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Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 1647-1785.

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Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 1647-1785. By Downing A. Thomas. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [vii, 411 p. ISBN 0-521-80188-5. $70.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

The development of French opera provided a flashpoint for the heated aesthetic debates in seventeenth-century France, most notably the "Querelle des Anciens et Modernes"--a series of literary arguments in which one side held up the forms and language of classical texts as unequalled exemplars, while the other argued that new genres and forms equaled, and even surpassed, those of ancient Greece and Rome. Opera, with its claims of ties to ancient Greek theater, posited as sung drama by the Florentine Camerata, caused particular anxiety in France where those in the traditionalist camp viewed it as an upstart genre far inferior to spoken tragedy. Furthermore, because opera was a foreign (Italian) invention, tragedie en musique also found itself implicated in the ongoing discussions of the relative merits of French and Italian music that had their roots in the sixteenth century (Georgia Cowart, The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism: French and Italian Music, 1600-1750 [Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981]). The complexities of early modern French aesthetics provide a view of ways in which tragedie en musique participated in important cultural shifts in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, as its admirers and detractors sought to come to terms with its aesthetic impact. These aesthetic debates invite interdisciplinary readings that yield a rich picture...

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