Conference Agenda

This paper reconsiders Johann Adolf Hasse’s La Contadina (1728), a remarkably successful intermezzo whose extensive “Turkish” subplot unsettles assumptions about the comic thematization of the Ottoman Empire in early eighteenth‑century musical theater. While scholars such as Larry Wolff have argued that comic “Turkishness” in early modern opera functioned largely as lighthearted travesty, offering European audiences a playful mirror of their own shortcomings, the second act of La Contadina resists such characterization and departs radically from the intermezzo genre’s customary slapstick. Indeed, it stages a strikingly violent—and gendered—vision of Ottoman alterity that engages Enlightenment discourses on civilization, barbarism, and the nature of power.

Drawing on work by Emily Wilbourne, Mary Hunter, and Gordana Lazarevich, I show that Hasse’s intermezzo both employs and subverts generic conventions: the comic tactics of disguise and pseudo‑foreign language, typically used to reinforce the female protagonist’s dominance, instead facilitate a dramatic reversal in which the male singing character, Tabarano, weaponizes his Turkish persona to assert control through threats of physical and sexual violence. This shift not only complicates the gender dynamics central to intermezzo dramaturgy but also resonates with broader eighteenth‑century concerns surrounding gendered authority, the Ottoman seraglio, and the emerging concept of “civilization.”

I argue further that La Contadina contains what may be one of the earliest notated examples of an alla turca musical topic. Hasse’s aria for Tabarano in Act II and the “Ballo da Turco” concluding the intermezzo deploy signature leaps of a fourth, ornamental runs, and directionless phrasing that reappear in Hasse’s later opera seria for Dresden, Solimano (1753). La Contadina thus suggests an earlier, southern origin for the style long associated with Austro-German cities and courts. The barbarity and exotic difference that it encodes underscore Tabarano’s volatility and amplify the intermezzo’s destabilizing representation of Turkishness.

Far from a disposable comic trifle, La Contadina emerges as a work that defied audiences’ expectations, circulated widely across Europe, and reveals the intermezzo as a space in which Enlightenment notions of East and West could be actively negotiated.

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.

In the late seventeenth century, works premiered at the Paris Opéra demonstrate a significant recalibration of the balance between juxtaposed ideals of gloire and plaisir, reflecting a broader cultural transformation visible in literature, theater, and music. Taking Marin Marais’ 1696 tragedie en musique Ariane et Bacchus as a case study, this paper examines how one opera participates in this reweighting of values by recharacterizing the figure of Bacchus within heroic discourse.

Although Bacchus is known today as the god of wine, classical mythology also supplies him with a heroic dimension, evident through the traditions surrounding his Indian conquest. Whereas other seventeenth-century French dramatic works associate the god with wine, madness, excess, and burlesque spectacle, the text of Ariane et Bacchus eschews these typical Bacchic themes. Never once does Ariane et Bacchus even mention wine. Instead, before Bacchus appears onstage, other characters frame him as a conquering hero who fully embodies vaillance and gloire. The livret thus places Bacchus squarely within the traditional rhetoric of heroism embodied by the tragèdie en musique. Yet once Bacchus finally enters, both music and dramatic action complicate this heroic image. In contrast to Lully’s late tragèdies, which treat love as a corrupting threat to heroism, Ariane et Bacchus exalts love and pleasure as values to be prized alongside glory. The opera presents the embrace of love’s pleasures as a worthy pursuit, one that can rival or even supplant a hero’s aspiration to glory.

The question remains: Why invoke Bacchus at all, only to strip him of one of his primary attributes? Drawing on late-antique heroic tradition and visual representations from both antiquity and the early-modern era that align Bacchus with conquest and nobility, this paper argues that Ariane et Bacchus selectively activates the deity’s heroic mythology while avoiding associations that would tip the character into the realm of burlesque excess. By removing Bacchus’s characteristic association with wine and foregrounding the mythology of his Indian conquest, he becomes an ideal god to represent a new ideal for kingship: a galant hero who blends the values of gloire and plaisir.