The Ranums' Panat Times
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The Ranums' Panat Times |
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Read about another work! Dowling A. Thomas replies I appreciate the thorough reading you have taken the time to give my chapter. Had I been given the opportunity to revise my chapter based on your criticisms, I would undoubtedly have changed aspects of my original argument, particularly with regard to my claims about what "most" of Charpentier's contemporaries actually said. In any event, I am pleased now for the opportunity to try to explain my intentions, however briefly. I make claims and propose connections that would have been unavailable to commentators of the period (for the obvious reason that they do not have the hindsight we do) but that were nonetheless unwittingly (the term I use in the chapter) articulated by them. In other words, while commentators did not state in so many words that Charpentier used his opera as a form of meta-musical commentary, what they do say, I claim, gives me ground to argue that Médée can be viewed in this way. I speculated that it was possible to view Médée as an allegory of the status of opera itself in the late seventeenth century. I made no claim about Charpentier's "feelings of rejection at Lully's monopoly over opera". Indeed, read as an allegory, Médée can be understood as a defense of the operatic genre itself, beyond any rivalry that may or may not have existed between Lully and Charpentier. The allegorical "spectacular revenge" I propose is that of the misunderstood, "operatic" Medea, and is directed at opera-haters, not at Lully. However, I did want to portray Médée as Charpentier's distinctive contribution (not, as it is sometimes characterized, as basically in the same mold as Lully's works, despite the many similarities), a contribution to tragédie en musique that could only have occurred after Lully's death. I had several reasons for reading the opera in this way, none of which was primarily pitched at any supposed rivalry between Lully and Charpentier. Most importantly, there was the fact of existing tensions between France and Italy in the musical field, tensions that would be the subject of much commentary during the course of the eighteenth century. Indeed, the reception history of early eighteenth-century French opera is incomprehensible without the French-Italian rivalry. Secondly, there is the fact that Thomas Corneille's famous brother, Pierre, had written his own Médée for the spoken theater. It would be extremely difficult to argue that Thomas's version of the Medea story was conceived in complete ignorance or indifference to that of his brother. This kind of "coincidence" sets up an implicit comparison between the Medea of the spoken theater and that of the opera (and the bulk of my chapter is concerned with advancing precisely this comparison). The point that Charpentier was a celebrated composer and "occupied a place at the very heart of the art forms and scientific knowledge" during Louis XIV's reign in no way diminishes the possibility of tensions or fissures within that political and cultural establishment. After all, the operatic genre itself was the royal spectacle par excellence, at the summit of the aesthetic hierarchy, and at the same time a highly contested and maligned art form (dismissed as a ridiculous Italian conceit by the abbé d'Aubignac in the late 1650s, blamed later by Boileau for contaminating morals and leading women astray, and lamented as having killed spoken tragedy in the early eighteenth century). Lecerf's denegration of Charpentier as "savant," and the association of this term with Italian music, is in no way an isolated incident. Admittedly, these terms were not used in connection with Charpentier in the 1670s and 1680s, as your musings point out; but my argument concerns Médée and the impressions that were attached to this opera in the eighteenth century. The fact that Medea herself, as a sorceress, is characterized as learned invites the comparison. And the opposition between Italian and French music-whether based on cabale-like circumstances or not-was an undeniable fact of eighteenth-century debates about opera. Commentators in the eighteenth century would often apply their vision (whether pro-French or pro-Italian) retrospectively onto works of a previous generation. The status of Rameau, who represented foreign, Italian influences for some, but later became Lully's successor in the public's eye, is a case in point. The fact that Médée "was virtually the only work available to Charpentier-lovers or -haters prior to 1752" only reinforces my argument, since much of my point concerns precisely the vague impressions and hearsay that were attached to this opera in the decades that followed its performance. My chapter on Médée took up the suggestion, made by Marc Fumaroli, that a work of art can reflect the circumstances of its inception. The principal aim of the chapter was to examine Médée in a way that would allow me to connect some of its best and most distinctive musical features (aspects that are not the focus of your musings) to the larger history of French opera during the period. And I think the other chapters in the book bear out my aspirations in this regard, to connect individual works to ongoing issues and debates on opera in France. Downing A. Thomas One thing I forgot to mention in my reply is that I believe you are absolutely correct in noting that Italianate style is at times denigrated as difficult and learned, at times as frivolous and overly ornamented, which are two distinct things. This will push me to review my notes on the Querelle des Bouffons, in which (as I recall) both characterizations of Italian music can be found, though surely the latter (frivolity) is more germane to the discussion. I suppose the two could be seen to meet in the vocal melisma, which could be construed as both merely ornamental and as evoking difficulty. |