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By Natasha Roule
Paris, December 2015. I was living in a small second-story studio in the Parisian neighborhood of Montparnasse. The buttery aromas of the Breton creperie below wafted through my floorboards each morning, and the tender strains of a local jazz band drifted into my room each night. It was a time as idyllic as it was tumultuous: the Paris Agreement had just been signed, and France was reeling from the terrorist attacks that had gripped its capital in January and November of that year.
I had come to France in pursuit of opera. I was thick in the research phase of my doctoral dissertation, which investigated the performance history of the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis XIV’s composer extraordinaire, in the decades following Lully’s death in 1687. My interest lay not in what had happened to Lully’s operas in Paris and Versailles, where they originated, but in other French cities: Lyon, Marseille, Rennes, and Strasbourg—urban centers that distinguished themselves from the French capital by what were sometimes stark differences in language, dress, governance, and other aspects of regional identity. I had hoped to unearth reams of scores copied for provincial music academies, ideally complete with performance annotations and musicians’ cues. Instead, I stumbled across La chute de Phaéton, comédie en musique—a slender, unassuming livret, or libretto, by a playwright I had never heard of named Marc-Antoine Legrand.
As I leafed through its pages, I couldn’t stop grinning. A spunky cast of hammy singers, foppish patrons, coy lovers, and no-nonsense officials sprang to life, mimicking the elegant verse of Lully’s tragédie en musique Phaéton (1683) with a humor that matched the dry wit of Oscar Wilde and the slapstick comedy of The Three Stooges. Lully’s opera told the story of the rise and demise of an arrogant demigod, cautioning spectators on the dangerous consequences of misplaced ambition and pride. Instead of a proud demigod, it is the opera company of Lyon—crippled by a history of poor financial decisions and personalities who do not care to truly set things right—that is the star of Legrand’s work. Legrand’s libretto cleverly reframes Lully’s lofty themes into a story whose questions were posed specifically to the residents of late seventeenth-century Lyon, but which remain achingly resonant today. What is the role of opera in a community? What value do we place in opera, both cultural and monetary? What are the consequences of a musical workforce that operates from paycheck to paycheck rather than with long-term financial security? What is the real attraction of opera—flashy soloists and edgy stage sets, or “the music itself”? Of those attractions, which one will sell the tickets? And if no tickets are sold, will opera—indeed, must opera—collapse?
Figure 1. Hendrick Goltzius, The Fall of Phaeton, late sixteenth–early seventeenth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.
But before grappling with these questions, I had to figure out how Legrand pieced together his parody. And that process launched my seven-year journey of getting to know La chute de Phaéton.
Stage 1: Forensic Analysis
When talking about La chute de Phaéton in this article, I am really addressing the second act of Legrand’s work. His first act—which is also included in my edition—constitutes a spoken play, in which several people from Lyon gather at a country house and discuss a comédie en musique that one of them has written about the recent bankruptcy of the Lyon opera company, known as the Académie de Musique of Lyon. Act 2 is a performance of this musical work. At first glance, I could tell that Legrand drew heavily from the text that Philippe Quinault wrote for Lully’s Phaéton. After laying out the entire text of Legrand’s libretto, I searched for similarities in word choice in the libretto of Phaéton. It quickly became apparent that Legrand had taken text from acts 1, 3, and 5 of Lully’s opera. These are the most exciting acts of Phaéton; they feature fierce duels between gods, tender love scenes, and the final stunt of the opera that captured audience imagination for decades after the opera’s premiere: a dramatic catapulting stunt in which the singer playing Phaéton soared across the stage in a wooden chariot before plunging to his fiery (stage) death. By laying out the textual similarities, I could also see which characters from Lully’s opera became the basis for Legrand’s cast. The conceited Phaéton transforms into the fumbling Le Musicien, who strives to rescue the Lyon opera company from bankruptcy but ultimately fails. Lovely Théone, whose air in act 3 of Lully’s opera drips with grief as she realizes that Phaéton loves his pride more than he loves her, transfigures into the saucy Isabèle, who spurns Le Musicien and his “cursed” opera company. And Jupiter, who strikes Phaéton from his chariot, becomes Le Sergent—a civic official who slaps the seal of bankruptcy on the doors of the Lyon opera company and pronounces it shut for good.
Musical reconstruction followed textual analysis; I layered the text of Legrand’s libretto with the corresponding portions of Lully’s music. Through painstaking work—and many dark battles of my own with Finale software—a patchwork of instrumental interludes, solos, duets, choruses, and dances coalesced. La chute de Phaéton was reborn.
Stage 2: Performance, Pedagogy, and the Passions
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2018. About six months before I completed my doctoral degree, my husband, Ian Pomerantz, who is a professional classical singer, was involved in founding a young artists’ music festival in the small town of McMinnville, Oregon.
“We should make La chute one of the centerpiece operas of the festival,” he urged. I enthusiastically agreed. Who wouldn’t be interested in such a delightful work as Legrand’s?
Getting La chute de Phaéton on the playbill was not quite as easy as we had anticipated. Not everyone involved was immediately sold on the financial giveback we believed La chute would bring. Nobody had heard of Legrand, some argued. Nobody would understand the jokes. This was no Don Giovanni or La Bohème. We compromised, making Le nozze di Figaro the festival centerpiece and La chute a secondary work on the program.
The battle of getting La chute on the program finally won, I embarked on a second journey of discovery. I understood how Legrand had stitched together his parody, but how did he perform it? Ian and I spent hours listening to singers’ audition tapes, debating the voice types and tessiture of Legrand’s characters, teasing apart the nuances of baritones, basse-tailles, tenors, haute-contres, and other voice types behind specific roles. Our cast assembled, we next began rehearsals. The experience was humbling. My first draft of Legrand’s score was ridden with errors; it truly takes a village to make a performance edition of an opera parody that is clean of mistakes. I will be eternally grateful to the patience of our musicians who pointed out incorrect notes, miscalculations in figured bass, or textual transcriptions that didn’t make sense. They were my first editors, and their dedication to making La chute sound right went lengths in whipping my edition in shape.
