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By Richard Sherr
My edition of the Parisian revue de fin d’année for the year 1857, Ohé! les p’tits agneaux!, has its origins in a problem faced by many people my age: “What am I going to do in retirement?” In 2013, after my decision to retire in 2015 had been gleefully accepted by the administration of Smith College, I began to seriously contemplate my future scholarly life. In one sense, the answer was easy. I could continue doing what I had been doing for the past fifty years: working in the Vatican Library, and particularly in the Vatican Archives, on the lives and careers of singers in the papal chapel in the sixteenth century. Since the Vatican Archives are inexhaustible, this was a project for several lifetimes. On the other hand, I was getting tired of it. I was also getting tired of Rome. So, I decided it was time for a change. But what change?
I had always liked Paris; what topic could I choose that would bring me to (pre-COVID) Paris as often as possible? This required some thought, since changing scholarly emphasis is never easy, and there are many excellent scholars working on French musical topics. For instance, there really was no point in inserting myself into the history of renaissance or baroque music in France. So, my thoughts turned to the nineteenth century. This is also well-populated territory, but it was also restricted mostly to “serious” music and its institutions (particularly the Opéra) and to “important” composers (Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, etc.). What I had to do was to pick a topic that was sparsely populated with scholars—in short, a topic that nobody was interested in. I began asking for advice and had the good fortune to get in touch with Gabriela Cruz, who, as is clear from the title of her recent book, has a unique view of musical life in Paris in the nineteenth century.[1] She turned my attention to music in the popular theater, a topic about which, except for the operettas of Offenbach, there had been little musicological research.
Every evening in the nineteenth century, all the theaters of Paris were filled with the sound of music. But most of it was not the kind of music that musicologists tend to be interested in. Instead, it was incidental music and songs interpolated into light comedies and farces called vaudevilles, which were the stock and trade of the popular boulevard theaters where most Parisians went for their entertainment. The interpolated songs were required by law to be contrafacta of well-known tunes (called airs connus or timbres). Thus, the music of these productions was not newly composed but a mixture of disparate elements put together without any apparent governing musical logic. There has been little musicological study of this kind of music, and for good reason: while the timbres (whose titles are always indicated in the published texts of the vaudevilles) can usually be retrieved, the harmonization and orchestral accompaniment that were actually heard in the theaters were not published. It turns out, however, that manuscript sources of this music exist. Of particular interest is the musical archive of the Théâtre des Variétés, one of the oldest of the boulevard theaters. With a little digging, I discovered that the entire musical archive of the Variétés had been cataloged and was available at the Bibliothèque nationale de France—not in the Département de Musique but in the Département des Arts du Spectacle.[2] As far as I could tell, no musicologist was aware that this archive existed, or at least, as far as I was aware, had ever consulted it—I had found something that nobody was interested in! (Of course, that turned out not to be true exactly—see below.)
In the summer of 2014, I went to Paris to explore of the musical archive of the Théâtre des Variétés and discovered a treasure trove of material containing, in varying degrees of completeness, the performance materials (i.e., the orchestra parts) for hundreds of productions from 1798 to 1923. As I looked at this material, one genre stood out: the revue de fin d’année, a specifically Parisian genre in which an entire year in the news and the theater was recapitulated in a series of comic and satirical skits.
The revue de fin d’année turns out to be a good subject of study. For one thing, these revues were gigantic spectacles with many scenes and a lot of incidental music, as much as four to eight times as much as in a standard vaudeville. For another, they provide a snapshot of what actually interested ordinary Parisians in any given year (apart from politics, which was banned by censorship). Studying a revue in detail poses scholarly challenges. Historical references must be identified, as well as the theatrical productions chosen for parody; the score must be created from original parts; the sources of the interpolated timbres must be discovered, and the way they are treated in the revue must be considered; the reactions of the reviewers must be examined; and the political constraints under which the authors operated must be considered through an examination of the livrets de censure, the librettos containing the alterations required by the censors.[3] In short, this was a real musical-historical-archival project, just like what I had been doing at the Vatican, except that the documents were written for the most part in legible hands and in a modern language—the exact opposite of the documents that had been my main concern for so many years. Furthermore, since this was nineteenth-century Paris, there were loads of primary historical sources, newspapers in particular, and many of them were available online.
