The Comedians of the King: Opéra Comique and the Bourbon Monarchy on the Eve of Revolution Julia Doe Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021 pp. vii + 314, ISBN 978 0 226 74339 4

Abstract

The opéra-comique encompassed a striking variety of lyrical forms and subject matter across its long history, but two characteristics have been seen as defining features: its use of spoken dialogue and its popularity. Both characteristics, in a schematic account of old-regime musical theatre, contrast readily with the opéra-comique ’ s more prestigious, fully sung counterpart, the tragédie en musique. The popularity of opéra-comique lay partly in its origins outside the ‘ legitimate ’ compan-ies and theatres patronized by the Crown and partly in its ability to appeal to audiences that spanned the French social hierarchy. Indeed, this popular quality has, with good reason, been so closely associated with opéra-comique that a recent book by David Charlton integrates its history within a broader study of ‘ popular opera ’ in eighteenth-century France ( Popular Opera in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)). In contrast, Julia Doe ’ s new study, The Comedians of the King: Opéra Comique and the Bourbon Monarchy on the Eve of Revolution , focuses on opéra-comique ’ s fortunes in the decades just before the Revolution, and it yields a rather different view of the genre ’ s development and its popularity. The book ’ s Introduction and six chapters, including a substantial Epilogue, offer a study of the institutional and genre history of opéra-comique in France during the pivotal decades of the 1760s to the 1790s. As the book ’ s title suggests, two ‘ revolutions ’ , one aesthetic and the other political, haunt the discussion that unfolds across its chapters. Its central question, as I read it, is how we should view the relationship of opéra-comique to the dramatic cultural and political transformations of the later eighteenth century, with which the genre has been so intimately linked in French opera historiography.