FRIPRO-Fri prosjektstøtte

The project focuses on opéra-comique during the French Revolution. One of the most influential changes that came from the French Revolution was the radically new use of mass communication. Theatre, and particularly the highly popular and genuinely French stage genre opéra-comique was particularly important. This form of public entertainment was unlike anything else in its time, consisting of a continuous mix of spoken dialogue and music. Opéra-comique, therefore, is both radically different to opera, which is entirely sung, and to theatre, which is entirely spoken. This unique mix made opéra-comique hugely successful before the Revolution. Under the Revolution itself it became an extremely useful political tool and the battle of public opinion, so important during the Revolution, was largely fought on the main opéra-comique stages. In the first year of the project there was a strong focus on archival work and collection of data. Extensive archival research was carried out and considerable material has been collected. A main focus in 2020 and 2021 has been collection of data about theater performances and material from archives. The project develops an opera-comique database (OCD). Completion of the database has been a man focus in 2021.

The aim of the project is to advance studies on the French Revolution by developing new approaches to one of the areas that has most conspicuously been neglected by scholarship, the prolific phenomenon of opéra-comique. This popular form of public entertainment was unlike anything else in its time, consisting of a continuous mix of spoken dialogue and music. Opéra-comique, therefore, is both radically different to opera, which is entirely sung, and to theatre, which is entirely spoken. This unique mix made opéra-comique hugely successful during the Revolution. But this single feature also fails to fit the disciplinary categories of modern academia and has made opéra-comique a blind spot in modern scholarship. Nevertheless, opéra-comique was one of the dominating forms of entertainment during the French Revolution and played a key role in political propaganda. Further knowledge on opéra-comique during the Revolution is therefore fundamental in order to understand how public communication was part of the Revolution itself. It is indeed one of the very few central areas of the French Revolution that remains to be fully investigated in its entirety. An analysis of opéra-comique during the French Revolution is a powerful means of developing new multidisciplinary approaches and of investigating an area that is crucially important for the European legacy. Revolutionary opéra-comique opens up new horizons for scholarship on the French Revolution in two ways: at a conceptual level, the project examines how political forces used opéra-comique during the French Revolution and how this shaped the genre in new ways; and on a practical level, the project includes the development and implementation of a digital tool consisting of a searchable critical repertoire catalogue of opéra-comique pieces performed during the French Revolution.