My dissertation focuses on Paris during the latter decade of Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852-1870). It concentrates particularly on the status of opera in the period, placing contemporary operatic discourse and practice within a cultural and political landscape marked by both identification with the past and fascination with the future. While opera continued to be a central part of Paris’s social life and its self-image as the pre-eminent modern metropolis, the period offers the first sustained evidence of operatic canon-formation, with increasing numbers of old works revived. In part because such revivals were often believed to be replacing new commissions, the emerging canon provoked much discussion. Responding to this debate, I ask how opera’s turns to the past in the 1860s related to the period’s preoccupation with the idea of ‘progress’: my enquiry thus aims to contribute to existing scholarship on mid-century musical historicism while also tracing how operatic practices related to contemporary cultural and technological change. After a brief introduction, the dissertation focuses on four moments: the 1859 revival of Gluck’s Orphée, a significant step in the transition towards the operatic ‘imaginary museum’ of the future; three concerts conducted by Richard Wagner in 1860 to showcase his ‘musique de l’avenir’, heard as an explicit instance of operatic soothsaying; the 1867 premiere of Verdi’s Don Carlos, a work whose mixed reception bears witness to changing modes of operatic listening; and commentary surrounding the Parisian funeral celebrations of Meyerbeer in May 1864 and Rossini in November 1868, occasions that foregrounded numerous anxieties about what was to come after the demise of two deeply symbolic figures – one embodying opera’s glorious past, the other believed to have held the key to its future.

Writing in 2000, Daniel Albright argues that the opera Les Mamelles de Tiresias (1947) by Francis Poulenc (l899- 1963) is an exemplar of surrealist ' dissonance' between words and music. Poulenc, Albright argues, consciously 'violates' the dramatic trajectory of the words by providing music which 'disables' the verbal systems of meaning which form the opera's zany plot (Albright, 2000:300). This thesis provides a reading of the libretto and music of the opera via its important thematic notions of gender and sexuality to argue for a reassessment of Albright's findings. By placing gender and sexuality as points of 'enabling similarity' between words and music after Nicholas Cook (1998: 70). an approach is found which is sensitive towards the verbal and musical developments of the plot in equal measure and also acknowledges that the syntactic/semantic production of meaning in music is based on different referential tropes from that of words. Drawing on postmodem critiques of the human subject following Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick et al. in combination with a topical analysis of musical signifiers of gender and sexuality (which are identified via work by Susan McClary, Carolyn Abbate, and Michel Poizat among others), I find that both words and music work together to confuse and complicate the 'feminine', 'masculine', ' heterosexual' and 'homosexual' identities of the characters in the opera. Interpretative readings are expanded by references to aspects of Poulenc's biography and to the politically turbulent World War II and post-war environments in which the opera was composed (1938-1945) and premiered (I 947). To conclude, four main attributes of the word-music relations in the opera which have been illuminated by the emphasis on gender and sexuality-primacy, layering, unravelling and parody-are identified.

Cycles of regeneration and decline in musical drama at the Académie Royale (the Opéra) can be associated with the names of a series of major composers. The first was Lully; 1774 marks the beginning of the "époque de Gluck". Gluck had already attempted the 'reform' of Italian opera in Vienna, with as its chief manifesto the preface (dedication) to Alceste, published in 1769 and translated into French about 1773. It has long been recognized that this reform owed something to the methods of Rameau (which were developed from Lully's). This study therefore opens with a comparison of Rameau and Gluck, showing the fundamental ways in which their methods and intentions differed. The "époche de Gluck" was not a sudden reversal of French operatic method, and one of its features - the introduction of the "international style" (basically Italian) of 18th-century music onto a stage which had generally tended to resist it - had been anticipated in several French operas, mostly mediocre resettings of old libretti but including distinguished works by Gossec and Philidor, composers whose talent Gluck recognized. Consideration of these works is followed by a discussion of the types of aria, recitative, and arioso used in Gluck's French operas, and of Iphigénie en Aulide, the work which definitely established the synthesis of French and Italian elements, and made a return to old French opera impossible while effectively forestalling the attempt to introduce a more purely Italian music. After adapting three of his existing operas, of which Alceste, on a subject also treated by Lully, was the most radically revised, Gluck directly challenged the founder of tragédie-lyrique by resetting Quinault's Armide with comparatively little alteration. Meanwhile various attempts were being made to introduce purely Italian music to France; arrangements of Sacchini were not played at the Opéra, but Piccinni was commissioned to set another, substantially altered, Quinault poem. Roland, J. C. Bach's Amadis, and subsequent resettings by Piccinni, Gossec, and Philidor, are measured in this study against Lully and each other. The controversy between the Gluckistes and Piccinnistes, a literary war in the tradition of the "Guerre des Boufions" raged fiercely from 1777 to the early 1780s. Artistically it came to a head in the two operas of Iphigénie en Tauride which, despite Piccinni's disclaimer of any desire to emulate Gluck, are in many ways comparable and revealing about the two composers' intentions and achievements. Piccinni was brought to Paris as apostle of Italian good taste and the melodic "Période"; but his French operas, far from opposing to Gluck's dramatic conception of opera the purely musical approach that had dominated in Italy for so long, are themseleves thoroughly, indeed strenously dramatic in intention. One consequence of this is that although many composers paid artistic homage to Gluck, the majority of their works resemble more closely those of Piccinni; Gluck was personally inimitable, and in any case belonged to an earlier generation. Moreover a critical study of "Piccinniste" melody suggests that elegance and adherence to the "Période" frequently produced music which, in terms of its own musical development and of the dramatic articulation to which it is supposed to contribute, is superficial; both Piccinni and Sacchini were more successful dramatically in the short forms and ariosi for which French precedent was stronger, than in the Italianate aria and recitativo accompagnato. The operatic genre most typical of the period, and the most successful, was tragédie-lyrique, frequently with Greek or 17th-century French dramas as model. The French composers, however, concentrated on comedy, pastoral, and non-tragic adventure operas. While Gluck's and Piccinni's pastoral operas were relative failures, successful composers of lighter genres, including Floquet and Grétry, were unequal to the challenge of tragedy. The later works of Philidor and Gossec kept the possibility of indigenous French opera alive, particularly as their work shows a closer relation to their own past (the 'chant français') than did their contemporaries'. With many points of interest, these works are uneven in quality; they include such oddities as Candeille's Fizarre, Dezède's "opéra féerie" Alcindor, and the "paysannerie larmoyante" Rosine by Gossec. The direct succession to Gluck was in the work of actual or intended pupils and shows strong symptoms of decadence, and exaggeration of techniques and passions. Lemoyne and Salieri both modified their manner after their first "horror" operas, Electre and Les Danides; the former declared himself Piccinniste but without making any significant change of style. Salieri also approaches Piccinni when less overtly copying Gluck, in his sober Les Horaces and exotic Tarare. Vogel's La Tolson d'Or, dedicated to Gluck, imitates his almost too closely in places, but elsewhere escapes into the (more Piccinnian) language of his own generation. Piccinni's last works met with varying degrees of success or failure; they show intermittently (in Didon and Pénélope) a deepening dramatic insight. His dramatic intentions - which led to the suggestion that he had become a Gluckiste - may have contributed to his eclipse, since the increasingly popular Italian cantibale had found a more consistent champion in Sacchini. The latter's musical gifts to some extent disguised his relative lack of interest in drama, a penchant which permits the discussion of him in this study to be comparatively brief.