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Conference Agenda

The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.

Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)

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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:18am EDT

Daily Overview

Session

Comic Subversions and Intertexts in Early Modern Opera
Session Chair: Catherine Gordon
Discussant: Kate Van Orden

Presentation 2

Favart, Gluck, and Cythère assiégée (Vienna, 1759): airs connus and airs nouveaux

Bruce Alan Brown

University of Southern California,

Christoph Gluck’s Cythère assiégée, created for Vienna’s court theater in 1759, is a hybrid of older and newer models of opéra-comique: traditional vaudeville comedy, with dialogue sung (mostly monophonically) to retexted popular songs – airs connus, or vaudevilles, versus an emerging type of spectacle with mostly or entirely original music – airs nouveaux, which took full advantage of the orchestral accompaniment. Revising the all-vaudeville 1748 Brussels original version of Cythère by Charles-Simon Favart, Gluck replaced a third of the preëxisting tunes with his own compositions, but retained some 60 vaudevilles, resulting in an opera with two different, interlarded communicative systems. Whereas Gluck’s airs nouveaux worked straightforwardly through word- and tone-painting, the popular tunes, residing more in the memories of the actors and audience members than in notation, communicated through a complex web of associations between their titles (indicated in the printed libretto), original and acreted texts, and the dialogue texts to which they were sung in the opera.
In this paper, based on my work editing Cythère assiégée for the complete Gluck edition, I analyze the mechanisms of “hypertextual” meaning in this opera’s vaudevilles, and suggest how these tunes may have affected spectators’ perceptions of Gluck’s airs nouveaux. Building on the scholarship of Dörte Schmidt (2004) and Judith le Blanc (2014), I show that Cythère is an “implicit parody” of Quinault and Lully’s Armide of 1686, through both musical borrowings and correspondences between casts. Another cluster of tunes is associated (more or less overtly; cf. Robert Darnton, 2010) with Maurice, Maréchal de Saxe, whose theatrical troupe first performed the 1748 version. For the vaudevilles generally, I consider the tunes’ origins, social and theatrical (re)uses, relative ages, and the ways in which Favart’s dialogue texts exploit the tunes’ salient musical features. The vaudevilles’ wit only fully emerges when the dialogue is reunited with the melodies, which few earlier writers on Favart or on this opéra-comique have bothered to do. Finally, I consider the aesthetic efficacy of the juxtaposition in Cythère assiégée of a largely referential body of airs and musical numbers working mainly through mimesis – a combination with which Gluck had had ample prior experience.