Opera Lafayette
Program Note Callum John Blackmore In the 1770s, Paris was gripped by pastoral fever. Pastoralism began to permeate every facet of artistic life in the city, from literature, to painting, fashion, architecture, interior design, and (above all) opera. This aestheticization of the countryside was the result of mounting anxieties over the state of French politics – anxieties that would later spill over into the French Revolution. Louis XV had led France into numerous expensive military conflicts which had left the royal finances in dire straits. The economy of pre-Revolutionary France was largely agrarian: over 80% of the French population lived in the countryside and agriculture provided over two thirds of the nation’s GDP. At the same time, France was experiencing a rapid period of urban expansion as famine, rioting, dwindling land supply, and growing commercial opportunities prompted many peasants to seek work as urban laborers. The Parisian literati saw this urban drift as bad news for the French economy. Many Enlightenment thinkers feared the economic and moral costs of urbanization – the cramped living conditions, the alienation from nature, the arable land left uncultivated – and proposed that a full-scale return to rural living was the only way to vouchsafe France from socio-economic ruin. Included among them were the Baron d’Holbach (the host of a glitzy Parisian salon), who declared that the cultivation of the land was “the true basis of the state,” and the physiocrats, an iconoclastic group of economists who believed that a free trade in agricultural goods would entice laborers back to the countryside. This radical agenda would penetrate the very highest circles of French society: Marie Antoinette, eager to align herself with the growing pastoral movement, ordered the construction of a model farm (replete with dairy, watermill, and barnyard) just outside of Versailles, where the queen-consort and her aristocratic companions would play as shepherdesses. Even as Paris became one of the cultural capitals of European Enlightenment, its salons were abuzz with talk of rural exodus. The Comédie-Italienne (a Parisian theater that specialized in opéra-comique, or opera with spoken dialogue) had become a hotbed of operatic pastoralism in the 1760s, renowned for pairing folksy, sentimentalized depictions of rustic life with progressive political messages. Opera Lafayette has recorded a number of these pastoral works, including the 1762 Le roi et le fermier and the 1769 Le déserteur. In the latter work (a moving opera about an innocent rustic tricked into deserting the army), librettist Michel-Jean Sedaine combines idealized rural imagery with a hardhitting, high-stakes plot (the eponymous deserter is almost put to death) to infuse the opera with tension, pathos, and political bite. 58