The rehearsals were far more than a crowdsourced editing spree, however. It was only after piecing together Legrand’s score that I realized that La chute de Phaéton was a mere 30 minutes of music. Furthermore, each character had only one or two pieces in which to tell their story. How do you deliver a complete emotional portrait of a character in just a few minutes? How do you elicit empathy from your audience as Isabèle, a woman comfortable in her femininity and confident in her superiority over the man she loved, for whom she realizes she still entertains feelings even as she decides to let him go? Or the terror of an opera chorister who realizes that her worst nightmare has come true, that she has lost her position, her livelihood, and her dignity, when she has only a handful of measures in which to deliver her sorrow?
Most of our artists had little or no experience with French baroque opera or the cultural milieu from which it emerged. As they worked to bring their characters to life, however, they naturally began to use expression and gesture to evoke the affect and passions of their characters—and, by so doing, learned through an experiential process the basic elements that make French baroque opera what it is. Over the course of our two-week rehearsal period, La chute de Phaéton revealed itself to be a pedagogical coup de force, a crash course in French baroque opera that left students both chuckling and horrified over the fact that opera artists have been struggling to make a living since, well, the birth of opera.
Figure 2. Emily Crisp and Elizabeth Galafa Ylaya in La chute de Phaéton, weeping after hearing that their opera company will remain bankrupt. Photograph by John Pak. Aquilon Music Festival, July 2018.
Figure 3. Simple Bodily Sadness (Douleur corporelle Simple). From Charles Le Brun, Expressions des passions de l’ame (Martin Engelbrecht, 1732). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain. “Douleur” translates both to sadness and pain, two emotions that the young artists in figure 2 adeptly incorporated into their performance.
I am proud to say that La chute ultimately sold more tickets than Le nozze, and that the audience roared with laughter at the antics of Legrand’s cast throughout the entire performance.
Stage 3: Pandemic
Like most of humanity in March 2020, I found myself wondering how the world would emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. I was back in the United States. The warm scents of Breton cider and caramel au beurre salé had exchanged themselves for the acrid odor of disinfectant, and the banshee cries of ambulances rather than the rakish twang of Django Reinhardt played outside my window now. I sought comfort in rereading my favorite source texts from Lyon in the years surrounding the premiere of La chute de Phaéton. It was perhaps no coincidence that I gravitated to Jean-Baptiste Panthot’s Réflections sur l’estat présent des maladies qui règnent dans la ville de Lyon, printed a year after Legrand completed La chute. Panthot, a physician in Lyon, wrote extensively on a severe epidemic, likely typhoid, that ravaged the city in 1694. The widespread sickness and death had led to social unrest, food shortages, and public distrust of medical professionals. I was sobered to realize that history was repeating itself as I doom-scrolled through the headlines of mounting deaths, the disappearance of basic commodities, and the bewildering rumors of fake medicine.
And that is when the final piece of the puzzle of La chute de Phaéton clicked. It was more than a commentary on the collapse of opera in Lyon. It was a pandemic piece.
Okay, not quite a pandemic piece—as mentioned above, the contagion that beset Lyon was technically an epidemic, as it did not spread across the globe. But Legrand was writing in an environment in which his spectators were grappling with disease all around them, as well as the disastrous social, political, and economic consequences that pervasive illness can wreak on a community. And specifically, as we all observed in March 2020 and unfortunately continue to observe today, the disastrous consequences that disease can have on music writ large. “Opera, pay me, for hunger devours me!” The lines from Legrand’s libretto, droll as they had once seemed to me as a poor grad student, were suddenly far too poignant as I watched musical institutions crumble and loved ones who worked in this industry lose their livelihoods. As it did in 1694, when opera in Lyon truly did go bankrupt, opera—and so much of music—had once more failed to survive a crisis.
I spent the darkest months of the pandemic editing my score, collaborating with the phenomenal staff of A-R to check and double-check notes, debate cues in instrumentation, verify vocal ranges, and tinker with translations. As I became more and more intimate with La chute de Phaéton, and as the musical world slogged through the havoc of COVID, I continued to ask myself the weighty questions that Legrand’s lighthearted comédie en musique forces us to confront. What worth does our society put in opera? How does opera bring a community together, and how can it push a community apart?
The fact that Legrand uses opera as a vehicle to meditate on its own demise cannot be dismissed; even as he critiques opera for its failings, Legrand also champions opera’s resilience. Indeed, over the next several decades after the premiere of La chute de Phaéton, the Lyon opera company succumbed to several more bankruptcies, only to successfully emerge from each one and start afresh. Two years and counting into the COVID-19 pandemic, opera is returning to theaters today. Yet Legrand’s work should remind us not to become too complacent. Opera may be resilient, but music remains vulnerable to crisis. This, I argue, is the ultimate question Legrand puts before us: what do we do when opera fails?
It is this question that I hope this critical edition will help us to answer.
Natasha Roule (Ph.D., Harvard University) writes on French baroque opera, particularly the reception of the tragédies en musique of Jean-Baptiste Lully. She has taught at George Mason University and presented widely on her research, giving guest lectures and panel presentations at the Harvard Art Museums, the Catholic University of America, and the National Cathedral Choral Society. Her most recent publication is La chute de Phaéton, comédie en musique (1694): An Opera Parody by Marc-Antoine Legrand of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Phaéton, Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, vol. 233 (A-R Editions, 2022).