-length plays with vocal numbers premièred in the final three decades of the century and published in vocal score, a new picture of the evolution of Parisian stage genres at the fin de siècle emerges.

Not only did vaudeville not renounce song after 1864, but one crucial development of the 1870s is a strand of vaudeville that had original vocal numbers. Variously labelled “comédie-opérette,” “fantaisie-opérette,” “opérette-vaudeville,” “pièce,” “vaudeville,” or “vaudeville-opérette,” these plays form a coherent repertoire with distinctive features. In the late 1870s and 1880s, composerly vaudeville, as I call it, was separate from, and in competition with, two other commercial genres with vocal numbers: late opéra-bouffe and commercial opéra comique (sometimes known as “grande opérette” in the literature). When, in 1882, one critic wryly remarked “‘Vaudeville-opérette’? No one had come up with that yet!,” the trend had in fact been around for a few years, and would soon produce its most lasting specimen, Hervé’s Mam’zelle Nitouche.

It is not until around 1890 that “opérette,” which until then had mostly either designated one-act works or served as a modifier, began to be used on its own as a genre designation for full-length plays. While the established historical narrative sees Jacques Offenbach’s Second Empire opéras-bouffes as the starting point of a linear French operetta tradition, I am suggesting that 1890s opérette, on the contrary, descended from composerly vaudeville. In other words, it is vaudeville that, through “vaudeville-opérette,” ultimately gave rise to opérette.

During the nineteenth century, the Parisian stage was dominated by music. The most popular form was the vaudeville, whose musico-dramatic discourses were characterised by the re-use of pre-existing airs. This use of timbres, however, spilled over into a wide range of related genres within the regulated theatre – parodies, revues de fin d’année and occasional works of all sorts – and outside it: songs destined for singing clubs, the literary pot-pourri and cognates. The tradition was adopted from eighteenth-century practice, and although thought to diminish during the second half of the nineteenth century, in fact continued into the twentieth.

In the two decades before the the First World War, a repertory of so-called fantaisie-opérettes was displayed on a number of Parisian stages; like vaudeville the genre depended for its musico-dramatic discourse on the use of timbres, and in doing so stood in a tradiation going back over a century. Fantaisie-opérette was mostly hosted in the wide range of establishments that encompassed cafés-concerts, music-halls and other theatrical environments on the borders of the regulated theatre; the most important for fantaisie-opérette was the Parisiana whose music director, Laurent Halet, was a key driver in the preparation of timbres and the composition of new music for the genre. As the 1890s yielded to the new century, a kaleidoscopic range of relationships between old and new music typified the fantaisie-opérette.

Generically important in its own right, fantaisie-opérette was elided with the theatrical display of the female body in various forms of undress (déshabillage), and the generalised erotic was rarely distant from its libretti, costumes and stage sets. In this regard, there is much in common with the ballet that occupied the same stages during this period, with the erotic emerging in such forms as direct revelation, subterfuge and prostitution. Critically, there is a clear correlation between the expression of desire on the stage and the use of music, especially new composition.

Fantaisie-opérette engages a wide-ranging network of musicians, librettists, theatre directors and other actors in a late efflorescence of the use of timbres. It illustrates the longevity of nineteenth-century musico-dramatic techniques well into the twentieth century.