LD2668 .T4 1966 W192 / Master of Science

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 363-383). / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / viii, 383 leaves, bound ill., music 29 cm

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.

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The tragedie en musique of Quinault and Lully was a highly successful new genre, representative of contemporary Parisian life. However, it is still largely viewed in the negative terms of its detractors, the proponents of classical tragedy. The purpose of this study is to redefine the tragedie en musique in terms of seventeenth-century modernism. An examination of the society and poetry of the contemporary gallant world provides the historical framework for an analysis of both the libretto and music of Quinault and Lully's Atys (1676). This study attempts to bridge the historical and cultural distances that until now have hindered accessibility to this major new genre in seventeenth-century literature and music.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Paris, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 547-589), discography (p. 591-593), and indexes.

The English semi-opera, Psyche (1675), written by Thomas Shadwell, with music by Matthew Locke, was thought at the time of its performance to be a mere copy of Psyche (1671), a French tragedie-ballet by Moliere, Pierre Corneille, and Philippe Quinault, with music by Jean- Baptiste Lully. This view, accompanied by a certain attitude that the French version was far superior to the English, continued well into the twentieth century. This view is misleading; although the English play was adapted from the French, both were representative of two well-developed native theatrical traditions. Therefore, though there are certain parallels, both in plot and in the subject matter of some musical numbers, the differences in structure, both of the drama and of the music, are more significant. This thesis is a comparative study of the two plays, analyzing both their dramatic and musical structures, and examining them both from the context of the two theatrical traditions. It is concluded that the literary approach to tragedy of French theater resulted in the separation of drama and music, the latter relegated to the prologue, or to end-of-act diversions called intercedes. This allowed Lully to have great control over his music, and in Psyche (1671), he was concerned with the form of each intermede as a whole instead of striving for a variety of forms and ensembles within individual songs. Most of his songs and dances are solo airs in binary form; he makes little use of chorus and ensembles. On the contrary, the music in Psyche (1675) on many occasions was integrated with the plot, and was scattered randomly throughout the play. This prevented Locke from having artistic control over his compositions; Shadwell, the lyricist, determined where the music would occur, the ensembles to be used, and the moods of songs. Shadwell and Locke were concerned with the variety in each individual piece, rather than with unifying the overall form of musical scenes, and the overwhelming majority of songs have a combination of solo voice, ensembles, and chorus. Therefore, Psyche is not an unoriginal copy, but is a reinterpretation of the myth using the aesthetic of the Restoration tragic theater. / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate

In the 1830s the opera-comique genre evolves from the simple "comedies melee d'ariettes" to a true operatic form with musico-dramatic significance. One primary area of development is found in the placement and dramatic function of solo forms which begin to play a markedly different role than they had in operas comiques of earlier periods. Despite the evidence suggesting significant musico-dramatic development, few scholars have attempted to identify the practices governing the placement and function of musical soli in the operas comiques of the 1830s. For this reason we have undertaken a detailed study of these elements in three libretti: Fra Diavolo (1830), Zampa (1831) and Le Pre aux Clercs (1832). In a preliminary examination, these libretti were found to exhibit traits representative of many works of the period. Our research has led us to conclude that solo forms are employed in one or more of the following four dramatic situations: (1) to convey background information to the plot or to characters, or to reveal pre-curtain events; (2) to paint a character's true personality; (3) to expose a character's emotional state of mind or train of thought at a given moment; and (4) to distribute the number of soli through the opera in a manner that reflects a character's importance in the drama. Although such uses of solo forms are not unique to the 1830s, the extent to which they were employed represents a significant departure from earlier practice. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter--by way of introduction--contrasts the roles of musical numbers in 1830s operas comiques with those of their predecessors. It also discusses the literary and musical conventions of the works of this period. The second chapter first presents a synopsis of Scribe's and Auber's opera comique Frat Diavolo, and a view of the well made play elements as displayed in the libretto, before focusing on a discussion of the placement of musical soli in the drama. Similarly, chapters three and four discuss Melesvilie's and Herold's Zampa, ou la Fiancee de marbre and Planard's and Herold's Le Pre aux Clercs respectively. The final chapter outlines the practices observed in the placement and dramatic function of soli in the three selected operas and relates the significance of these practices to the genre's development. / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate

In this dissertation, I explore the musical prosody of the literary symbolists and the influence of this prosody on fin-de-siècle French music. Contrary to previous categorizations of music as symbolist based on a characteristic "sound," I argue that symbolist aesthetics demonstrably influenced musical construction and reception. My scholarship reveals that symbolist musical works across genres share an approach to composition rooted in the symbolist concept of musicality of language, a concept that shapes this music on sonic, structural, and conceptual levels. I investigate the musical responses of four different composers to a single symbolist text, Oscar Wilde's one-act play Salomé, written in French in 1891, as case studies in order to elucidate how a symbolist musicality of language informed their creation, performance, and critical reception. The musical works evaluated as case studies are Antoine Mariotte's Salomé, Richard Strauss's Salomé, Aleksandr Glazunov's Introduction et La Danse de Salomée, and Florent Schmitt's La Tragédie de Salomé. Recognition of symbolist influence on composition, and, in the case of works for the stage, on production and performance expands the repertory of music we can view critically through the lens of symbolism, developing not only our understanding of music's role in this difficult and often contradictory aesthetic philosophy but also our perception of fin-de-siècle musical culture in general.