Christophe Charle: towards a comparative approach of musical
institutions
Although the questions raised in the general presentation of our
workshop are fairly familiar to cultural historians, they seem to have arisen
more recently in musicology or the social history of music. My aim is to
demonstrate that the field of musical activities can benefit from the
documentation and methodology that have been implemented in cultural
history and that a transfer of expertise can lead to significant results.
The first theme of the workshop is institutions, understood in a very
extensive way: opera houses, music societies, conservatories, wandering
troupes, private salons or piano makers’ showrooms, music festivals, popular
societies or circles of amateurs. Not only is this list not comprehensive but
these institutions do not lend themselves to historical research in similar
terms. The sources concerning these institutions are very uneven: some are
fairly complete, like those concerning the Paris Opera or public
conservatories, but most of the others can be studied only indirectly through
personal testimonies (memoirs, eyewitness accounts, diaries, letters), or
newspapers, police files, financial reports as the case may be. I experienced
the same difficulties in the fields of theatre history and of written culture:
documentation is much more abundant when dealing with central, official
and public practices than when they are unofficial, provincial or private. This
explains why we have an ample bibliography on opera houses and virtuosos
or divas but huge gaps in our information about the vast majority of musical
institutions. The first consequence is that comparisons between countries or
major cities in Europe are bound to be affected by these discrepancies in
documentary status.
The following observations are based on recently published studies of
operatic institutions, chosen either for their rich documentation or for their
direct relevance to our project; even if they share a similar social and cultural
perspective, they nevertheless reveal diverging approaches due to the uneven
state of local or national archives. I am referring here to three books: Philip
Ther, In der Mitte der Gesellschaft. Operntheater in Zentraleuropa 18151914 (Vienna, Oldenbourg, 2006); Jennifer Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts.
Opera and Elite Culture in London 1780-1880 (Durham, University of New
Hampshire Press, 2007); Mélanie Taversier, Gouverner l’opéra, une histoire
politique de la musique à Naples 1767-1815 (Rome, Ecole française de
Rome, 2009).
The three authors convincingly investigate theatre management,
political intervention, the social status of audiences attracted by these
important venues, but also the recurrent difficulties caused by efforts to
counterbalance mainstream taste with the spirit of innovation and the
particular ambitions of dilettanti or sponsors. Economic realities were a
constant threat to the creative impulses of operatic institutions. These general
views lie in the background of all three books, but even in such welldocumented cases there remains a wide scope for questions as yet
unanswered. A common feature is that opera houses were structurally in
deficit unless they were sponsored by an elite of social groups ready to lose
money for their passion, or funded by national or local authorities, sometimes
by sovereigns willing to draw on their personal budget. A comparative table
of different opera houses in Germany, Italy and Paris, provided by Michael
1
Walter,1 encompasses a broader space and period but reaches a similar
conclusion.
As shown by our three authors, influential groups or public authorities
wielded a cultural and political power which enabled them to intervene in
programming and management, especially in cities like Dresden, Lemberg or
Naples, or even in London, where ordinary ticket buyers, unable to buy or to
let a box and confined to the cheaper parts of the theatre, brought only a
marginal contribution to the overall budget. This general rule is perhaps less
true in other capitals like Paris or Prague, where the general public exerted a
more direct pressure and where several musical theatres competed with each
other, which resulted in breaking the monopoly of the central opera house
and forcing it to adapt more quickly to the changing musical scene.
If this general scheme is valid, it means that a comparative view of
opera houses should take into account not only the inner history of the central
institution but also the way in which it interfered with other venues, whether
in the same town or in other cities. Such competitors could offer alternative
programmes and extracts from new operas excluded from the main
institution, as a reflection of their dissimilar social, political or financial
status. For example, Mélanie Traversier showed that the San Carlo theatre,
during the eighteenth century, was parochial and conservative because of its
dominant position both in Naples, in Italy and even in Europe, being an
embodiment of “Italian opera” on the symbolic level. Two events then caused
the San Carlo and the Neapolitan school of opera to lose a great deal of their
appeal: first the competition of the Scala in Milan, from 1778, then the
domination of the French Empire in Italy and its cultural imperialism during
the first decade of the nineteenth century. Conversely, the well-known central
position of Paris opera houses in the European musical landscape during the
major part of the nineteenth century was mainly due to a specific
combination of public grants, elite sponsoring and acute theatrical
competition within a capital city that was able to employ at least three,
sometimes four opera houses at the same time (Opéra, Opéra-Comique,
Théâtre-Italien, Théâtre-Lyrique), to which should be added temporary runs
of performances in other theatres. London, on the other hand, though much
more populated and even richer than Paris, had only one opera house (the
King’s Theatre, later called Her Majesty’s theatre), with the addition of the
Royal Italian Opera after 1847, and no real home-grown works appeared in
the first part of the century. Jennifer Hall-White gives us some explanations
for this contrast between the two main European capital cities. The King’s
Theatre, being deprived of a public subsidy, unlike Paris, relied mainly on the
income derived from box rentals, which amounted to 62% of the receipts in
1834.2 Covent Garden was also strongly dependent on members of the
aristocracy sponsoring the theatre and backing the entrepreneur.
Does this mean that openness to change in the repertory was only
linked to the level of competition, to the nature of the institutions and to the
composition of their audiences? We may be inclined to see such types of
relationship, prompted by the liberal mood prevailing both in the nineteenth
1
Michael Walter, « Die Oper ist ein Irrenhaus ». Sozialgeschichte der Oper im 19.