So, I decided I would do an in-depth study of a revue de fin d’année. My first choice was the revue of year 1858, entitled As-tu vu la comète, mon gas? I chose it because 1858 was the year of Offenbach’s blockbuster hit Orphée aux enfers, the first real “Offenbach operetta,” and I wanted to see if the revue satirized it. (It turns out that it didn’t, which is in itself interesting, although the revue did use one musical number from the operetta.) I decided to go whole hog on the project. I created scores of the music. I consulted the Journal des débats, a primary Parisian paper, for the entire year of 1858 to track down the historical and theatrical references in the revue. I found and consulted the livret de censure in the Archives nationales. I then discovered that, indeed, there were other scholars interested in the topic of music in the popular Parisian theater—enough people to populate a conference held in Lucca, Italy, in 2015.[4] I read a paper at that conference on the revue of 1858 that was later published in its proceedings.[5]
But there was a problem with the revue of 1858: the orchestral parts were incomplete, making a full edition of the score impossible. However, I discovered that the musical sources of the revue of the preceding year 1857, Ohé! les p’tits agneaux!, were complete. This was my next project. Over the course of several years, I created full scores of all of the musical numbers (of which there are over eighty) and did the historical research needed to explain the topical references (which range from fashion, to the weather, to bullfights using cows instead of bulls, to rival newspapers, to Madame Bovary, which had been published in book form in 1857) and the theatrical satire (eighteen productions are mentioned or satirized). This turned out to be a lot of fun; further, the music, even though derivative, was actually interesting, and there was a lot of it (enough to fill about six hundred pages of score). It was, I thought, just as worthy of a critical edition as if it were an opera by Meyerbeer or Berlioz. Luckily, A-R Editions agreed, and the result is the first edition ever of the complete text and music of a nineteenth-century revue de fin d’année. My hope is that, through it, more people will become interested in the topic of music in the Parisian popular theater (which is already happening). Maybe more editions will appear somewhere in the future, and the music heard by ordinary people will take its place alongside the music for the more rarefied audiences of opera and opéra comique. And this, in turn, might even generate performances of the music—who knows?
Richard Sherr is the Caroline L. Wall ’27 Professor of Music Emeritus at Smith College. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1969, M.F.A. from Princeton University in 1971, and Ph.D. from Princeton in 1975, with a dissertation titled “The Papal Chapel ca. 1492–1513 and its Polyphonic Sources.” He is the author or editor of numerous books, editions, and articles on renaissance topics, including Papal Music Manuscripts in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries, Renaissance Manuscript Studies 5 (Hänssler-Verlag, 1996); Papal Music and Musicians in Late Medieval and Renaissance Rome (Oxford, 1998); The Josquin Companion (Oxford, 2000); The Papal Choir During the Pontificates of Julius II to Sixtus V (1503–1590): An Institutional History and Biographical Dictionary, Storia della Cappella Muscale Pontificia 3 (Palestrina, 2016); the thirty-volume series Sixteenth-Century Motet (Routledge, 1987–2000); and Masses for the Sistine Chapel: Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cappella Sistina, MS 14, Monuments of Renaissance Music vol. 13 (Chicago, 2009). Recently, he has turned his attention to theatrical music in Paris during the Second Empire (1852–70), specifically at the Théâtre des Variétés, and his work has resulted in his edition of the 1857 revue Ohé! les p’tits agneaux, as well as articles on Offenbach’s opéra comique Pépito, which premiered at the Variétés in 1853.
[1] Gabriela Cruz, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Ninteenth-Century Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
[3] See Archives nationales: Censure des répertoires des Grands Theatres Parisiens (1835–1906) Inventaire (Paris: Centre Historiques des Archives Nationales, 2003).
[4] “The Théâtre Musical Léger in Europe: From the Operetta to the Music-Hall,” Lucca, Italy, 5–7 October 2015.
[5] Richard Sherr, “Comets, calembours, Chorus Girls: The Music of the revue de fin d’année for the Year 1858 at the Théâtre des Variétés; A Preliminary Evaluation,” in Musical Theatre in Europe 1830–1945, ed. Michaela Niccolai and Clair Rowden (Turnout: Brepols, 2017), 23–48.