Opera Lafayette
The Musical Revolutions of Marie Antoinette Julia Doe Few repertories of Western art music have been more persistently identified with absolutist politics than the serious operas (tragédies lyriques) and courtly ballets of Louis XIV’s Versailles. The soundscape of the French Baroque was consolidated under the auspices of monarchy and functioned as an embodiment of governmental propaganda and prestige. Music historians have often traced a narrative of decline from this apex of French royal patronage. Over the course of an “enlightened” eighteenth century, the story goes, the Bourbon rulers became increasingly disinvested in the musical arts; composers instead catered to the demands of a Parisian public sphere (reflected, for example, in entrepreneurial new concert series divorced from Crown sponsorship). It is true that the kings that succeeded the Roi Soleil possessed neither his passion for music nor his savvy at exploiting its political potential. Louis XV was personally fond of opera, but far less active as a patron than either his wife, Marie Leszczyńska, or his maîtresse en tître, Madame de Pompadour. Louis XVI was rather more apathetic toward the art form—so much so, apparently, that it made the news when he managed to stay awake through an evening at the theater. When Marie Antoinette arrived in France in 1770, government administrators feared that she might share her new husband’s aversion to music. As M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet has discussed, she reacted with seeming indifference to the spectacles presented for her wedding festivities—lavish revivals of “canonical” court tragedies by Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau. The Mémoires secrets expressed concern that the musical offerings had “bored her to tears” (18 May 1770). It quickly grew apparent, however, that these official anxieties were somewhat misguided: if the Habsburg archduchess was openly skeptical of la musique ancienne, the aging ceremonial repertory of the Bourbon kings, this was not because she did not like music. Rather, it was because her tastes were more modern, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan than those that then prevailed amongst the French royal family. In the years that followed, Marie Antoinette would emerge as a performer and patron of expansive politico-cultural vision. Indeed, her influence would revolutionize aesthetics and programming at Versailles—with repercussions that reverberated in Paris, in Francophile courts throughout Europe, and in the distant reaches of the French colonial empire. Opera Lafayette’s festival, “The Era of Marie Antoinette, rediscovered,” thus offers a corrective to several ingrained assumptions about music in the French Enlightenment—situating this repertory within a global context, and reframing gendered narratives centered on kingly patronage (Doe [1]; Bartlet [2]; Powers [3]). 16