Jahrhundert, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1997, p. 90.
2
Jennifer Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts. Opera and Elite Culture in London 1780-1880,
Durham, University of New Hampshire Press, 2007, p. 155.
2
century and in our own time; moreover, the social history of opera companies
as exemplified by the books which I have briefly summarized also points in
the same direction. These studies, however, also show the limits of an
interpretation based on purely institutional considerations. Just as operatic
markets became more diversified, another process also came to the fore, that
of a slower turnover of works, as standard or older operas gradually
superseded novelties and creations. The classical explanation of this
phenomenon, which may be verified everywhere, is of an economic nature:
the growing weight of the general public, the decline in private or public
grants, the cost of grand stage sets and the exorbitant fees of the divas and
tenors led opera directors to curb their risks by programming well-known
works and a small group of favourite composers that would not fail to appeal
to the mainstream audience.
In London, for example, Jennifer Hall-White showed that the average
age of operas performed at Her Majesty’s Theatre is 14 years in 1826, but 27
in 1860; this trend increased during the second half of the century. We
cannot, however, be content with a merely economic explanation of this
phenomenon, for it is precisely during this period that a second opera house
appeared in the Covent Garden area and presented new works (mainly French
and German operas) that were excluded from the traditional opera house.3
Central institutions, dominated by small groups of the social elite or by men
of the trade, tended to favour their own taste or to promote types of operas
best suited to their talents; but at the same time, in the main cities, different
sections of the audience could attend other venues to seek different kinds of
entertainment or musical experience, especially with the multiplication of
concerts, wandering virtuosi, and so on. A lack of innovation, therefore,
could well amount to an economic miscalculation.
In this respect, we have to distinguish clearly between different types
of cities. Secondary capital cities or towns needed to import a large part of
their productions and to schedule an alternation of spoken theatre and opera,
serious and light music, while main cities (and there were very few of them
in the first part of the century) were key places to launch new works.
Sometimes, however, the opposite could be true. The unexpected success of
an opera in a secondary town led impresarios or directors of first rank
theatres to convince their companies to include it in their own programming.
It would be of great interest to establish in a systematic way the circulation,
rate of performance and length of run of old and new works chosen in a
sample of opera houses, and to correlate the results with the political and
social characteristics of these venues. A few monographs and recent projects
have been conceived along those lines, but on a scale that is far from
commensurate with the map of nineteenth-century theatrical institutions:
again, research is hindered by the scarcity of primary sources in many places,
thus making comparisons impossible on a larger scale.
In addition to the variability of sources, quantitative studies or
reconstructions of networks geared to repertoire databases encounter a
problem of ponderation. Studies of the London and Paris opera houses, or
Philip Ther’s book on central Europe, show the existence of well-defined
Gabriella Dideriksen, « Mener Paris à Londres. L’utilisation du répertoire français par le
Royal Italian Opera dans sa lutte pour la survie artistique », Histoire, économie, société, 22
(2003), p. 217-238.
3
3
circuits of creation and diffusion around some central places in different
regions of Europe. But this international network based on Italian and French
works, joined by German ones later in the century, was limited by the rise of
foreign works translated into local languages and by the growing share of
operas originating from smaller nations which defended their identity through
an autochthonous theatre or opera. To start with, these trends might be more
accurately defined through primary tables, measuring the respective share of
different traditions, and of dead and living composers. But we also have to
make finer distinctions, like the number of performances of each type of
opera (local, foreign, recent, old, etc.) over a decade, the number of
performances of the same opera within a given series, the rate of revival of
older works, the financial viability of older and recent works, and so on. Even
the three books which I have quoted lack such pondered statistics, without
which straightforward interpretations might be misleading. In a paper
published in the collective book Opera in France and Italy from Monteverdi
to Bourdieu, I have shown that a complex set of questions, such as I have just
outlined, changes our prospect on the European operatic landscape during the
second part of the nineteenth century, with the particular effect of placing
French opera in a far better position, on the international level, than is
currently admitted in standard histories of music, written by authors who
consider this repertory as old-fashioned.4 While the prevailing idea, among
historians, is of nations gradually closing themselves on their own musical
preferences, I also find that even nations with strong operatic traditions were
rather quick in importing works from other cultural origins. For example, in
Berlin, out of 99 works belonging to the lyric theatre presented after 1870, 52
(more than 50%) had been first performed outside Berlin in the previous five
years. In London the proportion was only 58 out of 138.
Similarly, focussing only on operas that were staged may lead to
errors of interpretation. As William Weber and other historians of concerts
have shown, many concert programs included famous arias or other excerpts
from operas. This means that in order to understand the continuing presence
of some works we should take into account not only statistics drawn from the
programmes, but also those alternative forms of diffusion which addressed
audiences that could not go to the opera on a regular basis.
These different suggestions towards a systematic research on
repertories obviously imply, in a first stage, some amount of collective and
coordinated work in order to build a common set of indicators, gather a
documentation which makes institutions comparable, and analyse the results
according to categories that can lead to cross views while remaining relevant
to the specificities of historical, geographical and musical conditions.
Christophe Charle
UFR d’Histoire
Université Paris 1
17, rue de La Sorbonne
75005 Paris, France
christophe.charle@ens.fr
4
Christophe Charle, « Opera in France 1870-1914, between nationalism and foreign
imports », in Victoria Johnson, Craig Calhoun, Jane Fulcher (eds), France and Italy from
Monteverdi to Bourdieu, Cambridge, C.U.P., 2007, p. 243-266.
4